#2172 - Sebastian Junger
02:22:05 Share

As I was saying, you're one of the last of the Mohicans rocking that flip phone.

Yeah, that's right. I'm proud of it. Do you text people? Yeah, yeah, I text. Do you do the do-do-do-do-do, where it takes a bunch of times? Well, it's something called T9. It's predictive texting, so it gives you a bunch of alternatives. You just have to do it all on a keypad with your thumb rather than with an iPhone where you have the full alphabet. But I bet that battery lasts like a week.

I don't even travel with a charger, man. Really? Yeah, I mean, unless I'm gone for a week. But if I'm just gone for a couple of days and I don't have any long conversations planned, I don't even bother. Wow. Yeah.

All emailed, everything's handled at home, all on the laptop, right? Yeah, plus chicks do get mad. They do? What kind of chicks are you hanging around with? Savages. No, at one point I was at CNN waiting to go on, and these two young women kept looking at me. This was like 10 years ago, so I plausibly could say to myself, well, maybe I still got it, right? Like, who knew, right? Yeah.

And then one of them noticed that I had noticed them looking at me. And she goes, oh, excuse me, sir. We were just, we can't believe that you have a flip phone. So I was like, well, that's the end of an era. 10 years ago. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. 10 years ago, there was a few people out there that were hanging out. My friend Ari still had a flip phone 10 years ago.

Yeah. The only people I know now are you and David Tell. So you're in good company. Yeah, that's right. It's cool. I'm telling you, it's cool. It's coming back. It's the next big thing. Well, I know a lot of people, you know, they switch to what's called, I think it's called a simple phone. Is that what it's called, Jamie? What is that thing called? What's that? No, the little tiny, the one that's, it just gives you nothing but like text message. I think you can get music on it too.

I think it's called a simple phone. It's like, do you read on a tablet, you know, like one of those Kindles? I don't. Well, the great thing about those is they have this white paper looking interface. So it doesn't look like a screen. It looks like paper. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what this little phone looks like. And it's the same sort of, that's what it is. Light phone. Yeah, that thing. Yeah.

So it has basically the same thing as your phone except you could text like a normal human. And it will play music and has notes. It gives you directions, right? Yeah. That's not bad. I mean what I don't want is to get sucked into the algorithms of social media and all that garbage. You don't want to get into the algorithms I'm in.

You don't want. I have seen more people fall off buildings, get hit by cars, get shot, get stabbed. And just not participate in their life, right? Yeah. Even if nothing bad happens. I mean, listen, man. I have young children. I have a 7-year-old girl and a 4-year-old girl. And we're at the playground. And I swear there are kids who fall. And I got to go – kids, I don't know. I got to go over and, like, dust them off and comfort them because the mom or dad –

Doesn't even know because they're on their phone. Yeah. Right? That's not parenting. I mean, like, what do you have kids for? Especially playgrounds, man. Playgrounds are still a little sketchy. You know, my daughter, when she was six, she broke her arm at school on a playground. Really? Actually, she was a little older than six. She might have been eight.

But yeah, it's a playgrounds are fucking scary, man. You know, you're, you're swinging around and you're playing and kids fall the wrong way. And, and we're on the Lower East Side in New York City. So it's sketchy in some other ways too. Like you gotta, you gotta be a,

Right. Yeah. You got to be alert and just like, and not only that, but you had kids. Like, what do you do? Like, just enjoy this while you can. Right. Right. Is the TikTok video more interesting than your, the human that you made? Yeah, exactly. You guys made humans. I mean, that still freaks me out to this day, even when they're mad at me. You know, I can't believe you made you. I made you and now you're mad at me. Like, well, how does that work? Yeah.

I have all girls, so they're mad at you for stuff that doesn't even make sense. You're like, okay. How old are they? The youngest right now is 14. Oh, wow. So I got seven of four. Right. So that thing's coming. Okay, got it. Yeah. I got a 14 and a 16 and then a grown one. I got a 27-year-old. Because I've had girlfriends that were mad at me for things that I didn't think made sense.

And I was like, okay, well, that's all right. That's because you're crazy and, you know, whatever. But actually, like, that might be in my future. Yeah, they're just different. It's just women and girls are just different. And me, you know, I think the universe did me a solid by giving me only daughters. Yeah, me too. Because you have a different perspective. Like, if I had a son, I'd be like, I got to keep this fucking savage out of jail. Yeah.

I'm passing my genes.

That kid's got to go to the gym. I mean, I got to get you into a jiu-jitsu gym early. Like, you got to start doing challenging things early. And then also you have to deal with the fact that you have a successful father, and that puts a lot of pressure on a kid because they – you know, a lot of kids, they try to measure up to their parents or compete with their fathers in some sort of strange way. So you have to mitigate that in advance and tell them that you're there for them, you're on their side. You know, it's like – there's a lot with kids, but with girls –

they're so different man i didn't i just i don't think i understood until i raised children i just didn't understand how different they are yeah yep i listen i agree and i'm i have two girls i'm i'm thrilled i mean it's the best thing that ever happened to me in my life that i'm meeting my wife like that just incredible and and partly because they're girls and not boys i don't i have nothing to learn from boys i already know what that's about i am one right and yeah but

But girls, it's just like amazing. And it wakes up some part of you that was dormant and you didn't know was there. It's just like it's an amazing feeling. Dave Chappelle said to me once that not only did it change the amount of love I have, but it changed my capacity for love. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great way to put it.

It's just a completely different experience. And I have friends that are just avowed bachelors. I'm never getting married. I'm never having kids. Fuck that. And I'm like, I get it. I know if you've had a bunch of bad relationships, you have a bunch of people that are annoying and there's constant drama and dilemmas and all these different things. But man, you're missing out on a different phase of life, a different experience of life. It's so humbling.

But you've got to meet the right person, right? Yeah. I mean, if you're not with the right person, I imagine being on top of that, that's hard enough just on its own, on top of that. Oh, yeah. Parenting with the wrong person must be a freaking nightmare. Yeah. You've got to fucking go on a dinner with the wrong person is a nightmare. A nightmare. Just dealing with nonsense. Yeah. Especially if you're not the type of person that handles nonsense so well. Yeah. You know, it's just... Well, what I do, I...

for a variety of family reasons, I flatline. Like if someone's coming at me with something that doesn't make sense and they're really upset...

I just sort of emotionally flatline. I get super rational and just zero Kelvin like nothing, which is kind of a good place to be because it's not escalatory. But I've come to find out that's also exceedingly provocative to do to someone who's upset. Oh, so they try to get a response out of you. Yeah, and they think that your non-response means you don't care. Right.

Ooh, that's a problem. And then you're just so screwed. That's also a problem with emotional manipulation, where you realize that this escalation of emotions is really just to incite a reaction. It's not the real feelings. Right. That's right. Which is why it's so exaggerated. And I think I'm doing the relationship a favor of...

Yeah, it was like somebody's got to stay sane in this room, right? Or the cops are getting caught, you know, whatever. So I'm like, all right, I'm going to flatline. The only way to do this, because you're making me really angry right now, is to flatline and feel nothing. You're not going to do us a favor by doing that. I'll be super rational and calm and blah, blah, blah. But I didn't realize, like, that's completely inflammatory also in a different way.

So there really isn't a good choice until that person figures out how to emotionally regulate. Yeah, the good choice is get the fuck out of Dodge. That's a good choice. Stay rational and calm as you can until you can abandon that relationship. Unless that person has just a complete understanding of what went wrong and apologizes and realizes like, oh, I'm being fucking crazy. I knew a guy who was, I won't name him.

His older brother, they're both sort of pretty well-known writers, and his older brother was in a bad relationship of that sort. And they were walking through, I think it was Paris. They were visiting Paris, and all their stuff was at the hotel. This is before cell phones. This is in like the early 90s, late 80s, something like that. And they're walking through Paris, and they stopped to look. She stopped to look at some clothing in a shop front, you know, the window, through the window.

And it took him some steps to realize that she had stopped and he had kept going. And he looked at her and he looked down the street. He was like, if you want to feel great, have energy and be healthy, it takes a lot, not just working out and eating right, but a lot of different vitamins and minerals and probiotics. And the supplements industry does not make it easy, but AG1 does. And that's why I've been using it for years. AG1 is 14 years of research, innovation, testing and improvement. All

All in one product with the goal of raising the standard in the supplement category. AG1 is a nutritional powerhouse that delivers my daily dose of vitamins, minerals, pre and probiotics and more. It's a powerful, healthy, research-backed supplement that has been a

game changer for me. And when people ask me what's the one thing I'd recommend to elevate their health, my answer is always AG1. And I'm so glad they sponsored this show. Try AG1 and get a free one-year supply of vitamin D3, K2, and 5 AG1 travel packs with your first purchase at drinkag1.com slash JRE. That's drinkag1.com slash JRE. Check it out.

This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Being an MMA fighter takes a lot of different skills. You need to be strong and durable and quick. And if you really want to be good, it helps to master all different kinds of moves from different types of sports. From wrestling, boxing, jiu-jitsu, and more. Having that mix of skills is a real help in the ring.

But that's true for any job. If you're hiring, you probably know just how valuable it is to find people with a mix of skills and specialties. A great place to find those people is ZipRecruiter. And right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan. ZipRecruiter can help you find qualified candidates fast.

More importantly, though, when you find a strong candidate you want for your team, it can connect you with them right away. With ZipRecruiter's pre-written invite to apply message, you can personally reach out to potential hires and even encourage them to apply sooner.

In the fight for top talent, ZipRecruiter is undefeated. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan to try ZipRecruiter for free. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. This is my chance. And he just started sprinting. Oh, my God. And he sprinted all the way to the hotel.

Paid the bill, left $500 on the bed, threw his stuff in his suitcase, out of there, straight to the airport. And that was the last time they ever saw each other. Wow. It was that bad? It was that bad. The pressure that he must have been feeling that allowed him to make that decision. Yeah.

Like he must have just been in hell. I don't think he was just a dick. He might have also been a dick. But I think one of the things that was going on, because I've been in relationships that were pretty tough, is that you can't even have the breakup conversation because it goes full nuclear. So you don't know what to do. Right. You got to flee. Right.

I support him. I support him. I mean, if he's a rational guy and he's never done that before, that seems like, if that's his move, that maybe it's you. Right. And then he met the right gal and they had a family and he's a great dad and blah, blah, blah. So it's not like he was just a congenital asshole. But that was his move in a split second. Wow.

Split second. I'm out of here. That's crazy. And no cell phones, of course. So now you'd be getting speed dialed over and over and over again, right? Wow. So he never saw her again? No. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That's wild. Boy, that must have been a mess. I love that moment where he looked back like, oh, she's in front of the store. And he just ran. I have a 20-yard head start. That is so crazy. That is such a crazy moment.

I don't support it, but I get it. Yeah. Like, I've never been that bad in that bad of a situation, but I've known people that have. Yeah. You just got to, sometimes you just got to do what you have to do to stay alive. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Like, literally. Because, like, bad relationships and bad friendships and bad jobs and bad a lot of things can, they'll rob you of your peace. They create anxiety, which creates, like, physical problems. Yeah.

Your body's under stress. Your cortisol levels get jacked up. That fucks with your sleep, which fucks with your health. You're literally robbing your life. I have a couple of buddies who I love who are bipolar. And I lost one of them. He killed himself. And it's tragic. But the other guy is OK.

And they're bipolar. And having a relationship with someone who's bipolar is almost impossible no matter how much you love them. It really presents a complicated challenge. And if you're having a romantic relationship with someone who's bipolar, which I've done, it's like a thousand times harder from like a buddy. And that was – I've had a couple of those. And it is really in some ways the most painful thing.

experiences of my life. So that was the sort of sprinting from the shop front window. I didn't do quite that, but close. Because if someone's bipolar, it's also volatile. That's sometimes your only choice. Yeah. The bipolar thing is wild because if your mind works well, you think, well, tell that person to get it together. Makes no sense. You're not making sense on it. It doesn't make sense. But you don't understand. Their brains, it's like

The chemicals in their brain are all fucked up. Everything's all fucked up. They can't. It's almost impossible to get it together. It's like you being on fire and someone saying, stay calm. Like, how the fuck are you going to stay calm while you're on fire? Exactly right. With lithium. Yeah.

Is that it? Is that the move? That's it. Is there anything else that works for those folks? It saved two people that I know of that I really loved, that I'm really close to. One guy and a woman that I dated who I later found out she stabilized on lithium. What is the downside of taking the lithium? Oh, I don't know. You're emotionally flat. You put on weight, all kinds of stuff. All kinds of stuff that's better than suicide. That's true. But it's not good. And bipolar –

You know, it destroys relationships. I mean, it's like it really – it's a very, very tough deal. Yeah. And often the result of trauma, right? I mean, in both cases of these people that I care about, they were traumatized as children, you know. So it often produces that terrible behavior that then just fulfills itself your whole life. It's absolutely tragic. The crazy thing is they don't even know. Like some people, it's not even trauma. They just get it.

