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0:01:52 What happens when we die?
0:01:54 I’ve always been a cold hard materialist on this one.
0:02:03 Our brain shuts down, consciousness fades away, and the lights go out.
0:02:12 And beyond that, what else is there to say?
0:02:16 I had no experience of life before I was born, and I expect to have no experience of life
0:02:22 after I die.
0:02:26 As best I can tell, that’s the most reasonable assumption we can make about death.
0:02:31 But most reasonable does not mean definitely true.
0:02:36 There’s the conventional view, taken by major religions, that the shape of your afterlife
0:02:42 depends on the quality of your actual life.
0:02:46 I have my issues with that, but it’s a widely held belief.
0:02:51 The point, in any case, is that this is one of the oldest questions we have.
0:02:56 Which means there are all sorts of theories about how consciousness, in some form, might
0:03:01 survive the death of the body.
0:03:04 However unlikely these possibilities might be, they’re not impossible.
0:03:11 And if they’re not impossible, how seriously should we take them?
0:03:18 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:03:31 Today’s guest is Sebastian Younger.
0:03:35 He’s a former war reporter, a documentarian, and the author of several books, including
0:03:41 his most recent one called “In My Time of Dying.”
0:03:46 Younger’s not the religious or superstitious type.
0:03:50 He’s a self-described atheist and a science-minded rationalist.
0:03:55 And I suspect he would have given a very confident response to that question about life after
0:04:01 death, until the day he almost died.
0:04:06 An experience that didn’t necessarily transform his worldview.
0:04:11 But it did shake it up.
0:04:14 I wouldn’t say my answer to the “what happens when we die” question is all that different
0:04:20 after reading the book.
0:04:22 But I would say that I’m less certain about it.
0:04:26 And that’s sort of the point.
0:04:38 Sebastian Younger, welcome to the show.
0:04:40 Very nice to be here.
0:04:41 Thanks for having me.
0:04:42 Before we get to the strangeness of your near-death experience, can you just describe what happened
0:04:51 to you the day you almost died, just to set the scene here a little bit?
0:04:55 Yeah.
0:04:56 So I was 58 years old.
0:04:57 It was four years ago.
0:04:59 I’ve been a lifelong athlete.
0:05:01 My health is like very good.
0:05:04 And so it never occurred to me that I would have a sudden medical issue that would send
0:05:09 me to the ER or kill me, sort of drop me in my boots, as it were.
0:05:14 So I just had no thoughts like that about myself.
0:05:18 And so one afternoon, it was during COVID, my family and I were living in a house in
0:05:23 the woods in Massachusetts that has no cell phone coverage.
0:05:25 It’s at the end of a dead-end dirt road.
0:05:28 On the property is a cabin, no electricity or anything like that.
0:05:32 And we went out there to spend a couple of hours.
0:05:35 And literally in mid-sentence, I felt this sort of bolt of pain in my abdomen.
0:05:40 And I couldn’t make it go away.
0:05:41 I sort of twisted and turned.
0:05:43 I thought it was indigestion, and I stood up and almost fell over.
0:05:47 And so I sat back down.
0:05:48 I said to my wife, “I’m going to need help.
0:05:50 I don’t know what’s wrong.
0:05:51 I’ve never felt anything like this.”
0:05:53 What was happening, I later found out, was that I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my
0:05:58 pancreatic artery.
0:06:00 And one of several arteries that go to the pancreas, and one of them had a bulge in it
0:06:05 from a weak spot.
0:06:07 And aneurysms are widow-makers.
0:06:09 I mean, they’re really, really deadly, particularly in the abdomen, because it’s hard for the
0:06:14 doctors to find them.
0:06:15 And if you’re stabbed in the stomach and an artery is severed, the doctors sort of know
0:06:18 where to put their finger as it were to plug the leak.
0:06:21 But if it’s just internal hemorrhage, your abdomen’s basically a big bowl of spaghetti.
0:06:25 It’s very, very hard to find it.
0:06:27 So I was losing probably a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes, and you know, there’s like
0:06:32 10 pints in the human body, 10 or 12 pints.
0:06:35 So you can do the math.
0:06:37 And I was a one-hour drive from the nearest hospital.
0:06:40 I was a human hourglass, basically.
0:06:42 So by the time they got me there, I’d probably lost two-thirds of my blood.
0:06:45 My blood pressure was 60 over 40, and I was in end-stage hemorrhagic shock.
0:06:50 I was probably 10 minutes from dead, but I was still conscious.
0:06:53 Blessedly, I had no idea that I was dying.
0:06:56 I was enormously confused by what was happening, and I had no clue about the seriousness of
0:07:01 it.
0:07:02 60 over 40.
0:07:03 My God, how are you even still alive at that point?
0:07:06 That’s sort of where you cross over into a place where you can’t recover from even if
0:07:10 you get a massive blood transfusion, which I got.
0:07:12 I mean, if you need that much blood, receiving that much blood causes other problems that
0:07:17 can also kill you.
0:07:19 So you can die in the hospital from blood loss with plenty of blood in your veins, because
0:07:24 other things happen chemically in your bloodstream that will kill you.
0:07:28 It’s deadly.
0:07:29 And I was sort of right on the cusp of when that could reasonably have started to happen.
0:07:32 And I’d actually had sort of intermittent pain in my abdomen for about six months, which
0:07:37 just being an idiot dude, I just ignored, right?
0:07:40 And it was bad enough to make me sit down at times.
0:07:42 I was like, “Oh, what’s that?”
0:07:43 And then it would go away, and I’d forget about it, and that was probably the aneurysm
0:07:47 getting to a kind of critical point where it was starting to leak a little bit, starting
0:07:52 to bleed a little bit or something.
0:07:53 And if I’d gone to the doctor, I could have avoided a lot of drama, but I didn’t.
0:07:58 Yeah.
0:07:59 Note to everyone in the audience.
0:08:00 If you know something’s wrong with your body, don’t fuck around.
0:08:02 Go get it checked out.
0:08:03 Yeah.
0:08:04 I mean, pain’s an indicator, and persistent pain’s an indicator.
0:08:07 And frankly, your unconscious mind, listen, I’m an atheist, I’m a rationalist, I’m an
0:08:13 anti-mystic.
0:08:14 I hate woo-woo stuff.
0:08:15 My dad was a physicist and an atheist, just, like, that’s who I am.
0:08:19 But the unconscious mind actually has access to a lot of information about the body.
0:08:24 It communicates with your conscious mind in these strange signals and intuitions and feelings.
0:08:29 And one of the stranger things about this was the first time I felt this pain in my abdomen,
0:08:33 I had this bizarre thought.
0:08:35 I thought, “Huh, that’s the kind of pain where you later find out, oh my God, I have terminal
0:08:40 cancer.”
0:08:41 Right.
0:08:42 I immediately thought this was a mortal threat, and then immediately dismissed it as, you
0:08:46 know, listen, you just have a pain in your abdomen, like, don’t worry about it.
0:08:49 And what was the survival rate for your condition that day?
0:08:52 The survival rate is as low as 30%, but I assume that that’s for a reasonable transport
0:09:00 time to the hospital.
0:09:02 It took me 90 minutes to get to a doctor.
0:09:05 My survival chances were extremely low.
0:09:10 The brain does such strange things in these moments.
0:09:14 You knew on some level that something was really wrong here, but even at the hospital,
0:09:20 you write about not having any grand thoughts about life or mortality, or even about your
0:09:25 family.
0:09:26 You wrote, “I had all the introspection of a gut shot coyote,” which is a great line.
0:09:31 But what the hell is that about?
0:09:33 You think it’s just a kind of defense mechanism in the brain, or is it just plain old-fashioned
0:09:38 shock?
0:09:39 I was in hemorrhagic shock and deep into hypothermia, which comes with hemorrhagic shock.
0:09:46 I was in an enormous amount of pain.
0:09:48 So blood in your abdomen, outside of your vascular system, is extremely irritating to the organs.
0:09:54 I was in and out of consciousness, which I didn’t know.
0:09:56 I mean, if you go in and out of consciousness, you don’t know it.
0:10:00 You think it’s all one stream of consciousness, but actually what drops out is the parts where
0:10:05 you’re unconscious.
0:10:06 You have no idea you’re in and out of consciousness.
0:10:08 So I didn’t know that about the situation.
0:10:11 And it was belly pain.
0:10:12 And I had this sort of distant thought, “You may turn out you’re going to wake up in the
0:10:15 hospital tomorrow morning with really grim news that you have a tumor in your abdomen.”
0:10:18 And I sort of was aware that that might happen, but I didn’t know it was going down right
0:10:23 now.
0:10:24 I had no idea.
0:10:25 And I had the level of sort of situational awareness that someone who’s really, really
0:10:30 drunk might have.
0:10:32 And pain turns you into an animal.
0:10:34 I was an animal.
0:10:35 I was a wounded animal.
0:10:36 So when this happened, if your wife, Barbara, wasn’t with you, if you were out running or
0:10:42 something like that, you’re probably dead right now.
0:10:45 We’re not talking.
0:10:46 I mean, how much did that thought rack your brain in the aftermath?
0:10:49 Oh, afterwards, I was tormented by that.
0:10:52 I mean, any other situation, I mean, the traffic jam and the cross-France Expressway, if I
0:10:58 was on an airplane, hiking in the woods, running, I mean, anything, like anything.
0:11:03 And as it was, I barely made it.
0:11:05 Another strange thing that I should mention about the unconscious.
0:11:09 So two nights prior at dawn, so about 36 hours before the aneurysm ruptured, I was woken
0:11:16 by this terrible dream, a nightmare, and it was that I was dead.
0:11:22 Not that I was dying or going to die.
0:11:23 I was dead.
0:11:24 I was a spirit.
0:11:26 And I was looking down on my family and they were grieving.
0:11:29 They were sobbing.
0:11:31 And I was trying to yell to them and wave my arms like, “I’m here.
0:11:34 It’s okay.
0:11:35 I’m right here.
0:11:36 It’s all right.
0:11:37 Everything’s okay.”
0:11:38 And then I was made to understand that I had died.
0:11:41 I was beyond their reach and there was no going back and this was just how it is.
0:11:46 And I was headed out into the darkness.
0:11:48 And I was so bereft, I was so anguished by this, that it woke me up.
0:11:53 I mean, I was just like, “Oh, my God, thank God, that was just a dream.”
0:11:58 As a rationalist, I have to sort of think, “All right, your unconscious mind has some
0:12:02 mechanism of knowing if there’s a mortal threat going on and it doesn’t know how to
0:12:06 communicate with dumbass up there who’s, “Okay, six months of pain, he’s still not taking
0:12:10 notice.
0:12:11 All right, now what do we do?
0:12:12 All right, well, let’s give him a really bad nightmare.”
0:12:14 Right?
0:12:15 Oh, he’s still not listening?
0:12:17 Well, we tried.
0:12:18 You know, I feel like the unconscious mind is sort of like a little bit in that place
0:12:21 with us.
0:12:22 Yeah, we’re about to careen into some potentially woo-woo stuff here.
0:12:25 So let me pause, back up just a hair, and then we’ll ease into it.
0:12:31 Because I want to actually get to the near-death experience itself.
0:12:35 The way you write about it in the book is so unbelievably vivid.
0:12:39 I mean, I really feel like I experienced it, just reading it.
0:12:44 There’s a moment when the surgeons and the nurses are working on you and they’re on
0:12:50 your right side, and then on your left side, there’s this pit of blackness, it’s scary
0:12:56 as hell, and your father, who I think has been dead eight years at this point, appears
0:13:02 before you or above you.
0:13:05 Tell me about that.
0:13:06 Right, yeah.
0:13:07 So the doctor was busy trying to put a large-gauge needle into my jugular vein, you know, through
0:13:12 my neck.
0:13:13 It sounds a lot worse than it actually is.
0:13:16 It didn’t particularly hurt, but…
0:13:17 It sounds bad.
0:13:18 It sounds bad, yeah.
0:13:19 I mean, I think they numb you with lidocaine, so actually I didn’t feel much except the
0:13:22 kind of pressure.
0:13:23 But anyway, so they were working on that, and seeming to take a long time, and suddenly
0:13:29 this black pit opened up underneath me that I started getting pulled into.
0:13:33 You know, again, think of me as extremely drunk, right?
0:13:36 Like, I’m like, “Whoa, what’s that?”
0:13:37 Like it didn’t occur to me like, “Black pit, that makes no sense.”
0:13:41 Like, I was like, “Oh, there’s the pit.
0:13:43 Like why am I getting pulled into it?”
0:13:45 And I didn’t know I was dying, but I sort of had this animal sense that if you don’t want
0:13:49 to go into the infinitely black pit that just opened up underneath you, like that’s just
0:13:53 a bad idea.
0:13:54 And if you get sucked in there, you’re probably not coming back.
0:13:57 Like that was the feeling I had about it.
0:13:59 And I started to panic, and that’s when my dead father appeared above me in this sort
0:14:03 of energy form.
0:14:04 It’s hard to describe.
0:14:05 I can’t describe what it was like.
0:14:07 I just perceived him.
0:14:09 It’s not like there was a poster board of him floating above me.
0:14:11 It wasn’t quite that tangible.
0:14:13 And he was communicating this incredible benevolence and love.
0:14:16 He’s like, “Listen, you don’t have to fight it.
0:14:18 You can come with me.
0:14:19 Don’t take care of you.
0:14:20 It’s going to be okay.”
0:14:22 I was horrified.
0:14:23 I was like, “Go with you.
0:14:25 You’re dead.
0:14:26 I’m not going anywhere with you.
0:14:27 Like what are you talking about?
0:14:29 Get out of here.”
0:14:30 Like I was horrified.
0:14:32 And I said to the doctor, because I was conversing, “You got to hurry.
0:14:36 You’re losing me.
0:14:37 I’m going right now.”
0:14:38 And I didn’t know where I was going, but I was very clear.
0:14:39 I was headed out, and I did not want to.
0:14:42 And I knew he had to hurry.
0:14:43 So you say communicating.
0:14:44 What does that mean?
0:14:45 Is he actually talking to you?
0:14:46 Is it gesturing or just a feeling, or is it telepathically or what?
0:14:51 I didn’t hear words, right?
0:14:53 But his communication to me, I guess you would have to classify it as telepathic.
0:14:57 But it was very specific.
0:14:59 You don’t have to fight this, “I’m here.
0:15:02 I’ll take care of you.
0:15:03 You can come with me.”
0:15:05 And so, you know, again, now I’m a rationalist, but I’m a rationalist with questions.
0:15:11 Like I’m a rationalist with a serious question of like, “What was that?
0:15:16 Is it just neurochemistry?”
0:15:17 I mean, when I woke up the next morning in the ICU and the nurse came in, and I was
0:15:22 in a lot of distress.
0:15:23 I was throwing up lead.
0:15:24 I was a freaking mess.
0:15:25 I was still not, I could have still died at that point.
0:15:27 I mean, I was not out of the woods at all.
0:15:30 And the nurse came in and said, “Well, congratulations, Mr. Younger.
0:15:33 You made it.
0:15:34 We almost lost you last night.
0:15:35 You almost died.”
0:15:36 And when she said that, that’s when I remembered my father.
0:15:40 I was like, “Oh my God, I saw my father, and I saw the pit.”
0:15:44 And it all came rushing back to me.
0:15:46 A rationalist with questions.
0:15:48 I love that.
0:15:49 That may be my religion if I have one.
0:15:53 I mean, given what I know about your dad from this book, that he would appear to you almost
0:15:59 like an angel, seems like exactly the kind of thing he and you, hyper-rationalists and
0:16:05 whatnot, would have dismissed as supernatural nonsense before this.
0:16:10 He would have said, as I’m sort of inclined to say, but not entirely.
0:16:14 I think he would have said, “Well, you know, I’m sure there’s sort of neurochemical explanations.
0:16:19 It’s the brain in distress.
0:16:21 There’s probably all kinds of things going on, neurochemically, high cortisol levels,
0:16:25 this and that, like dopamine, whatever.
0:16:29 I mean, you know, you can make the brain hallucinate.
0:16:31 You can, you know, epileptics have visions.
0:16:33 You know, I mean, there’s analogous phenomena in life with people.
0:16:36 And so I think he probably would have ascribed it to that.
0:16:39 And I’m inclined to as well, you know, sort of, except there’s one thing that sort of
0:16:43 stuck in my mind that the doctors and the rationalists couldn’t quite explain.
0:16:48 And let me just say, reiterate again, I’m an atheist.
0:16:52 Now, I still do not believe in God.
0:16:55 Atheist means that you do not believe in God.
0:16:56 I do not believe in God, but I do have serious questions about whether we understand the
0:17:01 nature of the universe and the physical reality that we inhabit.
0:17:05 That there is a serious question.
0:17:06 And that’s different from God.
0:17:08 There’s something you describe in the book that was maybe the most holy shit moment for
0:17:13 me and there are several holy shit moments in this story.
0:17:17 So a few days before your, your dad died of heart failure, you had an intense dream.
0:17:23 He was in Boston, you were in New York, but you woke up in the middle of the night as
0:17:28 though he was screaming your name from the next room.
0:17:31 You look at the clock and it was 315 a.m.
