Transcript for #369 — Escaping Death

It's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Yeah, 97 like a million years ago.

That's, that's very funny because I had, you know, I had similar fears afterwards. I was very paranoid about being far from medical help.

Yeah, well, just to start off by saying, within my population of foreign reporters, that's the norm. And I'm probably at the low end of risk taking and the sort of aggregate of dangerous experiences. So just to be clear, like I look like a risk taker to the general population, but to not to my population. Right. So I grew up in a very safe, pretty affluent Boston suburb in the 60s and 70s. And I had this sense. I don't know why, but I had the sense that there's a teenager. If I wasn't somehow tested in some sort of mortal way, that I would never mature into a man. I would just stay forever or sort of juvenile. And, and I knew that in this suburb, nothing was ever going to, you know, nothing was really ever going to test me. There were no volcanoes. There were no hurricanes. No rebels were going to come driving down the street and pick up trucks. There would be no way to sort of prove my, my worth to society, which Throughout history, young men have felt compelled to do, and the society needed them to do that. And I don't know why I was aware of this, but I was. And, you know, eventually my father was refugee from two wars. He's born in Germany, but he grew up in Spain and his family. He and his family left Spain with the fascists came in in 1936 with Franco. And they went to Paris. His father was Jewish when the Nazis came in. They fled to the United States. And so war was sort of in the background of my family's history. And in my early 30s, I'd worked for some years as a climate for tree companies, taking trees down, so way up in the air on a rope with the chainsaw, and I actually got in hurt doing that. And in the early 90s, there was a civil war in Bosnia, and I just thought, I've got a I'm 32, I need to test my, I mean, I need to do something that demonstrate something worthy about myself. And I, and I, and I, I want to sorry you, and I, and I, and I turned myself into a war reporter, and then I kept doing it, despite having to occasionally write books.

No, God, if only. So I was like plankton in the food chain of foreign reporters and sorry, I have a right. I mean, I was like an occasional freelance radio correspondent. I'd basically phone in 30 second, 40 second voice spots into a radio and would have you touch a villa. And you know, it was very much a just sort of initiatory process. I mean, I mean, I, I learned how to do that work, but I didn't come close to earning anything close to what living doing it. But it was like going to journalism school. And I was in a war. And I was with other freelancers. And I learned something really, really valuable about war, about humans, about myself. I came back feeling very, very different and really sort of in love with the idea of a job that had enormous meaning. I was reporting on world, even at my tiny level. I was reporting on world events on things that were happening in front of the tragic things, important things, and communicating that back to a population in the United States. And that to me, this sort of role of the messenger and society, that to me was like, just absolutely intoxicating.

Well, for me, consequences create meaning. So if you're in a situation where you could get killed, there's an enormous amount of meaning around the idea of not making a mistake of making the right decisions of relying on other people and they rely on you and you all come out of it, okay, there's an enormous amount of meaning that comes within danger. And the problem with things that are free of danger and listen, we're blessed if we have those things, right? I mean, many people in the world don't. But the problem with, say, around of golf is that it might be fun, it might be pleasurable, it might be relaxing, but it actually has very little sort of meaning. And what I found in the, in the, in the, say, whole suburb that I was growing up in was I was sort of desperate for meaning. And sometimes war reporters are called sort of adrenaline junkies or whatever. And for me, what I think was going on more for me and for most of the other people that I knew, men and women both in those situations, is that there was more like they were meaning junkies. Like they wanted to be living lives where things had huge consequences, enormous amount of meaning. And that's actually the thing you sort of get addicted to. It's not, you know, frankly, sprinkling across the street while a sniper is trying to shoot you is not particularly addictive.

Well, I imagine Alex handled the free soloist who, um, if I said his name correctly anyway, I think we know who I'm talking about.

No, that's definitely a solo activity, and it's definitely a huge amount of meaning to it for him and for anyone understanding what he's doing. So, it doesn't have to be with other people, but consequences sort of sharpen the contours of reality. And he's obviously dealing with enormous consequences when he does his work on those cliffs. But for most humans, I don't know if he's human or not, but for most humans.

