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What happens when we die? I’ve always been a cold, hard materialist on this one: the brain shuts down, consciousness fades away, and the lights go out. And beyond that, what else is there to say? I had no experience of life before I was born and I expect to have no experience of life after I die. As best I can tell, that’s the most reasonable assumption we can make about death. But “most reasonable” does not mean “definitely true.” The life-after-death question is one of the oldest we have and there are all sorts of theories about how consciousness, in some form or another, might survive the death of the body. However unlikely these possibilities might be (and I do think they’re unlikely), they’re not impossible. So how seriously should we take them? Sebastian Junger is a former war reporter, a documentarian, and the author of several books, including his most recent In My Time of Dying. A few years ago, Junger came as close as you possibly can to death. While his doctors struggled to revive him, he experienced things that rattled his understanding of reality and that left him with profound questions and unexpected revelations. So I invited Junger on The Gray Area to talk about what it’s like to almost die and what he’s come to believe about life and death. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing What happened on the day you almost died? Sebastian Junger I was 58 years old. It was four years ago. I’ve been a lifelong athlete. My health is very good, so it never occurred to me that I would have a sudden medical issue that would send me to the ER or kill me. I had no thoughts like that about myself.  One afternoon, it was during Covid, my family and I were living in a house in the woods in Massachusetts that had no cellphone coverage. It’s at the end of a dead-end dirt road. On the property is a cabin, no electricity or anything like that.  We went out there to spend a couple of hours and mid-sentence I felt this bolt of pain in my abdomen and I couldn’t make it go away. I sort of twisted and turned. I thought it was indigestion, and I stood up and almost fell over. So I sat back down and I said to my wife, “I’m going to need help. I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve never felt anything like this.” What was happening, I later found out, was that I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, one of several arteries that goes to the pancreas, and one of them had a bulge in it from a weak spot. And aneurysms are widow-makers. I mean, they’re really, really deadly, particularly in the abdomen, because it’s hard for the doctors to find them.  If you’re stabbed in the stomach and an artery is severed, the doctors sort of know where to put their finger, as it were, to plug the leak, but if it’s just internal hemorrhage, your abdomen is basically a big bowl of spaghetti. It’s very, very hard to find it.  So I was losing probably a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes, and there’s like 10 pints in the human body, 10 or 12 pints, so you can do the math. And I was a one-hour drive from the nearest hospital. I was a human hourglass, basically. Sean Illing What was the survival rate for your condition that day? Sebastian Junger The survival rate is as low as 30 percent, but I assume that that’s for a reasonable transport time to the hospital. It took me 90 minutes to get to a doctor. My survival chances were extremely low. Sean Illing So you’re in the hospital and there’s a moment when the surgeons and the nurses are working on you and they’re on your right side, and then on your left side there’s this pit of blackness and your father, who I think has been dead eight years at this point, suddenly appears. What happens next? Sebastian Junger The doctor was busy trying to put a large-gauge needle into my jugular vein through my neck. They numb you with lidocaine, so actually I didn’t feel much except the pressure. But at any rate, they were working on that and it seemed to take a long time and suddenly this black pit opened up underneath me and it felt as though I was getting pulled into it.  You can think of me as extremely drunk. I’m like, “Whoa, what’s that?” It didn’t occur to me that a black pit suddenly appearing makes no sense. I was just like, “Oh, there’s the pit. “Why am I getting pulled into it?”  I didn’t know I was dying, but I sort of had this animal sense that you don’t want to go into the infinitely black pit that just opened up underneath you, that’s just a bad idea. And if you get sucked in there, you’re probably not coming back. That was the feeling I had about it.  I started to panic and that’s when my dead father appeared above me in this energy form. It’s hard to describe. I can’t describe what it was like. I just perceived him. It’s not like there was a poster board of him floating above me. It wasn’t quite that tangible. He was communicating this incredible benevolence and love. He’s like, “Listen, you don’t have to fight it. You can come with me. I’ll take care of you. It’s going to be okay.”  I was horrified. I was like, “Go with you? You’re dead. I’m not going anywhere with you. What are you talking about? Get out of here!” I mean, I was horrified. And I said to the doctor, because I was conversant, “You got to hurry. You’re losing me. I’m going right now.” And I didn’t know where I was going, but it was very clear I was headed out, and I did not want to go. Sean Illing When you say communicating, what does that really mean?  