0:17:35 And then a few hours later, your mom calls tells you to go to Boston as soon as you can
0:17:39 because your dad tried to throw himself out of bed in a panic.
0:17:44 And when you asked her what time that happened, she said 315 a.m.
0:17:49 I mean, come on, Sebastian, what the hell is that?
0:17:54 That’s crazy.
0:17:55 It is crazy.
0:17:56 And again, the rationalist in me is like, okay, does that prove there’s a God?
0:17:59 No, not really.
0:18:00 It means that humans can communicate in ways that science doesn’t understand and even
0:18:05 communicate across distance.
0:18:07 And there’s at the quantum level, at the subatomic level, there actually is instantaneous communication
0:18:14 between particles across vast distances, even across the entire universe.
0:18:19 And that’s known to be true.
0:18:20 And we don’t know why we can’t explain how that works, but we know that it does work.
0:18:24 So if that’s possible, can human minds communicate with quote, telepathy?
0:18:31 That seems to be something that almost everyone experiences with people they love.
0:18:34 So to me, it stands to reason that it’s possible.
0:18:36 Well, you talked to plenty of doctors and scientists about this.
0:18:41 You even tried talking to some of your own doctors about your experience.
0:18:46 What do they make of it?
0:18:47 I’m sure they take you seriously, but how seriously do they take this story and stories
0:18:53 like this, near-death experiences, that is?
0:18:56 Well, it depends on the doctor.
0:18:58 And who you’re talking to depends on the researcher.
0:19:00 And there’s a whole body of research conducted by doctors and neurobiologists and all kinds
0:19:06 of very accomplished, educated people.
0:19:10 There’s a lot of documentation of what are called NDEs, near-death experiences, and sort
0:19:13 of hovering above loved ones as I did in my dream, or seeing a dead person show up to
0:19:20 escort you over the threshold, or very, very common for NDEs.
0:19:24 Now, I didn’t know this, so I wasn’t projecting something that I knew.
0:19:28 So some researchers have concluded that this is sort of verifiable proof that there is
0:19:34 some kind of afterlife that we don’t understand.
0:19:36 And they do use the word afterlife, which is, of course, on a semantic level is kind
0:19:41 of a problem, because death is the end of life.
0:19:44 So afterlife, I don’t even know what the quick word that means is clearly not life, but they
0:19:49 do come to that conclusion.
0:19:50 And then there’s a lot of other scientists and doctors, like nonsense, it’s neurobiology.
0:19:54 We can explain all of this.
0:19:56 And after I came home from the hospital, it was not a sort of joyful party.
0:20:01 I was enormously traumatized.
0:20:04 The fact that I’d almost left my children fatherless was devastating to me.
0:20:08 I became very sort of paranoid that now that I sort of looked over the precipice and realized
0:20:13 that any moment of any day, you can suddenly find yourself dying in entirely unpredictable
0:20:20 ways.
0:20:21 It really rattled me.
0:20:22 And then I got into this other existential bind, which was I started to worry that maybe
0:20:27 I had died and that I was a ghost and that I was sort of haunting my family and they
0:20:33 couldn’t see me.
0:20:34 And I just thought they could see me and were interacting with me, but actually I wasn’t
0:20:38 really there.
0:20:39 And I know that sounds totally silly, but it was a real fear.
0:20:42 And at one point I went to my wife and I was like, “Tell me I’m here.
0:20:45 Just tell me that I’m, you know, of course you’re here.”
0:20:48 And she sort of reassured me.
0:20:49 But in my mind, I’m like, “That’s exactly what a hallucination would say to you.”
0:20:53 Right?
0:20:54 Like I was in a real very, very difficult place, which is not uncommon for someone who survives
0:20:59 something like this.
0:21:00 So I started researching and eventually I tracked down researching NDE’s and quantum physics
0:21:06 and all this stuff, trying to explain what happened to me.
0:21:09 And party was kind of rooting that maybe there, wow, maybe there isn’t afterlife.
0:21:13 Maybe we don’t need to be scared of death, you know, like, oh, wow, these stories are
0:21:17 pretty hard to refute.
0:21:18 And then I’d read the rationalist, I was like, “Oh, well, like nice try, but this clearly
0:21:23 is just nonsense.”
0:21:25 So I called on some colleagues of my father who were younger than him, who were really
0:21:30 fond of my dad.
0:21:31 And I invited them for lunch and I told them what happened to me.
0:21:34 And I said, “What do you think my dad would have thought of this?”
0:21:37 And at one point I asked, “What would the odds be of my father reappearing above me, reconstituting
0:21:43 himself on some level above me as I was dying?
0:21:47 Are there odds for such a thing?”
0:21:49 And he said, “Well, this is how scientists think, right?”
0:21:53 He took me totally literally.
0:21:54 He was like, “All right, well, let’s see.”
0:21:56 He’s a random, he’s like, “Well, I would say probably about 10 to the minus 60.”
0:22:01 Very specific.
0:22:02 Very specific.
0:22:03 It’s a number with one chance and a number that has 60 zeros following it, roughly.
0:22:09 I was like, “What’s, what are you talking about?
0:22:12 How did you come to that number?”
0:22:13 He said, “Well, it’s roughly the odds of all the oxygen molecules converging in one corner
0:22:19 of the room and suffocating us.
0:22:22 Their odds are not zero.
0:22:23 They’re almost infinitely small, but they’re roughly, according to statistical mechanics,
0:22:28 they’re roughly one to the minus 60.
0:22:31 And so those are the odds of the molecules that made up your father or the subatomic particles
0:22:36 that made up your father randomly and miraculously having a reunion in the corner of the room.
0:22:46 There are numbers for this.
0:22:47 And so at that point, I realized the infinite rationality of the scientific mind.
0:22:52 Yeah, I think when I got to that part of the book, I was reminded that I most definitely
0:22:57 do not have the brain of a physicist for better or worse.
0:23:01 Yeah, for better or worse.
0:23:02 That sort of focus of thought makes human relationships hard because my father missed
0:23:07 a lot of the sort of, the human element, right, the sort of emotional element.
0:23:12 He was a very sweet man, but very distant and had no idea how to relate to children
0:23:16 or really, I had sometimes a tough time with adults.
0:23:20 So when he appeared above me, it struck me as the most overtly loving, generous, big-hearted
0:23:27 thing he’d ever done.
0:23:33 When we get back from the break, what can science tell us about near-death experiences?
0:23:39 Stay with us.
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0:27:37 Getting back to the science, do we really understand what happens in the brain during
0:27:41 these experiences?
0:27:43 Do science have a firm grasp of this?
0:27:46 Yes and no.
0:27:48 There was a case where a man was dying, I think he’d had a stroke, and they had electrodes
0:27:54 attached to his skull to signal different brain activity to know how to treat him.
0:28:00 He passed some point of no return, and the doctor said, “It’s okay.
0:28:04 You can sort of turn the machines off, basically.”
0:28:06 But the sensors were still in place on his skull, and so they had the chance to watch
0:28:11 what was happening to the brain waves in real time as a person died.
0:28:20 What they found was that in the 30 seconds before and after the moment of death, and
0:28:25 of course death isn’t just confined to a single moment, it’s a spectrum, but there was a surge
0:28:30 in brain activity related to dreaming and memories and all kinds of other things.
0:28:36 One of the things that might happen when people die is that they experience this sort of flood
0:28:41 of sensations from their life.
0:28:43 Why would they?
0:28:44 Who knows?
0:28:45 It’s hard to come up with this sort of Darwinian reason, like how would that be adaptive?
0:28:48 The person’s dying.
0:28:49 It’s not a question of survival and procreation, and Darwinism is not concerned with emotional
0:28:54 comfort.
0:28:55 It doesn’t matter in those sort of Darwinian arithmetic, so it’s hard to know what to
0:28:57 make of that, but they did have one chance to do that.
0:29:00 Science is reductionist by design, and you can study near-death experiences and you can
0:29:07 map the neurochemical changes, and you can give a purely materialist explanation for
0:29:14 them.
0:29:15 But do you think it’s wise to leave it there, or do you think there’s something just inherently
0:29:20 mysterious about this that we just can’t quite understand?
0:29:25 At one point, someone said to me, “You couldn’t explain what happened to you in rational terms.
0:29:29 Why didn’t you turn to mystical terms?”
0:29:34 And I said, “Because rational terms is what an explanation is, and the alternative is
0:29:42 a story,” and humans use stories to comfort themselves about things they can’t explain.
0:29:49 I don’t choose to use the God story or the afterlife story to comfort myself about the
0:29:54 unexplainable, which is like, “What’s going to happen when I die?”
0:29:57 But let me say that the one thing that really stood out, I sort of bought all the neurochemical
0:30:03 explanations, all of the sort of hard-boiled rationalists, like we’re biological beings.
0:30:07 When we die, that’s it, and the flurry of experiences that dying people have is just
0:30:12 the dying brain frantically bombarding us with signals, like, “What’s going on?
0:30:18 Stop.
0:30:19 Stop.
0:30:20 Stop.
0:30:21 Stop.”
0:30:22 You know, that kind of sort of neurological confusion.
0:30:23 Except for one thing, and what I don’t understand is this, like, if you give a roomful of people
0:30:27 at LSD, we know that 100% of those people will have hallucinations.
0:30:34 We know why.
0:30:35 We know how that works.
0:30:36 There’s no mystery there.
0:30:37 You don’t need God to explain that.
0:30:39 But they’ll all hallucinate different things, right?
0:30:42 And what’s strange about dying is that only the dying seem to see the dead, and they do
0:30:48 that in societies all around the world and have for ages.
0:30:51 I mean, there’s many historical accounts of this as well, and the people who aren’t dying
0:30:56 do not see the dead.
0:30:58 And often the dead are unwelcome, and they’re a shock.
0:31:01 It’s not some reassuring vision of Aunt Betty, right?
0:31:04 It’s just like, “Dad, what are you doing here?”
0:31:06 Or my mother, as she died, she saw her dead brother, who she was not on speaking terms
0:31:11 with, and when she saw him, she was horrified.
0:31:14 She was like, “What’s he doing here?”
0:31:16 And I said, “Mommy, it’s your brother.
0:31:18 I mean, I just took a guess, right?
0:31:20 I said, “Mom, it’s your brother George.
0:31:22 You have to be nice to him.
0:31:23 He’s come a long way to see you.”
0:31:25 And she just frowned and said, “We’ll see about that,” you know, she died a day later.
0:31:29 So it’s not like these are comforting visions or in projections.
0:31:33 And the fact that only the dying see the dead is the one thing that science can’t quite
0:31:39 explain.
0:31:40 It’s the one thing that really does make me wonder, you know, maybe we don’t understand
0:31:44 everything in scientific terms.
0:31:46 Maybe there is something missing here that is very significant about how reality works,
0:31:52 how life and death work, what consciousness is, and ultimately what the universe is.
0:31:56 Yeah.
0:31:57 I don’t want to fetishize doubt or make a virtue of doubt, but this is the kind of stuff
0:32:01 that just leaves me in that same place, just the position of, “Man, I don’t really know.”
0:32:09 And I’m not sure it’s knowable.
0:32:10 And that’s okay.
0:32:11 Yeah.
0:32:12 I mean, like I said, some people rush in with stories to fill that gap.
0:32:15 A lot can go wrong there.
0:32:16 Yeah.
0:32:17 One of the theories about consciousness, a theory that Schrodinger has described to,
0:32:21 who was one of the pioneers of quantum physics, is that consciousness actually suffuses the
0:32:27 entire universe.
0:32:30 And there’s a kind of colossus of consciousness in the universe, which is 93 billion light
0:32:35 years wide at the moment, just so that you understand the scale of the universe.
0:32:41 And that our individual consciousness is sort of a very, very limited experience of
0:32:47 the universal consciousness.
0:32:48 It sort of scaled down to sort of the puny human size, but actually there is a universal
0:32:54 consciousness.
0:32:55 And there’s a theory called biocentrism that this consciousness completely affects how
0:32:59 the universe is constructed physically, that there’s a symbiotic relationship between physical
0:33:04 reality and consciousness where they actually depend on each other.
0:33:08 And you can’t prove it.
0:33:09 You can’t disprove it.
0:33:10 It’s a fascinating theory.
0:33:12 But it’s where there, for me, there’s a little bit of comfort.
0:33:15 Like, no, I do not believe in God.
0:33:16 And I certainly don’t believe in an afterlife where I, as Sebastian Junger, sort of continue
0:33:21 on without the need to eat or sleep, and I can kind of float around talking to all the
0:33:26 people I miss.
0:33:27 But it’s possible that when we die, that the sort of quantum information that involved
0:33:34 our identity and our consciousness is reunited with the grand consciousness, the colossus.
0:33:41 There is something there that I find a little comforting and scientifically possible, right?
0:33:46 It’s just we’re never going to prove it because I think we just don’t have the tools.
0:33:49 And even to say that there’s an afterlife is not to say that there’s a God necessarily.
0:33:55 There could be some post-life reality that we just don’t understand, or one that’s far
0:33:59 weirder than we can imagine.
0:34:01 But that would not mean that any of our religious stories are true.
0:34:06 It would just mean shit’s a lot weirder than we thought.
0:34:08 Yeah, I mean, as I say in the book, our understanding of reality might be akin to a dog’s understanding
0:34:14 of a television set.
0:34:15 No concept that what they’re watching is a product of the screen and the wider context
0:34:21 that produce the screen.
0:34:22 I mean, religious people, and I have obviously a number of friends who are religious, like
0:34:28 when they hear this story of mine, they’re very fond of saying, “So, are you still an
0:34:32 atheist?
0:34:33 Like you saw your dead father while you were dying.
0:34:35 Are you still an atheist?”
0:34:36 And of course, my pat little answer is, “Look, I saw my dad, not God.
0:34:40 Like if I’d seen God, we might have a conversation to have, but I saw my dad.”
0:34:43 And as you point out, it’s entirely possible that there could be some kind of creator God
0:34:50 that created biological life in the universe that when it dies, it dies absolutely and completely
0:34:56 and there’s no quote afterlife.
0:34:58 Or there could be a post-death existence at some quantum level that we don’t and can’t
0:35:03 understand in a completely physical universe that has no God.
0:35:07 The two things don’t require each other and you could have one or the other or neither
0:35:11 or both.
0:35:12 It’s all possible.
0:35:14 One of the medical paradoxes here is that people who are dying experience near total
0:35:23 brain function collapse and yet their awareness seems to crystallize, which seems impossible
0:35:31 on its face.
0:35:32 Do scientists have an explanation for this?
0:35:34 Is it even a paradox at all or does it just seem that way to someone on the outside who
0:35:37 doesn’t understand it?
0:35:38 I don’t think anyone knows.
0:35:40 You know, ultimately, no one even knows if what we perceive during life is true.
0:35:45 I mean, it’s known at the quantum level that observing a particle, a subatomic particle
0:35:51 changes its behavior.
0:35:52 And of course, when you observe something, it’s a totally passive act.
0:35:56 You’re not bombarding it with something, right?
0:35:58 You’re just watching.
0:36:00 If a particle, a photon is sent through two slits in an impassable barrier and it’s unobserved
0:36:06 by a conscious mind, it will go through both slits simultaneously.
0:36:12 And once you observe it, it’s forced to pick one slit.
0:36:16 So as the early physicists said, observation creates the reality that’s being observed
0:36:21 and then the snake starts to swallow its tail.
0:36:25 And it’s been proposed that the universe is one massive wave function of all possibilities,
0:36:32 of all things, and that the arrival of conscious thought, conscious perception forced the entire
0:36:39 observable universe to collapse into one single thing, which is the universe that we know.
0:36:45 The observer creates the reality that was being observed, including the entire universe
0:36:49 that the observer inhabits.
0:36:52 I will say this.
0:36:53 If there is a heaven or afterlife, I don’t think it’s what most people think it is, which
0:36:58 is a projection of our earthly wishes and a rather transparent one at that.
0:37:03 But it might be some bizarre quantum reality that I can’t even pretend to understand because
0:37:08 I don’t know the first thing about physics or quantum mechanics other than that great
0:37:12 line from Einstein calling it spooky action at a distance.
0:37:16 This is sort of where you land too, right?
0:37:18 That reality is just very strange and who the hell knows what’s really going on or what’s
0:37:21 really possible for that matter?
0:37:23 Yeah, I mean, at the quantum level, things happen that contradict everything we understand
0:37:28 about the macroscopic level.
0:37:30 So you can’t walk through two doorways at the same time.
0:37:33 You can’t be in two places at once, but at the quantum level, you can.
0:37:36 And so that opens the possibility of extremely strange things that are extremely strange in
0:37:42 the macroscopic world being absolutely ordinary in the quantum world.
0:37:47 What the granddaddy of them all is the universe.
0:37:52 The universe came from nothing and expanded from nothing to hundreds of millions of light
0:38:02 years across in an amount of time that is too small to measure.
0:38:09 So if that’s possible, and we know it’s possible because it happened, we can prove that it
0:38:14 happened.
0:38:15 We are proof that it happened.
0:38:17 If that’s possible, in some ways, what isn’t possible?
0:38:21 Just a question of how limited our brains are, our amazing brains, but how limited are
0:38:25 they in what we can perceive and explain?