So there's some neurochemical stuff. But trauma is a known pretty correlate to bipolar as an adult. The crazy thing about mental illness is that it's just no one can really tell what's going on in your head. And it's up to you to talk to your psychiatrist or whatever and try to explain it. Right.

And they have to try to like make a map of the territory. But no one knows how you think about things other than you. And are you an honest reporter on your own experience? Right. So if you're telling your shrink about the fight you had with your wife the other night, are you really being an honest – Right.

They are so, I think on some level, so fearful and well defended, psychologically defended, that they have a very hard time saying, yeah, my wife's mad at me. But on the other hand, I was kind of a dick. Right. They can't do that. It's all sort of victim-centered. And the shrink doesn't – hopefully they see through this stuff, but they don't necessarily know that that's not true. Well, there's just so many medications that get prescribed to people. Yeah.

Based on the person reporting a feeling that you can't like see in a test You know like if someone says like if you have you know some sort of a disease they say oh We found that you're sick with you know syphilis whatever it is and we'll get it We're gonna give you this medicine, and we've got this figured out. We tested you we know what it is right with your mind You know like if someone says they're depressed like Okay

What does that mean? What does that mean? There's no measurement. There's nothing, you know, like, so they have to say, okay, let's try a little of this or try a little of that and try to figure out what it is. And there are some things that are legit bad, really, really tough things to have, like borderline. And I, my, my, my buddy, I mean, he was my closest friend. He was my brother. Right. And,

And he's the best man at my first wedding. And we were in Bosnia together during the Civil War and just brothers, right? And amazing, brilliant, funny, funny man. But he was a lifelong depressive. And part of his brilliance was rooted in, he says, in his depression. Like it gave him a certain kind of mind. And he was...

But he was finally diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. And one of the problems with schizoaffective is that they reject the diagnosis, right? They're saying, no, no, no. Everyone has it wrong. I'm fine.

And I have no problem. And it's you guys that don't understand what I'm up against. Right. And so it's very hard to treat because they like borderlines. They reject the idea. Narcissism disorder is another one. They reject the idea there's anything wrong with them. So it's really, really hard to treat. It's crazy when someone's weakness is actually like their strength in their career. Yeah.

You know, which is a thing with some creative types. Like there's this guy, Richard Jennings, like one of my all time favorite comedians, and he killed himself. And everyone who didn't know him was baffled. They were like, that guy's at the top of his game. That guy's everything we all want to be.

Right. He was so good that I went to this club in New York, in upstate New York, or in Long Island, rather, Eastside Comedy Club. And this dude, Peter, who was the MC, was depressed because he worked with Richard Jenney all weekend. And he was like, he did a new hour every night. He did a new two hours Friday, two different hours, two different hours Saturday.

For most of us, we have one hour. You're right. Like, while we're on the road, we have one hour. We tone that thing down. We tighten it up. We fucking... We edit it. We get it to... It's like a rock in one hour. This motherfucker destroyed with four different hours on a weekend. And Peter was like, I should quit comedy. Like, I... This is a real... That's a real comedian. I'm a fucking poser. This fucking... And that guy killed himself. Yeah. Well, my... John, my buddy, like, he... I mean, he wasn't a professional comedian, but...

He could have been right. I mean, he had that sort of unbelievable brilliance and just devastating humor and just crazy. I mean, his he could just he could just sort of sit there and just riff. Right. I mean, he just like and he would go for an hour and everyone would be like pissing themselves on the floor.

And he just on and on he went, right? Just this brilliant riff that had never been heard before, would never be heard again. And it just flowed through him. But he was, you know, life... I mean, as a teenager, he said, you know, he said to his mom, he said, I know eventually I'm going to kill myself. He knew that as a teenager. Oh, my God. Yeah. And he held it off a long time. He had a family, two little girls, and he was like... He killed himself while his girls were young? Yeah. And, you know...

Of course, it's hard not to say, John, what the fuck? Right? Like, are you kidding? But then I realized, no, no, no. That just shows how much pain he was in. Yeah, they just can't take it at all anymore. They can't take it. And they're worried what they're going to do with that pain. Are they a threat to their family? Can they trust themselves? You know, I think they start to worry about that. There's an amazing story. Not that I know that this was where John was at, but it could have been. There's an amazing story from...

the Iliad and the Odyssey of Ajax, who threw himself on his sword, right? And the conventional understanding is that he was dishonored by Agamemnon

in some way that I can't remember. And he couldn't, after the trauma of combat and the siege of Troy, and he lost his best friend, et cetera, et cetera, he couldn't stand the dishonor. He had PTSD, right, in sort of contemporary terms. And he threw himself on his sword. And I sort of looked into the story a little bit because it didn't quite, I was like, wow, that's a lot of honor, right? I mean, that's like, he had a family, he had children. That's why would you, so what it turned out was that he had, he was walking on a hillside, right?

And he, in his mind, he thought he was attacked by the enemy. And he drew his sword and he killed them all. And then he realized he had killed a herd of sheep. Whoa. In his trauma, he had mistaken sheep for the enemy. And I have no proof of this. I've never heard, you know, whatever, like I'll stand down if I'm wrong. But it occurred to me that what he thought at that moment was, if I can kill a herd of sheep because I think they're Trojans,

My family's not safe. No one's safe. No one's safe, right? And I'm a warrior. I'm a protector. My job is to defend and protect. And if I think a herd of sheep are enemy warriors, like I am not safe for my loved ones to be around. And he said to his half-brother, please take care of my family. And then he went down to the beach. He buried the sheep.

the handle of his sword in the sand at an angle, and then he ran, and he threw himself on the sword and killed himself. Oh, that's a rough way to go. Yeah. But if you're worried you're going to kill the things that are most precious to you,

How can you not? Also, when you're talking about childhood trauma, imagine childhood trauma in a time where people fought with swords. Oh, my God. What did you see? Absolutely. You know, what did you see when you were a baby? Yeah. What did you see your whole life? People getting beheaded and gutted, you know, and then you're off at war.

Yeah. And when you come back from war, you know, you're not coming back from like landing rounds at 500 meters against the enemy position. Right. I mean, you're coming back with, you know, people's blood on you. I mean, covered in other men's blood. Right. And entrails and whatever. Yeah. I mean, the Iliad is it. It's like a medical textbook. It's like then he sliced his abdomen open and his entrails fell out and he staggered away holding his entrails and then this and then that. I mean, it's completely bloody. Right.

Right. Visceral in the literal sense of viscera. Right. Like completely bloody. If that's what combat was like, and I'm sure for the Native Americans here as well, like it must have been unbelievably traumatizing to the guys who did it. Unbelievably. Yeah. I mean, one on one combat with swords must be so insane. Yeah. And arrows flying and cannonballs. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, they were hunting cultures. Like, for example, in North America, they were hunting cultures and they were used to gutting animals and the guts spilling out and beheading, you know, whatever. Like, I mean, they were used to that, you know, with animals, with hunting, they were used to blood and guts, literally blood and guts. So maybe the transition to hunting.

warfare is less of a distance to cross than it is for a kid who grew up in a suburb of Boston and then suddenly is in Afghanistan and, you know, it gets intimate and bloody. You can, you know, the psychic distance that that person has to travel is quite far and maybe not quite doable. That's a good way to put it. The psychic distance that one has to travel. Right. But just I think

you get accustomed to what's normal, right? But I think every human being that existed back then was probably in this heightened state of urgency and fear because they had experienced sword fights. Right. That's right. That's right. And also...

No distractions. You're staring up at the stars every night. You're waking up in the morning to sword fight again. Yeah. That's right. Jesus Christ. That's right. No Instagram. Nothing. Nothing. Stories are being told by the fire. Everyone's on a flip phone. If you had a flip phone back then, man, you'd run everything. Like, look, I'm going to call the general. Yeah, exactly. Right now. From the trench? Like, what? From the trench? Yeah.

Yeah, what do kids do? I mean, these fucking kids are filming things now, which is really crazy. The footage that you get out of Ukraine right now is so nuts. Oh, my God. It's insane. So nuts because it's high resolution cell phone camera and GoPro video footage. It's absolutely crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

As a person who's been there, like when you did Restrepo and you've been to wars, what is it like for you to see these new ones emerge? And I mean I've always hoped that there's going to become a time in our culture, in my life, where we're not going to be involved in any of this shit anymore. We the human race or the U.S.? We the human race and particularly the U.S. Yeah.

Well, I mean, here's the thing. Like I have, you know, I have some sort of like peace oriented friends, pacifist friends, you know,

I mean, there's a sort of two different flavors, right? There's a sort of a conservative isolationism and a liberal pacifism. And they wind up, ironically, in sort of the same place. It's like war is bad. We don't want any part of it. You know, like the convergence is sort of interesting politically. But so the sort of left-wing people that I know are sort of Vietnam-era pacifists, right? And so in my mind, I'm like, listen, you know, if war is bad...

avoiding it isn't the only, you know, there is a moral case to be made for, say, in Bosnia, which was stopped by a very brief NATO intervention. And, you know, you could make a moral case for, you know, drop a few bombs, the war stops, and then human life is preserved. Yeah, you can make that case. But, you know, basically, I think, say, for Ukraine, peacefulness works, and it's a wonderful thing to aspire to, sort of as long as no one invades you.

Right? Right. And if you knew that no one would invade you and you're warlike anyway, you're an asshole. Right? Right. But what you have to do, any society from a group of

Like Comanche warriors in the hill country around Austin in 1840 or Ukraine or the US or Israel or any nation, right? You have to figure out how to be a peace-loving society that can also defend itself. And that's really – and then if you're going to defend yourself, what is your obligation to defend your allies or your friends or even just on a strategic level?

countries where if they fall that eventually the dominoes wind up with you know and i don't know the answers to that but that to me is like the the the strategic and moral question is like where is that where is that line where you have to defend something because eventually you're going to be end up defending yourselves yeah it's just when does the human race ever get out of this cycle

It's just individuals as human beings are capable of coexisting in harmony. But when we get into groups, there's always something. It's like it's unavoidable. I mean, we've talked about this a bunch of times, but if you ever ask people, in your lifetime, do you think there'll be no war? No one says yes. Well, there's always the possibility of a bad actor that's like, you know what? I want those oil fields. I want those diamond mines. I want whatever. Like there's all...

And, you know, we've been that guy too sometimes, right? And, you know, you're a strong, jacked-up guy who knows how to fight. And if the world contained only peaceful men—

You wouldn't need to be. You might want to be, but you wouldn't need to be. Right. But you're walking down the street, you know, in your mind, like I can defend my family and myself with my hands. Like, and I need to know that I can. I'm just reading into your mind. Like, I don't obviously I don't know how you think, but I'm guessing that somewhere in your mind, you're like, I can take care of business if my family's threatened. And and there's a there's a security in that. And if you just knew for a fact that there were no predatory people out there, not one.

You wouldn't need to be, right? But that's not – we're social primates and that's not the world that we evolved in and it's not – it's never going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Unless something changes, something really big. Right. And it's not going to change overnight. No. Right. I mean we have the DNA we have. We have the cultural wiring that we have. So all the democracies which are – tend towards sort of fairness and –

and peacefulness because it's frankly good for business, right? Right. War is not particularly good for the stock market. Unless you are Raytheon. Right. For some businesses, absolutely. But for the array of economic enterprise in the world, like war, you know, war doesn't, war doesn't do the economies much good overall. And the, uh,

This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Being an MMA fighter takes a lot of different skills. You need to be strong and durable and quick. And if you really want to be good, it helps to master all different kinds of moves from different types of sports, from wrestling, boxing, jujitsu, and more. Having that mix of skills is a real help in the ring.

But that's true for any job. If you're hiring, you probably know just how valuable it is to find people with a mix of skills and specialties. A great place to find those people is ZipRecruiter. And right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan. ZipRecruiter can help you find qualified candidates fast.

More importantly, though, when you find a strong candidate you want for your team, it can connect you with them right away. With ZipRecruiter's pre-written invite to apply message, you can personally reach out to potential hires and even encourage them to apply sooner.

In the fight for top talent, ZipRecruiter is undefeated. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan to try ZipRecruiter for free. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. This episode is brought to you by Bowl & Branch Sheets.

There are millions of things you can do to optimize your performance, but none of it matters if you don't get a great night's sleep. If you want real recovery, upgrade to bowl and branch sheets. They've got better sleep down to a formula. Bowl and branch's best-selling signature sheets use their highest quality 100% organic cotton,

with an insane softness and breathability so that you can fall asleep and actually stay asleep even on the hottest summer nights. Sleep better with the softest, naturally cooling bedding from Bowl & Branch. Go to bowlandbranch.com for 20% off your first sheet set plus free shipping. That's B-O-L-L-E-N-C-H.

