Life after near-death: a new perspective on living, dying, and the afterlife | Sebastian Junger

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com/subscribe. My guest this week is Sebastian Junger. Sebastian was a previous podcast guest back in February of 2022 I want to have him back on to discuss his recently published book, In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the idea of an afterlife. Sebastian is an award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, and New York Times bestselling author. Some of his previous works include The Perfect Storm, Tribe, and Freedom, among others. I was compelled to have this conversation with Sebastian after reading or really devouring his book. I explained as much to him at the beginning of this podcast. It really is a special book, and I don't think it's just because of the nature of what I focus on professionally. I think it really is the type of book that anybody would read and be moved by because I believe at the end of the day, we are all in some ways a little bit afraid of our mortality, and obviously curious about what it implies. In this conversation, Sebastian shares his story of his near-death experience, and really how that's the substrate and the launching pad, if you will, towards the investigation that leads to this book. We talk about how the universe works, what we understand about physics, what does it mean to be sacred beyond secular, and discuss whether or not there may be an afterlife. Absent any sort of religious overtone, by the way, these two can be quite uncoupled. We discuss how our beliefs might impact how we live our lives and what shapes our value in our own experience. Again, I found this to be a very intriguing conversation and one that is a bit more philosophical than perhaps our usual discussions on the drive. I think it offers a chance, of course, to reflect on the themes related to how we think about death, our spiritual beliefs, and of course, this idea of an afterlife. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Sebastian Junger.
Sebastian, thanks so much for coming to Austin. It's great to finally meet you in person, having spoken with you and emailed you many times over the past few years, and spoken with you obviously on a previous podcast. This book is really a fantastic book. It's hard to describe the experience of reading it. I think it's so beautiful, it can almost bring you to tears in certain sections because there are the stories within it that tell us about our mortality. But I also think there's something so beautiful about it, which I'm curious if others have explained to you their reaction, which is you can feel so incredibly insignificant reading this, which is actually a nice thing. It makes this whole thing seem a little less scary, and by this whole thing, I mean death.

**Sebastian Junger** (3:47)
Well, our insignificance in the cosmos does take the pressure off. We don't mean anything, and that's terrifying and liberating. I mean, it's both, and one of the things I talk about in the book is a reverence for life, and I think it's quite hard to find one's way in the busyness of daily life in our modern society. It's quite hard to find your way to that reverence. It was for me without having been terrified. Once I was terrified by almost dying, the flip side of that terror was reverence, and I found it quite easily after that. And so for me, one point after my near-death experience, I had a lot of psychological struggles. I mean, we can talk about that, but at one point my wife said to me, Sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that you almost died? I mean, not that you survived, of course you're lucky, but that it happened at all. If you could go back and push a button and have it not happen, would you push that button? I honestly did not answer.