0:38:29 You used the phrase “the other side” a lot in the book.
0:38:33 Someone was clinically dead, they glanced the other side, and then they came back.
0:38:36 I mean, on some level, this is just the only language we have to describe such things.
0:38:42 But what is your understanding of the other side as you sit here now?
0:38:48 Is it a place, is it more like an awareness, or is it just neurochemicals detonating in
0:38:52 our brains?
0:38:53 Well, I mean, my direct experience of it was it was an infinitely black, deep pit that
0:39:01 would swallow you and never let you back.
0:39:04 And where you would become part of the nothingness that’s in it.
0:39:08 Whatever you want to say about this, I did have a dream where I experienced being dead.
0:39:12 Whatever you want to make of that, I did have that dream.
0:39:15 And the experience of that dream, for whatever it’s worth, is that I was a spirit.
0:39:20 I didn’t exist physically, but I existed as a collection of thoughts, and that that entity
0:39:26 that was thinking was being pulled away from everything I knew and loved out into the nothingness
0:39:34 forever.
0:39:36 And there was a sense of the nothingness being an enormous circle that I was going to start
0:39:43 sort of like proceeding around.
0:39:46 And in infinitely huge circle, there was a sort of circularity to it, a kind of orbit
0:39:51 to it.
0:39:52 And I was getting pulled into this orbit of nothingness, and it made me panic, right?
0:39:57 It was horrified.
0:39:58 Like, there are my children, there’s my wife.
0:40:00 So for me, the other side is nothing.
0:40:04 I mean, it’s not like, oh, it’s the other bank of the river.
0:40:06 You know, as the joke goes, like, how do I get to the other side of the river?
0:40:09 You’re on the other side.
0:40:10 It’s not like that.
0:40:12 And that’s a kind of comforting vision, and it’s one that religions seem fond of.
0:40:16 But it’s not at all how I see it.
0:40:17 And you know, if it were that way, you’d be looking at an eternity of consciousness with
0:40:22 no escape, which is its own hell, right?
0:40:25 I mean, I could barely get through math class in high school, 50 minutes, right?
0:40:29 That was an eternity.
0:40:30 Like an eternity.
0:40:31 You really want to be conscious for eternity with no way out?
0:40:34 I mean, at least with life, if you need a way out, you can kill yourself.
0:40:37 There’s no way out of an eternity of consciousness.
0:40:40 And suppose that includes unbearable pain or grief, suppose it’s unpleasant.
0:40:45 People often talk about the near-death experience as though it’s a gift.
0:40:52 To get that close to death and survive, the story goes, is supposed to bring clarity and
0:40:57 peace or something like that.
0:40:59 Do you find this to be true?
0:41:01 It brought an enormous amount of trauma and anxiety and depression afterwards that I
0:41:06 eventually worked through.
0:41:08 And I mean work.
0:41:09 I mean, it was work to climb out of that.
0:41:11 The ICU nurse who told me that I’d almost died, she came back an hour later and said,
0:41:16 “How are you doing?”
0:41:17 And I said, “Not that well.”
0:41:19 And she said, “Try this.”
0:41:20 Instead of thinking about it like something scary, think about it like something sacred.
0:41:25 And then she walked out.
0:41:26 And so, as an atheist, I’m happy to use the word sacred for its other wonderful meanings.
0:41:32 You don’t need God to understand that some things are sacred.
0:41:36 So for me, that word means what’s the information that people need to lead lives with greater
0:41:44 dignity and courage and less pain?
0:41:48 That’s sacred knowledge.
0:41:49 So did I come back from that precipice with any sacred knowledge and took me a long time
0:41:55 to sort of answer that question?
0:41:57 And I read about Dostoevsky.
0:42:00 He sort of provided the final answer in some ways for me.
0:42:03 So when he was a young man, before he was a writer, he was a little bit of a political
0:42:06 agitator.
0:42:07 And this is the 1840s during the times of the Tsar and serfdom.
0:42:11 And he and his sort of like, his woke brothers were agitating for freeing the serfs.
0:42:17 Much like in the United States, there was talk about fending slavery.
0:42:21 And the Tsar didn’t take kindly to the intelligentsia talking about such nonsense.
0:42:26 So he threw these kids in jail.
0:42:27 But no one thought it was a particularly serious situation, right?
0:42:32 And then finally, they were released and they were sort of put into a wagon.
0:42:36 And they assumed they were going to be released to their families after eight months.
0:42:39 And instead, they were driven to a city square and tied to posts.
0:42:47 And a firing squad was arrayed against them.
0:42:51 And the rifles were leveled and the rifles were cocked and the men waited for the order
0:42:57 to fire.
0:43:00 And what happened, we know what Dostoevsky was thinking because a writer galloped into
0:43:07 the square and said, the Tsar forgives them.
0:43:10 It was all theater, but they didn’t know that, of course.
0:43:12 The Tsar forgives them, you know, do not stand down, I do not kill them.
0:43:17 So Dostoevsky threw a character that is widely thought to be a substitute for himself in
0:43:23 a book called The Idiot notices sunlight glinting off a roof and thinks to himself, in moments
0:43:29 I’m going to join the sunlight, I’ll be part of all things.
0:43:33 And that if I should survive this somehow by some miracle, I will treat every moment
0:43:39 as an infinity.
0:43:41 I’ll treat every moment like the miracle that it actually is.
0:43:45 And of course, that’s a almost Zen appreciation for reality that’s impossible to maintain
0:43:51 while you’re changing the baby’s diapers and the smoke alarms going off because you burned
0:43:55 the dinner and blah, blah, blah.
0:43:56 I mean, of course, we’re humans and we get sucked into our drama.
0:43:59 But if you can have some awareness at some point that life happens only in moments and
0:44:06 that those moments are sacred and miraculous.
0:44:08 If you can get there once in a while, if you can understand that the sunlight glinting off
0:44:13 the roof that you’re part of it and it’s part of you and one day it’s all going to be the
0:44:17 same thing.
0:44:18 If you can do that, you will have reached a place of real enlightenment and I think it
0:44:23 deepens your life.
0:44:24 You had a great line in the book, you wrote it’s an open question, whether a full and
0:44:28 unaverted look at death crushes the human psyche or liberates it and it really is, isn’t
0:44:35 it?
0:44:36 We all know that death is inevitable and that it can come on any day and living in constant
0:44:42 contact with that reality is supposed to be motivation for being more present, for living
0:44:47 in the moment, as they say.
0:44:48 But no matter how hard we think about it, our death remains an abstraction until it arrives.
0:44:55 And I just don’t know how you can be prepared for that.
0:44:57 And I love what your wife, Barbara, says about that in the book to the effect of that attitude
0:45:03 of life where you feel like you’re always at risk of losing everything.
0:45:08 That doesn’t seem to be healthy to be in that space all the time.
0:45:13 That’s the needle we have to thread is be aware of a mortality but not taken hostage
0:45:17 by that awareness, which is what happened to me in the immediate aftermath of almost
0:45:21 dying.
0:45:22 So I should say that two of the young men who were with Dostoevsky by his account were
0:45:30 insane for the rest of their lives.
0:45:31 They never psychologically recovered from the shock.
0:45:34 Dostoevsky went in another direction.
0:45:36 He went towards a kind of enlightenment.
0:45:38 I don’t know.
0:45:39 I guess never thinking about death seemed as unwise as obsessing over it.
0:45:43 So maybe there’s some sweet spot in between.
0:45:46 That’s where we’re supposed to toggle.
0:45:48 One of the definitions of consciousness is to be able to imagine yourself in the future.
0:45:52 Well, if you can imagine yourself in the future, you’re going to have to imagine yourself dead
0:45:55 because that’s what the future holds.
0:45:57 And once we’re neurologically complex enough to have that thought, it would be paralyzing
0:46:04 for the puny efforts of our lives if we weren’t able to use an enormous amount of denial.
0:46:09 So we have this abstract knowledge that all is for naught and we’re going to die.
0:46:14 But we have to keep it out of our daily awareness because otherwise it would demotivate us.
0:46:19 It would keep us apathetic and crazy.
0:46:21 And so it’s a balancing act that the human mind does.
0:46:26 And so the trick, I think in terms of a kind of healthy enlightenment, is to allow in that
0:46:30 awareness of death only to the extent where it makes life seem precious, but not to the
0:46:37 extent where it makes life seem so fleeting that why bother.
0:46:41 Maybe that’s just our fate as finite, painfully self-aware creatures.
0:46:45 We live, we keep rolling our boulders up the hill until the lights go out.
0:46:49 And as Camus says, we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
0:46:53 Oh, wonderful.
0:46:54 I didn’t know that quote.
0:46:55 It’s a wonderful quote.
0:47:05 After one more short break, we talk about how confronting death changes the way you
0:47:11 live.
0:47:13 Stay with us.
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0:50:41 You spent so much of your life taking risks, calculated risks, I would say.
0:50:46 Now that you’ve almost died, now that you’re a parent, the game has changed.
0:50:51 I imagine the calculus for you is much different as well.
0:50:55 Oh, I stopped war reporting after my buddy Tim was killed in 2011.
0:50:59 I saw what his death did to everyone who loved him, and I just realized that going off to
0:51:04 war suddenly looked like a selfish act, not a noble one.
0:51:07 And so I stopped doing it.
0:51:09 And then six years later, I had my first child, and I’m an older dad, so I feel extremely
0:51:14 lucky, extremely lucky to be a father, and I’m the most risk-averse person you’ll ever
0:51:20 meet now.
0:51:21 I won’t cross Houston Street against the walk light, I mean, you know, it’s ridiculous.
0:51:25 Being a parent is emancipatory in the sense that you’re not living for yourself anymore,
0:51:31 which I do believe, I’ve come to believe, is a happier, more fulfilling existence.
0:51:36 But it makes the prospect of death even worse because of what you leave behind, because
0:51:41 the people you love need you.
0:51:45 That is what terrifies me.
0:51:46 I had a recent scare with a mole, a funky-looking mole on my arm, and I was so worried about
0:51:52 it.
0:51:53 I mean, my wife was like, “You’re fine, you’re fine,” but I mean, I was Googling what does
0:51:58 Melanoma look like and all this shit?
0:52:00 Oh, Bob Marley had a Melanoma on his foot.
0:52:03 Oh, shit, that can happen to him.
0:52:05 Those are the thoughts running through my mind.
0:52:07 Not that I would cease to be, but that my son would not have a father, and that is the
0:52:13 most terrifying thought I’ve ever had.
0:52:15 I talked to a fireman, a father of four, I think, a fairly young man who was trapped
0:52:19 in a burning building.
0:52:20 He couldn’t get out.
0:52:21 I mean, he was so desperate, it was a brick exterior wall, and he started trying to punch
0:52:26 his way through it.
0:52:27 He obviously couldn’t, and he finally got to a window, there was zero visibility, it
0:52:32 was so filled with smoke, and he finally got to a window and threw himself out head first
0:52:36 and survived, and another guy didn’t survive.
0:52:38 But in those terrible moments, he kept thinking, “My son’s going to grow up without a father.”
0:52:44 Once you’re a parent, it’s foremost in your mind, and if you’re a parent when you’re
0:52:48 young, that’s the point in your life when you’re enormously driven by your own desires
0:52:52 and curiosity, and juggling that with the responsibilities of parenthood is extremely
0:52:57 hard, and frankly, it’s pretty easy to resent the obligations, right?
0:53:01 I mean, I’m glad I wasn’t a parent at 25.
0:53:03 I think I would have been a selfish parent, like I became a parent at 55, and by that
0:53:09 point, I didn’t interest me anymore, like I wanted to be a father.
0:53:13 In that sense, as long as I live a long life, it will have been a very good choice for me.
0:53:17 I didn’t interest me anymore.
0:53:19 That’s a good line.
0:53:20 Yeah.
0:53:21 I may have to steal that.
0:53:22 There’s a beautiful passage at the end of the book that I’d like to read if you don’t
0:53:27 line, because it feels like an appropriate way to wrap this up.
0:53:31 So now I’m courting you.
0:53:33 One might allow the quick thought that it is odd that so many religions, so many dying
0:53:39 people, so many ecstatics, and so many quantum physicists believe that death is not a final
0:53:45 severing, but an ultimate merging, and that the reality we take to be life is in fact
0:53:50 a passing distraction from something so profound, so real, so all-encompassing that many return
0:53:57 to their paltry bodies on the battlefield or hospital gurney, only with great reluctance
0:54:02 and a kind of embarrassment.
0:54:04 How can I pass up the truth for an illusion at the end of the quote?
0:54:09 What I would say to that is that there’s something in me that revolts against any ideology that
0:54:16 thinks of life itself as an illusion.
0:54:19 This is why I didn’t care for Christianity, the religion of my community when I was younger,
0:54:25 because I didn’t like the idea that this life is some kind of way station en route to the
0:54:31 next life, which is supposed to be the more important life.
0:54:35 But hearing these accounts of Indies, your account, it gives me pause.
0:54:39 I don’t know how else to say it.
0:54:40 I don’t know what to think.
0:54:41 I don’t know what’s true.
0:54:42 There’s something here, something worth taking seriously.
0:54:45 I guess that’s all I know.
0:54:46 I guess I’ll stop there and let you close this out with your own thoughts on that.
0:54:49 Yeah, so I’m a journalist and I try to keep my biases out of my work and I do not come
0:54:57 to assertions to conclusions that aren’t backed up by fact.
0:55:01 So what I found in my research is that there was an extraordinary number of people who,
0:55:11 on the threshold of death like I was, looked back and thought, “That’s not the real thing.
0:55:18 Life’s not the real thing.
0:55:19 I’m entering the real thing now.”
0:55:22 And then I was surprised that there were some extremely smart people and non-religious people
0:55:27 like Schrodinger, like the physicists, who had a sort of similar thought.
0:55:31 And so I put that in there not because I’m trying to convince anyone of anything and
0:55:36 I don’t even know what I believe particularly, but it’s good information.
0:55:40 It’s important.
0:55:41 It’s interesting information.
0:55:42 It either says something profound about the human brain’s capacity for self-delusion
0:55:49 or it contains something profound about the nature of physical reality.
0:55:53 And I doubt we’ll ever know which it is, but it’s important to keep both in mind and to
0:55:57 take all the information we can from these extraordinary experiences and to take them
0:56:01 at face value, to take them literally.
0:56:03 Like these people really did experience this.
0:56:06 What does it mean?
0:56:07 I’m going to leave it right there.
0:56:08 Once again, the book is called In My Time of Dying.
0:56:12 I read it cover to cover in a day, just a sublime and honest book.
0:56:17 I can’t recommend it enough.
0:56:19 Sebastian Younger, this was a pleasure.
0:56:21 Thank you.
0:56:22 Thank you.
0:56:23 I really enjoyed the conversation.
0:56:28 Alright, another episode about death.
0:56:39 How about that?
0:56:41 As you can tell, it’s a recent favorite of mine.
0:56:44 I just, I love the intensity of it and I love the honesty and for a show that prides itself
0:56:52 on leaning into the questions and not needing final answers.
0:56:58 This one felt pretty on brand.
0:57:02 What did you think?
0:57:03 You can drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com and let us know.
0:57:07 And if you don’t have time for that, great review, subscribe.
0:57:12 That stuff really helps and we appreciate it.
0:57:16 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:57:23 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:57:25 New episodes of The Gray Area Drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
0:57:33 The gray area is part of Vox, which doesn’t have a paywall.
0:57:36 Help us keep Vox free by going to vox.com/give.
0:57:40 Get ready to laugh out loud at the Tribeca Festival, June 5th to June 16th in NYC.
0:57:54 Experience hilarious talks, comedy specials, and feel-good films with your fan favorite
0:57:59 comedians like Hannah Einbinder, Judd Apatow, Neil Patrick Harris, Take Nataro, and more.
0:58:05 You have to be there.
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0:01:53 If you track the news at all, you’re aware of a potentially revolutionary new weight
0:01:59 loss drug called Ozympic.
0:02:02 To be honest, I don’t have anything profound or novel to say about Ozympic.
0:02:08 But I know it’s monumental, or certainly has the potential to be, and I wanted to find
0:02:13 out more about it.
0:02:15 So I invited someone who’s done the research as a journalist and as a patient.
0:02:23 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:02:40 Today’s guest is Johan Hari.
0:02:41 He’s the author of a new book called Magic Pill, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing
0:02:47 Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs.
0:02:51 I just read the book and it was eye-opening to say the least.
0:02:55 Hari talks to the scientists and researchers developing these drugs, but he also, importantly,
0:03:02 experimented with them himself and writes vividly about that experience.
0:03:07 Make no mistake, some of the early findings here are incredible and the potential health
0:03:13 benefits are immense.
0:03:15 So I invited Hari on the show to talk about what he learned and what he thinks we should
0:03:20 know about these drugs.
0:03:27 Johan Hari, welcome back to the Gray Area.
0:03:30 I always find it really weird coming on your podcast, Sean, because I listen to it so much
0:03:33 that I feel like I’ve slipped into my own phone.
0:03:36 It’s a slightly disconcerting experience, but I’m very happy to be here.
0:03:39 This is a familiar tactic.