So the question is, like, how do you... So democracies are...

invested in stability, in market stability. They're invested in it because they disproportionately benefit from it, right? Iraq under Hussein was not disproportionately benefiting from market stability because it was an oppressive dictatorship, right? And the economy sucked and there was a ton of corruption, right? But democracies are quite, they really do benefit from stability. But all of those democracies are defended by really robust militaries, right? And if they weren't,

Right? They would get overrun like in half a generation. Right. Well, that's what scares the shit out of me about today because I think with AI and with weapons technology advancing in the same exponential rate as cell phone technology and computer technology is, we're getting to this really weird place where it's not just mutually assured destruction because of nuclear weapons. It's like...

It's whoever presses the button first wins. And so you have this, like if you can completely disable a nation's army almost instantaneously and then take over their cities or bomb their cities like instantaneously, it's just we're relying on good nature. The understanding that this is a horrible thing to do to humanity to pull that trigger first. Right. Well, there's also this sort of,

What do you what happens when the dog catches the tire? Right. So if Russia had I mean, what the Ukrainians I mean, all the politics and whatever aside, just on this on a military level, what the what the Ukrainians were able to do, you know, quite outmatched by the by the Russians, what the Afghan what the what the Taliban were able to do with the U.S., the Mujahideen against the Russians, all of this like that.

What the Ukrainians were able to do against the Russians is quite extraordinary. The Russians really should have taken Ukraine in a few weeks, right? And had they...

That would have been what – that was what everyone predicted. I didn't think that was going to happen. But that was what everyone predicted. It didn't happen. And the motivation to defend your home is always far greater than the motivation to invade someone else's home. Just for the 19-year-old male, like the – and motivation is, as you know, I'm sure from MMA, is like super important in outcome, right? And so –

But had the Russians done it, had they taken – had they just blitzkrieged all the way through Ukraine, seized it, then they would – what they would have had is the huge, huge and costly problem of maintaining order in a nation of 40 million people, 40 million resentful people who did not want to be governed by outsiders. Right.

Don't try this at home. Right. I mean, this is. And so I think, yeah, so you can take out say you had a magic, you know, electromagnetic pulse that took out everything in the. I mean, I'm just bullshitting here. I took out everything that the U.S. military relies on to communicate and to function. You just zapped it out of existence and invade it. Right. The Russians took the east of the Mississippi. The Chinese took west of the Mississippi or whatever, whatever it might be.

Then you've got to run this place. And that's when you really have a tactical problem, township by township, mountain by mountain. And then your electromagnetic pulse actually doesn't serve you that well. And the Afghans – I mean the Taliban didn't defeat us. They just outlasted us until we got tired of being there and didn't want to pay the bill. Yeah. So –

Your what I when I got reached out to about you was that you had gotten through a near-death experience and I really didn't want to read into it at all. I just wanted to ask you about it. Sure. So Something happened you had an aneurysm that burst inside internally. He has over does yeah, so

I mean, the short, you know, the medical description is I had an undiagnosed aneurysm, which is a ballooning of an artery at a weak spot. Like, so, I mean, arteries can dilate to get more blood flow. But an aneurysm is like one specific spot that for one reason or another is weak and it starts to sort of give way and it'll bubble outwards. And as that bubble grows bigger, and this takes decades, it's a very slow process, right?

I have a basically I have a ligament in the wrong place and that set in motion a sort of vascular problem that resulted in an aneurysm and they don't they don't hurt there's no way to diagnose I mean unless you scan someone's abdomen I've always been super healthy and so throughout my life I just never had any reason for an abdominal scan right I'm fifth fit healthy male right fit healthy person and so I just never needed that that look inside me so no one saw the aneurysm growing right

And so at some point, the artery wall gets stretched so far that it will rupture. It'll just burst. And now you have an arterial bleed. So you know what that, you know, if someone shoots you in the femoral or stabs you in the abdomen and you have an arterial bleed, you know, your life is measured in minutes or whatever or hours. And if someone does you the favor of stabbing you in the abdomen, right?

And severing your pancreatic artery, which is the artery that ruptured on me. Now, it's a little artery, the thickness of a number two pencil. It's not a big deal. But it's arterial blood, right? I mean, don't stop that shit. You're going to die, right? And so if someone just like stabbed you in the abdomen and you rushed to the hospital, the doc is no problem. If you're still alive, they'll transfuse you. The doctors know exactly where to sort of put their finger to plug the leak.

It's no problem. The problem with an internal hemorrhage, an abdominal hemorrhage, is the doctors have no idea where it is. And your abdomen is basically a big bowl of spaghetti, right? And it's filling up with blood. And they have to find where it's leaking. Yeah, because the blood... You know, if you're stabbed, the blood's going out of your body onto the kitchen floor. With an internal hemorrhage, it all stays in your abdomen. So I...

It happened. It was during COVID, and we were in a remote area, an old house that we own at the end of a dead-end dirt road in Massachusetts. And it's so remote, there's no cell phone service, the phone lines are old, and they short out when it rains. And my wife and I had a little bit of babysitting at the time, a three-year-old and a six-month-old. We had a little bit of babysitting from the teenage girls that lived down the road that we knew the family, and so they came over to give us a few hours.

And my wife and I went out to this cabin that's even deeper in the woods. And, you know, paradise basically, right? And so we're out there. And in mid-sentence, I felt this sort of pain in my abdomen. Like, ooh, what was that? Right? Like not kidney stone pain, but worse than indigestion. Right? And so I sort of twisted and turned to see if I could work it out, you know, and then nothing helped. And then I finally stood up. I said, maybe I can walk it out.

And as soon as I stood up, the floor just reeled away from me and I almost fell over. What was happening is my blood pressure was just like tanking because I was losing all my blood into my abdomen and my body hadn't compensated yet. So I was just like, like, like my head was reeling. Right. So I sat back down and I said something I never thought I'd ever have reason to say to my wife. I said, something's wrong. I'm going to need help.

Right. And you don't want to ever have to say those words. Right. And you're fit. I'm fit. It never crossed my mind that I would ever have to say that unless someone shoots me or something. Right. Like, but not in my life. I stopped war reporting. You know, I gave all that gamble, you know, gambling with your life. I gave it all up. I had a family. We're in this beautiful spot. Like, are you kidding? It can come after you here, too. Right. Who knew? Right. So.

Um, she dragged me through the woods. You know, I have my arm around her shoulder. I'm sort of like a stumbling drunk. Right. And she started dragging me through the woods and she gets me to the car and, um, puts me in the passenger seat of the car. And, and, you know, we're a one hour transport to the hospital and I'm bleeding. I'm losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes. You know, my wife didn't know this and thank God I didn't either, but I was literally a human hourglass. Right. Right.

And she ran, she put me in the passenger seat of the car and I'm lying there. Now I'm starting to go blind, right? Which is one of the things that happens when you lose too much blood is you go, you go blind. She ran into the house, the sort of electric white just took over the world. And that's all I could see. Electric white. That's the light. If you bleed out, that's the last thing you'll see.

And, um, and then darkness, which is what I finally got to was the darkness. But, um, so she ran into the house, told the girls, the teenage girls, one of them ran out. The phone line didn't work, but the girl, one of them was able to get one bar of signal, like in one spot on the driveway, like one bar. And she called the ambulance and the ambulance guys came. And, um, you go into something called compensatory shock if you're bleeding out and the body senses in its, in its miraculous way, it senses that, um,

you know, there's a five alarm fire going on here and we got to tighten our game, right? So it literally shuts down vascular, like blood flow to parts of the body you don't need, like your legs and your arms, your skin. And it sort of hoards the blood in your chest and

your abdomen your chest and your brain around your heart right you know those things go you're dead so it collects the blood around there and keeps it there through muscular tension right you don't know you're doing this but what happens is your blood pressure goes back up and suddenly you're sort of back in the world and i was no longer going in and out of consciousness i was suddenly i could see again the ambulance guys get there and they're like how you doing i'm like well

You know, belly pain, but I don't want to be a complainer here. I'm feeling a little better. You know, maybe blah, blah, blah. My wife, and this is why there's a famous statistic, married men live longer. My wife is like, you know what? Because they were going to leave me. They were like, oh, it's a hot day. Drink some water. You probably just dehydrated. Oh, shit. Yeah. My wife is like, no, he's going to the hospital.

I watched him. He was in and out of consciousness. He couldn't stand up. He was going blind. Like, what's it take? Yeah. Guys, what's it take to get a guy to the emergency room? So anyway, they took me. My body stayed in compensatory shock for that hour that it took. But I was losing blood, losing blood, losing blood. And then I got to the hospital immediately.

And my body couldn't hold compensatory shock anymore. And I went straight into end stage hemorrhagic shock, which is you're dead in 10 or 15 minutes. Right. And I went off a fucking cliff right as we got to the hospital. And I they estimate my blood pressure was 60 over 40, which is like rock bottom. They estimate I lost like two thirds of my blood.

If you lose more than two-thirds, even if they transfuse you and top you off with full complement of blood, they pump it into you. If you lose that much blood, there's complications that happen with coagulants and all kinds of things like that that will kill you. So people can die of blood loss with a full complement of blood that they've gotten from transfusions. Right.

Just because this chemical process gets initiated and they can't reverse it. Right. And that starts to happen when you've lost two thirds of your blood, which is right where I was at. Right. Ten minutes later, I'd have been dead. And so they rushed me into the trauma bay and the doctors knew immediately what was going on. And they one doctor rushed.

had this sort of large gauge needle and he and he started and she asked my permission i had no idea i was dying right and he asked my permission to stick it through my neck into my jugular which didn't look like a lot of fun and i was like really is this is this totally necessary like we really need to do this it was like why in case there's an emergency and he was like no this is the emergency like i had no idea right i'm i'm 10 minutes from dead i have no idea i'm dying zero

Right. Thank God, because I would have been terrified and I would have been thinking about my family. And I would, you know, I mean, you know, like, yeah, you don't want that. Right. And so he said, this is the emergency. Well, if you say so, go ahead. Have at it. Right. So while he's working on prepping my neck and it did actually didn't hurt at all. Right. So if you ever have to have this done, don't worry about it. But they while I'm lying there and he's sort of working on my neck, getting ready.

It felt like it took longer than it probably actually did. But while I'm there, all of a sudden, and I have to stop and say, I'm an atheist. I'm a lifelong atheist. I'm a rationalist. I'm not spiritual. I'm not a mystic. I'm not woo-woo. Like, I'm nothing, right? And my dad was an atheist and a physicist. I have to say all this because of what's coming. And I'm still an atheist, by the way. So all of a sudden, I sensed below me and to my left,

This black pit opened up, this black abyss, like this infinite black void. And I was getting pulled into it. And it's not like darkness had taken over the world. The world was here. I could see the doctors. I was talking to them, right? Here I am. But the darkness was contained in this hole that was underneath me, and I was getting pulled into it, right?

I didn't know I was dying, but I had this like this instinct of like a wounded animal. Like if I go into the pit, the infinitely dark pit, I'm not coming out. Right. Like I just sensed like don't go in there because you're not coming back. And I started to panic because I felt myself getting drawn in. Right. And then my father, my dead father, appeared above me and to my left.

Now, there's a whole body of inquiry of NDEs, near-death experiences, and I didn't know anything about this stuff, right? I didn't know anything about it. It didn't interest me. I'm not culturally prepped for anything like that. I'm not Christian. I didn't see angels. Like, I'm just—I'm a zero in that regard, right? There's my dead father above me, right? He'd been dead eight years. I love him. But I was not happy to see him, right? I was like—

I was shocked. I mean, dad, what are you doing here? Like, and there he was and he was and he communicated to me. And so what I saw, see isn't quite the right verb, but I don't know if there doesn't exist the right verb. I sensed slash saw him and it was his voice.

essence, his energy, his presence, right? It's not like I see you, right? It's like, oh, there we are, right? It wasn't with that clarity. In some ways, it was with a deeper clarity because it was his essence, right? And there he was, his presence was right there and above me and to my left. It was like quite specific. And he communicated to me, again, not with words, but with some manner that I understood that I can't quite explain what it was, but

Basically, the idea was you don't have to fight it. You can come with me. I'll take care of you. It's okay. It's okay. Don't be scared. Right? I'll take care of you. I was horrified. I was appalled. I was offended. I was like, you're dead. Why would I want to go with you? You're dead. You're the opposite of what I am. Why would I possibly want to go with you and be dead with you? Because I'm alive with my family right now. Like, I'm not going anywhere with you. Like, get out of here.

And I said to the doctor, you have to hurry. I'm going right now. I didn't know where I was going, but I knew I was sort of outbound. And once that happened, I was, there's no inbounds. And I sensed that. I said, you got to hurry. You're losing me right now. So what'd they do? Well, they transfused me. They stabilized me with three units of blood. Eventually I needed 10 units, which is a full complement of blood. Like, and so let me just pause for a moment and say, please donate blood. Like everybody who's listening, please.

I'm alive. My daughters have a father because 10 people who I'll never know donated their blood.