Sebastian Junger I didn’t hear words, but I guess you would have to classify the communication as telepathic, and it was very specific. It was, “You don’t have to fight this. I’m here. I’ll take care of you. You can come with me.” Again, I’m a rationalist, but I’m a rationalist with questions. I wanted to know what that was. Was it just neurochemistry?  When I woke up the next morning in the ICU, I was in a lot of distress and the nurse came in and said, “Wow, congratulations, Mr. Junger, you made it. We almost lost you last night. You almost died.” And when she said that, that’s when I remembered my father. I was like, “Oh my God, I saw my father, and I saw the pit,” and it all came rushing back to me Sean Illing The experience you had is not all that uncommon. This kind of thing gets lumped under the umbrella of “near-death experiences.” At this point, does science have a firm grasp on what’s going on here? Sebastian Junger Yes and no. I mean, there was a case where a man was dying. I think he’d had a stroke and they had electrodes attached to his skull to signal different brain activity to know how to treat him. And he passed some point of no return and the doctor said, “It’s okay, you can turn the machines off,” basically, but the sensors were still in place on his skull. So they had the chance to watch what was happening to the brain waves in real time as a person died.  What they found was that in the 30 seconds before and after the moment of death — and of course death isn’t just confined to a single moment, it’s a spectrum — there was a surge in brain activity related to dreaming and memories and all kinds of other things. So one of the things that might happen when people die is that they experience this flood of sensations from their life. Why would they? Who knows? It’s hard to come up with this Darwinian reason for why this might be adaptive when a person’s dying. It’s not a question of survival and procreation, and Darwinism is not concerned with emotional comfort. It just doesn’t matter in the Darwinian arithmetic, so it’s hard to know what to make of it. Sean Illing One of the medical paradoxes here is that people who are dying experience near-total brain function collapse, and yet their awareness seems to crystallize, which seems impossible on its face. Do scientists have an explanation for this? Is it even a paradox at all, or does it just seem that way? Sebastian Junger I don’t think anyone knows. Ultimately, no one even knows if what we perceive during life is true. I mean, it’s known at the quantum level that observing a particle, a subatomic particle, changes its behavior. And of course, when you observe something, it’s a totally passive act. You’re not bombarding it with something. You’re just watching.  If a photon is sent through two slits and an impassable barrier, and it’s unobserved by a conscious mind, it will go through both slits simultaneously. And once you observe, it’s forced to pick one slit. So as the early physicists said, observation creates the reality that’s being observed, and then the snake starts to swallow its tail.  Sean Illing Science is great and we can map the neurochemical changes and I’m sure we can give a purely materialist explanation for them, but do you think it’s wise to leave it there or do you think there’s something just inherently mysterious about this that we’ll never quite understand? Sebastian Junger At one point, someone said to me, “You couldn’t explain what happened to you in rational terms. Why didn’t you turn to mystical terms?” And I said, “Because rational terms is what an explanation is.” The alternative is a story, and humans use stories to comfort themselves about things they can’t explain. I don’t choose to use the God story or the afterlife story to comfort myself about the unexplainable, which is what’s going to happen when I die.  But there is one thing that really stood out to me. I bought all the neurochemical explanations. I bought the hard-boiled rationalist explanation that we’re purely biological beings when we die and that’s it and that the flurry of experiences that dying people have is just the dying brain frantically bombarding us with signals like, “What’s going on? Stop. Stop, stop, stop!” Except there’s one thing I don’t understand.  If you give a roomful of people LSD, we know that 100 percent of those people will have hallucinations. We know why. We know how that works. There’s no mystery there. You don’t need God to explain that, but they’ll all hallucinate different things. And what’s strange about dying is that only the dying seem to see the dead. They do that in societies all around the world and have for ages. And the people who aren’t dying do not see the dead. And often, the dead are unwelcome and they’re a shock. It’s not some reassuring vision of Aunt Betty.  It’s more like, “Dad, what are you doing here?” Or my mother, as she died, she saw her dead brother, who she was not on speaking terms with. When she saw him, she was horrified. She was like, “What’s he doing here?” And I said, “Mom, it’s your brother, George. You have to be nice to him. He’s come a long way to see you.” She just frowned and said, “We’ll see about that.” She died a day later. So it’s not like these are comforting visions, and the fact that only the dying see the dead is the one thing that science can’t quite explain. It’s the one thing that really does make me wonder if maybe we don’t understand everything in scientific terms. Maybe there is something missing here that is very significant about how reality works, how life and death work, what consciousness is, and ultimately what the universe is. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