0:03:40 You butter up the host right at the outset to set the turn.
0:03:44 I’ve seen this before, sir.
0:03:46 Tactics have been exposed.
0:03:49 Let’s start with the basics here.
0:03:51 What is Ozympic for people who don’t really know anything about it?
0:03:55 I remember the exact moment I asked this question for myself.
0:03:58 It was the winter of 2022 and it was the end of the pandemic and I got invited to a party
0:04:05 for the first time in all those months and I decided to go in the Uber on the way there.
0:04:10 I was feeling a bit self-conscious because I gained loads of weight.
0:04:13 So I was going to a party that was thrown by an Oscar-winning actor.
0:04:15 I’m not saying this just to name-drop, it’s relevant.
0:04:18 I suddenly thought, “This is going to be fascinating because everyone I know gained weight.
0:04:22 It’s going to be so interesting to see these actors kind of looking different with a bit
0:04:26 of podge on them.”
0:04:28 I arrived and it’s not just that they hadn’t gained weight.
0:04:32 Everyone was gaunt, everyone was thin and I was kind of wandering around in a bit of
0:04:36 a daze and I bumped into a friend of mine and I said to her, “Wow, looks like everyone
0:04:42 really did take up palates during lockdown.”
0:04:45 She laughed at me and I said, “What are you laughing at?”
0:04:47 She said, “Well, you know it’s not palates, right?”
0:04:50 And she pulled up an ozempic pen on her phone and I don’t remember ever feeling so conflicted
0:04:56 about anything as what I learned, the kind of basics I learned in the next couple of
0:04:59 days.
0:05:00 So we have a new kind of weight loss drug which works in a completely new way on new mechanisms
0:05:05 in your gut and in your brain that produces massive weight loss.
0:05:09 The average person who takes ozempic loses 15% of their body weight.
0:05:14 The average person who takes minjaro, which is the next in this class of drugs, loses
0:05:18 21% and for the next one that’s coming down the line that will be available next year,
0:05:22 the average person loses 24% of their body weight which is only slightly below bariatric
0:05:28 surgery.
0:05:29 And I remember as soon as I learned this, I don’t remember any topic I ever learned about
0:05:33 where I felt so profoundly conflicted as I did about these drugs because I immediately
0:05:38 thought, “Well, I know that obesity causes all sorts of health risks.
0:05:42 I’m older now than my grandfather ever got to be because he died of a heart attack when
0:05:46 he was 44, loads of the men in my family get heart attacks.
0:05:50 My dad had bad heart problems, my uncle died of a heart attack.”
0:05:54 So I thought, “Wow, if there’s a drug that reverses obesity, that could be really big
0:05:57 for me.”
0:05:59 But I also thought, “Come on, I’ve seen this story before, right?”
0:06:02 Every 20 years or so a new miracle diet drug is announced, millions of people take it and
0:06:08 then we always discover it has some terrible side effect that means it’s pulled from the
0:06:11 market leaving a wave of devastated people in its wake.
0:06:15 So to really investigate this, I ended up going on this really big journey all over
0:06:19 the world from Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo to interview the leading critics of these
0:06:24 drugs, the leading defenders of these drugs, and really dig into, “Well, actually, what
0:06:27 are these drugs and what are they going to do to all of us?”
0:06:30 Well, you mentioned how we’ve had these miracle drugs in the past, again, it’s perhaps too
0:06:38 soon to say, but what makes this one different or potentially different?
0:06:44 Lots of things.
0:06:45 So the first is that it works on a completely new mechanism.
0:06:48 If you ate something now, Sean, your gut would produce a hormone called GLP1.
0:06:53 And we now know that’s part of your body’s natural signals, just saying, “Hey, Sean,
0:06:57 you’ve had enough, stop eating.”
0:06:59 But natural GLP1 only stays in your system for a few minutes.
0:07:03 So what these drugs do is they inject into you an artificial copy of GLP1, but instead
0:07:09 of lasting for a few minutes, it stays in your system for a whole week.
0:07:12 So it has this bizarre effect.
0:07:15 I’ll never forget the second day I took it, because I took it to research it for the book.
0:07:20 I was lying in bed, I woke up and I had this really strange sensation and I couldn’t locate
0:07:25 in my body what it was that I was feeling.
0:07:28 And then I realized I wasn’t hungry.
0:07:32 I had woken up and I wasn’t hungry.
0:07:33 I don’t remember that ever happening before.
0:07:35 And I went to this diner near where I live and I ordered what I used to order every day,
0:07:39 which was a huge brown roll with loads of chicken and mayo in it.
0:07:43 And I had like three or four mouthfuls and I couldn’t eat anymore.
0:07:46 I felt full.
0:07:47 So one of the things that’s different is we know that these drugs produce a feeling
0:07:51 of satiety that lasts, the feeling of being full and having had enough.
0:07:56 And we know that they produce sustained weight loss over a significant period of time.
0:08:01 How confident are we in these early results?
0:08:03 Well, it’s an extremely high level of confidence that it produces significant amount of weight
0:08:07 loss.
0:08:08 I mean, there’s been hundreds of studies involving tens of thousands of people.
0:08:10 And that’s just in its trick use for obesity.
0:08:12 These drugs have also been used for diabetics, for other purposes, which gives us some insight
0:08:17 onto the safety risks around the drugs as well.
0:08:19 So yeah, huge numbers of people, I mean, as robust a finding as you get with any new drug.
0:08:26 So if we’re talking about this hormone that’s not just in your gut, but also in your brain,
0:08:31 does that mean that this drug could potentially be a general anti-addiction drug, a drug that
0:08:38 bolsters your capacity for self-control, as opposed to just a weight loss drug?
0:08:44 Because this is a hormone that’s made in your gut, it was thought that these drugs primarily
0:08:49 affect your gut, that they work by slowing down your gastric emptying or some other mechanism.
0:08:54 And that’s true and there is certainly an effect on your gut.
0:08:57 But we also know that you have GLP-1 receptors not just in your gut, but in your brain.
0:09:02 It’s increasingly clear that these drugs work primarily not on your gut, but on your brain.
0:09:07 If you give these drugs to rodents and then you cut open their brains, you see that the
0:09:11 drug goes everywhere in their brain.
0:09:14 And the neuroscientists I interviewed and the science they’ve produced strongly suggest
0:09:19 that these drugs work primarily by changing what you want, by changing your cravings and
0:09:25 your desires.
0:09:26 There’s a huge debate about how that works, and it’s slightly disconcerting to interview
0:09:30 the leading neuroscientists and say, “Okay, you’re saying this works primarily on my brain?
0:09:34 What’s it doing to my brain?”
0:09:36 And they all said a very erudite vision of, “Ah, we don’t really know.”
0:09:40 There’s also a huge debate about both negative and positive effects that may be happening.
0:09:45 There is debate about whether it’s causing depression or even suicidal feelings in a
0:09:49 minority of users.
0:09:51 So what we know at the moment is we have a huge amount of unbelievably promising evidence
0:09:56 in animals.
0:09:57 So I interviewed loads of scientists who’ve been doing experiments on this.
0:10:00 Think about, for example, Professor Elizabeth Jarlhag, who’s at the University of Gothenburg
0:10:04 in Sweden.
0:10:05 What she does is they get a load of rats and they get them to drink loads of alcohol and
0:10:10 get used to it.
0:10:11 And rats quite like getting drunk.
0:10:12 They wobble around their little cages, and so they give rats alcohol for quite long periods
0:10:16 of time until eventually their cage looks like a bar in downtown Vegas.
0:10:21 And then they inject them in the nape of their neck with GLP1 agonist, the active component
0:10:26 in ismpic and wogovi.
0:10:29 And what they find is a dramatic reduction in how much alcohol they consume.
0:10:33 It’s usually about 50%.
0:10:35 And we discover that they get less dopamine when they drink alcohol.
0:10:39 They like it less.
0:10:40 They crave it less.
0:10:41 They’ll put in less effort to get it.
0:10:43 It really does change the amount they want alcohol.
0:10:45 But initially it was thought, OK, well, that could just be these drugs reduce your desire
0:10:50 for calories.
0:10:51 Obviously, alcohol has caloric content.
0:10:53 Maybe it’s just that.
0:10:54 So other scientists then experimented with drugs that don’t have any calories in them.
0:10:58 For example, Professor Patricia Griggsen, who I interviewed is at Penn State University,
0:11:03 got rats to use fentanyl and heroin heavily, gave them GLP1 agonists found they used significantly
0:11:09 less.
0:11:10 And Dr. Greg Stanwood, who’s at Florida State University with mice, gave mice cocaine.
0:11:16 When they give them GLP1 agonists, they discover the mice use far less cocaine again by around
0:11:21 50%.
0:11:22 We have very little amount of human evidence.
0:11:25 We’ve got a lot of anecdotes, a lot of people I spoke to who started to take ismpic and saw
0:11:29 their addictions go away.
0:11:31 But very little human evidence so far.
0:11:33 What we do have is a little bit of a mixed picture.
0:11:35 We know that these drugs reduce smoking, but only if you combine them with a nicotine patch.
0:11:40 We know they reduce alcohol use, but only for people who want heavy drinkers at the
0:11:44 start.
0:11:45 We’ll know a lot more in the next few years because there’s a huge number of trials going
0:11:48 on.
0:11:49 But you’ve stated, rightly, the most optimistic possible scenario, which we should treat with
0:11:54 caution, but equally shouldn’t dismiss, which is that actually this is not an anti-obesity
0:11:59 drug, that this is a drug that boosts self-control across the board.
0:12:02 Now, we need a lot more evidence before we start backing up statements like that.
0:12:06 But I would say it’s not totally implausible.
0:12:09 With that necessary caveat, what do you make of all these preliminary findings?
0:12:14 Again, there’s just so much too good to be true energy, and it makes me very, very cautious,
0:12:20 but wow, the potential here is obvious and dramatic.
0:12:25 The book is called Magic Pill because there’s three ways in which these drugs could be magic.
0:12:30 The first is the most obvious, they could just solve the problem, right?
0:12:33 And there are days when I feel like that, Sean, you know, I’ve been addicted to junk
0:12:36 food all my life, I’ve been obese most of my adult life, and now I inject myself once
0:12:41 in the leg every week, and I’m not obese anymore, like it feels like magic.
0:12:47 The second way in which it could be magic is, it could be a magic trick, it could be like
0:12:52 the magician who shows you a card trick while secretly picking your pocket, right?
0:12:56 It could be these drugs in addition to these benefits cause such severe drawbacks that they
0:13:01 end up screwing you over.
0:13:02 I do not rule out that scenario, I think it is plausible.
0:13:06 The third way in which they could be magic, I actually think is the most likely.
0:13:09 If you think about the stories we tell about magic, you find the lamp, you get the genie,
0:13:14 you make your wish, and your wish comes true, but never quite in the way you expected.
0:13:18 Well, one of the problems with a lot of these fad diets and other things people have done
0:13:23 to lose weight is that as soon as you stop doing the thing, whatever the thing is, you
0:13:29 put all the weight back on.
0:13:31 What happens when you stop taking this drug?
0:13:32 In other words, when you start taking it, do you have to keep taking it?
0:13:35 Just add in for an item?
0:13:37 We’ve got mixed evidence about this.
0:13:39 There may be a minority of people who keep the weight off, but it seems that most people
0:13:43 regain most of the weight pretty quickly after they stop taking it.
0:13:47 So it’s not a kind of holiday romance, it’s a lifelong marriage, or it’s like statins
0:13:51 or blood pressure medication.
0:13:52 It works as long as you take it, and when you stop taking it, it stops working.
0:13:55 So is the basic causal mechanism here that the drug deactivates the reward centers of
0:14:01 the brain?
0:14:02 That’s basically how it works.
0:14:04 This is highly disputed.
0:14:06 So there are different theories about what it is doing to the brain, and everyone who
0:14:10 gave me a theory said, “Look, at this point, it’s speculative, we don’t know.”
0:14:14 So one theory is exactly what you’ve articulated.
0:14:17 You have in your brain something called the reward centers, and everything you do that
0:14:20 gives you pleasure, whether it’s having sex, eating food, meeting up with a friend.
0:14:24 We do in part because it makes your reward centers hum.
0:14:27 And one theory is that I’m eating more salad and less Big Mac because the Big Mac is significantly
0:14:33 less rewarding to me, so the gap between the Big Mac and the salad is now much smaller.
0:14:37 Now that theory obviously raises a whole series of concerns.
0:14:42 If it’s dampening my reward system for Big Macs, how do we know it’s not dampening my
0:14:46 reward system for writing my next book or having sex or whatever it might be?
0:14:51 And indeed, there has been a safety signal raised around depression and suicide in a
0:14:56 small minority of people using these drugs.
0:14:58 A different theory is that these drugs boost a different system in your brain, as Professor
0:15:02 Paul Kenney explained to me, who’s the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai.
0:15:07 In addition to a reward system in your brain, you’ve got something called your satiety system.
0:15:12 Satiety is a really important concept for understanding how we got into the obesity
0:15:15 crisis and how these drugs work.
0:15:18 Your satiety is just your feeling that you’ve had enough and you don’t want any more.
0:15:21 You’re sated when you don’t want any more.
0:15:23 We all get that feeling sometimes maybe Thanksgiving dinner or whatever.
0:15:26 And he argues it’s not that it dials down your reward system, it’s likely that it’s
0:15:30 dialing up your satiety system, actually dialing up the bit of you that goes, “Oh, I’ve had
0:15:34 enough now, I don’t want any more.”
0:15:37 But the reality is, I have to say, it’s disconcerting to realize this is an experiment on millions
0:15:42 of people.
0:15:43 I’m one of the guinea pigs and there is an enormous amount we don’t know.
0:15:47 There’s a huge amount we do know, some really extraordinary benefits, some quite disturbing
0:15:52 risks.
0:15:53 But a lot of what you’re asking quite reasonably, when I put it to the scientists, they just
0:15:57 kind of go, “Good question, come back in five years, we might know.”
0:16:01 A huge part of the book is your own experimentation with Osemic.
0:16:05 And look, I should stress that your experience is your experience.
0:16:09 It’s a sample size of one.
0:16:11 It may not be the experience someone else will have, but it nevertheless is relevant.
0:16:18 How long have you been taking it?
0:16:19 It’s been a year and four months now.
0:16:23 And how much weight have you lost?
0:16:24 42 pounds.
0:16:25 I went from being 33% body fat to 22% body fat, it’s an enormous fall.
0:16:31 And one thing you talk about in the book is feeling not quite depressed, but feeling
0:16:37 emotionally doled, I think is the phrase that you use in the book.
0:16:41 How would you explain that distinction between not feeling depressed, but feeling emotionally
0:16:45 doled?
0:16:46 Because they’re certainly similar.
0:16:47 Yeah, you know, it’s funny, my friend Danielle was pregnant the first six months I was taking
0:16:51 the drugs and every time I saw her, it was like we were on reverse trajectories, like
0:16:54 she was swelling and I was shrinking.
0:16:57 And I remember saying to her one day, “This is really weird, I’m getting what I want,
0:17:01 I’m losing loads of weight, but I don’t actually feel better.”
0:17:04 And there seems to be, although there’s much debate about this, a significant minority
0:17:10 of people who experience something like that.
0:17:15 And we know with a parallel bariatric surgery, which is the best form of medical assisted
0:17:20 weight loss we’ve had up to now, after you have bariatric surgery, in fact, your suicide
0:17:24 risk almost quadruples and 17% of people who have that surgery have to have inpatient psychiatric
0:17:29 care afterwards.
0:17:30 And I’ll show you why that might be.
0:17:32 So obviously one potential theory is the brain effects we’ve been talking about and other
0:17:35 brain effects.
0:17:36 I actually think for me it was something different, seven months into taking these drugs, I was
0:17:41 in Las Vegas, I was researching for a different book I’m writing, and I went really on autopilot,
0:17:47 I went to a branch of KFC, I’ve been to a thousand times, I went on West Sahara.
0:17:51 And I went in and I ordered a bucket of fried chicken, which is what I would have ordered
0:17:54 a year before.
0:17:55 And I ate a chicken drumstick and I suddenly thought, “Shit, I can’t eat the rest of this.”
0:18:01 And I really felt like an epiphany, “Oh, I’m just going to have to feel bad,” right?
0:18:06 And I realized, and there’s a lot of evidence for this, what these drugs do is they interrupt
0:18:10 your eating patterns.
0:18:11 And one of the consequences of that for many people is they bring to the surface the deep
0:18:16 underlying psychological factors that make us overeat in the first place.
0:18:21 So for me, I realized, you know, I had been using food to manage my emotions and calm myself
0:18:26 down going right back to when I was a very small child, I grew up in a family where there’s
0:18:29 a lot of addiction and mental illness.
0:18:30 And one of the ways I dealt with that was just by numbing myself with food.
0:18:34 And you can’t do that when you’re on OZMPIC.
0:18:36 For a lot of people, that transition is very bumpy and some people never make that transition,
0:18:40 they just remain feeling really bad.
0:18:44 Are you scared to stop using it?
0:18:46 I’m not going to stop using it.
0:18:47 And for me, it’s for a very simple reason.
0:18:51 So I actually think some of the best evidence for what these drugs will do to us, we can
0:18:54 get from looking at this parallel.