And when you donate blood, you are literally allowing another person to live. And one day you might live because someone else donated blood. And doctors can't manufacture that shit. Like if you donate blood, it takes an hour. It doesn't hurt. And your body will replace it in a couple of weeks. It's the ultimate free lunch. I think it's quicker than a couple of weeks. I think it's pretty quick. It's pretty quick. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, to get up to 100%, I think it's a little long, but whatever. It doesn't matter, right? It's like we're talking about human life here. And if you want to be part of something greater than yourself, it's blah, blah, blah. All these things that we all kind of want. Like, how do I participate? You know, like nobody needs me. I'm not part of anything. I feel lonely. Give blood, man, and you'll be part of something amazing, right? And you might. So I give blood regularly. So at any rate, there's my pitch. But yeah.

So they stuffed some blood in me through my jugular. I stabilized, and they brought me to the interventional – the cath lab, the interventional radiology suite. And what interventional radiology is, it's a freaking miracle, right? Like 20 years ago, I'd have been dead, right? I mean even – the advances are so fast. They're just so miraculous. So what they do is they put you on something called a fluoroscope, which is basically –

sees into you with x-rays, but it's x-ray video, right? So they can see in real time what's going on in your body. And then they pop a hole into your femoral from your right groin and they insert a catheter into it, which is a flexible rubber tube or wire. And because of the way the heads of these catheters are designed, they have little shepherd's crooks and little curves and all this stuff, and they can navigate the

through your venous system, through the twists and turns, and they can get that thing almost anywhere in your body. And then once they're there, they can pop a coil and plug a leak, or they can inflate and put in a stent, or whatever. They can do miraculous things. They can inject radioactive dye, and then they see where it goes, and they turn on the fluoroscope, and then they can see, ah, the dye is leaking into the abdomen from here. Here's where the leak is. It's amazing what they can do, right?

And so they popped the entry into my femoral and then threaded a catheter up through my venous system. And because of this ligament that's in the wrong place, the arteries in my abdomen are very distorted, right? And they're tortuous. They're called tortuous. And they couldn't get the catheter through these twists and turns, right?

And they couldn't get it to the site of the bleed, which they knew where it was, right? And they couldn't get the catheter there. The alternative, if you can't fix it with a catheter, is you pull your gear out and you send the guy to the OR and you do this crazy, like, race against time. But you cut them open. And then one of the reasons the blood loss slows down is that there's so much blood in your abdomen that there's back pressure.

And it keeps – it slows down the blood loss from your artery because now it's trying to flow into a full container. Right. And it doesn't leak as fast, right? So as soon as you open up the abdomen, you can imagine what happens. I mean, you geyser blood. And, you know, you got to like –

Push the organs aside, and it's this desperate search for the bleed before you bleed out. And as you can probably guess, it doesn't go well very often, right? So it's not quite a death sentence, but if you go into the OR with an abdominal bleed, you know, they bring your wife in to say goodbye to you, basically, before you do that. They don't tell you or her that, but that's what they're doing. And that's what they would have done with my wife, who got to the hospital. The ER doctor was like, you better come now. And so...

So at one point, I'm in agonizing pain because I've got all this free-floating blood against my kidneys and my liver and my spleen and just agonized like kidney stones, right? It's just, I'm in agony and they can't sedate me because my vitals are too low, right? So I'm conscious through all this and I'm watching the doctors. And at one point, I watched one of the doctors just sort of shake his head and shrug and was basically like, well, we tried. This isn't working. And the other doctor nodded and he's like, yeah, we tried.

And it was the first moment where I realized, oh, my God, I didn't realize this is we're playing for keeps right now. This might not turn out well. I might not be going home. I couldn't believe what I'd seen. And then the first doctor, who's this brilliant interventional radiologist named Dr. Phil Dombrowski, he saved my life, died.

you have in your mind a special relationship with someone, a man or anyone who has saved your life. It's a very particular relationship. And I've never been in that position before. And so Dombrowski said, we can try one last thing. Let's try going through his left wrist. And so because of your vasculature, like the left wrist allows a different point of attack. You come down from above instead of coming up from below. And you don't have to go through all those twists and turns.

And he had to get through a problematic spot in my celiac artery that was impeded by the ligament that's in the wrong place. Well, he was a lot of problems, right? And you had to be like a super high-level IR guy to even think of this, much less do it. Like I was told a very, very few interventional radiologists would even think of doing this, right? But he was a genius, right? So...

The other doctor said, I like the way you think. And I watched them put a catheter into my left wrist. I no longer have a pulse in that wrist because it messes up the artery. And they did it.

They got the thing to the place. Like they got the catheter to the bleed. They popped a coil in there. It blocked the artery, blocked the leak. And then they sent me to the ICU. They knocked me out, sent me to the ICU. I remember seeing my wife very briefly afterwards. I held her hand and that sent me off. And I woke up in the ICU the next morning. And so the blood in your abdomen, do they drain it?

Does your body absorb it? No, no. I guess maybe they do sometimes. No, your body absorbs it. Yep. Six pints of blood. Like, you know, I could feel it in me. I mean, it didn't feel good, right? You know, and you're sort of discolored. I mean, it's like, it's awful. Not a good look. Right. Now, you keep saying you're an atheist, right?

What exactly – everybody sort of defines that differently. I feel like a lot of atheists are actually agnostic more than they're atheists because an atheist is someone who just doesn't believe. I don't believe. What do you think the experience with your father was, his presence? Well, that's right. The billion-dollar question, right? So I'm an atheist in part because I respect the highest intentions of religion too much.

To take them lightly. Now, there's plenty of religious expression, which is not at a very high level, which I find even offensive and destructive. But at its best, like journalism, like psychology, like everything, at its best. Right. It's a very noble thing.

thing that helps people live with more dignity and less fear and blah, blah, blah. Right? I get it. So I take that stuff really literally. And so for me, believing in God is an active thing. Right? And really, it's not like that you found God. It's God found you. Like, oh my God, suddenly God was in my life. Right? And it's like when you fall in love. You can't choose to fall in love. Right? Right?

It's an overwhelming feeling that you can't resist. And if it's not, you're not really in love, bro. You might have married Betty, but you're not in love with Betty, right? But when you have that experience of overwhelming love, like, oh my God, I'm in love with that person. I got to be with them. My life is with them. Like, that's love finding you. You didn't

manufacture it and you didn't make an executive decision, well, I'm in love with Betty now and we're getting married. I mean, people used to do that and it just isn't love. It's a contract. It's a decision. It's an arrangement. No problem, right? And so what I can't do is make an executive. When people say, you got to find God, you got to find Jesus. I'd listen, man.

Even if I wanted to, which I don't, but even if I wanted to, it doesn't work that way, right? I can't just decide to love God. That's not a feeling that you can summon and dictate to yourself. So I'm an atheist because I don't make God a sort of part of my daily practice. It's not part of my life. It just isn't, right? And I can't just choose to make it be. I could fake it, and I could go to church every Sunday.

But I respect religion in its best form too much to frigging fake it. Right. So and I'm not an agnostic because, you know, if I if I saw in my mind agnostic is like a hung jury. Right. It's like, you know what? I don't know. There could be a God. There might not be a God. I don't have an opinion on it. Right. A hung jury. You might be innocent. I might be guilty. You know, we can't. Your Honor, we can't decide either way. And we can make an argument for both. So.

It's a hung jury. Like we can't – we don't know, right? In the legal system, that means he's innocent. If you can't come to a decision of guilt, then he's innocent, right? But so in the sort of agnostic sense, like there's evidence for, evidence against. I can't decide, so I'm an agnostic. But for me, there is no evidence that there is a God.

I mean, there's belief, right? Which is a beautiful thing. But I've never in my life actually seen something happen where I was like, oh my God, there went God. I just saw him. Holy shit. Like, are you kidding? Like, there he is. Like, now I believe there's a God. Had I, while I was dying, had God come to me, whatever that would even look like, right? Whatever that is. Had God come to me afterwards, I'd be like, you know what? I don't know. Maybe there is a God, right? Because I saw some strange shit.

And that's the only explanation I can think of is that there actually is a divine power in the world. I encountered it. It changed my life. Like, even if I'm not religious, I'm at least agnostic. But I've never—this never happened to me, right? So I'm not an agnostic because I just—I have no reason to think there is a God. It never happens, right? I'm an atheist, right? So—

I'm happy to be staying corrected if someone offers up some proof, but thus far it hasn't happened. And when people say, you know what, the proof of God is that the universe exists. Who created the universe, motherfucker? Like who do you think it has to be God, right? And I'm like, well, not really, like because if complex systems need a creator and that's your proof of God, clearly God is a complex system that's at least as complex as the universe he created. So who created God? Like that will not get you – that doesn't prove anything, right? So –

So the theology aside, what did I make of my father appearing above me? So the next morning, to get in there, I have to sort of say what happened to me, if I may. The next morning, I woke up in the ICU to the nurse saying,

Good morning, Mr. Younger. Congratulations. You made it. Like, it's a miracle. We almost lost you last night and no one can quite believe you're alive. It's, you know, welcome back to the world, basically. I cannot tell you how shocking it is to get news like that if you had no idea you were dying.

I mean, I knew something was going on with me. Belly pain. Maybe I'm going to wake up to shitty news about a tumor, you know, cancer in my, you know, whatever. I mean, I was aware that this might not be a fun day tomorrow. I had no idea I was dying in that moment, right? So it's absolutely shocking. And particularly if you have children, right? And my little girl. I mean, I immediately thought about my little girls. And then I remembered my father. I'm like, oh, my God. I saw my father last night in the pit, right? It all came back to me. And...

I didn't know what to do with it. I was, Jesus, like, are you kidding? What was that? And so I'm left there with my thoughts. I'm throwing up blood. I'm a freaking mess, right? And then the nurse comes back later and says, how are you doing? Like, not that great, frankly. Like, thanks to you. What you told me is terrifying. Like, what?

I can't stop thinking about it. And I almost died. And she said, try this. She had an awesome Boston accent. She was like one of these sort of middle-aged lady, like heart of gold, straight shooter, tough as nails, buried three husbands, you know, whatever. She's one of those ICU nurses, right? I liked her enormously. And she was like, try this.

instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred. She walked out like a hell of a thing to say to an atheist, right? So, you know, for me, all those wonderful words like blessing and sacred, they, you know, they have one, they have beautiful secular meanings as well. So I feel entitled to interpret them in my own way. And for me,

Something sacred is anything that allows, as I was saying before, any work, any task, any knowledge, anything that allows people to live with more dignity, with less fear.

more connection, more love that just helps the human condition a little bit. Like that's sacred knowledge, right? You know, it could be a minister, right? It could be a shrink. It could be a journalist, right? It could be, you could be doing sacred work for people. I'm sure you are. And so, you know, the things that you say are helping people navigate their painful lives. Yeah, bro, absolutely. We're all capable of sacred work, right? That's what it means to me. So when she said that, I'm like, okay,

I've been going to front lines my whole life and coming back with knowledge that, you know, in my in my most grandiose moments. Right. I thought might help humanity. Like what's going on in you? No, I wasn't in Ukraine, but right now, like what's going on in Ukraine? What knowledge can we come back with that will help the world and the United States make better decisions about how to preserve human dignity and human life? Whatever that whatever that means. Right. So that's that's at its best. That's sort of a sacred task, like many others are. And yeah.

So, and now I'm not going to front lines anymore. I went to the ultimate front line. I went to my own mortality, the place, the front line we're all headed to and that most of us are scared of. Like, and I was allowed to look over the edge and then I came back. I was allowed to come back. Did I come back with sacred knowledge? In other words, with knowledge that would be helpful to me and to other people lead their lives and with less fear, more dignity, et cetera. And

That was the challenge. And I set about doing it at that moment. I just lay there. I was like, all right, what did I learn? What did I learn? And the big question that I had to answer for myself was, what the hell did I see with my father? Like, what was that? And does that mean that there's something, quote, more, right? Is there something after we die that we can sort of like look forward to and count on?

Or is it just the dying brain hallucinating some shit because we're so frigging scared and the synapses are shorting out and it's going haywire and that's what you get. You see some weird stuff, right? Like which is it? And so I started researching NDEs, near-death experiences. And there's a whole body of literature, a whole body of knowledge and frankly a whole cottage industry, somewhat shameless cottage industry around that, proof of heaven, blah, blah, blah.

But the flakiness aside, there's some legit – it's very, very common. And the NDEs that people have had, thousands of cases of them from all over the world, different societies, different cultures, even different ages. There are historical accounts of this. And the interesting thing about them –

If you give a roomful of people LSD, they'll have a wide variety of hallucinations. And we know how that works, right? We know what happens in the brain when you take LSD. No big mystery there. And they'll hallucinate a whole bunch of crazy stuff, right? With NDEs, what's sort of strange is that the experiences are – there are an infinite number of them, right? It's not like some people see ham sandwiches and other people see kangaroos, right? It's like they fall into some – like three or four basic buckets, right? And that's across culture, right?