Yeah, and it seems to be an extraordinarily nice guy. I mean, anyway, from most humans, hardship and risk and danger and trauma are generally faced in a group. And that's been true for hundreds of thousands of years. And, you know, war is no different. And even if you were a war reporter and you're in, say, Sierra Leone and late 90s, like I was, or Liberia in 2003 or Bosnia in the early 90s, whatever it made up in an American platoon in combat in eastern Afghanistan, as I was in 708, you end up inevitably in sort of these social groups, sort of survival groups as it were. The relationship between the individual and the group that find themselves dependent on for survival is very, very intense. And the deal seems to be that if you are willing to be sort of selfless and altruistic on behalf of the welfare of the group, the group that takes you in and you're welcomed in a way and you're sort of honored in some way. And you know what I saw in Sarajevo was really interesting. The and immediately wanted to sort of be part of it almost at almost had the totally self indulgence and thought wow those people are lucky that they get this and what I was seeing was that every neighborhood had a sort of local defense group and these were like Young men, typically, that we're using an assortment of hunting rifles in AK-47s and would have you, and they dug trenches, and they were defending the city of Sarajevo neighborhood by neighborhood in very, very local groups. living a kind of communal life on a front line and it looked so tribal and these young people and the women as well because they had a very important role as well. These young young people were such a totally necessary vital part of their own community and its survival. I just thought like that's life, like that's what life's supposed to be, something like that. And again, a self-indulgent thought because there was a huge amount of suffering. You know, one out of five civilians was wounded or killed in that city over the three years of the siege by the besieging Bosnia and served forces. I mean, just absolutely grotesque. But, you know, I think we can still say in sort of human terms, they had a core human experience that's typified human life for very, very long time and the pity Along with the huge blessings and benefits of modern safe affluent modern society, the pity of it is that we, particularly young people, get sort of deprived of being in a role of importance and urgency like that.

Well, I think there's two things going on. First of all, survival is meaningful. I mean, just in basic Darwinian terms, right? Like, if we didn't value survival, we wouldn't be here. And the behaviors that help our survival, evolutionary process has made gratifying or pleasurable. So if your hungry eating is an important thing to do, and it feels good, sex feels good, right? Archery feels good if you hit the bullseye, and you get a little bump of dopamine, right? So all of these behaviors that help us survive and master our circumstances, are rewarded with some kind of good feeling. And one of the good feelings is that we have is, you know, topping out on the, you know, top of El Capitán or whatever. It's like, you know, winning, succeeding, like overcoming the monster, the beast, you know, like vanquishing. And the other one, and they're very tied together, is human connection, right? That's also as the other, along with survival, is the other exceedingly meaningful thing that we do. And after my book Tribe came out, I can't remember where it was a comment. It might have been on Amazon or something. I can't quite remember, but it was a young woman whose sister tragically had died of cancer, I think. And she talked about how during those last days of her sister's life while her sister was dying. that she missed those days. Because everyone came in, the cousins and the friends and the family, and it was just this gathering of forces. And there was something, as she said, as tragic as it was, she missed it because it felt real. And she was connected to so many people in this vital way. And if you look at at history. You know, the tragedies, the catastrophes that hit human society, the blitz in London. All right. The German Air Force bombed London and other English cities night after night for six months. They killed 30,000 civilians. Right. There were civilians digging civilians out of the rubble and injecting the ones they couldn't save with morphine so they could, you know, die painlessly and everyone was sleeping and You know, in the subways and rationing food, and I mean, just a nightmare, right? And what happened afterwards, Londoner said that they missed it. And the class, the ghastly class system in England sort of broke down during those days. I mean, if you're sleeping shoulder to shoulder with other people in the tube station, it doesn't really matter if you're, quote, upper class or quote, lower class, right? And not only that, but the catastrophe, the crisis seemed to promote sort of psychological well-being. The government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties during the bombings, right? Of course they were. And it turns out that admissions disciples went down during the bombings and then back home after the bombings stopped. And after Hurricane Katrina, there was a similar thing along the Mississippi coast. I have friends who lived out there. He said people really missed the time of sort of community effort and bonding that happened in the wake of that terrible hurricane. So yes, it seems sort of odd that these catastrophes illicit such fun feelings, but they give people a purpose of meaning that is survival, and they bring people together. And those are the things that make humans happy. We're social primates, like we're adapted for that.