0:18:56 Because up to now, it’s been extremely hard to lose huge amounts of weight and keep it
0:18:59 off.
0:19:00 I mean, some people can do it purely by calorie restriction and exercise, but that’s actually
0:19:04 surprisingly rare.
0:19:05 So we’ve got good evidence from bariatric surgery.
0:19:08 And as we know, bariatric surgery is a horrible, horrifying, grisly operation.
0:19:13 One in a thousand people die in the operation.
0:19:15 It’s no joke.
0:19:16 But if you have bariatric surgery and reverse your obesity, the benefits are absolutely staggering.
0:19:23 In the years that follow, you are 56% less likely to die of a heart attack, 60% less
0:19:29 likely to die of cancer, 92% less likely to die of diabetes related causes.
0:19:34 In fact, it’s so good for you, you’re 40% less likely to die of any cause at all.
0:19:40 And we now know the drugs are moving us in a similar direction alongside some risks.
0:19:43 And for me, that just decided it, right?
0:19:46 So many men in my family have heart problems.
0:19:48 I’ve been worried about that all my life.
0:19:51 So I’m not going to stop taking it.
0:19:53 If we ran out of supply, which I really worry about, not only that I would regain the weight
0:19:57 and regain the heart risk, but I actually may gain more weight than I have before.
0:20:01 So yeah, I worry about that.
0:20:03 Are there any other potential downsides that researchers are thinking about?
0:20:08 When you talk about the risks, a lot of the scientists say absolutely rightly, actually,
0:20:14 we’ve got quite a lot of evidence here on these drugs.
0:20:16 Diabetics have been taking them for 18 years.
0:20:18 So they say, look, if they cause some horrific short to medium term effect, it would have
0:20:24 shown up in the diabetics now by now.
0:20:26 If it made you grow horns, the diabetics would have horns, right?
0:20:29 And that’s a good point.
0:20:31 And it should give us some sense of security.
0:20:34 But equally some other scientists said, okay, if we’re going to base our confidence that
0:20:38 these drugs are safe on the diabetics, let’s really dig into the data around the diabetics.
0:20:43 So for example, there’s a brilliant French scientist called Jean-Luc Fayet.
0:20:47 And what he looked at was a very large group of diabetics who use these drugs, and then
0:20:51 he looked at a comparable group of diabetics who were very similar in every other way,
0:20:55 but didn’t use these drugs.
0:20:56 And what him and his colleagues calculated is these drugs, if they’re right, increase
0:21:00 your risk of thyroid cancer by between 50% to 75%.
0:21:05 That’s significant.
0:21:06 Yeah.
0:21:07 As he said to me, it’s important to understand what that doesn’t mean.
0:21:10 That doesn’t mean if you take the drug, you have a 50% to 75% chance of getting thyroid
0:21:15 cancer.
0:21:16 If that was the case, we’d be having bonfires or a zempik all over the world.
0:21:19 What it means is, if you take the drug, whatever, if he’s right, and this is highly disputed,
0:21:25 if you take the drug, whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, that risk will
0:21:31 increase by between 50% to 75%.
0:21:33 Now other people say thyroid cancer is relatively rare, 1.2% of people get it in their life,
0:21:39 82% of people survive.
0:21:42 Nonetheless, I was extremely alarmed by that.
0:21:45 Since that, lots of other scientists said to me, “Well, look, even if that’s right,
0:21:49 you’ve got to compare it to what would happen to your cancer risk if you just remain obese.”
0:21:54 Right?
0:21:55 And actually, I was stunned by the evidence about the cancer risk just from being obese.
0:22:00 One of the biggest preventable causes of cancer in the United States and Britain is obesity.
0:22:04 So the thing I think we have to do, you have to look at two competing sets of risks here.
0:22:10 The risks of obesity and the risks of these drugs.
0:22:13 And there isn’t a pattern answer to that.
0:22:15 It’s a weird thing.
0:22:16 To start the book so divided and then go on this huge journey and read hundreds and hundreds
0:22:22 of studies and interview so many experts, and here I am at the end of it, I know much
0:22:27 more about the benefits and risks and what it’s going to do to the culture.
0:22:30 But to be honest with you, Sean, and this hasn’t happened to me in my books before, I’m still
0:22:34 really, really conflicted.
0:22:36 I don’t really know.
0:22:38 That itself was kind of revealing.
0:22:39 Yeah.
0:22:40 Yeah.
0:22:41 When we get back from the break, what does this demand for a weight loss drug say about
0:22:54 our culture and our food?
0:22:57 Stay with us.
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0:27:08 Another part of the book that I do want to discuss a little bit here is the story of
0:27:13 how we got to this place as a society.
0:27:17 And the main character here is the modern food industry.
0:27:22 What did you want to say about this in the book?
0:27:23 What should people know about this dimension of the problem?
0:27:26 So I guess the most important thing to know is just how recent and unusual the obesity
0:27:30 crisis is.
0:27:32 You have 300,000 years where obesity is exceptionally rare.
0:27:36 So what happened?
0:27:38 We moved from eating mostly whole foods that are prepared on the day to eating mostly processed
0:27:45 and ultra processed foods that are assembled in factories made out of chemicals in a process
0:27:50 that isn’t even called cooking, it’s called manufacturing food.
0:27:53 And it turns out that processed food affects our bodies in a completely different way to
0:27:59 the kind of food that human beings evolve to eat.
0:28:01 There’s a brilliant scientist called Professor Paul Kenney, who I mentioned before, head
0:28:05 of neuroscience at Mount Sinai.
0:28:07 He grew up in Dublin in Ireland, and he moved in his 20s to San Diego to do his PhD, I think.
0:28:12 And he quickly clocked, whoa, Americans do not eat like Irish people did at the time.
0:28:17 They eat much more processed food, much more junk food, much more sugary and salty food.
0:28:22 Unlike many a good immigrant here, simulated, and within a year he’d gained 30 pounds.
0:28:27 And he started to feel like these foods weren’t just changing his body, they were changing
0:28:34 his brain, they were changing his cravings, they were changing what he wanted.
0:28:38 So he designed an experiment to test this, it’s very simple.
0:28:40 He got a load of rats and he raised them in a cage.
0:28:43 And for the first part of their life, all they had was the kind of nutritious whole foods
0:28:47 that rats evolved to eat for thousands of years.
0:28:51 And when they had that food and nothing else, they would eat when they were hungry and then
0:28:54 they would stop.
0:28:55 They never made themselves fat.
0:28:57 They seemed to have some kind of natural nutritional wisdom when they had the food they evolved
0:29:01 for that just said, okay, stop now.
0:29:04 Then Professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet.
0:29:08 He fried up some bacon, he bought some Snickers bars and crucially he bought a lot of cheesecake
0:29:13 and he put it in the cage.
0:29:14 And they still had the option of healthy food, but the rats went crazy for the American diet.
0:29:20 They would literally dive into the cheesecake and eat their way out, just completely kind
0:29:24 of slicked and caked in this cheesecake.
0:29:28 They ate and ate and ate and ate.
0:29:31 The way Professor Kenny put it to me, within a few days they were different animals and
0:29:35 they all became very severely overweight quite rapidly.
0:29:38 Then Professor Kenny did something that to me as a former junk food addict since pretty
0:29:42 cruel, he took away all that American food and left them with nothing but the healthy
0:29:46 food again.
0:29:47 He was pretty sure he knew what would happen, that they would eat more of the healthy food
0:29:51 than they did before and this would prove that junk food expands the number of calories
0:29:54 you eat.
0:29:55 That is not what happened.
0:29:57 What happened was much weirder.
0:29:59 They refused to eat anything at all.
0:30:02 When they were deprived of the American food, they would rather starve than go back to eating
0:30:05 healthy food.
0:30:06 It’s only when they were literally starving that they went back to eating it.
0:30:09 Now all this shows, and we have a huge amount of evidence for this in humans, there’s something
0:30:14 about the food we’re eating that is profoundly undermining our ability to know when to stop.
0:30:20 It is destroying our satiety and what these drugs do is they give us back that satiety.
0:30:26 The way one scientist put it to me, is there satiety hormones?
0:30:29 When you see it like that, you realize one Professor, Michael Lowe in Philly, said to
0:30:35 me, they’re an artificial solution to an artificial problem.
0:30:39 The point you were making earlier about how disevolved or maladapted we are to this environment,
0:30:45 we evolve under conditions where salty, sugary, starchy foods were very hard to come by and
0:30:52 now these unhealthy, super processed foods are cheap and omnipresent.
0:30:58 I’m not saying it’s impossible to be healthy in the modern world, but as you say in the
0:31:02 book, we have built a system that almost deliberately poisons us, which is insane.
0:31:08 Yeah, it’s catastrophic and it’s profoundly harming our health.
0:31:12 It didn’t have to happen.
0:31:13 It’s not an inevitable effect of modernity.
0:31:15 It’s the effect of allowing the food industry to systematically poison the minds and bodies
0:31:21 of the country.
0:31:22 Now, they’re not doing that because they’re wicked bond villains.
0:31:25 They’re doing that to make money, but we’ve allowed them to do it and they have lobbied
0:31:29 to prevent laws that would have sensibly prevented this and they’ve massively pumped
0:31:34 our heads full of bullshit.
0:31:36 So, you think about from the moment we’re born, we are bombarded with imagery, telling
0:31:41 us to eat things that are really bad for us and I include myself in that by the way.
0:31:46 Well, they kind of are the bond villains.
0:31:49 Some of them are.
0:31:50 I read in the book where you talk about an internal memo from 1998 from a company that
0:31:56 makes biscuits.
0:31:57 The memo was talking about how to market their shit food to kids.
0:32:04 And they’re literally saying, we’ve got to get them when they’re young.
0:32:06 We’ve got to get them to shape their tastes before they’re making rational choices, right?
0:32:11 And they talk about, well, let’s use cartoon characters, let’s advertising kids TV, let’s
0:32:16 give our shitty food free to schools so that when they go home, they demand it.
0:32:20 Yeah, these are reprehensible people.
0:32:23 As angry as I am with the food industry, and I am very angry with them, I think it’s despicable
0:32:27 and they should have made different moral choices, I’m more angry with the society that
0:32:32 didn’t regulate them, right?
0:32:34 Because those companies are maximizing profit for their shareholders.
0:32:36 That’s what the company is built to do.
0:32:38 The bigger issue is not just moral condemnation of them.
0:32:41 I don’t think that gets us very far.
0:32:42 They’re not going to morally change.
0:32:44 The issue is why have we not regulated them?
0:32:47 So we end up with this shitty choice of, do I continue with a risky medical condition
0:32:52 or do I take this risky drug?
0:32:54 That choice didn’t have to happen.
0:32:56 And that choice does not have to be the choice for the next generation of Americans.
0:33:00 If we get this right, we can fix this.
0:33:03 We don’t have to let our kids grow up in this trap.
0:33:05 It’s really important that people know that.
0:33:07 And if that sounds very pie in the sky, I would say think about smoking, right?
0:33:11 Think about when we were kids.
0:33:12 When we were kids, people smoked everywhere.
0:33:16 People smoked on the subway.
0:33:18 People smoked on planes.
0:33:19 People smoked on game shows.
0:33:20 The doctor used to smoke while he examined you.
0:33:22 I remember that when I was a kid.
0:33:24 There’s a photograph of me and my mother where she’s breastfeeding me, smoking and resting
0:33:29 the ashtray on my stomach, right?
0:33:31 Now, I’m speaking to you from Britain, you know, the British government has just begun
0:33:34 the criminalization of smoking.
0:33:36 That’s an enormous public health transformation.
0:33:38 We can make similar changes like this.
0:33:40 I’ve been to places that have begun to do it.
0:33:43 But it requires first an honest reckoning with how this happened and what it is physically
0:33:49 doing to us.
0:33:50 One of the reasons I identified pretty early on in my life as on the political left is
0:33:57 I would constantly see these arguments about this or that societal problem.
0:34:03 And I thought conservatives overestimated the role of agency and choice and liberals
0:34:11 seemed more tuned to the realities of the incentive structure that we live in and how
0:34:18 those constrain our actual choices.
0:34:20 And this is the same dynamic I struggle with here, right?
0:34:23 Like sure, people need to make wise life choices.
0:34:26 I get that.
0:34:27 We need to exercise more.
0:34:28 We need to eat as well as we can.
0:34:30 But if you’re poor or working class, eating healthy is expensive.
0:34:35 Finding the time to work out if you’re a single mom or working two jobs or whatever is hard.
0:34:42 So I guess what I’m asking is how do we avoid tumbling into a post-ozympic world that’s
0:34:47 even more unequal than the world we already live in?
0:34:51 You’re totally right.
0:34:52 My grandmother left school when she was 13.
0:34:55 She raised three kids on her own because her husband died when he was very young.
0:34:58 She had a heart attack and my grandmother came home dog-tired from a day cleaning toilets,
0:35:04 working bars.
0:35:06 And the one comfort she had in her life was eating Stodge and carbohydrates and she ate
0:35:10 a lot of them and became very obese.
0:35:12 And anyone who criticizes her as an asshole.
0:35:15 So you’re absolutely right.
0:35:17 There’s the inequality of access to healthy food and then there’s just it’s really stressful
0:35:21 to be poor and you don’t have many comforts when you’re poor and one of them is food.
0:35:27 With ozympic there’s some possible scenarios for how this might play out now and one of
0:35:31 them is a pretty dystopian one which is that these drugs work, that the benefits outweigh
0:35:35 the risks but they are only accessible to a tiny elite.
0:35:39 So you have the Real Housewives of New Jersey get to be super skinny and the Real School
0:35:43 Children of New Jersey get to be diabetic at the age of 12, right?
0:35:46 That’s a real risk.
0:35:48 I think it’s possibly the most likely scenario given the current configuration.
0:35:52 It’s not because the drugs are inherently expensive.
0:35:54 The drugs cost about $40 a month to manufacture.
0:35:57 It’s because of the patenting system and the insane way the American medical system works.
0:36:01 You know, I live half the time in the US half the time in Britain.
0:36:05 When I’m in Britain I buy these drugs for about £200 a month.
0:36:09 What’s that?
0:36:10 $280 something like that.
0:36:11 When I’m in Las Vegas it costs me like $1,000 a month, right?
0:36:15 This disparity in drug prices happens in the US the whole time.
0:36:18 It’s madness and it’s insane that the United States tolerates this.
0:36:21 It doesn’t have to be that way.
0:36:22 There are all sorts of ways that we can bring down the price and the price will come down
0:36:26 anyway in eight years time because in 2032 a Zempik comes out of Payton.
0:36:31 So eight years from now these drugs will almost certainly be in pill form.
0:36:35 You can already get the pills but the pills will be more effective.
0:36:38 At that point, I anticipate if we don’t find really horrific side effects, I would guess
0:36:43 half the American population will be taking them and don’t take my word for it.
0:36:48 Look at the markets and what they’re saying.
0:36:50 Jeffrey’s Financial just did a big report for the airlines saying prepare for the fact
0:36:56 that you’re going to have to spend far less money on jet fuel because the population’s
0:36:59 about to become much thinner and you’re going to have to spend a lot less money on it.
0:37:02 The CEO of Nestle, Mark Schneider, has been making very nervous noises about the future
0:37:07 of their ice cream market.
0:37:08 Even think about little things.
0:37:09 There’s a company that manufactures the hinges for hip and knee replacements.
0:37:14 Their stock is down because fewer people are going to be having hip and knee replacements
0:37:18 because the main driver of those operations is obesity and a lot of fewer people are
0:37:22 going to be obese.
0:37:24 Some of that sounds really overstated to me in terms of the impact.
0:37:29 Talk me through that a little bit.
0:37:31 Even if half the country is taking this drug and losing 20, 25 pounds or whatever the case
0:37:38 may be, is that really going to be significant enough to tank airline prices and up in the
0:37:44 market in that way?
0:37:45 That seems wild.
0:37:46 I think you have to think about it in the wider context.
0:37:50 In terms of the consequences of this, I mean, by many measures, obesity is the biggest killer
0:37:54 in the United States.
0:37:56 If you can massively reduce the biggest killer in the country, yeah, that has enormous consequences.
0:38:02 It also has huge cultural consequences, by the way, in all sorts of complex and much more
0:38:07 worrying ways about what young women aspire to be like, what the young women they see around
0:38:11 them look like.
0:38:12 But yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s overblown to say if you can reduce the biggest killer
0:38:16 in the society, and you can transform how people look and how they move and how their
0:38:22 bodies work and what kind of illnesses they get, that’s pretty, pretty big.
0:38:26 If 50% of the country is taking this, then presumably that will include kids, young kids
0:38:33 and teenagers.
0:38:35 And I read what you wrote about this in the book, and it is appropriately nuanced.
0:38:40 But man, I don’t know what to think about that.
0:38:43 The first thing I feel when I think about this is profound anger.
0:38:46 It was the angriest I got when writing the book.
0:38:49 So the first thing we should say is it is an outrage that parents are being put in the
0:38:54 position where they have to make this choice.
0:38:56 It isn’t happening in countries that made better societal choices.
0:39:00 We shouldn’t allow it to continue.
