Near Death Experiences, with Sebastian Junger

**Andrew Heaton** (0:00)
This episode is all about death, and to be frank, it's a little self-indulgent as I just got back from a family funeral, but if you're okay with that, it's a pretty interesting chat.
Hello, and welcome to The Political Orphanage, a home for misfits, wanderers, the living, and possibly the dead. We don't know how good the Wi-Fi is on the other side. I'm your host, Andrew Heaton, and I am also a big fan of Sebastian Junger. He's a decorated work correspondent and a fairly famous writer. He wrote The Perfect Storm, which was adapted into a film some years ago, but I'm a particularly big fan of his book, Tribes on Coming Home and Belonging, which has played a significant role in my assessment of how both people and politics work. For that reason, he was one of the very first guests I sought out on this program now more than five years ago. You can find a link to our initial interview in today's show notes. And I was going to interview him about a book he wrote on freedom and the nature thereof, which seems pertinent to this program, except that he died. Or technically he almost died. In the course of a day, I believe he lost 10 pints of blood, which is all the blood. He lost all the blood, all the blood on the human body, and then was able to barely survive through a number of medical miracles and medical technology and doctors and blood transfusions. We will hear from Mr. Junger in a bit, and what it's like to be on the precipice of death, which, as a teaser, is particularly interesting to me, given that Mr. Junger is an atheist. And on his deathbed, his dad came to talk to him. And this is the part I really wanted to discuss with him. His dad died eight years earlier. Apparently, he was an atheist too. So there's a lot of a friendly agnostic talking to a friendly atheist about trying to piece a mystical experience together on today's program. Now, on my end, just a day or two after I interviewed Mr. Junger, my uncle died. And I don't want to elaborate on that too much right now, maybe later. My family is fine, thank you. But the, you know, death is kind of on my mind at the moment. I'm kind of thinking about this. So this week is, I think, a very interesting interview with a really interesting guy about death and a full on 100% reprieve from the world of politics. If you are just here for politics, which would make a lot of sense, given that it's called The Political Orphanage, you could skip this episode. You will miss zero substantive political analysis this week, and we will return to that next week. But if you don't mind indulging me in a little bit of chat about near death experiences, this is a fun ride. My guest today is Sebastian Junger. He is a journalist and former war correspondent. He is the author of The Perfect Storm, which I imagine a lot of you saw in film back when it came out. And he is also the author of an incredible book that I really love called Tribe on Homecoming and Belonging, which I quote liberally in my own book on tribalism. He's written a book called Freedom, which is probably the most pertinent to the show, but we're actually going to skip over that because he recently very nearly died hard and wrote a book called In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of the Afterlife. Welcome, Sebastian.

**Sebastian Junger** (3:39)
Thank you very much, it's a pleasure.

**Andrew Heaton** (3:42)
I'm, as I said, I'm a very big fan of yours. I'm delighted you're here and I'm glad you're not dead. So just right off the bat, this is a good day for me.

**Sebastian Junger** (3:49)
Thank you.

**Andrew Heaton** (3:50)
Well, so I'm curious to talk to you about this experience. You're a journalist. I think you're an atheist, so you've got an interesting viewpoint on all of this. Before we get into everything, what happened? I feel like we do need to set the stage of what exactly occurred before anything else makes sense in today's conversation.

**Sebastian Junger** (4:07)
Yeah. Well, very briefly, I was a war reporter for a long time and many years, and I came a few times, came very close to losing my life. After my friend and colleague, Tim Hetherington, was killed in Libya, I stopped war reporting. I got married. I had children. I felt like I slid into home base in terms of my life and not risking death all the time.