Life after death?

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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.
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