Yes, so after I came back from a year off and on with a platoon in combat with American forces in combat in eastern Afghanistan, I made a documentary. called Brostrapo with my buddy, Tim Heatherington. And I came back from there, and the guys that I'd been with were, I was quite surprised, like a lot of them wanted, I mean, this was a hellish hilltop, right? They were like, It was all men that they were getting, we were getting shot at just about every day. There was no communication with the outside world. There was no internet. There was no way to call your girlfriend. There was no, first three months, there wasn't even electricity. They didn't even have a generator, right? There was sleeping in the dirt with the tarantulas and the scorpions and then, et cetera. And they spent 15 months up there. And so they finally got brought back to Italy and all the pleasures and delights of civilization. And you can imagine what that looked like for a while. But then the party sort of died down, and a lot of them said they wanted to go back, they couldn't deal. They wanted to go back to Restruppo. A lot of them said that. And I remember, I had a, I was very fortunate to have a surrogate uncle named Ellis, who I've written about. And he was part of Apache parts sue, I believe. It anyway, he was Native American, he was born out west in the late 1920s and an incredibly learned man and extraordinary man. And I remember him, sorry, I'm going to have to be a little improper here, but this is his language. But I remember him saying to me, Sebastian, all throughout the history of the United States from the earliest days on. he said you white people were always running off the join us Indians to join the tribes and he said we Indians never ran off the join what society to you know plow fields and go to church on Sundays and all that stuff is always towards the tribal and I you know in my mind I'm like oh right yeah okay right and I didn't know if Alice was sort of selling me a bill of goods or whatever and then what I was trying to understand the soldiers I thought oh my god maybe Alice was right maybe that's true Maybe what these guys miss is that tribal component of like we're all equal. We're all together. We need each other. We're in the fight together. Like maybe that's actually what's intoxicating. And you come back to safe America. And yeah, of course, great to not get shot at anymore, et cetera, et cetera. And again, we're blessed to live in those circumstances. But there is a real human loss. I mean, the more affluent and safe you are, the less you need other people to survive. And then you end up without human connection, which is the ultimate, I mean, human connection is the ultimate drug, right? I mean, the ultimate thing that makes you feel good. Again, we're social primates. Humans don't survive by themselves in the wilderness. They die almost immediately. We survive in groups. And we have a lot of sort of neurochemical reinforcement of those oxytocin and all these, all these other, all these others. the hormones that allow us to make us feel good when we're collaborating in a group. And so I realized that Ellis was right and I looked back into the history books and indeed along the frontier, the Pennsylvania frontier where my ancestors settled in the 1780s, all the way out up through the Midwest and the West and the Southwest, young men and sometimes young women would run off. and join the native culture, or even if they're native society, and even if they've been kidnapped during raids, if often they didn't want to go home. They want to go back. They wanted to stay, quote, Indian. And so that to me suddenly made sense of this thing. So how do you live your life in a, I live in America? It's a modern affluent country, right? It's a highly mechanized industrialized country. How do you live in such a place and to your question, keep some, what decisions can you make to keep some sort of tribal feeling? And so, you know, what I would say first of all is, I mean, I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb and I've just made it a point in my life. They're extremely alienating places and I've just made it a point in my life to never, to never do that. And so I live in a very much a mixed-income, mixed race, low-reside in the New York's low-reside community, which is sort of small enough in human and enough that, you know, people recognize each other. We need each other. There's all kinds of sort of street-level collaboration. And it feels very, very communal and good. And the building that I live in with my wife and two little girls before I was in there during Hurricane Sandy, There was an extraordinary example of this sort of community that you would get in a poor neighborhood and I think not in a rich one. Hurricane Sandy shut off the lights in New York City for 34th Street and below. So at nighttime it was quite frightening and Manhattan actually gangs of young men roaming around and all kinds of sort of quasi-apocalyptic buildings. So in this particular building is a tenement building and mostly Spanish speaking and a lot of interrelatedness between the apartments, cousins and uncles and what have you. One of the mothers, Dominican or Puerto Rican, I'm not sure which I got a machete, because they're worried about a break-ins, because a lot of the people who had children had to leave the building, because there was no water, there was no running water, so the people with young children left the building, so there's empty apartments, they're worried about break-ins, right?