Throughout, you know, throughout the history and which sort of argues for a sort of seminal, seminal human experience rather than just a sort of function of brain chemistry and essentially drugs. Right. Endogenous drugs being released in your brain in your final moments. And so there are a lot of people very well credentialed, smart people who are like, listen, these accounts amount to evidence of an afterlife. Right.

Right. Sorry. Like there's so many of them. They're so consistent. How do you explain this shit? Like, come on. Right. And then there's other people well credentialed, equally smart, et cetera, et cetera. Like nonsense. I'm a neuroscientist. I'm a neurochemist. You know, like we can explain all this through, you know, you put fighter pilots in a human centrifuge, spin them to five G's. They will see a tunnel of light. They will see God. They will experience their entire life in one moment. Blah, blah, blah. You know, epileptic. Same thing.

brain seizures, like we can reproduce all of this in the lab. Like this isn't evidence of anything. Right. But isn't the problem with that, that you're actually killing a person when you're spinning them into centrifuge? No, no, no. They do this with fighter pilots. Right. But you know, if you keep doing that, you'll die. Oh, absolutely. And your body knows that too. So you are in a near death experience.

You're near death. Well, you're near death because blood's not getting to your breast. And your body knows that. I mean, you are opening that door. Whether you're opening that door in a safe manner, you're still opening that door. Absolutely. Yeah, you're right. You're right. But the argument for—you're absolutely right, and I never thought of it that way. But the argument by the scientists, the rationalists, is, look, we can reproduce all of this in the lab. Yeah, but it's a dumb argument because what you're doing in reproducing it is bringing someone close to death. Right. Right.

Right. Well, another thing they can do is stimulate the brain during brain surgery. And they do that to make sure that they're not scooping out tumor, not your piano lessons or whatever. And one of the things they can do is they stimulate certain parts of the brain. They can give people a sensation that they're floating.

or that they, oh my God, my grandfather, you know, whatever. They can do weird shit with the brain with, you know, a tooth, basically a toothpick and a bone saw, right? And so, and it's,

At any rate, just suffice it to say there's the sort of slightly mystical argument of this is proof of an afterlife. And then there's the sort of rationalist argument. No, no, no. We understand the physiology of all this. And so there was a guy in, I think it was Estonia, an older guy who fell and hit his head. He had a hematoma. They put electrodes on his scalp to see what the brain activity was because he was having seizures. Other stuff happened to him that the family said, you know, he doesn't have a chance of recuperating anymore.

pull the basically pull the plug let him die he had the um the electrodes on his on his brain monitoring brain activity before the decision to pull the plug so they did something that would otherwise not be ethical if someone's going to die you're like hey let's hook him up to see what his brain does that's not ethical right this guy already had that stuff in place as part of the life-saving measures so they were able to see what happened

At the moment of death, right? So what happened in the human brain, in his brain, was that there was a flood of, I think it was gamma in his brain that is associated with long-term memory. A flood of gamma in his brain, right? And...

And that was – and one other frequency. I can't remember. At any rate, there was this – the brain did – basically did what brains do when they're remembering very, very old stuff, right? And that they even found that in rats that they ethically are able to kill, like hook them up, kill them. What happens in the brain, right? And so the most ancient sort of memory source centers of the brain are activated at the moment of death.

While there's a sort of lingering, dying consciousness. So, boom, all of a sudden, you're five and you're talking to your grandfather. You know, whatever it is, we don't know the specific things that that man saw, but we know that his brain was activated in ways that suggest memory retrieval, right? So the rationalist is like, okay, the brain dies. All of a sudden, you'd see your, you know, you have these old memories, right? So, now...

For me, as I read – so I got home. It's a rather convoluted story, but hopefully it's interesting. So I got home. I was a week in the hospital. It was a surprise to everybody. But the reason I survived it all was that I'm a fit, athletic person. And so I gave the doctor something to work with. It also meant that I recovered quite quickly. So instead of three weeks in the ICU, I was five days. And then, boom, I'm out of there, right? And so I came home.

And, you know, it's not the kind of party you would expect, right? Like I came home and I was like, woohoo, I'm alive. I made it, blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, my God, I almost died on a totally ordinary day. And it could happen again.

This also could be the day that I die, right? Maybe I have another aneurysm. Like, we don't know. And I completely freaked myself out. It was a classic post-trauma, like, anxiety, panic reaction. Like, it was all very classic. It was way worse than combat. Way worse, right? But one of the problems...

I started to have the sense that I wasn't really there and that maybe I had died, which sounds freaky. But apparently it's quite common in people that almost die that they get they're seized with this fear that they're actually a ghost and they didn't make it.

I know it sounds insane, right? But I can just tell you, like, I sincerely had that worry. It was the ultimate panic disorder, right? Like, that you're dead. Like, is there anything bigger to panic about, that you're actually dead? Right. So, and the reason I had that, and this gets to another rather mysterious, slightly woo-woo part of this whole story, is that two days prior...

You know, I had no idea, obviously, that I had something that was going to kill me in my abdomen. I had no conscious idea. But two days prior, at dawn, my family and I, we still co-sleep. And so we sleep in a group on a pad on the floor. And we sleep as a family, the four of us. And so at dawn on the previous night, so 36 hours prior to almost dying, I was woken by this horrific nightmare that

The worst nightmare I've ever had and I've ever heard of. And the nightmare was this, that I was hovering above my family and they were crying in grief. And I was waving to them. They were crying in grief that I died. And I was waving to them. I was like, I'm over here. I'm right here. I was shouting. I was waving my arms and they couldn't hear me. They couldn't see me. And...

I didn't know why. And then I was made to understand in the same way that my father communicated with me. It was just a sort of transmission of knowledge, right? I was made to understand that they couldn't hear me because I'm dead. I'm a spirit. I'm not there. And I'm above them. And I'll be going now. Mr. Younger, you're outbound and you're not coming back. It's too late. You can't go back. It's over. And I was so anguished.

That it woke me up and I woke up next to my, I happened to be next to my oldest daughter. I just like clutched her like a stuffy. Like I was like, oh my God, thank God. Because it really felt like I was dead. Thank God that was just a dream. I'm actually here. I'm alive. Right? So then 36 hours later, ooh, what's that pain in my abdomen? Off to the hospital. Almost, almost die. Doctors have later told me, not the doctors who saved me, but other doctors who have

were honest with me, like, it's a miracle you're alive, right? Like, this isn't just, oh, good, well done. It's a freaking miracle. Like, 10 slices of Swiss cheese, 10 holes having to line up, and you threaded the needle through those holes, right? Like, so I got back home, and I was super emotional. Every time I heard a siren, I'd start crying. Like, I mean, I was just a freaking mess, right? And then I thought, oh, my God, I died in my sleep.

That and that that dream, because I started to read about NDEs. And one of the most common is that you're hovering above your family. Another is that you see a dead relative. Right. So like, oh, my God. And I knew nothing. None of this. Right. Oh, my God. That wasn't that wasn't a dream. That was my experience of actually dying. Right. The kind of experience that many people who almost died and were say were, you know, were resuscitated report having had. I was hovering above my family and dying.

I died and I died in my sleep. My wife woke up next to her dead husband. It's over. I just don't know because I'm in the middle of a dying hallucination. I'm a ghost. I'm not here. I think my daughter's talking to me.

I think she's on my lap. I'm not, bro, you're not here, man. You're like, just face it, right? And, you know, you can't disprove it, right? And if you're crazy enough, it actually feels like it might be what's happening. And I was plenty crazy enough for this, right? And I'm not a naturally neurotic person, but it turned me into one for a while, right? And at one point, I went to my wife, right?

Like, honey, just tell me I'm really here, that I survived. We're here. We're good. Like, just tell me. He said, of course you're here. You survived, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But my mind, I'm like, that's exactly what a hallucination would tell you. Right. And I was inching towards madness. Right. And so finally, so sorry, long story just to sort of finally answer your question. Yeah.

Where I landed, you know, so I'm reading the NDE stuff and the sort of like the scaredy cat in me is like, oh, wow, that's pretty convincing. Like maybe there is an afterlife. Maybe we don't have to be worried. Like, wow, how pleasant, right? How pleasant to think like that there's something to go on to, right? Nothing to be scared of. And then I read afterwards.

The sort of like party poopers, right? Just sort of like the rationalists come in like nonsense. We can explain all this. It's all neurochemistry. Like there's no freaking afterlife. Like come on. So – and because of – partly because of the father I grew up with like who really valued rationalism. Like I was like, oh, well. Nice try. Like close but no cigar. Oh, well. I guess when we're dead, we're dead. And so then –

The one thing that didn't quite make sense was that there's this incredible consistency in people, like an enormous percentage of the time, and I can't remember off the top of my head, but quite a large percentage of the time, the dying, people who have NDEs and are resuscitated and report their memories like I was, I was able to. They are received by the dead, right? The dead come to receive them. Sometimes it's your father. Sometimes it's a friend who died decades earlier.

And sometimes it's someone that you might not even like very much. But the dead come to receive the dying in the way that my father did. You know, my mind, I'm like, I don't know. You know, like, I get it. You give everyone LSD and they all have hallucinations and the dying brain produces hallucinations. But it's sort of odd. Like, OK, you stir up the memory banks of the brain when you die with the gamma and all that stuff.

So, all right, so suddenly I'm five years old and we're playing by the swimming pool. Now suddenly I'm camping with my buddy at 12. Yeah, there's a whole array of memories. That's different than dad showing up. Like dad showing up saying, come with me into the afterlife. That's not exactly memory recall, right? That's something else, right? And then I started talking to hospice nurses and doctors.

It's a super common experience. Older people, people dying of cancer in their last days and hours, what are they doing? They're having conversations with people in the room that no one else can see. They're having conversations with the dead who are clearly there to take them. It's okay. Come with me. It happened to my mother. She suddenly scowled in her last hour. She scowled and looked up at the coroner and said, what's he doing here?

And she had a terrible relationship with her brother who had died in his 50s, you know, like decades earlier, right? And I just guessed. I was like, Mom, that's Uncle George. And he's come a very long way to see you. And you have to be nice to him. And she frowned and she said, we'll see about that. It continues into the afterlife, right? Oh, my God. It's not over when you die, right? It goes on, right? There's a sequel to this. Wow. Right? So...

So these visits are not necessarily a sort of benevolent, like, oh, the dying, you know, sort of need some kind of comfort, and they manufacture a vision of a loved one to make them feel better. It's not quite that either. And then there's super poignant stories. I talked to a hospice nurse who was taking care of an older gentleman who was dying painlessly, you know, no morphine at all, so of clear mind, right, and

you know, in his eighties or seventies or eighties. And, um, and in his last, you know, 12 hours or so, he suddenly, the nurse that I talked to, he said that the man looked and he was like, Barbara, oh my God, you know, it's so good to see you. Thank God you're here. You know, like,

So the nurse who's been through this a million times says, OK, he's in his last hours now. This is the end game. Right. Thank God, because he's dying and it's, you know, like needs to resolve. And so she went into the kitchen where the wife was and said, I think we're in the last stages. He's wrecking, you know, he's seen someone in the room. He seems very, very happy to see her. It's someone named Barbara. Yeah.

Does that name mean anything to you? So the wife says, yes, that was his one true love. So, of course, the nurse is like, oh, my God, I stepped in it. Right. And then she goes, that was our 19 year old. Right. I mean, how do you tell that story and not start crying? Right. I mean, it's like so that kind of story is super, super common. So in my mind. Right. I'm like, OK, I buy the I buy the centrifuge. I buy the.

you know, like endogenous DMT and the blah, blah, the gamma. I get it. I get it. What I don't understand is the consistency of the visions of the dead coming to, like my father did. I mean, you, you, I get that we hallucinate in times of extreme stress, but not that I don't get the content being consistent across cultures, across ages, manners of death, like on and on, like all,

Like, how do you like? So to me, that doesn't prove there's a quote afterlife, but it raises a legitimate question. Like, what is it we're talking about here? And so where I land and I promise I won't like drag us into a long conversation about quantum physics. But, you know, basically the rational that the argument that's both rational and open minded is.

And my mind has been enormously opened by this experience, not to God, but to maybe we just don't understand the nature of existence completely. Right. It's been open to that. So the rational and open minded explanation for some of this stuff, if you don't dismiss it, if you don't dismiss it as just neurochemistry and you're not going to go whole hog on, well, you know, God exists. Thank hallelujah. If you're not going to do either of those two things, the conversation that I think can be had is,

is maybe there is some sort of post-death existence at the sort of quantum, meaning the subatomic level, that we just don't understand. And some post-death existence for the individual. And not necessarily post-death consciousness. We're not on a hammock with a daiquiri. You know, it's not like, you know, those are human projections, right? But maybe at the quantum level,

We just don't quite understand what death is, what reality is, what consciousness is.

