Name: Sebastian Junger's Scary Near Death Experience
Uploaded: 2021-05-21T02:20:31.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Sebastian Junger's Scary Near Death Experience' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Sebastian Junger's Scary Near Death Experience' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-21. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience. We were talking before, there's so much to talk about,
but we were talking
before and you were saying that over the last year you almost died because you
had some crazy
internal, you had an aneurysm in your pancreas, is that what you said it was?
Yeah, I had an
undiagnosed asymptomatic aneurysm, which is a sort of ballooning in the blood
vessel in the
artery, in my pancreatic artery and out of the blue, it was a congenital thing,
like I'd apparently
developed during my whole life. It was just from a structural problem. And one
afternoon,
one beautiful June afternoon last year it burst. And, you know, I just felt
this pain shoot through
my stomach. I was like, damn, what is that? Within a few minutes I couldn't
stand up. And within about
10 minutes I started to go blind. And my wife called the ambulance and those
guys got there and, you
really fast. And the hospital is an hour away. And by a miracle, I don't even
think the doctors
understand it, but by a miracle I was still alive when I got to the hospital. I
lost 90% of my blood
into my abdomen. And I didn't know I was dying, but I was right in that sort of
twilight zone. And a black
pit opened up underneath me and I felt myself starting to get pulled down into
it. And I didn't want to go.
Like it was cold and dark and black and bottomless. And I just knew like, do
not go down there. I was getting
pulled down into it. And right at that moment, my father who passed away in
2012,
my father sort of appeared next to me and started trying to communicate, trying
to communicate with
me and comforting me. And I, I sort of waved him away. And the last thing I
remember saying to the
doctor, I was sort of losing consciousness. And the last thing I said to the
doctor was, you're losing
me right now. You got to hurry. He was trying to put a, he'd cut my neck open.
He was trying to put a line
into my neck to, you know, they pumped 10, 10 units of blood into me. And that's
what brought me back.
It was really close.
Wow.
When you say you, you felt like you're, you were sinking into a pit. Like, were
you seeing this?
Yeah. I mean, you know, your perceptions are very weird because I, you know,
very little oxygen in
the brain. I had a hemoglobin count of 1.2. If you're a doctor, you know what
that is. It's almost
unheard of. And so I just felt this pit underneath me and it was pulling me
into it. And I didn't
want to go.
And you can see a pit?
Yeah. I mean, again, see slash feel your perceptions are very weird when you're
like that. And then my father
also was sort of floating above me. He was a presence. I don't know if seeing
him is quite
the word. It's another perception.
Wow.
Yeah.
So coming out of that, once you regained your health, you must have had an
incredible newfound
appreciation for all the people in your life and just everything.
It was a long path. You know, I mean, I'm a really healthy guy. Later, the
doctor said,
you know, it was your, you know, I was a marathon runner when I was young and
I don't drink. I'm athletic and I use my body pretty vigorously. And he said
that saved your life.
Like you didn't have a heart attack. Like you, you, you owe your life to that.
Oh, wow.
But the next morning, you know, I didn't know that I'd almost died. I had no
idea. I have two
little girls. I have a four year old and a one and a half year old. And the
most precious things to me,
I mean, I can't even describe it, obviously. And the fact that they almost lost
their dad was just
devastating. When the ICU nurse came in and said, how are you doing, Mr. Younger?
You're one lucky guy. You almost died yesterday. I had no idea. And then she
came back an hour
later and, um, and she said, how are you doing? And I said, you know,
physically I'm, and I was
throwing up blood. I was, I'm not, I was not doing very well physically, but I
said I was,
I said, but you know, I'm really struggling with what you told me. And, um, it's
really terrifying.
I didn't know. And I mean, I said, I almost died in my own driveway in front of
my family. And I
didn't even know, like, and I said, I keep thinking about it. I can't stop. And
she said,
the wisest things, one of the wisest things I've ever heard. She said, um,
she said, stop thinking of that moment as scary and start thinking of it as
sacred.
And she didn't elaborate. She didn't need to. And the next five days in the ICU,
I thought about
the word sacred and what the experience was now giving me access to.
And, you know, not to sound sort of like trite, but, um, life is a frigging
miracle. And, you know,
I'm not religious. I, you know, whatever. I, I don't think any of us, few of us,
I certainly didn't
quite understand, um, what a miracle it is that we're alive, that we exist,
that we draw breath,
that we can think about ourselves, that we're here for even one day is a
freaking miracle. And
you can forget that because your life gets busy. And all of a sudden I feel
like life was sort of
returned to me, meaning that I understood how sacred it is. And, um, again, I'm
an atheist. I don't mean
sacred in a religious sense. I mean, in the sense that it's has a profound
value and you mustn't,
mustn't, mustn't forget.
It's so easy to lose sight of that when you're caught up in your bills or
traffic or your
bullshit. And yeah, there's so much, so much of life that is essential in, in,
in order for you to
just keep on existing in society, but not really important.