0:39:01 But my biggest worry about these drugs for myself and for these kids is we just have
0:39:07 no idea about the long term effects.
0:39:10 You know, these drugs are activating key parts of the brain, right?
0:39:14 I had a quite chilling conversation with one of the neuroscientists.
0:39:17 She was explaining to me which brain regions we know are affected by these drugs.
0:39:21 And I remember saying to her, “So what else does that brain region do?”
0:39:24 And she said, “Oh, memory processing, control of your gut.”
0:39:27 And I was like, “Oh well, just the trivial stuff then.”
0:39:30 Of course this raises the question, if you are chronically activating these parts of
0:39:33 the brain and you think about an eight-year-old child to have the benefits throughout their
0:39:38 life, they will have to take it for what, 80 years?
0:39:41 What will be the effect of that?
0:39:43 The answer is we have absolutely no idea.
0:39:45 Is that the biggest concern for you in terms of the risk, just simply the unknown?
0:39:52 It’s the biggest risk for me personally because a lot of the risks don’t apply to me.
0:39:56 I’m obviously not going to get pregnant.
0:39:58 I’ve never had thyroid cancer in my family.
0:40:00 I didn’t experience a loss of pleasure in food.
0:40:03 The one that I’m most worried about, this is not for myself, but eating disorders in
0:40:07 young women.
0:40:08 So prior to the pandemic, we already had historically high levels of eating disorders
0:40:13 among American girls.
0:40:14 It is overwhelmingly girls of their course, some boys.
0:40:18 And then during the pandemic, incredibly it rose from the already historically high level.
0:40:23 And I am extremely worried about what happens when people who are determined to starve themselves
0:40:30 get hold of an unprecedentedly powerful weapon to amputate your appetite.
0:40:35 My biggest worry is that we will have an opioid-like death toll of young women who starve themselves
0:40:42 to death using these drugs who would not have been able to without these drugs.
0:40:45 Now there’s a lot we can do to prevent that.
0:40:48 At the moment, you can get these drugs from a doctor on Zoom.
0:40:51 Doctors on Zoom are not good at assessing your BMI.
0:40:54 These drugs should only be prescribed in person by doctors who have training in detecting
0:41:00 eating disorders.
0:41:02 That’s not perfect.
0:41:03 There are still holes in that system, but it would prevent a lot of this harm.
0:41:06 Well, I think this relates to another tension you deal with in the book, which is that on
0:41:11 the one hand, the body positivity movement has been good in lots of ways.
0:41:16 We’ve shattered stigmas and around weight and all of that.
0:41:20 But on the other hand, it’s just a biological fact that carrying too much weight leads to
0:41:24 bad health outcomes.
0:41:26 And if we can conquer that, that would be a pure, unminigated good for society.
0:41:35 Can we embrace this medical revolution without unwinding some of that cultural progress we’ve
0:41:40 made, which is connected to these issues with eating disorders and the like?
0:41:44 I really agonized over this question.
0:41:46 One of the people who really helped me to understand it and think it through was an amazing woman
0:41:51 named Shelly Bovee.
0:41:52 She’s basically the person who introduced body positivity into Britain, so she grew
0:41:58 up in a working class town in Wales where she describes herself the only fat girl in
0:42:02 her school.
0:42:03 And one day when she was 11, her teacher said to her, “Bovee, stay behind after class.”
0:42:10 So she stayed behind thinking, “What have I done wrong?”
0:42:13 And the teacher said to her, “You’re much too fat.
0:42:15 It’s disgusting.
0:42:16 Go see the school nurse.
0:42:17 She’ll sort you out.”
0:42:18 So kind of shaken, Shelly went to see the school nurse.
0:42:21 The school nurse said, “Why are you here?”
0:42:22 She said, “Well, the teacher says I’m too fat.”
0:42:24 She said, “Take off your clothes.
0:42:25 I’m going to inspect you.”
0:42:27 She took off her clothes and the school nurse said, “This is disgusting.
0:42:30 You’re a greedy pig.
0:42:32 Stop eating so much.”
0:42:33 She just berated her.
0:42:34 So Shelly left and her whole life she was soaking up abuse and insults like this.
0:42:39 And it made her hate herself and hate her body.
0:42:41 In fact, she told me she hadn’t ever looked at her body when she was showering even.
0:42:45 She’d never looked at her body naked because she hated it so much.
0:42:48 And then she learned about the body positivity movement, which had obviously begun in the
0:42:52 US, that was saying, “This is just a form of bigotry and bullying and cruelty and we
0:42:56 don’t have to take this shit.”
0:42:58 And Shelly introduced it to Britain, where I heard of it for the first time.
0:43:01 I remember seeing her on TV when I was 10 years old when she was presented as this kind
0:43:04 of laughable mad woman.
0:43:06 And she really pioneered opposing stigma and she remains proud to this day of the work
0:43:10 she did, rightly so in my view.
0:43:13 But Shelly also faced another problem.
0:43:15 She was extremely obese and she was finding it hard to walk.
0:43:19 In fact, she was in a wheelchair a lot of the time and a doctor told her she had heart
0:43:22 problems.
0:43:23 And she really began to wrestle with, “Well, am I betraying my body positivity if I talk
0:43:28 about the harm caused by obesity to my health?”
0:43:32 And she began to say, “Well, what kind of body positivity would it be that would judge
0:43:37 me for keeping my body alive?
0:43:39 That doesn’t seem like body positivity to me.”
0:43:42 She lost an enormous amount of weight through calorie restriction and exercise and became
0:43:47 much healthier.
0:43:49 And she stands by everything she said about stigma, but she said, “It’s not either all.
0:43:53 It’s not either you’re against stigma or you’re in favor of reducing obesity where possible.
0:43:58 It’s both and.
0:43:59 If you love someone who’s obese, you want to protect them from cruelty, shaming and bullying.
0:44:04 And if possible, you want to protect them from diabetes, heart disease, dementia.”
0:44:08 So to me, there’s no playoff between those two.
0:44:10 I think your question goes to a wider and deeper problem.
0:44:15 And actually weirdly, of all the time I spent writing the book, the worst moment for me
0:44:22 was what might seem like a small moment in some ways, but I’ve got a niece called Erin.
0:44:26 She’s the baby in my family.
0:44:27 She’s the only girl in her generation and she’s 19 now.
0:44:30 But last year when I first started taking the drugs, we were FaceTiming.
0:44:35 And she was kind of teasing me about how good I looked.
0:44:37 She said, “I didn’t know you had a neck.
0:44:38 I didn’t know you had a jaw before.”
0:44:40 And I was kind of laughing and she was saying, “Oh, you look really good.”
0:44:44 And then she looked down and she said, “Will you buy me some Mozempic?”
0:44:49 And I thought she was kidding.
0:44:50 And I laughed.
0:44:51 She’s a perfectly healthy weight.
0:44:53 And then I realized she wasn’t joking and I thought, “Oh, shit.
0:44:56 Have I undercut here all the advice I’ve been giving her since she was a little girl?”
0:45:01 And I think there’s two quite different things here, but they’re very hard to separate culturally.
0:45:05 There’s overweight and obese people who are taking these drugs to be a healthy weight.
0:45:10 And then there are people who are already a healthy weight or indeed skinny who are taking
0:45:14 these drugs to be very thin.
0:45:15 They’re in fact incurring health risks in the opposite direction.
0:45:17 Like the actors at the party.
0:45:20 Exactly.
0:45:21 None of them were fat to start with, right?
0:45:23 And again, we can look at historical examples.
0:45:25 Between 1966 and 1968, the number of young women who felt they were too fat exploded.
0:45:31 That’s really weird.
0:45:33 What happened between 1966 and 1968 is very short period.
0:45:37 What happened is a new model known as Twiggy was presented as the face of beauty of the
0:45:42 sixties.
0:45:43 Now, it’s not Twiggy’s fault.
0:45:44 She was naturally skinny, but very few girls looked like Twiggy, right?
0:45:48 A new thinner body norm was created and that made more girls hate their bodies.
0:45:53 I’m very worried about that dynamic.
0:45:54 I think that is in fact happening now.
0:45:56 And it’s not like young girls didn’t already have a nightmare set of pressures on them.
0:45:58 Of course they did.
0:46:06 After one more short break, we talk about the decision to take these drugs and some
0:46:10 of the difficult trade-offs.
0:46:12 Stay with us.
0:46:13
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0:49:36 Thank you.
0:49:37 I’m always wary of treating symptoms, not causes.
0:49:55 And in this case is one of the bigger risks that the availability of these drugs will prevent
0:50:02 us from dealing with these systemic problems that we have with the food industry and pop
0:50:08 culture and that sort of thing.
0:50:10 And if it does in fact make it harder for us to deal with these systemic problems, what
0:50:17 is the net good over the long haul?
0:50:20 I wrestled with that myself and I still wrestle with that.
0:50:23 One person I put that to.
0:50:25 I said, “Will it undermine the political pressure to deal with the food system?”
0:50:28 And this is a very prominent person, I won’t say who, but it said, “What pressure to change
0:50:34 the food system?
0:50:35 You won’t ever find a more popular person than Michelle Obama, a more charismatic and
0:50:39 brilliant communicator.
0:50:41 Even Michelle Obama couldn’t get any political traction for this.
0:50:44 She couldn’t get any political traction for the idea that you should physically move your
0:50:47 body.”
0:50:48 I mean, that was regarded as controversial.
0:50:50 Let’s get our children to move.
0:50:52 I think that’s too pessimistic.
0:50:54 I do believe we can build political pressure around this, but I don’t feel I can say to
0:51:00 people, “You should incur negative consequences now because it will create more political
0:51:06 pressure further down the line to make it better for future people.”
0:51:11 I get it and I wouldn’t tell that to anyone else either, but we have the benefit of being
0:51:15 able to think dispassionately about this in conversations like this, removing ourselves
0:51:20 from the immediate emotional impact of that.
0:51:23 Yeah, there’s just not easy answers, for sure.
0:51:27 I guess the dream scenario is many people start taking these drugs, they work, our collective
0:51:33 health skyrockets, and then, as you say in the book, that awakens us to the insanity
0:51:39 of the situation we got ourselves into, and then maybe that spurs reform.
0:51:44 I don’t know if it’s going to play out that way, but that’s the timeline I would sign
0:51:47 up for.
0:51:48 In the range of scenarios from the most pessimistic to the most optimistic, obviously the most
0:51:52 pessimistic is that this is like the diet drug Fen Fen in the 1990s, hugely popular front
0:51:58 page of Time magazine said the new miracle weight loss drug, 18 million Fen Fen prescriptions,
0:52:04 and then we discover it causes catastrophic heart defects and lung problems, it gets yanked
0:52:10 from the market, leads to the biggest compensation payout in the history of the pharmaceutical
0:52:13 industry.
0:52:15 That’s quite unlikely given what we know about the diabetics, but it’s not inconceivable.
0:52:20 If that’s the most pessimistic, the most optimistic is precisely, as you say, that the drugs work,
0:52:24 that the benefits outweigh the risks, and that we wake up and go, how did we get to
0:52:29 this point?
0:52:30 I think the probably most likely scenario is somewhere in the middle, that’s very disconcerting.
0:52:35 I think what we don’t know yet scares me as much as what we do know excites me, and I
0:52:41 guess I’m just conditioned to believe that there are no biological free lunches.
0:52:45 Be a smaller free lunch if it’s those unpicked.
0:52:48 One of the last things you write in the book is that these drugs are going to change the
0:52:54 world.
0:52:55 For better or for worse?
0:52:58 So what do you think it’ll be, for better or worse?
0:53:01 I think it’ll be both.
0:53:02 I think it’ll be better for people like me who had heart attack risks.
0:53:05 I think it’ll be much worse for people with eating disorders, and I don’t think there’s
0:53:09 a kind of moral calculator where you can put me not dying of heart attack versus a person
0:53:13 with eating disorders dying because they were able to starve themselves.
0:53:16 I don’t think you can really make those calculations.
0:53:19 We can definitely take the steps needed to protect those people with eating disorders
0:53:22 now, and many of the other risks, warning people with thyroid problems, warning people
0:53:27 who are pregnant, a whole range of things.
0:53:30 It’s definitely both, but I can’t measure out the proportions yet.
0:53:36 I’m inclined to say for the better, that’s just a wild guess.
0:53:39 A hundred years from now, someone in the smoking ruins of our civilization will find this episode
0:53:43 of this podcast, and go, “Gah, Sean, did he get it right?
0:53:47 They’ll know.
0:53:48 We don’t know.”
0:53:49 I mean, to me, the big hinge is the access question, right?
0:53:52 We have to get that right.
0:53:53 We have to get that right.
0:53:56 If we don’t, if this becomes a drug for rich people, that will be a moral catastrophe.
0:54:01 Yeah.
0:54:02 Oh, it’ll be disgusting.
0:54:03 That’s an eight-year window, right?
0:54:05 We’ve got an eight-year window until a Zempik goes out of patent, at which point they’ll
0:54:07 be able to manufacture it for $40 a month for anyone.
0:54:11 So we’ve got eight years in which this could be confined to a small elite, and that’s scandalous
0:54:15 and lots of people will die in that eight-year window who could have lived.
0:54:19 And then 2032 onwards, we don’t have that dilemma.
0:54:24 The book is called Magic Pill, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risk of the New Weight
0:54:28 Loss Drugs.
0:54:29 Yo-ha and Hari.
0:54:30 Always a pleasure, my friend.
0:54:31 Oh, what a delight.
0:54:32 Cheers, Sean.
0:54:33 Thanks so much.
0:54:33 Thanks so much.
0:54:41 What did you think about this episode?
0:54:43 For me, I know this wasn’t necessarily a conventional TGA episode.
0:54:47 We weren’t deep in the works of Aristotle or Nietzsche or something like that.
0:54:52 But I learned a lot about this drug.
0:54:55 And I think we should all know a lot about this drug because it is going to be huge.
0:54:59 It’s already huge, and this was a useful education.
0:55:04 But I’m curious what you think, as always.
0:55:06 So drop me a line at the gray area at Vox.com and tell me.
0:55:09 I’ll read it and I will respond.
0:55:12 And as always, please, please, please rate, review, subscribe.
0:55:15 That stuff really helps our show.
0:55:19 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala,
0:55:26 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:55:29 New episodes of the Gray Area Drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
0:55:34 The gray area is part of Vox, which doesn’t have a paywall.
0:55:37 Help us keep Vox free by going to vox.com/give.
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0:01:52 If you’re into UFOs and aliens, the last five years or so have been fantastic.
0:01:59 Congress is investigating what they call unidentified anomalous phenomena.
0:02:04 The rest of us call them UFOs.
0:02:06 After decades of public denial, the Pentagon now admits there’s something out there.
0:02:11 Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are pressing the Pentagon and other government
0:02:16 agencies for more answers about UFOs.
0:02:19 A Pentagon report is detailing a dramatic increase in UFO sightings.
0:02:24 Back in 2019, The New York Times published an article about reports of UFOs off the
0:02:30 East Coast.
0:02:32 It included several Navy pilots who witnessed and recorded mysterious flying objects.
0:02:44 If you haven’t seen the videos, it’s worth checking out.
0:02:48 They are strange.
0:02:57 I still haven’t seen any evidence that actual aliens were involved, and that remains the
0:03:02 least plausible explanation, in my opinion.
0:03:07 But the story itself, that was a big shift in the public discourse around UFOs and alien
0:03:15 life.
0:03:17 The mere acknowledgement by the government that these objects were real was unprecedented.
0:03:28 And the possibility that aliens might exist raises all sorts of fascinating questions.
0:03:36 How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life change our world and our understanding
0:03:42 of our place in it?
0:03:44 And what if aliens are real, but so unlike anything we can imagine, that we can’t even
0:03:50 begin to understand the implications?
0:03:55 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:04:07 Today’s guest is Diana Posuka.
0:04:10 She’s a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and
0:04:14 the author of two books on this topic.
0:04:17 Her latest is called Encounters, Experiences with Non-Human Intelligency.
0:04:24 Posuka has been studying UFO culture for roughly a decade now, and I think she’s done the
0:04:29 most compelling work in this space.
0:04:32 And that’s because it isn’t really about UFOs and aliens, at least not directly.
0:04:39 This new book dives more deeply into the experiences of people who claim to have encountered alien
0:04:44 life.
0:04:46 And those experiences, I assure you, are so much weirder than you think.
0:04:51 They’re also, as we discuss here, profoundly religious in their own way.
0:04:58 Reading it, I kept coming back to that famous Werner Heisenberg quote.
0:05:03 Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
0:05:15 Diana Posuka, welcome to the show.
0:05:18 Well thanks for having me on the show.
0:05:20 Well Diana, it’s a hell of a time to be on the UFO beat.
0:05:26 Do you think we’ve reached escape velocity on this topic, and this is just going to be
0:05:31 part of the public conversation?
0:05:33 Moving forward?
0:05:34 Absolutely.
0:05:35 Well, so when you write in this book that UFO events are a spiritual reality, what does
0:05:43 that really mean?
0:05:45 UFO events are transformative realities, not necessarily good.
0:05:51 Religious events are sometimes bad and sometimes good.