And one of – so my father was a physicist and my – just weirdly, my great-aunt had a long, passionate affair with Schrodinger, the physicist who – Schrodinger's cat, right? And one of the mysteries of quantum physics – and I'm sure you've come into this in your studies and your research and your conversations. One of the profound mysteries of quantum physics that was sort of broken wide open about 100 years ago by people like Schrodinger and –

and heisenberg um that when you observe a subatomic particle it acts differently than if you don't observe it right so you create basically the act of concert conscious observation like if i you know if i look at that ashtray the ashtray does exactly what it does if i don't look at it right in the macroscopic world conscious observation doesn't change anything right at the

In the subatomic world, it changes everything, right? So a subatomic particle, an electron, is in all positions as a statistical probability. It's in all positions until you observe it, and then it's in one position, right? If you fire a photon at two slits in a metal plate with some photographic film on the other side to mark where the photon hits—

If you fire the photon at a plate with two slits, as the famous double slit experiment, fire the photon at two slits and actively monitor it with a photon detector while it's moving. It will go through one slit and hit the strike plate on the far side with a signature of passage through one slit. If you fire a photon through two slits and don't monitor it,

It simultaneously goes through both slits and leaves a signature on the other side of having done so. Right. In other words, and this is one of the deepest mysteries of existence. Right. At the quantum level, our act of observation creates the reality that we are observing. And then if we don't observe it, it's another reality.

Right. So given that deep, unresolvable mystery, is it possible in the sort of like the electrons in all places at once until we watch it and then it's in one place in that sort of basic sense of a profound mystery at the quantum level, is it possible that there's an equivalent mystery around biological death, the existence of consciousness, which people still don't understand, right? They can't even define what it is exactly, right? Right.

Is there a mystery around that that we not only don't understand, can't understand? And one of the theories, super, and I'll end with this, but it's a super out there theory. It's called biocentrism. There's a guy named Adam Lanza that you might be interested in talking to. He's a brilliant guy. He's one of the sort of pioneers of biocentrism. And basically what he's saying is that, look, if consciousness determines reality at the quantum level,

And the universe ultimately is a quantum reality. It's possible that consciousness is part of – that there's a subatomic particle associated with consciousness just like the Higgs boson is associated with gravity. Like gravity exists because of the Higgs boson. It's a subatomic particle that we can measure, right? And –

Maybe consciousness is in the same way as part of the physical existence of the universe. Without gravity, there is no universe. There's no nothing, right? It's essential to existence. And maybe consciousness is essential to the existence of the universe in the singular form that it takes.

And it landed in this singular form with the arrival of consciousness. Maybe it's all one and the same thing. And that actually coincides quite nicely with Schrodinger, who was of the opinion that there was a universal consciousness. There was a kind of colossus of consciousness there.

That we are all a tiny part of. And when we die, we return to it. Right. On some quantum level that no one has any freaking idea. As I say in my book, we might understand reality about as well as a dog understands a TV screen. Like with absolutely no concept of the machinery, the mechanisms, the processes that produce the flickering images that are in front of us.

Like the dog doesn't have that understanding of what it's looking at, we might not have an understanding of the cosmos that creates the system that creates the reality that we are seeing and that we think is existence. Yeah. I'm entitled to believe that we're entirely too arrogant.

our understanding of what we know and that we have a very limited amount of information even though it's incredibly complex for our understanding for our understanding the leaps and bounds that we have made since using leeches to treat diseases is off the charts right and you're a living testament to it yeah but I think it is a very very shallow understanding of an infinite thing that's happening all the time and

Have you ever seen – they just recently made images of quantum entangled photons. No. I mean I know about quantum entanglement, another great mystery. I haven't seen the images. Spooky action in the distance. Yeah, yeah. Take a look at what this looks like. Quantum entangled photons look like a yin-yang. Like exactly. Oh, awesome. Exactly. That's it. That's a quantum entangled photon. Oh, my God. Are you kidding? Oh, my God.

Oh my God. So each one contains at its center a bit of the other. Exactly. So maybe someone knew this thousands and thousands of years ago. The idea that the Chinese or whoever created that initial symbol, the idea that they just stumbled accidentally upon...

The an actual image of quantum entangled photons very very unlikely that just seems too insane and too amazing That's fascinating fascinating right and to find that out when was that discovered Jamie was that very recently? I saw it in some science Okay, yeah entanglement is has been around for decades right but but those images are recent. That's stunning stunning. That's amazing Yeah, so

I think this whole thing that, oh, we know what's going on in the brain. Oh, we know the human neurochemicals that get – oh, we know we can stimulate the brain. Oh, we know we can stick you in a centrifuge. You don't know shit. This is a – we are at the edge of a vast forest and we're peering in and we're arrogant.

And we're arrogant because the people that know, know more than everybody else. The people that do have an understanding of human neurochemistry and do have an understanding of how the body works know far more than I do, know far more than most people do. So they have an arrogance of this understanding, this rational sort of reductionist perspective of what reality is.

But I think it's nonsense. Well, listen, the physicists that give them their due, they are the branch of science which is actually fully aware of the drop-off where the mystery begins – knowledge ends and the mystery begins. They could not explain this stuff when it happened. It actually unsettled those guys, Schrodinger and Einstein and Heisenberg and all. It really quite unsettled them, right? They were like –

whoa, what are we unfolding here? And are we sure we want to unfold this, uncover this? And once Sir Arthur Eddington said this wonderful thing. He was asked about these sort of central mysteries of quantum physics and the universe. And he said, something that we don't know is doing we know not what. Ooh, that's a good way to put it. So he's like, yeah, there's some humility right there, right? And at its core, quantum physics, there's a mystery here.

at the core of quantum physics, equivalent to the mystery at the core of religion. At the end of the day, religion is an act of faith, right? And you can't answer these questions, right, rationally. And at the end of the day, the physicists themselves will say, look, we just don't know. These test results make no sense in the macroscopic, rational world that we live in every day.

The macroscopic and the subatomic world, they're completely opposite to each other. The laws of physics are completely different at the macroscopic level and the subatomic level.

Yeah. And, you know, just the fact that if you look at atoms themselves, it's mostly empty space. Yeah. Like what the fuck is going on? That's right. There's all of this. We have a cursory, a cursory understanding of something that's infinitely complex. We have an understanding of it and far greater every year. And they keep, they keep exploring. But I think we're also cursed with these fucking primate brains, right?

These primate brains that we have already talked about today are filled with flaws and childhood trauma and bipolar and depression and schizophrenia and all these different issues with the primate brain. And we are the dog looking at the television screen. We are. And I think I've talked to a lot of these doctors that have this reductionist perspective and –

Very few of them have had psychedelic experiences. I think the brain is capable of opening up a door. And I think that door opens when you die. And I don't know where – door is a bad word. It's not the right word. But it's all I have. It's an opening. It's a gateway. There's something going on inside of us. There's something going on. We are interconnected in ways that are far greater than –

our understanding of human social interactions. There's something going on with us, and we experience that with love. We experience that with the love of your wife or your husband or the love of your child or your family members. We experience this connection that's like this. It's very different. It connects us like as souls, and that's what I think I'm getting to. I think the soul is real, and I really didn't have that experience

That thought really, I was pretty, pretty atheist. I grew up, I was, went to Catholic school when I was very young for first grade and had a really bad experience there. And it just, I was like, religion's bullshit. My parents were breaking up when I was young.

And I was, uh, I got really into religion because I felt like religion, at least like if there's chaos in my family life, you know, there's always God, like God's going to make sense. And then I went to Catholic school. I was like, okay, okay. God has nothing to do with this. Like this is fucking ridiculous. Then my grandfather died. I was very close to my grandfather. I loved him very, very much. I stayed with him when I moved to New York and, um,

I was like 23 years old and I didn't have a place to stay. I didn't have any money. I just got signed by this manager and I was going to go to New York to do stand-up comedy. I was going to chase my dreams. So I was living with my grandfather and it was – my grandmother had an aneurysm and they gave my grandmother 72 hours and she lived for 12 years. Wow. At least 12 years. It might have been a little longer. Yeah.

And she was bedridden, and I was staying with him and her. And my grandfather had been dealing with his wife dying for all these years. And she would, like, moan in pain. You'd hear, like, make these sounds. And I knew they were... He was old, and she was old. They were dying. And I knew she was going to die probably quicker than him. And it was this...

transition in my life from Me like going forth on this great adventure to seeing this man that I loved in just darkness It was like yeah, it's wife. My grandmother was bedridden It was agony. It was depression. They lived in a very bad neighborhood They lived in on North 9th Street in Newark, New Jersey When they lived when they moved there in the 1940s. It was an all-italian neighborhood and

And then they started doing this thing called blockbusting. And what blockbusting is, is they would real estate agents would come in and they would say black people are moving into your neighborhood. You have to sell now. If you don't sell now, you're going to lose the value of your home. And it's the way they like they fired up the real estate market and they crushed communities this way. And my grandfather was like, I like black people. I'm not going anywhere.

And he never moved. And he stayed there. It changed from a black neighborhood to a primarily Hispanic neighborhood. And when I was with him, when I stayed with him, just before after I got there, I can't really remember.

30 years ago The kid next door was selling crack and police broke down the door and like he had an Audi I remember he had an Audi in the driveway. I remember looking I was like this kid about fucking out. Yeah, it's a nice car, you know in 1990 and It was just bad everything was it's very depressing. It was a depressing depressing space like the neighborhood's depressing

His life was ending. You know, he, it was very, very sad. And when I went to his funeral, when he was in the casket, I looked at him and I'm sure you've been to a funeral before. And I know you've seen dead people before, but there's something about seeing a dead body where you're like, oh, he's not there. Yeah. It's not, it's unmistakable. He's not there. It's not as simple as, you know,

He stopped moving. Right. No, he's not there. He wasn't there anymore. And I remember, I remember this feeling of like understanding came across me like, oh,

Like the thing is inside of you. Whatever that is, is real. It's not just as simple as you're alive. Right. And I, at that moment, at that moment, I was seeing my grandfather in his casket. I started considering a soul. I started thinking like, oh, this isn't bullshit. And then I started thinking like how arrogant it is to assume that, you know,

All these people for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years have talked about souls, right? It's not it's a Universal idea. It's not common to one specific culture. It's not isolated. It's a universal concept and

There being something inside of you and I think it's an I think it's something that we intuitively understand that we know we are aware of it We know it's real. Yeah, we just can't put it on a scale. We can't put a ruler on it and measure it We can't but this it's a thing and I think that thing is It's intertwined with consciousness. That's what I think. This is just my own feeling I think your soul

Interacts with consciousness and consciousness is a force And I think we're all experiencing consciousness. We're just doing it in this weird way We're doing it with different biological entities different life experiences different People and stimuli you're around different neighborhoods different parts of the world, but it's the same thing and I

The way I've described it is like I think that you are me I know it sounds like hippie nonsense horseshit But I think if you live my life you would be mean if I lived your life I would be you and I think we are all people I think all people are the same We are just living through different genetics different biological experience at different biological filters different life experiences I think we're all the same I really do and I think that what your soul is is your connection to consciousness and

I think your thing, the thing that you intersect with. And I think whatever we are, there's like a place that that thing goes. Right. And I have a feeling that that's what these near-death experiences are. That's what a lot of psychedelic experiences are. I think it's a looking into the other side. I don't think all these cultures have had this same idea by accident.

Yeah, structurally, like at their core, they're all incredibly similar. And there's the realm of the dead, right? And so I think there's also a very limited – there's a perspective of what God is. And there's a perspective of the universe itself. Like, oh, who made the universe if God didn't make the universe? Or who made God? I think we are limited by our own biological perspective, which requires a birth and a death. Right.

A beginning and an end. And that there has to, it has to come from somewhere. And I don't necessarily think that's real. And I have a feeling that this concept of a God is even greater, what it entails is even greater than an entity. I think it's all things. I think what God really is, is the universe. I think it is all things. Right.

Right. Well, that's – biocentrism is sort of along those lines. Yeah. It's all one huge thing. Yeah. I've come to this thought like in steps over time where it makes more and more sense. I'm not trying to comfort myself. I'm not looking for some sort of rational – that's not what I'm doing. I'm just – I feel like –

All these cultures have this idea for a reason. Right. I don't think it's... I think we're tuning into it in these little blips and we're bringing back evidence from the other side. We're bringing back stories and anecdotes and feelings that you get, intuition, things that happen at certain times in your life where you're just like, okay, what is that? What is... I think...

We all know also that if you have love in your life and you love your friends and you have good times, like there's an elevated feeling that comes with that that's bigger than just fun. There's a bond that we have because it's the moment in these great times of love where we recognize that we're one.

That's right. You lose the shackles of your individuality. You lose your ego. You lose your biological limitations, this chimp body and chimp mind that wants to keep you alive, that wants to make sure you spread your genes and control resources and do all the stupid things that humans do. That thing confuses you that that's what life is. Right, right.

There's a cemetery, a veteran's cemetery in the woods near in the town where my mom used to live. My mom passed away, obviously. And I'd go running there. And it's a beautiful little spot sort of hidden away. And there's a gravestone of a World War II vet who died later in life, right? He lived a natural life and died in his 80s. And it's a very simple gravestone. I can't remember his name. I wrote it down. And all it says is, all that survives of us is love.