That's right. So she got a machete and she got a bunch of teenage boys and young men and gave them a sort of guard roster. And so there was a young man with a machete in front of the, you know, front of the door 24 seven until the lunch went back on. Now that's community, right? Like that's, that's the fabric of human society. And so, you know, one of the decisions I made was just not, not living in affluence and not living suburbia.

Yeah, so if I could, I'll start a backup a few years after being a war reporter for for many years and having had many close calls. I was blown up by an ID. I hadn't bullet hit next to my forehead into a sandbag, et cetera. My colleague, my brother, my friend, Tim Heatherington, who I made a strip of with was killed in Libya. He caught up with a mortar fragment in his groin and he bled out in the back of a Rebel pick up truck looking at the blue Libyan sky as he raced to the misraught of hospitality got there a few minutes too late and I so I got out of the war business at that point I I didn't want to devastate all the people who loved me like I just watched him do to everyone who loved him and did you have your daughters at that point? No, I didn't. I didn't. I was in my first marriage and that I had a lot of psychological struggles after the Streppo and after Tim was killed and among other things, it contributed to costing me my marriage. But you know, then I, you know, I sort of things got better again. I got together with Barbara my wife and we had a family and everything was amazing. I never looked. I stopped war reporting. I never looked back. Now at this point I have a family and I definitely, they're my absolute priority and so I mean then COVID hits and so when COVID hits we have a newborn and a three year old almost three year old. and COVID hits. And we're lucky, again, you know, I'm extremely lucky person. And we had the choice of leaving New York, this little apartment. We live in a tiny apartment. And we co-sleep. It's like 500 square feet. And it's like we're camping in an apartment, right? I mean, it's really small. The idea of going through COVID in that with, you know, two young kids just seem really tough. And we own property in Massachusetts in the woods, an old old house in the woods, at the end of a dead end dirt road. And it was a no-brainer, right? moved in there. And it was in June of 2020. I don't think in terms of medical emergency because I'm a lifelong athlete. I was a really good distance runner when I was young. I've got an athlete's heart. I'm not a walking, you know, I'm not in my heart. It's not a ticking time bomb. I'm not going to have a stroke. I mean, all these things that drop middle-aged men in their tracks, I just don't have those worries, right? So I just never thought I would have to rush to the hospital for anything. And so in this house, there's no cell phone service. It's a long dirt road. Do the woods to get there and sometimes impossible. And the phone lines don't, the land line doesn't work when it rains because the lines are old and they shored out. So that's the context for what's about to happen now. So it's June 16th, 2020. And we got, we had a little bit of babysitting from some teenage girls who lived down the road. and they came in to take care of our six-month-old in our three-year-old, and I'd built a cabin for even deeper into woods, just like oil lamps and wood stove, like a really primitive place. And my wife and I went out, Barbara, and I went out there to just chill out for a little bit, and very beautiful spot. And in mid-scentance, in mid-scentance, I felt this jolt of pain. in my abdomen. And I was like, oh, what is that? You know, it was sort of, it was like incredibly bad in suggestion, right? And it's no, what it was, it was burning. And I just stood up to try to walk it out and, and I almost fell over. And I mean, the floor just went reeling away from me. And I sat back down and I said, words, I never thought I'd ever say, I said, I'm going to need help. I've never felt anything like this. And so Barbara sort of dragged me half dragged me out of the woods and sort of keeping me upright and my arm around her shoulders and got me to the driveway and put me in the passenger seat of the car and then ran in and told the girls like whispered to the babysitters, you know, Sebastian's Sebastian has to go to the hospital and something's really wrong. So one of the phone lines weren't working. Nothing was working. One of the girls managed to get one bar of cell phone connection on her cell phone and called 911. And so I didn't know this, but I had an undiagnosed aneurysm, a sort of ballooning of the blood vessel in one of my pancreatic arteries. It's extremely rare. And it's not, you know, it's a random defect, right? It's not a high cholesterol or what have you clogged arteries. It's really a sort of a random Freakish saying and and in yourisms are deadly because they have no symptoms and if they rupture the mortality rate is incredibly high. It's very hard to fix that and people just bleed out into their own abdomen, which is what I was doing. I was losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes and my blood pressure was just tanking. So I'm in the car and I'm in and out of consciousness and I start going blind, all symptoms of blood loss, rot, extreme blood loss. And I'm basically a human hourglass. And the hospital is an hour drive away. And I would have, the odds would have been long if the hospital had been five minutes away, right? And it's an hour. I hung on. They put me in the ambulance. They didn't know what was wrong. They didn't think it was particularly serious, but we went to the hospital and right when I sort of kept it together, something called compensatory shock where your body shuts down all unnecessary blood flowed to your limbs, et cetera, to your skin, and pools it where it's needed in your chest and your brain. Your body can do that for like an hour or so, and then it can't do it anymore. And that's what happened as soon as we pulled up to the ER. I went from compensatory shock into end stage hemorrhagic shock. I was convulsing and totally disoriented. And the doctors knew immediately what was happening. And they rushed me into the trauma bay. And a doctor started getting ready to insert a large gauge needle through my neck into my jug straight into my jugular to transfuse me, which is actually, I mean, it sounds horrifying. But it didn't hurt at all.