0:05:55 So I heard people talk about their experiences with UFOs, sometimes with what they called
0:06:01 beings associated with UFOs, and they were having transformative experiences, and it
0:06:07 sounded very similar to what I had been reading about in the Catholic historical record.
0:06:13 I was finishing a book about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, and I noticed that
0:06:17 there were a lot of aerial events in the Catholic tradition, the historical record.
0:06:22 There were no planes, there were no rockets back then, so people were seeing things in
0:06:25 the sky, and they were interpreting them in various ways, one of which was these could
0:06:31 be souls from purgatory, or they could be houses of saints and things like that that
0:06:36 are up in the sky.
0:06:37 And so when I say that we’re dealing with something that I would call not necessarily
0:06:42 a new religion, I would call it a new form of religion, a new form of spirituality, because
0:06:49 a lot of people, when they have these events, and say they happen to be religious, say
0:06:54 they’re Christian, they look at this and at first it challenges their religious framework.
0:06:59 But then what they do, I noticed within a few months, sometimes a year, they reinterpret
0:07:05 their own religion.
0:07:06 They start to read the event back into their religion.
0:07:11 So then you get the idea of like Ezekiel’s wheel was a UFO or what happened to Mary when
0:07:16 Gabriel came and announced that she was pregnant, you know, that was a UFO type event and things
0:07:22 like that.
0:07:24 Muslims were doing this, Catholics were doing this, Baptists were doing this, atheists were
0:07:29 doing this, right?
0:07:30 So I begin to see this as a non-regional form of religion.
0:07:35 I may end up repeating some version of this refrain several times in this conversation,
0:07:42 but I just don’t know what I believe with so much of this.
0:07:48 One thing that’s pretty consistent with so many people who report these experiences is
0:07:54 that there’s this psychic dimension, you know, people report having intuitions, experiencing
0:08:00 bizarre synchronicities, visions before and after the encounter, and they seem to believe
0:08:07 that these beings or these intelligences are able to communicate with them telepathically,
0:08:15 you know, that these things, whatever they are, are interdimensional, you know, they’re
0:08:20 here and not here, or they’ve always been here, just outside of space-time.
0:08:24 And I sound like I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs just describing all of that.
0:08:29 I don’t even know what half those words mean, but that’s accurate, right?
0:08:33 Yes.
0:08:34 So you have to understand that that’s not actually very new.
0:08:38 Maybe the framework of science and kind of outside space-time is new.
0:08:43 But what struck me when I began this study is, first of all, every religious tradition
0:08:47 that I study, practitioners talk to me about synchronicities, meaningful synchronicities.
0:08:53 So they could be Catholic, and they say, “I was converted because something happened,
0:08:58 and it was obviously meant to be because it was so coincidental, it was improbable.”
0:09:03 So when I talk to people who are experiencers, people who experience UFO events, they have
0:09:08 the same language.
0:09:09 So I suggest that synchronicity or these meaningful coincidences, this is the engine of spiritual
0:09:16 belief.
0:09:17 It’s not just within the UFO community that people are experiencing their religiosity as
0:09:23 this moment.
0:09:25 About these beings that seem to have telepathic abilities and people experiencing telepathy
0:09:32 with them.
0:09:33 You see this in the history of religions.
0:09:37 When a person meets an angel, an angel usually doesn’t move their mouth when they’re talking
0:09:40 to a person.
0:09:41 They just beam thoughts that these people understand.
0:09:44 You do have very, very similar patterns within the historical religions.
0:09:50 You say that the UFO event is like a door that opens a person to a non-ordinary world.
0:10:00 What does that mean exactly?
0:10:02 It sounds like something you’d say about psychedelics.
0:10:05 Yes, it does.
0:10:07 I think that when a person experiences the UFO, this is just from the data that I’ve
0:10:13 seen, something shifts in them.
0:10:17 This doesn’t happen to everyone, but it does happen to many people.
0:10:20 I think they don’t take life for granted.
0:10:24 They don’t see it in the same way as they saw it.
0:10:26 They don’t make the same assumptions.
0:10:28 And because of that, they see it differently.
0:10:32 So when people tell you that they’ve encountered aliens or had been visited by angels in their
0:10:40 dreams or any of these sorts of accounts, do you believe them?
0:10:45 Or do they put that differently?
0:10:46 Maybe that’s the wrong question.
0:10:48 Do you believe that they believe what they’re saying?
0:10:51 I definitely do.
0:10:53 So I believe that they believe it, but that doesn’t commit me to believe that it happened.
0:10:58 And I’ll give you an example.
0:10:59 Ashuna Vasan Ramanujan is that very famous mathematician in the early 20th centuries
0:11:04 from India, and he was a genius, and he believed these math calculations were whispered in
0:11:11 his ear by his goddess, the goddess of his local region.
0:11:15 I think she was a version of Lakshmi.
0:11:17 So okay, when I start to look at that, there’s this story that gets repeated.
0:11:22 And so am I committed to believe that it was Lakshmi that gave Ramanujan that?
0:11:28 No, I’m not.
0:11:29 But I can definitely study that process, and I can study it in people today who say that
0:11:34 they are experiencing aliens who are giving them this type of creative impulse.
0:11:41 Some people say it was an angel that gave it to them.
0:11:43 Let’s study the process of it, and we leave aside that question of does it actually objectively
0:11:49 exist?
0:11:50 Because there are a lot of things that you’ll see that appear to be unbelievable.
0:11:53 And you’ll say, “That’s unbelievable.”
0:11:56 Because if I was a scientist, my mind would be shattered, I think, if I started to get
0:12:00 into this data.
0:12:01 But as a person who studies religion, we’re already studying things that people believe,
0:12:06 but for which we have no evidence of.
0:12:08 Of all the interviews you’ve done with people in this world, all the stories you’ve read
0:12:14 about, all the stories you’ve heard, what is the most mind-blowing thing you’ve encountered?
0:12:22 What is the most holy shit revelation or anecdote you’ve seen or heard?
0:12:28 I would say it would be the experience of a pilot who had a sighting while he was flying
0:12:34 and then saw something that appeared to be like a human face.
0:12:39 And then he started to see this person in crowds.
0:12:42 He would also see UFOs in daylight, but he wouldn’t tell anybody because he noticed that
0:12:50 other people didn’t see that.
0:12:52 And he also had burns, like his eyes started to hurt.
0:12:57 I asked a scientist about that and said, “What’s this effect?”
0:13:01 And he said it was the effect of some type of radiation on his retinas.
0:13:06 So that was pretty weird.
0:13:09 I wouldn’t want that to happen to me.
0:13:12 I don’t think I’d sign him for that either.
0:13:15 Some of these stories or these characters you profile in the book, I mean, it is just
0:13:20 extraordinary that the vividness and some of the consistencies across these accounts,
0:13:26 you know, like there’s some part of me that cannot dismiss the thousands of testimonies
0:13:31 of serious people and it’s hard to believe there’s nothing to see here.
0:13:35 I just don’t know how much there is to actually see, but I don’t think it’s nothing.
0:13:40 Well, I agree with you.
0:13:41 I mean, I started out as a complete non-believer and even though I’m not supposed to be, I
0:13:48 actually was.
0:13:49 Then when I met people who were in the space program or top researchers, one at Stanford,
0:13:56 and there were so many of them, and I was shocked.
0:14:00 I was absolutely shocked.
0:14:02 And that shock lasted for a couple of years.
0:14:04 You know, I’ve been studying this now for about 14 years, so that’s a long time.
0:14:08 I actually believe these people.
0:14:11 I also believe that there’s a there there, but I don’t know what it is.
0:14:16 And so it’s definitely changed the way I look at the historical religions as well as the,
0:14:22 you know, what people are talking about today.
0:14:25 So what’s the there there?
0:14:26 No, I don’t know that.
0:14:27 Oh, come on.
0:14:28 So we’re not there.
0:14:30 We can only say that these people are having these experiences.
0:14:33 Most of these people will not come out and say that they are because of their jobs.
0:14:38 And you know, there’s still a stigma regardless of what happened with the New York Times, you
0:14:42 know, coming out and talking about it.
0:14:44 There’s still a stigma, and I don’t blame these people for not coming out publicly.
0:14:49 And I’m not going to disbelieve them because I’ve met so many now, thousands of people
0:14:54 who are credible witnesses.
0:14:57 And the patterns are so similar, too, that it leads me to then say, OK, you know, I am
0:15:02 no longer that disbeliever.
0:15:04 But then I’m I don’t know what it is either.
0:15:07 And that’s where we have to keep being credulous, you know, like, OK, we know that these people
0:15:11 are having these experiences, we’re not going to stigmatize them like, you know, what happened,
0:15:17 you know, 10 years ago.
0:15:19 But we don’t I don’t honestly can’t say that we know where we’re at.
0:15:22 Yeah.
0:15:23 You know, and again, I may sound like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m just being honest about my
0:15:28 own ambivalence, you know, the will to believe the extraordinary is strong for sure.
0:15:34 But so is the will to hold on to our current worldview, because letting go of that means
0:15:40 letting go of almost everything we take to be true.
0:15:43 And that’s scary.
0:15:44 So there are forces pulling in both directions here in the direction of belief and in the
0:15:48 direction of disbelief.
0:15:51 And I think, I don’t know, maybe the only sensible position, at least at this moment
0:15:56 is agnosticism on this, just openness to the evidence, but, you know, remaining inconclusive.
0:16:03 Yeah, I do think that I want to also push back on a little bit of what you say about,
0:16:09 you know, the will to believe.
0:16:11 It seems like most people don’t want to see like that pilot didn’t want that experience.
0:16:17 He didn’t want to believe it.
0:16:19 You know, if you’re just going about your daily life and you have a pretty okay life,
0:16:24 you know, it’s not like you’re looking for a UFO and you want to see it.
0:16:29 And then all of a sudden it plagues you by appearing, you know, daily in the clouds almost
0:16:35 like mocking you like who would want that experience.
0:16:38 This is also the case with people who say see angels or see souls from purgatory in
0:16:43 the 1600s or 1700s.
0:16:46 They weren’t actually looking for that.
0:16:47 So, you know, I put one of those experiences in my book about purgatory and, you know,
0:16:52 it was this nun who saw an orb and it would come into her cell in the convent.
0:16:58 And she was terrified.
0:16:59 And she told people in the convent, nobody believed her, but she kept her story.
0:17:04 And finally the mother Teresa sat up with her and sure enough, she saw the same thing.
0:17:09 And so they then interpreted that orb as a soul from purgatory and the whole convent
0:17:13 prayed for weeks to get rid of it and it finally disappeared.
0:17:18 I think the skeptic in me will think the will to believe is so strong in the human mind
0:17:24 and we can convince ourselves of almost anything.
0:17:27 And I believe that the people you write about in the book believe the things they’re telling
0:17:32 you to be true.
0:17:33 Because you were saying that doesn’t mean they’re true or it doesn’t mean that they’re
0:17:36 reliably true.
0:17:37 You know, so there’s that guy you talked to who moved his family out of LA to live in
0:17:41 some remote town because he got a message from Jupiter telling him to do so, right?
0:17:47 Like that could just be the hallucinations of a confused person.
0:17:50 In fact, I’m pretty confident that it is, you know, so when you hear stories like that,
0:17:56 what’s your reaction?
0:17:59 I mean, what did the pilgrims do, you know, or what did people who had visions and thought
0:18:05 that they needed to leave Egypt or, you know, go someplace, you know, because a God told
0:18:10 them to or because they had a vision from an angel that told them to do this.
0:18:15 This is how I see that type of thing.
0:18:16 I see it as a continuation of a process that humans have experienced for thousands of years
0:18:23 really.
0:18:24 So it’s a religious impulse.
0:18:26 That’s how I see it.
0:18:27 Well, for all the utility of science, it has gradually destroyed a lot of the spaces for
0:18:36 mystery in human life.
0:18:38 And to be clear, I think that’s a more than fair price to pay for the benefits of science,
0:18:43 you know.
0:18:44 I don’t want to live in the Bronze Age.
0:18:45 I don’t think anybody does.
0:18:47 But there does remain this yearning for the unknown, for genuine awe.
0:18:53 I mean, I think I’m probably like a lot of people in that the closest thing I’ve had
0:18:58 to a religious experience is an extremely heavy dose of psychedelics.
0:19:04 And I’ll just say that on the other side of that, I was much less certain of what I thought
0:19:09 I knew and all that stuff I had heard about, you know, some kind of higher consciousness,
0:19:15 which always sounded like pure New Age dribble to me suddenly felt like a real possibility.
0:19:21 I mean, that’s the only way I can relate to the stories you described in this book, because
0:19:24 I can’t quite go full alien yet.
0:19:28 I’m going to need more evidence.
0:19:30 I would push back on the idea that science has gotten rid of the mystery of life.
0:19:37 The more I learn about science and the more scientists I meet, I mean, quantum theory
0:19:42 is pretty weird.
0:19:43 So once we start to study the universe, I’ve met a lot of astrophysicists.
0:19:49 And what they’re doing is mind blowing the kinds of things like black holes that they’re
0:19:54 studying, the event horizon, I mean, that’s a very strange thing right there, right?
0:20:00 So it’s not necessarily that the more scientific we are, the less of a mystery life is.
0:20:08 I think the more scientific we are and the more we delve into the science, I think it’s
0:20:13 much more mind blowing to us.
0:20:15 That’s a very good point.
0:20:18 The destruction of mystery as such is not really what I’m thinking about.
0:20:23 And if it was, I was just wrong.
0:20:26 I mean, if the images from the Hubble telescope don’t invoke mystery and awe, nothing does.
0:20:33 I think what I mean is that religion and mythology were really our first attempts as a species
0:20:39 to make sense of the world.
0:20:41 And science has undermined them in various ways, which has created a lot of tension to
0:20:47 say the least.
0:20:48 But the mystery is still there.
0:20:50 The awe is still there.
0:20:53 Maybe we just need new language, new myths, new stories.
0:20:57 Yeah, I think that the instruments have changed.
0:21:00 So we’ve developed instruments to allow us to go to Mars and see what’s there and to
0:21:07 look at the strange ways that space, time bends and works and works in different places.
0:21:14 And I think that this is awe-inspiring, frankly.
0:21:17 I think it’s really amazing.
0:21:19 And it’s just think about people a thousand years ago and the ways in which they talked
0:21:25 about the mystery, they try to explain it.
0:21:28 So I think that it’s always the case that we’re going to try to explain the mystery
0:21:33 to ourselves.
0:21:34 But I think that the more instruments we have in order to study the mystery, the weirder
0:21:39 it becomes, frankly.
0:21:41 When we get back from the break, we’ll talk about what extraterrestrial life would even
0:21:55 look like.
0:21:57 Stay with us.
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0:25:45 What is the best evidence you’ve encountered?
0:26:02 It doesn’t even necessarily have to be alien life, but just evidence of something that
0:26:06 you would call supernatural.
0:26:09 This is the evidence that we have first throughout the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s of radar blips
0:26:20 and things that are on radar that go on and off that we can see and then in that area,
0:26:27 people will have seen what they then called reported in a UFO, people who didn’t even
0:26:31 know each other.
0:26:32 So it’s these observational things with accompanying evidence of radar reports.
0:26:37 I don’t know what those are.
0:26:39 Those could very well be advanced technology, but I have had people tell me, “This is not
0:26:44 our technology, and these are people that are supposed to know.”
0:26:47 When we see these things with those types of instruments, we also have people on the
0:26:51 ground saying, “Oh, I saw a UFO,” and this is well recorded.
0:26:55 Why if aliens are real and they have visited in some form or another, why would they deliberately
0:27:03 choose to reveal themselves to so few people instead of to everyone?
0:27:07 So as to remove all doubt, I mean, presumably if they’re advanced enough to get here or
0:27:10 communicate with us, they could observe us without being detected.
0:27:16 So why do it in this way?
0:27:17 If you have an education in the historical religions, you can see that angels work that
0:27:22 way too.
0:27:23 So they actually intervene in human history, apparently, for those who believe in them,
0:27:29 but they don’t do so on the White House lawn, right?
0:27:32 They’re not like, “Hey, God exists,” you know, and you need to believe in God.
0:27:36 They only do it to certain people, and then those people then tell others and others believe
0:27:41 or disbelieve.
0:27:42 So you asked me before, you know, “How is this like a religion?”
0:27:44 Well, this is how it’s like a religion.
0:27:47 There are things that are based on faith.
0:27:49 They’re not based on something that we can replicate and show like in a laboratory.
0:27:56 One thing that’s clear reading this book is that there is a huge gap between the representations
0:28:05 of UFOs and aliens in the press and in popular culture, and the first person accounts of
0:28:15 these encounters.
0:28:16 Do you find that disconnect to be maybe the biggest obstacle to having a serious public
0:28:23 discussion about what the hell is happening here or what the hell has happened?
0:28:29 This is something that a lot of people don’t understand.
0:28:32 Even you see religious events from the past, that same disconnect is at play.
0:28:39 So when people back in that time period saw something, they didn’t understand what it
0:28:45 was.
0:28:46 So they had to look through their own cultural narratives in order to interpret it.
0:28:53 And this moment was a moment of confusion, and then this confused the people around them.