That's so beautiful. Yeah. Right? And I think that's right. And you don't need to be religious to think that way. You don't have to. You can be whatever. It's just like such a profound truth. Like that's all that survives. Yeah. And I think a lot of religions are simply people's beliefs.

effort to try to consolidate all these thoughts and feelings into a doctrine, into something that you can tell people that you have the answer. And whenever someone tells you they have the answer, well, that's impossible. That's impossible, so you don't have the answer. But there might be wisdom in these ancient teachings that I think is real. And I think that's really what fascinates me about religion. It's ancient man's

attempts to understand and define this whole thing with this monkey mind that we have. Right. Right. Sometimes people ask me, so how did this change you? You know, did you find God? You know, no, I didn't. But, you know, it did change me. And one of the ways it changed me in is that I realized even if you're in good health, even if you're not in a war zone, blah, blah, blah, that we don't know. None of us, none of us know that this is not our last day.

Right. Right. None of us know. I mean, probably not. Hopefully not. But we don't know for sure. June 16th, 2020 was an utterly ordinary day when I woke up that morning. I had no idea. I was really slated to die in 12 hours. Right. No, no clue. And so if you somehow knew that you were going to die in 12 hours, somehow knew that, who would you want to be that day?

Right. I'm guessing you wouldn't be scrolling through Instagram. I'm guessing you wouldn't be wasting your time hating on people that pissed you off. I'm guessing you'd be just holding your loved ones close and just being amazed at how beautiful a tree is or I don't know what. Right. Like it's almost a religious vision of what existence is. I think it would inspire that. And so so my question is, like, you don't know that today isn't your last day. So who do you want to be today?

Right. Because you never know. So who do you want to be in the world? And hopefully day after day, you're that person. And then you don't have to die at the end. Like what a beautiful way to live. And that's so it sort of changed me in that sense. I saw after I finished the book, I read a story about Dostoevsky, the great Russian writer who suffered a mock execution incident.

When he was in his 20s. I mean, what a sadistic thing to do to a young person or anybody. Right. So he was a he was a radical, you know, like he and his and his sort of like radical friends would sit around talking about outrageous stuff like liberating the serfs and crazy ideas like that. And this is in the 1840s. And so Czar Nicholas I, you know, didn't take that kind of thing kindly. And the police arrested them all, like six of them.

Threw him in jail. It wasn't a particularly serious crime, right? But threw him in jail. It's czarist Russia, right? It's an oppressor state, right? And after eight months, they finally released them. And these young men assumed that they were going to be like put in a wagon and driven to the courthouse and discharged and returned to their families after eight horrible months, right? Like, okay, they're put in a wagon and they're driven to a city square. They only had minutes to adjust to this. Instead of being released, they were tied to posts.

and a firing squad was lined up in front of them. And the order was given to the soldiers, charge your rifles, ready, aim. And at that moment, a rider galloped into the square and said, the Tsar forgives them.

So what – so the question – my question would be like what does the world look like? Like how hallucinatory is it if you know that you're going to be dead in seconds? What does the world literally look like to you from that perspective? Yeah.

Because we're all Dostoevsky, right? I mean, the command to fire isn't maybe in five seconds. It might be in 50 years. But we're all waiting for the right. We're all getting the command eventually. So what does the world look like to someone where all of that, their whole lifetime is compressed into a few seconds? What's the world look like?

We should understand that vision of the world and incorporate it to some degree into our experience of our hopefully 50, 80, 90 years of life. Right. So this intense little capsule of reality, like what is what is what did he what did he see in those moments? Because he wrote about it. This is valuable information. Like, what's the world look like? What's it really look like when you're about to be torn from it? Right. And so he said he was standing there.

And he saw sunlight glinting off the steeple of a church. And he had this amazing thought, which goes to your point, right? This amazing thought. He said, in moments, I'm going to join the sunlight. I'm going to be part of all things. We're all part of all things. And in minutes, that's what I'll be. And then he said, in his mind, he thought, if I should, by some miracle, survive this, I'm going to live my life turning...

every moment into an infinity. Mind-blowing, right? So two of the six men in that group, it broke them. They were insane for the rest of their lives. Dostoevsky, he survived it psychologically, and it deepened him enormously. And he wrote, through other characters, he wrote about that experience. Yeah, if you have knowledge of your death, you know, I used to do this bit about, there was a tiger attack in San Francisco, and like, the

I guess it was like the early 2000s or something like that. These kids were throwing pine cones at a tiger in an enclosure in the zoo. And they didn't know that the tiger, when they built the zoo, they made the fence 14 feet high. They thought that was enough. Oh.

It's not enough. I know what's coming. The joke was if you have a monster in a box in the middle of the city, maybe you should put a fucking roof on the box. Like how expensive is it to put a cage on the top? Well, these kids are throwing things at the tiger. The tiger leaps.

leaps up, gets a hold of the top of the fence. And the thought was like, if you're that kid and you see those paws hit that fence and you see that thing like flying through the air, coming right at you, do you even see it? Or is it just like this kaleidoscope of psychedelic images as this thing, you know, it's over. Like you're looking at the most beautiful death that's currently available. It's the most beautiful animal that can kill you. A

A tiger. I mean, they're gorgeous. And they're also terrifying at the same time. And it's running at you like a psychedelic experience. They died. Yeah. One guy lived, I think.

I think one guy lived. I think, unfortunately, the kid who was throwing the pine cones lived. I don't remember. I don't really remember the whole story. One died, two survived. Yeah. Okay, two survived. And they had to kill the tiger. Of course. They always have to kill the tiger because it went tiger. Yeah. I mean, look, I fucking hate zoos. I mean, I used to take my kids to them because my kids loved them, but they're fucking prisons. They're prisons for animals that didn't do anything wrong. Yeah. And, uh,

Last time we went, we were in, I think it was in Denver, and we were turning towards this primate section where they have all these monkeys in these cages. And this monkey's wailing, just screaming in agony, just, wah!

Like a crazy person locked up in a cage. I'm like, that poor motherfucker. Like, what are they doing to him? Just so people could stare at it and go, oh, there it is. Oh, there it is. Yeah, it's awful. And tigers are nature's balancing system. You can't have too many deer, so you have to have tigers. Right. And...

Axis deer are the kind of deer that live around tigers. I don't know if you've ever seen an axis deer. They're beautiful They have white spots over their body and they move like bullets. You've never seen an animal move that fast and

Axis deer, they just fucking go because they're just always looking out for tigers. So this animal is primed by nature to be chasing things and killing things. That is literally its biological reward system. That's what it's here for. That's why it's 600 pounds of fucking tissue and talons.

And what we do, we give it cold meat that they push out on a platter and it just eats the meat. It doesn't get to kill anything. And then things stare at it and look at it in the eyes, which is fucking insane that you ever look a tiger in the eye in the wild. You would be fucking frozen in fear.

And this thing has to endure other puny little things throwing stuff at it over its fence. And this universal karmic moment, it realizes that it can get them. There's an amazing poem by Ted Hughes called Wolf Watching. Wolves are, of course, equivalent to tigers, right? The canine equivalent to tigers. And he goes to the zoo and

And looks at the wolf. And the poem, Wolf Watching, it's worth looking up. It's just one of the most extraordinary poems about exactly what you're talking about. And the look in the wolf's eye and what he knows you're doing to him. Yeah. And he's superior to you. And he knows. It's an unbelievable poem. Ted Hughes, Wolf Watching. You got to, I mean, seriously, like, look it up. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, we're bizarre. We're bizarre with this whole fucking zoo thing. The zoo thing is very weird. It's like on one hand, it helps preserve diminishing populations of some animals. Right. You know, and they do that. But on the other hand, like why do you have a polar bear in a fucking swimming pool in the middle of the night? Right. What are you doing? Right.

They go crazy. They just go in circles. Yeah, of course. You ever see bears in an enclosure where they just wander around in circles? Look, people go crazy too. A solitary confinement. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I mean, people can't take it more. You know, like it drives, it breaks their brain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You keep saying like the word, like, I'm an atheist. Do I believe in God? Why even have a belief?

I mean, I don't. I don't have any belief. You don't have anything anymore. But you still consider yourself an atheist? An atheist is someone who doesn't believe in a God. Right. I don't have that belief. So you don't believe or not believe? I mean, not believing isn't an active... Right. I mean... Well, you don't know, right? This is why the atheism thing usually kind of drives me nuts with people. Like, when people say, there is no God, I'm like...

Well, that's not atheism, right? Atheism is that I don't believe in God. It's not claiming to be able to prove there is a God. There's a little more arrogance to there is no God rather than I don't believe in a God. And you can't make yourself believe in something. Right. Right. So if you want to tell me that gravity doesn't exist, I can't make myself believe that. Right. And I can't make myself believe God exists anymore.

contrary, you know, despite the complete lack of evidence that he does or she does, whatever, like I can't force that belief in myself, even if I wanted to. But I would never, ever say, oh, there is no God. Yeah. I would never assert that, right? And I wouldn't even say I'm agnostic. Like I don't know one way or the other. I wouldn't even say that. I would say I don't believe in God. I don't run my life according to a belief in God. Right.

Jordan Peterson says whether or not you believe in God, if you live your life as if God is real, you'll live a better life. I'm paraphrasing. But that's essentially what he's saying. Well, he's exhorting people towards moral behavior, which is totally fine. But you don't need God to be—look—

You don't need God. Some people might, and some people need laws to not rob banks. I think the concept of it, that we're all connected in some way that's greater than just this life experience, that's the foundation of this understanding of it. Well, so then what I would say is, because as soon as you say God, it presents some logical problems. I would say, you know, live your life as if

You believe in a universal unity, a colossal unity of all things. I think the word God is the problem. It's just been kind of co-opted. And it gets co-opted by visuals of like a person, you know, a woman.

patriarchal leader who's in the sky with a fucking book of all the shit you did wrong. Right. Yeah. Right. And that's a silly, I mean, I was, so I, you know, a guy raised his hand at one talk and he was quite incensed and that I was still said I was an atheist. Right. And, uh,

And he said, you know, you were – he was quite – you know, he came right at me, right? And, you know, atheists don't – I mean, I don't care if someone's a believer. Like, why would I care in what you believe? You know, like, but often believers are quite upset that you're an atheist, which is this bizarre quirk of the psychology that I don't understand. But at any rate, he raised his hand and he said, you know, you're only alive because of God's grace, right?

And you have to be thankful. You have to find Jesus and you have to be thankful to God for saving you because it was only his grace that saved you. And I said, you know what? I flatlined, right? I did like what I do with upset people. Like I didn't get emotional. I went to zero, you know, zero Kelvin. I said, you know what? My problem with that is why me? Like why me and not Tim?

Tim Hetherington was my buddy out at Restrepo, the guy I made the movie Restrepo with, who was killed in combat in Libya. He died like I did. He bled out, except he bled out not from an aneurysm but from a shrapnel wound in his groin, right? So why me and not Tim, right? And for that matter, why me and not a nine-year-old with cancer? So what you're saying is, unless you can answer that question, which I don't think you can, what you're saying is that there's actually a kind of random lottery for God's grace, right?

And if that's the way he runs things, I don't want anything to do with him because that's cruel, right? And so that's my quibble with the word God. But universal unity, you know, I'm good, right? Schrodinger is, you know, good for Schrodinger. It's good for me, you know, whatever. And so, you know, I would—

I don't know. The violence of the emotions around all this is just puzzling to me. Like I don't understand why people get so heated about what someone else believes. Well, people get heated about everything. You know, I've had conversations with people that are just Democrats.

To the end. That's my team. I'm with the Raiders. And that's just how it is with everything. And people are that way with religion. They're that way with the state they live in, the football team they support. They're that way with everything. That's just humans. It's just some primate shit. Yeah. And I think the real discussion is in how do you feel, why do you feel the way you feel, and what do you think, and what do you know that has sort of educated these thoughts? Yeah.

And, you know, if you believe that human beings are inherently bad and that only a fear of hell and a fear, frankly, not a love of God, a fear of God will make you act well. If you really think that's what humans are, then sort of religion makes sense. But so for me, for example, and I'm assuming for you and most people that I think we probably know, like I don't murder people and rob banks and things like that because I'm afraid of going to jail.

I refrain from doing those things because I don't want to be someone who does those things. I have my own inner morality about what it means to be a good person, to not be a freaking psychopath.

I mean, I don't want to go to jail either, but you don't need the laws. You don't need the courts to make me act well in that sense. So if you need God in order to not rob banks and kill people and rape people, bro, you got a freaking problem. Right. Right? You're still a problem even if you don't do those things because you're scared of God. You're still not a person that I trust. Yeah. No, I share that perspective. I think what...

This whole thing is for a lot of people. And one of the problems with religion and true believers is, boy, folks, there's a lot of different versions of that story. And you got to make sure you're betting on the right one because there's a billion people that don't think you are. And you think you're smarter than them. Like, I think it's people trying to get a map of what this is all about. Right. And.