Yeah. And you know, we're humans. We're, I mean, you know, we're wired to have
react to things,
you know, someone pisses you off or you're, you're tired or whatever. It's not
that we shouldn't have
those reactions. Those reactions also keep us alive. I mean, our emotional,
physical reactions,
are, are adaptive and they protect us. Right. But at the end of the day, you
don't want them to run
away with your experience of life. You want to reclaim it and just go right.
You know, all I have
to do is go back to that moment of what happened in that driveway and that I
was spared getting pulled
into that pit that didn't happen. And my daughters get to have a father. I get
to experience whatever the
rest of my life is, whatever it is, who knows how long I'll live, but I get, I,
I, that gift was returned
to me. Um, and I don't even know, I don't even know who to say thank you to
other than I've started
giving blood. 10, 10 people, 10 people donated blood and saved my life. I'll
never know who they are.
And that, um, you know, it makes you part of this sort of web of life, um, in a
way that it's,
you know, when I gave blood for the first time, you know, like after this
happened,
I gave blood and it made me feel so good. Uh, and now I've, I can't wait to do
it again.
Like you're, I'm part of something bigger and, and, and that's one of the most
profound human
joys is to be part of something greater than yourself. So this, this experience,
um, that you,
how long did it take you before you were fully recovered? Well, you know, I had,
I had a, you know,
gallon of blood in my abdomen and, and a gallon, well, whatever that amount of
blood in your body,
get it out, something like that. They can't, you know, it's a hematoma and my
body had to
gradually reabsorb it. Uh, so, you know, that takes months. And, uh, and now I'm
left with this
sort of psychological residue of the experience, which is, I have this, um, uh,
you know, renewed,
reinvigorated appreciation for life. Um, but also the, the truth about life is
that none of us know for
sure we're going to be alive at sunset. You know, I mean, we all know you can
get cancer or you can
die at a car accident or whatever, but really the truth is the thing that we're,
we're alive because
the tiniest membranes in your body are, are, are, are not rupturing. You know
what I mean? Like
the system that your body is, is like incredibly complex. And if something goes
wrong, you can be
dead in minutes and you can be totally healthy and that can happen. And the
fact that the universe
can just randomly take you out for, um, no apparent reason. Um, that's pretty
startling
news. If you think about it, I didn't know it worked that way and it can make
you kind of paranoid.
Did it make you paranoid? No, totally. Yeah. I mean, I just, every day I was
like,
I mean, this is gradually going away, but I just, I realized like, you don't
know,
you just don't know that you're going to be alive in an hour from now. And you're
going running,
you're reading a book to your daughter, you're whatever, having dinner with
some friends. And
now I like an hour from now I could be dead or the guy I'm talking to could be
dead. And none of us
know, and none of us can do anything about it. And that's just what life is. We're,
we're, we're
living on a rock hurtling through the universe. I mean, we're, we're, we're
part of the universe and
we exist that it's, um, and it's mercy really. Were you afterwards contemplating
what that pit was
and what it means and what it means to slide into that? And like, you know, I,
I started to do a
little research into the death. I want to write a book about this and I think I'm
going to call it
pulse. Ooh, I like the thing that keeps us alive. It's a good name. And why we're
alive and what
happens when you die? And I've just started doing some research into this and,
and the, the, the,
the visitation by dead ancestors is very common for people. Um, and often, um,
I mean, there's all
kinds of reasons that you might hallucinate when your brain's low on oxygen,
but I, you know, I didn't
hallucinate anyone in my family. I didn't hallucinate, I hallucinated my dead
father. Right. And that's
very, very common. And I didn't know I was dying. So it's not like I conjured
him up because I knew
I was headed somewhere. Uh, I was very confused and there he was trying to
comfort me and that's a
really common experience. So I looked into it. And so they have, they have all
these, you know, release
of ketamine and all like they have all these DMT and they have all these sort
of neurochemical explanations
for the subjective experience of dying for the person. And we only know this
because people come back
like I do and report what they saw and it's usually pretty weird, but it's
pretty weird in predictable
ways. Like a lot of people see the dead. It's as if they show up to help. And I
want to repeat,
I'm an atheist. I'm not religious. I don't believe in anything. And my dad was
a physicist.
So I want to sort of explain what happens in ways that he would, um, respect
scientifically.
And so one of the things they said is that you can take low oxygen, ketamine,
all these things that
physically could happen in the brain. You can, you can subject a, a, a healthy
person to those things
and they don't have the same kinds of hallucinations. Those hallucinations are
particular only to the
dying. And I want to know, I want to try to figure out what is going on in that
weird twilight space.
Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan experience for free, only on Spotify. Watch
back catalog JRE videos
on Spotify, including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio
experience on Spotify. You
can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download
episodes to save on data
costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a
premium account to watch new JRE
episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to
Spotify now to get this full
episode of the Joe Rogan experience.