A Conversation Thought Lost: Sebastian Junger | Engel Angle

I don't know about you, but I've realized a big part of my day now is deleting stuff.
MacEngle, fourth star telegram, angle angle podcast, here on the Sunset Lounge, a bit
of a different episode today, but one that I wanted to share for a while, just to give
you a quick backstory on this.
When I first started this podcast, it was on a different platform, and I interviewed
a bunch of people, and the platform basically kind of went away or downsized, however you
want to say it, and some of the episodes more or less were lost, or they were never
listened to in the first place, I don't know, but this one, this is one that I thought
was gone, and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this.
You open up a drawer, and then you find that thing you've been looking for forever,
or you open up a closet, and there's that piece of clothing, or something that meant
a lot to you that had sentimental value, and there it is.
You sure it was gone.
Well, this one, I was sure it was gone, and then for some reason or another, I don't know
why, I went into my Google Drive, and there are just dozens and dozens and dozens of things
that I thought I had deleted, and there they are.
It's like, oh my gosh, there it is.
So I can't even imagine, when we talk about deleting things, I can't even imagine what's
still floating around in the technology clouds that exist, that we were only too sure that
we deleted.
99% of which we will never need again, and we probably didn't need in the first place,
this is a delightful exception.
So one of the benefits of my job is that I've had the opportunity to interview any number
of very interesting people who've had very unique successful careers and endeavors just
beyond sports, and 20 some years ago, I started to explore those spaces because they really
do interest me, and somebody in front of mine used to call me 60 minutes, because I am
really curious, and I'll ask people questions, and I'm generally curious about people
and events and things, and I'm the boring guy in the museum and all that, and I'm a big
believer in trying to gather as many unique experiences as you can, so that's why I'll
jump off the cliff, or jump out of a plane, or just any number of other things that I've
done, really in an effort to just experience unique events, and that includes interviewing
people way beyond basketball, football, baseball, all of which I enjoy, don't get me wrong,
these are places that are unique, and something that I really enjoy, which includes a clip
that I'm going to play of a podcast that I produced however many years ago, and like
I said, it was lost, and it's with best-selling author Sebastian Younger.
Now if I told this story to people Sebastian Younger, they might draw a blank, or sometimes
they know who he is, he's a best-selling author, and there's not many best-selling authors
who are household names anymore.
Eric Larson is one of them, there's a few others, there's not many, but Younger to
me was a professional hero, somebody that I admired from afar, a great deal because
he's so good at reporting and writing, and I had always wanted to meet him, I had always
wanted to interview him, and a lot of times I'll look for reasons to interview people that
really interest me.
Now you can go to my website, and there's a whole bunch of them that I've interviewed,
certainly in this podcast that I've taken, and I've full advantage of to try to interview
people that just interest me.
One was Johnny Resnick of the Goo Goo Dolls, I did that last year, I'm a big Goo Goo Dolls
fan, I know that's a middle-aged white guy thing, but I was a big Johnny Resnick fan, and
when the Goo Goo Dolls came to town, their promoters were reaching out, and I said, yeah,
I would love to interview Johnny, and they said, well he's kind of busy, would you take
the drummer?
And I don't know if it was the drummer or not, but my point was I was like, well, if it's
going to be an audience, I really need Johnny, and I didn't think I'd get him, but I got
him, he was great, we chatted for about 15 or 20 minutes, and I've got a whole bunch
of those experiences, so many of which I've probably forgotten.
This wasn't, this is not one that I forgot, and this clip I want to share with you really
resonates with me because, well, I'm on the right side of 50 now, it's the right side,
and I think it applies to anybody that's ever asked themselves about the afterlife.
That's a very, very heavy subject, but I think anybody at some point, after we turn 18,
15, maybe 20, and our brains are more developed and we're exposed to religion and pop culture
and thoughts and ideas and philosophies about heaven, hell, the afterlife and all those
things, we do ask questions about it, and obviously there is no answer.