I think it's been that way forever. I think people have always tried to figure it out and they have little bits and pieces and we're putting it together. And unfortunately, we also like to look at these things as if they're like this doctrine is 100% factual. I've seen Muslims do it. I've seen Christians do it. I've seen Jews do it. People have this idea.

This belief that their way is the way. It's the only way. Everyone else is the other, which seems contrary to the word of God, the real thought, the concept of this interconnected thing that we're experiencing. I think it's I think it's all way weirder. I think everyone's scared to die, but no one's scared to sleep.

Because you know you're going to come back. Yeah. But you do it every night. Every night you go to some crazy place. You shut off and you return and you assume because you have memory-

And because you have an understanding of the environment and you have a task that you have to do, oh, I've got to be at work by nine. You have all this stuff in your head. You're assuming, just assuming that as you woke up today, that this is your life at 56 years old, continuing along the same path. But it might not be. It's just guessing. We're just, we are, we're, we're a...

Our eyes closed and we're feeling through the darkness. Yeah. And we don't know. And we give ourselves these rules and we give ourselves these stories. We give ourselves these...

religious practices to put structure into this thing and to put certainty into this thing that is absolutely uncertain. And we get angry if someone questions our certainty because our certainty defines our ability to exist in this experience in a way that keeps us sane. Like God has a will, God has a plan, this is all. I think it's way weirder.

I think it's way weirder, and I think that's what you experience when your dad came to you, and that's what you experience when you look down at the pit. I think the whole thing is way weirder. I don't think it's as simple as why would God take a child and give it – I mean, I think the whole thing is an uber-complex interaction of emotions and experiences that we're all going through simultaneously. Yeah.

And I have a feeling that part of the thing that moves us forward, unfortunately, is negativity and the positivity battling against that negativity which strengthens the positivity because of the resistance. I think like the evil of the world is almost like an important factor in the whole equation of our existence. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think humans have always struggled with it, and they've come up with theories that sort of, like, help them get by. And some of them even support human dignity. Some don't. And here we are with the great, you know, still surrounded by the great mystery. The great mystery. And you know what? Like, let's hear it for the great mystery. Yeah. Like, if you think about it, this thought came to me the other day. Like, we're in a kind of sweet spot. So if you sort of knew...

For sure. Like we could, if the scientists could prove, right, if the nerds could prove that there was an afterlife and what you got to do was just more of the same, except it's a lot more pleasant for eternity. If we could prove that, it would strip the value out of these precious decades that we are allotted, right? One of the reasons that life is so precious is because it's so finite, right? So if you could prove there was an afterlife, right?

Don't worry about it. Like, you know, okay, your wife dumped you and blah, blah, blah. But don't worry about it because soon the afterlife is going to start and then you're good forever. So just don't sweat it. Right? In fact, why don't you just kill yourself right now and just get on to it because that's when the good part starts. Right? It would ruin what life is. It would just strip it of value. On the other hand...

Like the two other guys in Dostoevsky's group of friends, if we could prove, like literally prove scientifically that there is no afterlife, and you can't prove a negative, but somehow if we could prove there was no afterlife whatsoever, we're biological beings. When we die, that's it. We rot. We return to the soil. That's it. Done.

If we could prove that, that might be so psychologically devastating that it would be actually quite hard to lead a meaningful life because in your mind you're thinking, well, what's the frigging point? Right. Right. So where we're at right now, there's the perfect level of ambiguity. Right.

That there's not such a proof of afterlife that, you know, why bother leading our lives? But there's also not such a doubt about it that it's psychologically devastating. We're in this sweet spot, which allows us to sort of invest maximum meaning in the least amount of psychological distress in these decades that we're allotted. Right.

So in a weird way, where we're at right now is to sort of tune perfectly to the human brain for giving the maximum amount of meaning to this time that we have here on Earth. And if you go in the extreme of either direction of absolute certainty that there is an afterlife or is no afterlife, if you go to that extreme, it actually just robs us of what we do know for sure that we have, which is this life right now. Right. And that's part of the magic of it, right? Yeah.

The magic of it is the uncertainty, the temporary nature of it, the finite nature of existence, all of it. Yeah. And the reason, you know, Karl Marx hated religion is because basically the peasant class had been told, listen, don't worry about it. Your lot sucks, right? The serfs. Like your lot sucks. You're oppressed. You're poor, blah, blah, blah. But don't worry about it.

Because there's an afterlife. And Marx was like, there'll never be revolution as long as people think that once they die, everything gets nice. Right. Right? Right. And so that's why the Marx hated religion. And it's a totally legitimate point. Yeah. It's a legitimate point. But I think, you know, even that is like, there's too much we don't know. And it's too hard to not know things. So we pretend.

Right. And the version of religion that he was rebelling against is like, look, the meek shall inherit the earth. Right. Right. You're crushed under the boot heel of czars, the czars boot heel here in life. But, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth. So just wait a little while and then it's all going to come to you. Like that's what, you know, Marx wasn't objecting to a sort of like transcendent norm.

not knowing, a transcendent mystery. He was objecting to a completely calculated and manipulative social program that kept people oppressed. Which is oftentimes what religion becomes, particularly when people have groups of people that they control. Genghis Khan famously let people practice any religion they wanted. People are like, oh, he's so open-minded. No, that's not what it was. He

He wanted order. And he's like, yeah, believe that. Go believe that. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. That's right. He also apparently just screwed his way across Asia because I think it's 11% of the population in the areas that he conquered are directly descended from him, his DNA. Yeah. 11%. He killed 10% of the population of the planet.

And replaced them with... Well, he did. I mean, in his lifetime, because of his actions, somewhere between 50 and 70 million people died. It's so many that you can see when they do core samples of the earth, a difference in the carbon footprint of human beings. Yeah. The areas that they devastated reforested to the point where there's a difference in the level of carbon. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. That's how many people they killed.

There's a famous story. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is this amazing podcast. And he has this series called The Wrath of the Khan. In one of the stories, they talk about the Charismian Shah who goes to visit Jin, China. And they think what they see in the distance is a snow-covered peak. And as they get closer, they realize that it's a mountain of bones. Right.

They had killed over a million people in the city and piled them up on top of each other. And they had to abandon their, they were pulling wagons. They had abandoned the roads because the roads were so mucked up with decaying humans that the roads had become muddy. You couldn't traverse them because so many people had rotted and decayed in the roads that it became mud.

That's insane. But he was really open-minded when he came to religion. Yeah. And he opened up trade to the East. Like, there's a lot of, like... And he had a lot of wives. Yeah. Well, I don't think they were wives. They weren't wives. Yeah, he did a lot of raping. A lot of murdering and horrible, torturous murdering. And, like, the stories, it's just, like, just what we know. Just about how... How about the way they hid his burial site? Yeah.

Do you know that story? Yeah. They fucking killed everybody. Everybody who went and buried him, everybody who killed the people who buried them, they killed them. They killed thousands of people just to protect the location of his grave. And to this day, nobody knows where it is. Yeah, that's right. Wild. Yeah. There's an amazing book by, is it Jack Weatherford, I think his name is, about Genghis Khan, like the classic book. It's an amazing book, worth reading. Jack Weatherford. Yeah. I mean, what a...

It's just what a fucking bizarre moment in history where this one genius is like really the best at killing people and taking over countries. And he does it at a scale. And then it goes away, which is a real lesson for America. Yeah.

Because the Mongols ran everything for a long fucking time, for hundreds of years, and then they didn't. Because of infighting. Yeah. Infighting. They weren't defeated from the outside. It was infighting. Well, also, Genghis Khan was dead. And the genius behind the whole operation, you know, he had a particular...

tactical war mind that was just different than everybody else's. He was a genius. Absolutely. He was just a genius applied to killing people. Right. And that was gone once his children took over and it's how it always works. Yeah. I mean, that's right. But that's us folks. When people, when I talk to left-wing people about, you know, aggression, right. And how it's, uh, how it's, um, sort of bad, like the,

I was maladaptive with the anthropological term, like maladaptive. It produces bad outcomes. Right. And I'm like, look, arguably the most aggressive man on the planet in history was Genghis Khan. And he left the largest genetic footprint on the human genome, on the human race of any individual ever. Right. So aggression at that level in Darwinian terms. Right. Is absolutely rewarded.

The shy guy that was writing poetry had one kid, right? Genghis Khan, 11% of the population of the area that he conquered is descended directly from him. He's their daddy. That was because of his aggression, right? So you have to understand that in evolutionary terms, aggression is richly rewarded.

So the trick for human culture is to blunt that with some cultural values that bring people back into a place of peace and dignity and cooperation and blah, blah, blah. Right. But just don't tell me that aggression is counterproductive. Right. It's that's complete nonsense. Well, it's just it's a utopian perspective. Right.

Yeah. You know, aggression's bad. Toxic male energy is bad. Yeah. Until someone's invading your fucking country. Yeah. And yeah, those are toxic males. Yeah, I get it. But guess what? You need some on your side too. And that's the only way we survive. It's the only way we made it to 2024. I mean, listen, chimpanzees do the same thing. Males will invade a rival territory and kill off individual males by ganging up on them. This isn't a fair fight, right? This is 10 to 1. Mm-hmm.

Beat the males, rival males to death from the rival troop. Beat them to death. And when they're shrieking in terror, their buddies in the rival troop don't rush to their aid like humans would. They run away. That's the difference between chimpanzees and humans is the male, what's called the male coalition is

exists in chimpanzee society, but they don't run to the aid of their brothers when the chips are down. They save themselves individually. Humans don't do that. We will rush to help a brother who's in danger, as it were. Even at risk to our own lives, it's one of the few unique traits that humans have that other mammals don't. Which is probably how we made it.

Yeah, exactly. No, because we're better off in a group, even a group in a desperate situation. But chimpanzees, the rival troop that's getting beaten to death one by one, eventually they're wiped out because they don't form a coalition to defend, only to attack. They'll form a coalition to attack, but not to defend. Right? So what happens is the more aggressive troop of chimpanzees...

wipes out the males of the rival troop one by one because the rivals won't form a coalition to defend. And then they take over the territory, all the food resources of that territory and the females.

And now the aggressive troop of chimpanzees is now bigger and stronger. And those genes will be passed on at a higher rate than the genes of the poor bastards who got beaten to death one by one. That's how Darwinism works. And that's why aggression exists in the world. There's a genetic reward for it.

And that's why we're here. And that's why we're here. And this is all God's plan. And then human culture. That's right. That's right. It's all God's plan. And human culture came up with this extraordinary thing. It's like, you know what, guys? We're all one thing. We're this tribe. We're that tribe. We have to fight to the last man to defend each other and defend our families, blah, blah, blah, because otherwise we're not going to make it because the fucking Vikings are coming over the ridge. Right? So who's with me?

You know, Braveheart, you know, whatever. I mean, there's endless stories about that kind of heroism. Like, we're all together, we'll die together if we have to, but we are all together, right? And that's a uniquely human trait. Yeah, it certainly is. And the problem is when you...

have a utopian perspective and you want everyone like I'm not dangerous I want the world to not be dangerous the problem is the world is dangerous and it's genetically dangerous it's like it's always been dangerous it's just this is what it is and I think we're in this

enormous process it's certainly much better to live today at least it is here than it would be during the time of Dostoevsky if you live back then it's a less information it's danger more dangerous some people have more control of people they're crueler it's more common yeah things get better over time but it's a slow slow process yeah yeah that's right

And we're in the middle of it. That's right. And, you know, we look back and we say, oh, those fools. But in the future, they're going to look back at us and say the same goddamn thing. The same way we look at Genghis Khan, they're going to look at us like, what the fuck did they do in Ukraine? What the fuck did Israel do in Gaza? What the fuck is going on in Sudan? What the fuck is going on in wherever? Fill in the blank. Anywhere in the world. Yeah, that's right.

And, you know, there is some hope that sort of global alliances blunt some of this stuff. Like, so there is some – there is a sort of cultural evolution from the sort of like ancestral – the ancestral origins of the species. And so, you know, alliances do often stabilize things, which is great. I mean, that's a good thing. But, again, alliances can also precipitate conflict. So, whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a complex mixture of things happening. And I think, again, not to get too like woo-woo spiritual, but I think that's a part of our journey. A part of our journey is navigating the good and evil. Right. These are real forces. That's right. Yeah. I will be killed, publicly executed, like Dostoevsky almost was, by my publisher if I don't say the name of my book.

I know you don't want that to happen. Let's say it now. I definitely don't want you to get killed, especially after what you've been through. In my time of dying, how I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife. All right, man. Well, listen, brother, it's always great to see you. I'm glad you're alive.

Thank you. I really enjoy these conversations we've had. Me too, man. Me too. They're really wonderful. Thanks for having me on and having such a great long talk about all this stuff. My pleasure. Did you read the audio book? I did. Yes. Good. Beautiful. So you got to listen to it on the treadmill. Yes, I will do that. Thank you very much, man. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you. My pleasure. All right. Bye, everybody.