0:28:59 They said, “I saw this, I don’t know what it was, help me out ’cause it’s freaky,”
0:29:05 and then the people around them were concerned and said, “This seems like it could be this
0:29:09 type of angel,” or something like that.
0:29:11 Well, this happens with modern day UFO reports as well.
0:29:15 What people see is definitely not what you see in independent stay and that type of thing,
0:29:23 but we have to represent it.
0:29:25 So conventions then arise, right?
0:29:28 And now we have this idea of the saucer type thing, this UFO.
0:29:33 Reading your book and listening to you now, I kept thinking about that movie Arrival.
0:29:36 I’m sure you’ve seen it.
0:29:37 I love that movie.
0:29:39 For me, the smartest thing about that movie was its focus on the limits and possibilities
0:29:46 of language and communication and how that might play out in the event of an encounter
0:29:52 like that.
0:29:54 But was that story, that scenario, the kind of thing the scientists in this book are thinking
0:30:01 about?
0:30:02 I do think so.
0:30:03 When you do learn a different language, remember what happens to the main character in Arrival
0:30:07 is that the way she thinks changes, the way she perceives time changes, and this is definitely
0:30:14 what I see with people who do this kind of work is that their perspective changes the
0:30:20 way they think even changes.
0:30:22 In what way?
0:30:23 Okay.
0:30:24 So there’s a researcher named Jacques Vallée, and he’s been studying UFOs for his whole
0:30:29 life and now he’s in his 80s.
0:30:31 He talks about post-contact effects.
0:30:35 So when people have experiences of things related to UFOs or something associated with
0:30:40 UFOs, that they have effects.
0:30:42 And one of the effects is that they perceive things like coincidences more often, and they
0:30:48 also perceive time differently.
0:30:51 So think about what a coincidence is.
0:30:54 Carl Jung said that it’s something that has to do with a moment in time that seems as
0:30:58 if you’ve been there before, right?
0:31:00 Has this kind of deja vu experience where something that you’re thinking about appears
0:31:05 in your experience of time and also your experience.
0:31:09 So these kinds of effects happen, and this is something that was related in Arrival as
0:31:15 well.
0:31:16 So yeah, so these kinds of effects happen to people.
0:31:18 But I really dig about this book, and I really enjoyed your first book as well, American
0:31:23 Cosmic, but this one is especially interesting to me because it extends this conversation
0:31:28 about UFOs and aliens to a broader exploration of all the possibilities of non-human intelligence,
0:31:40 both terrestrial and extraterrestrial.
0:31:43 And what it would mean to take that seriously, and it turns out a lot of scientists have
0:31:50 been quietly taking this seriously, and I had never heard of this group called the Order
0:31:56 of the Dolphin, which apparently included Carl Sagan, a hero of mine, and they were researching
0:32:03 ways to communicate with dolphins, but was the real aim there to discover ways to potentially
0:32:11 communicate with extraterrestrial life in the event of a real-world encounter?
0:32:16 Absolutely.
0:32:17 I think that what they were doing, and by the way, I found out about this group when
0:32:21 I was at the Vatican, has an observatory, and the observatory is in Castle Gandalfo
0:32:29 in Italy, right outside of Rome, and it’s next to this volcanic lake.
0:32:34 It’s really a beautiful place, and they have an archive, so everything space-related goes
0:32:39 to that archive, so I was in that archive, and I kept coming across references to the
0:32:45 Order of the Dolphin, and I was like, “Who are these people?
0:32:48 What were they doing?”
0:32:50 And so they were, of course, Carl Sagan was fascinated with the possibility of extraterrestrial
0:32:56 conversation should that happen.
0:32:59 They were basically trying to have a conversation with another species here on Earth to kind
0:33:04 of get us prepared, but also because wouldn’t that be a great thing to do?
0:33:08 Then scientists right now are utilizing different types of AI in order to interface with different
0:33:14 species like dolphins or whales.
0:33:16 Well, you mentioned AI.
0:33:18 If and when AI becomes truly sentient or when AGI, as they call it, emerges, if it emerges,
0:33:25 that would be an utterly alien form of intelligence.
0:33:29 Would that be much different from the appearance of aliens on Earth?
0:33:33 Well, you see, this is where I think it’s really interesting, so two people of interest
0:33:37 to me here in terms of how they view this.
0:33:40 One of them, he’s former NASA historian, but he was a NASA historian and an astronomer
0:33:44 for NASA for 40-plus years, and his name is Steven Dick.
0:33:49 He, more than 20 years ago, had postulated that if we meet ET, it’s going to be a form
0:33:57 of technology beyond AI to a different form of biotechnological evolution.
0:34:04 That’s why we can’t see it because we’re looking for things that look like us, really, but why
0:34:08 would we be doing that?
0:34:10 Well, that’s what I love about this book.
0:34:12 It gets you to think less and less about little green men and all that shit that we’ve
0:34:18 inhaled through TVs and movies and that kind of thing, and just think more broadly about
0:34:24 non-human intelligences, whatever that may be, and that’s a different way to think about
0:34:29 it.
0:34:30 But the idea of technology as its own kind of alien life is really interesting to me.
0:34:35 I haven’t thought all that much about it, but it’s interesting.
0:34:38 Yeah.
0:34:39 A lot of the people who I know who have been doing AI for 20-plus years, this is what they
0:34:45 think that whatever it is that we’re seeing in the sky is most like a form of AI, and
0:34:51 it is an involved consciousness.
0:35:02 After one more short break, we get into the recent congressional hearings that might hint
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0:38:23 This is from your last book, I believe, but you were brought to an alleged crash site
0:38:29 in New Mexico years ago.
0:38:31 You were given rare access, and you encountered a material that did not appear to be of this
0:38:39 world.
0:38:40 Let’s put it that way.
0:38:41 Allegedly, yes.
0:38:43 So that is how I opened the book.
0:38:44 So I was working with scientists, and one of them knew that I didn’t believe at all.
0:38:50 He said, “I think that you think that people are seeing this in their imagination, but
0:38:53 I want to take you to a place where, you know, I have some evidence, some physical evidence.”
0:38:59 And so I said, “Okay.
0:39:00 Where’s that?”
0:39:01 And he goes, “Well, it’s in New Mexico, and it’s a crash site.”
0:39:03 Now, this is, of course, a long time ago before any talk of crash sites.
0:39:08 I mean, I thought that he was crazy.
0:39:10 Honestly, I thought, “Okay, well, he’s really smart, and he has a really amazing job, and
0:39:16 you know, he seems like a normal person, but I thought maybe I was being given misinformation.”
0:39:22 There was definitely stuff out there, and it looked like it had been the site of some
0:39:28 very important thing that happened, because you could tell that, you know, there was rubble
0:39:33 everywhere and, you know, and it was really old.
0:39:37 So I wasn’t buying into the Roswell mythology, but I was saying that this is part of the
0:39:43 Roswell mythology, and, you know, I’m here where people believe in this, and I’m just
0:39:50 hoping that through my book, I’m not, like, reinforcing that belief, but that ship has
0:39:56 sailed.
0:39:57 You know, that’s already been done.
0:40:00 But it was at the time when The New York Times came out and said that there were these programs,
0:40:04 and they, in fact, were crash retrieval programs.
0:40:06 So inadvertently, I was doing this research, and this is what I found.
0:40:11 It seemed like, you know, such a coincidence, you could say, that it came out right after
0:40:17 The New York Times stories came out, but that was purely unintentional.
0:40:22 When those times stories came out, and, you know, obviously, you know, the Pentagon released
0:40:27 those Navy videos, there was a lot of speculation that this, there has to be some reason for
0:40:35 this.
0:40:36 Why would they do it?
0:40:37 And that perhaps it was, you know, part of some active disinformation campaign to muddy
0:40:43 the waters for whatever reason.
0:40:46 Is there something to that, in your opinion?
0:40:49 There could possibly be something to that.
0:40:51 My own work is completely uninvolved with that, whatever is happening in Congress.
0:40:58 I did a historical comparison between, you know, ascent narratives from history, Catholic
0:41:03 history in particular, and modern-day UFO reports.
0:41:07 I stumbled upon a group that was studying UFOs.
0:41:12 I wrote about that group.
0:41:14 I believe that there is a continuation of experiences that people have that you can
0:41:21 identify in the historical record for the various reasons that I’ve stated.
0:41:27 So I guess I feel like I’m in a parallel research tradition to whatever is happening
0:41:33 with the government right now.
0:41:34 Do you think that those, whatever that was in those videos was an actual, I won’t say
0:41:42 alien craft, but crafts that defied the laws of physics as we understand them in the way
0:41:47 that they appear to on the videos?
0:41:49 I think we have to be really careful about what we see these days because of deep fakes
0:41:53 and everything like that.
0:41:54 So I think that being very, very sober with respect to what we conclude about what we
0:42:00 see is the best position to take.
0:42:04 Okay, so I’m just going to give you an anecdote here, if that’s all right, Sean.
0:42:08 So when I was a child, my father had been in the Coast Guard, and he always had this story
0:42:15 that he told in our family about something that stopped the ship he was on.
0:42:20 It was called the bittersweet, and he was the sonar man.
0:42:23 The sonar kept going, and they were able to see something in the ocean, down at the bottom
0:42:28 of the ocean.
0:42:29 It actually stopped their ship, but all the electricity on their ship stopped, and it
0:42:33 was terrifying.
0:42:34 So this was an interesting kind of phenomena, you know, family history type thing.
0:42:39 Well I had forgotten all about it, and then I meet Tim Gallaudet, who is an admiral in
0:42:45 the Navy, and he told me the very same story.
0:42:48 Now he didn’t know that my father had this story as well, and he actually has data about
0:42:53 it.
0:42:54 My dad only had the members of his ship, and you know, it was only testimonial evidence.
0:42:58 So I guess that what we have are credible witnesses, and we do have data.
0:43:05 But I think that when we look at things on the internet and social media, that we should
0:43:10 probably just be like agnostic at this point.
0:43:13 I should probably say that the government has not acknowledged the existence of aliens.
0:43:20 It has simply acknowledged the existence of these unidentified aerial phenomena, if
0:43:26 that’s still the term we’re using.
0:43:28 The name keeps changing, so it’s unidentified anomalous phenomena now, and that’s because,
0:43:33 I know, I know.
0:43:35 That’s because they allow for transmedia, like, you know, some of these things come
0:43:38 out of the ocean, and they’re seen by people in the Navy.
0:43:42 What do you think this conversation around UFOs and aliens looks like in 10, 15 years?
0:43:48 Honestly, I don’t have an answer, because I feel like I couldn’t have predicted what
0:43:51 happened after American Cosmic was published in 2019.
0:43:55 I couldn’t have predicted that Congress would be talking about this, and I can only say
0:43:59 that I think we’re going to be surprised.
0:44:03 Tell me more.
0:44:04 Well, I was surprised, you know, I thought I had written this book, and you know, I
0:44:08 did the best I could in terms of the field research, and I said, “Look, you know, these
0:44:11 people are studying this, and they’re very well-educated, and they’re affiliated with
0:44:15 our space program.”
0:44:16 And then the New York Times articles came out, and then before I knew it, there was
0:44:21 the Pentagon report that talked about UAP, and the name UAP shifted a couple different
0:44:27 times, and you know, there was a constant conversation in Congress about this, so none
0:44:32 of that I could have predicted.
0:44:34 I’m not even going to ask if the discovery of alien life would be the most significant
0:44:39 event in human history, because it obviously would be, but I do wonder what you think the
0:44:46 most significant implication of that discovery would be.
0:44:49 So for a person who has studied the historical religions, I would say that most people in
0:44:54 the world believe in non-human intelligence, because most people are religious.
0:44:58 And so within various different religions, you have different forms of non-human intelligences
0:45:03 that display themselves in different ways to people.
0:45:06 So it’s the people post-enlightenment in the West.
0:45:10 We’re disbelievers in that narrative, so it would be the most shocking event for us.
0:45:16 And the implications is almost like a post-secular society.
0:45:21 What made the Copernican Revolution and the Darwinian Revolution so significant, not just
0:45:26 scientifically but culturally, is that they decentered humanity in the grand scheme of
0:45:34 things.
0:45:35 Earth is not the center of the universe.
0:45:37 Humanity is not a special animal with some unique significance.
0:45:42 We’re part of the same historical process as everything else.
0:45:46 And the discovery of the alien life, if it were to happen in a way that would be impossible
0:45:50 to deny, that would be the final step.
0:45:56 And the revolution opened up by Copernicus and Darwin and would in a terminal way, I
0:46:01 think, up in our sense of our own creaturely significance, which I think is a beautiful
0:46:08 thing in some ways, but would be totally not worth it if the price of that discovery was
0:46:14 aliens destroying us.
0:46:17 Hopefully that doesn’t happen.
0:46:18 Yeah.
0:46:19 That would be a bad scenario.
0:46:20 Again, if you just look at the history on our planet, it’s not a pretty picture when
0:46:27 populations or species collide where there’s a significant power or technological asymmetry.
0:46:34 It tends not to go well for the side.
0:46:36 That’s weaker.
0:46:37 So yeah, that’s the game I don’t want to play.
0:46:40 That’s right.
0:46:41 That’s right.
0:46:42 I agree with you there.
0:46:43 You mentioned earlier that you started out as a typical academic skeptic, and I guess
0:46:48 you’re still agnostic on a lot of this stuff, but maybe I’m just trying to tease out as
0:46:55 much as I can from you, but how has all of this research transformed you?
0:47:02 Not just your worldview, but you as a person, really.
0:47:06 I have to say that it completely changed me.
0:47:08 Like you said, I was a skeptic, and it took a few years to really shake that out of me,
0:47:15 and it took a lot of meeting people like the admirals and the scientists and these people
0:47:21 that I know, and then thinking back on things like the story of my dad and other people
0:47:28 and what they’ve said, and then seeing the historical record as well.
0:47:33 And so this shook me out of the assumptions that I had, and it made me think, okay, well,
0:47:39 I actually don’t know that much about this.
0:47:42 Maybe I should learn.
0:47:44 And so it put me into a space of questioning, and I’ve been in that space ever since.
0:47:49 I don’t know what the threshold would be for you, but what would it take for you to step
0:47:53 off the agnostic ledge and say, yeah, aliens are real?
0:47:57 Is it a spacecraft landing on the White House lawn?
0:48:00 Well, something that was anomalous in 1952 did fly over the White House.
0:48:05 So we do have that, and that’s one of those cases that is still weird.
0:48:12 What would it take for me to say, okay, aliens are a fact and they’re real?
0:48:17 If they landed and we met them and they would say, okay, we’d like to give you this really
0:48:21 awesome technology and your problems are going to be erased.
0:48:24 And I mean, that’s probably what it would take.
0:48:27 Now I would be very suspicious of them if they did that.
0:48:30 Why?
0:48:31 Probably because I’ve seen too many X-files and twilight zones.
0:48:39 This stuff is so crazy, Diane.
0:48:41 Again, I don’t know what I believe, I really don’t, other than it feels like a cop-out,
0:48:48 but I don’t know what else to say other than I’m intrigued, but I need more evidence.
0:48:52 I agree.
0:48:53 And I think what’s really interesting is that we don’t have to be convinced to be
0:48:57 completely interested.
0:48:59 And we’re going to find out more as time goes on.
0:49:02 Well, I’ve read your last two books and I enjoyed the hell out of them.
0:49:06 And I’m just, I just think it’s incredibly cool that you stumbled into this space as
0:49:11 a scholar and you did it really at the perfect time.
0:49:15 And now you’ve kind of become one of the point people for UFO discourse.
0:49:20 So congratulations.
0:49:21 I don’t know.
0:49:22 I agree with you, I’ve become that person, but it wasn’t intentional at all.
0:49:28 At this point, even if you want to do something else, I’m not sure the world’s going to let
0:49:31 you.
0:49:32 No, I don’t think so.
0:49:33 Once again, the book is called Encounters, Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences.
0:49:39 I read it.
0:49:40 It is really terrific.
0:49:41 I cannot recommend it enough.
0:49:43 Diana Posuka, thanks so much for doing this.
0:49:45 Oh yeah.
0:49:46 Thank you so much.
0:49:47 Thank you so much for this conversation.
0:49:53 All right, aliens, am I right?
0:50:02 I don’t know about you.
0:50:04 I love this conversation.
0:50:05 I love aliens.
0:50:06 I love UFOs.
0:50:07 I love all of it.
0:50:09 And I think what I loved most about this particular conversation with Diana is that I think she
0:50:14 has the almost perfect balance between being open-minded and skeptical, between genuine
0:50:21 curiosity and also scholarly seriousness.
0:50:26 And I think that’s the right orientation to all this, because it is kind of weird.
0:50:30 And there is a lot of strange stuff going on.
0:50:33 And I don’t believe much of it, but it’s worth taking seriously.
0:50:37 And she does in a way that doesn’t feel overly credulous.
0:50:42 Let me know what you think.
0:50:43 Thank you.
0:50:44 Thank you.
0:50:45 Bye.
0:50:45
0:50:47 Bye.
0:50:48 This episode was produced by John Ehrens, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick
0:50:54 Boyd, and Alex Ovington wrote our theme music.
0:50:57 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:51:00 Listen and subscribe.
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