We have yet to meet that person who comes back with irrefutable evidence and says, yeah,
this is what it's like, you're going to see your dog again, you're going to see your
long-lost relatives again, they're all there waiting for you to be seen and everybody's
nice to each other, and there is no war, there's no anger, there's no hate, that's what
it is.
Well, obviously, we don't know that, we hope that, but we don't know that.
So, when I had an opportunity to interview Sebastian younger the first time, he had, I'm
not sure what the book it was he had written, and he's written several books in the book
that everybody knows because it was made into a big Hollywood movie, of course, is the
perfect storm.
It really launched him, and even though he was a very successful writer and reporter
by that point, the perfect storm really pushed him into a different stratosphere that most
writers never see.
He went on to write other books called War, which I highly recommend, Freedom, Death
and Belmont, which is outstanding, Tribe, it was also heavily involved in the production
of the documentary movie Restrepro, which was fantastic.
So I've interviewed him a couple of times, like I said, and he's a very, very nice man,
and when I reached out to him, I guess this was four or five years ago, maybe longer
than that, I asked him at the end of the interview, so what's next?
And he was at the time working on a book about his experience where he had a life and death,
life after death experience.
And the funny part about this interview, and you won't see it here, but when he
mentions it, he starts describing the story, and at the time I was doing the interview,
it was on Zoom, and I only had 45 minutes blocked.
And I'm looking at the clock, for those of you who are familiar with Zoom, you know that
the free Zoom only lasts 45 minutes, and it has a clock.
And I'm watching the clock go down as he's giving me this terrific answer.
And I'm just thinking, oh no, I'm going to lose this.
He was very nice, and when it was done, he came back, and he finished the story about
his near death experience.
It eventually did become his book in my time of dying, which was published in 2024,
and like any of Jungers' work, I highly recommend it.
They're very readable, they're very digestible, and they're books that, even if you're not
necessarily interested in that subject, they are so well-reported.
And so detailed that it's going to make you want to read the next sentence.
And something that I told him, and something that he agreed with, which was, somebody
will say to you, what's great writing?
Or someone might say, what makes a movie good?
And I heard Martin Scorsese say this about films, and I had already previously thought
this about writing, which was, if you think about all of the reading that you have done
in your life, from Cat and Hat, middle school books to Kill a Mockingbird, any of the classics
that you were assigned in high school or maybe college and have gone on to read since,
all the reading that you've done, what did you read that you still remember?
And if you can remember it, it was probably pretty damn good.
And Martin Scorsese's point about films is that you don't really remember the whole movie,
you remember scenes of a movie.
And if you can remember scenes of a movie, if you can remember passages of a book, it
was probably pretty damn good.
And I, can certainly name a handful of passages of books that I have read that still sit
with me today in amazement.
There's one from the book, Catch 22, where the hero of the book, Yosarian, is wandering
around, war strewn, Rome in the 1940s, and it is unbelievable.
Sebastian Younger has written many passages in his books that I still remember.
And I told him this.
He was, he was flatter, he was a nice compliment to give somebody, but he was flattered.
And this particular part that I'm going to share with you now is something that I think
you'll remember.
This is about his life after death experience.
If you give it a listen, it applies to all of us.
And whenever we think about heaven, hell, life after death, it's certainly an interesting
perspective.
I, I had a undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, and it ruptured two years ago,
and it's almost always fatal occurrence.
And I managed to, I hung on for 90 minutes till they got me to the hospital and they managed
to save me.
I lost half my blood into my abdomen.
I mean, this is a real widow maker.
And you know, it was just a random freak event.
It was not a health, I didn't have a health problem, I just like, I'm a fit, healthy person.
That's why I survived, actually.
But my, you know, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in anything.
And I'm an anti mystic and, you know, whatever, show me the data, right?
And as I was dying, my dead father appeared above me to, to welcome me.