Well, and you know, I didn't, I had no idea what was dying, right? And the doctor said to me, do I have permission to do this procedure? And I, you know, it didn't sound very fun. I said, you mean in case there's an emergency. Yeah. And he said, sir, this is the emergency right now.

Yeah. And I had no idea. And so, you know, I should say right now. So people don't get the wrong idea. I'm an atheist. I'm a stone cold atheist. My father was a physicist. He was an atheist. I'm not a mystic. I'm not spiritual. I don't think coincidences mean anything. I don't think things are meant to be or not meant to be like, I just I don't believe in anything, right? And so while the doctor is working on my neck trying to get the needle in there, which just takes a little while. I suddenly become aware of this black pit that has opened up underneath me, just slightly to my left, and I'm getting pulled into it. And it's sort of infinitely, infinitely black and infinitely deep.

You know, a good question and I don't know. I sensed it. I just became aware that there was a pit to my left below me and then I was going to pull into into this darkness. And it was a final darkness. And again, I didn't know I was dying. But I had the sense like you go in there, you are not coming back out. And I was minicking. And then my dead father appeared above me. above me and to my left.

They were open. I mean, I was still talking to the doctors, but I was also, you know, it was like I was incredibly drunk. Like my mind was not working right. And I was in and out of consciousness. And I, you know, I mean, I wouldn't say it's not like I saw him in the ceiling like a cardboard cut out of my father. I mean, it wasn't that tangible. But he was there in a sort of energy form. I mean, I don't even really words to precisely say what it was I was seeing or feeling. But I was startled. I was startled to see him. I'm like my dad. What are you doing up there? He'd been dead eight years, and he was a physicist. He was definitely, you know, realized later in my life on the spectrum, a very sweet man, but not hard to be close to, emotionally close to. That was my relationship with him, and suddenly there he was. And he was communicating to me, it's okay. You don't have to fight it. Like, I'll take care of you. You can come with me. And my reaction was hard. I mean, I didn't know I was dying. So when you said, come with you, I'm like, you're dead. I'm not going anywhere with you. We have nothing. We have nothing in common. Like, it was rough. The suggestion was to go to house. And I said to the dog.