And he was like, it's okay.
It's going to be all right.
You can come with me.
It's okay.
He was trying to calm me down.
I was getting pulled into this black pit underneath me and there was my father saying,
it's okay.
It's all right.
You can come with me.
His hands were open like that.
And I said, and I was still conscious.
I said to the doctor, I'm going, you got it, you got it, I'm going right now, like
you got a hurry.
I'm leaving.
And he was working on putting a line into my jugular to get enough blood into me to save
my life.
And he was doing, middle of doing that.
I was like, you got to hurry because I'm going.
I don't think in mystical terms and religious terms about anything.
And yet there my dead father was and I, and I didn't know I was dying.
I knew something bad was happening that I was sort of being taken away.
I didn't know I was actually dying and I was some minutes from death, apparently.
And there he was.
I'm writing a book called Pulse about that experience and about, and, and, and, and,
sort of trying to explain in rational terms what happened to me.
My dad was a physicist.
I want to write a book that he would respect about what the hell he was doing there.
Well, I mean, you know, I'm not the first person to inquire about what are called NDE's
near death experiences.
What happened to me?
And this is what's odd about it.
What happened to me is extremely common.
And that people, people have, people who are on the threshold of death don't have wildly
different experiences.
They all have sort of basically the same set of experiences, which would, which would
sort of argue for there being something going on that we don't understand rather than
just, you know, give LSD to a bunch of people, they all have different hallucinations.
You make a bunch of people almost die, they all have basically the same hallucinations.
So what is that?
And so the explanations run from, it's just an artifact of our neurochemistry when our
blood oxygen is low, blah, blah, blah, you know, endogenous, subendogenous hallucinogens
that are in our, you know, in our brains that get triggered, sort of runs from that all
the way to maybe some of the more out there theories of quantum physics explain a post-death
reality that we don't understand.
So in other words, that when you die, there is some reality that continues, that your
existence continues in.
Some dimension that your existence continues in, we just don't understand it.
And it intersects with our experience in these sort of occasional ways, and particularly
when you die, you know, told theory, right?
But it's a theory.
So I'm trying to, sort of just looking at all the different theories, I'm looking at
shamanism, for example, I mean, all the different theories that involve these sort of trends,
these sort of these threshold experiences to see if there's anything in any of these
bodies of work, any of this research that could help illuminate what happened to me.
You said you're an atheist, did a near-death experience change your attitude towards religion
and that, that part of your philosophy?
You know, it didn't.
I mean, if I'd seen God, it might have, but I didn't see God.
I saw my dad.
And so what it, to me, you know, it might, it made me willing, made me willing to admit
that it's possible, it might dismissal of mysticism that it may be meant that I might,
I might not know everything, that the universe in physical terms, right, that in, in, in,
in terms of the, like, the laws of physics and the, in the atoms, the atomic particles
that were made up of, that in physical terms, the universe might operate in ways that we
don't understand, and that would include a post death reality.
And I finally came to me that it's, it's extremely unlikely that there's quote, life after
death that is a post death existence, it's extremely unlikely to the point of being
sort of preposterous, but this universe itself was extremely unlikely to exist to the point
of being preposterous.
So existence itself probably is not less unlikely than a post death existence.
They're both totally preposterous propositions.
So it made, it made me sort of willing to open my mind that there might be something that
we don't yet understand that involves some existence that continues after our, our, what
we call our death.
So I want to thank Sebastian Younger again for providing me some insight into something
that I don't think I'd ever adequately given the proper weight to because when you think
about just this sort of existential heaven and hell life, you know, the hereafter, you
don't necessarily equate it to the preposterousness of our very own existence and the rarity
of it all.
And in doing so, it made me appreciate it all that much more.
Thank you Sebastian Younger.
I hope you enjoyed that.
And I'll see you next time.
Hello, it's Mike Riner of your dark companion here.
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