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BALTIMORE, MD - MAY 18: A man wearing an American flag suit places a bet for one of the earlier races in the day ahead of the 149th running of the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course on May 18, 2024 in Baltimore, Maryland. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images) If you’re an American looking to make some money betting on future elections, I have some bad news. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency tasked with regulating financial products like derivatives, has voted 3-2 for a proposal to ban “event contracts” on elections, but also on sports and on events like the Oscars. The rule targets prediction markets, sites like PredictIt or Kalshi that let you place real money on events happening in the future. It probably won’t be in effect until after November, but if you want to bet on the 2026 midterms, you may be out of luck.  The case for prediction markets is simple: They give observers valuable information about the future. The information may seem low stakes in the case of the Oscars or sports, but obviously who controls the presidency is of public interest, and with polling getting harder and harder, we need all the help we can get in forecasting and understanding election results. I find these arguments pretty persuasive, and the arguments raised against legally allowing prediction markets frankly silly. Sports betting is now legal in 38 states and DC. It seems incredibly perverse that bets on the Knicks and Pacers would be legal but bets on Senate races that provide actually useful information to citizens the same way polls do would be banned.  At the same time, I’m skeptical that a bad legal regime is really what’s holding prediction markets back. Nick Whitaker and J. Zachary Mazlish have a smart essay in Works in Progress outlining a theory I find persuasive: prediction markets aren’t working because they don’t provide enough value to the kind of people you need to make a market work. Who puts money in a prediction market? While the proposed CFTC ban is very broad, prediction markets on subjects other than elections are usually legal. At Kalshi right now, you can bet on what the Rotten Tomatoes score will be for Francis Ford Coppola’s comeback movie Megapolis (bets are currently hovering around 50), whether the Fed will cut interest rates before the end of July, and how thin Arctic Sea Ice will be next summer. But these markets have not exactly taken the world by storm. Only 14 markets on Kalshi have $100,000 or more bet on them. That may seem like a lot, but compared to the stock market or sports betting it’s a pittance. What’s more, the top four markets are all about Fed interest rates, which, as Whitaker and Mazlish note, you can already bet on through the much larger futures market. The novel opportunities prediction markets offer, like betting on Megapolis’s Rotten Tomatoes score, are less utilized. In a world where the markets are efficient and reasonably well-used, there are strong theoretical reasons to think the prices they produce will be accurate. If they weren’t accurate, and it was possible to know that, then someone could be making a ton of money betting in a different way. And once they made that bet, the market would move and become more accurate. For prediction markets to be obviously wrong, someone would need to be leaving easy money on the table, and that doesn’t normally happen in a capitalist society. But when they aren’t well-utilized, this argument doesn’t follow. The price might be wrong simply because the amount of money at stake is too small for people who know better to bother wagering, because the amount they can win isn’t worth the trouble. This is the heart of Whitaker and Mazlish’s case. They divide participants in betting markets into three types: savers, who try to grow their wealth; gamblers, for whom they’re entertainment; and “sharps,” who try to make money from understanding the market better than others.  For none of these groups are prediction markets very useful. You should absolutely not invest your 401(k) in a prediction market; whereas the total value of the stock market grows over time, prediction markets are zero-sum. If you take your savings out of the S&P 500 and put it in buying both “yes” and “no” on the “will The Tortured Poets Department top the Billboard charts for over 10 weeks” contract, you will absolutely lose money. Savers are out. Gambling is a more plausible case for prediction markets. But Whitaker and Mazlish observe that in the UK, where this is all much less regulated, the popularity of sports betting completely swamps that of any other kind of contract. Yes, people like to gamble — but just about sports.  That makes sense: Sports happen in real time, where the odds are fluctuating constantly, and where betting in real time can give you a certain rush. In-game betting, for instance, is especially popular. Other sorts of questions prediction markets might help us understand — Who’s going to be the next president of Iran? Will China attack Taiwan? Will bird flu become a pandemic? — don’t have this dynamic. They aren’t exciting. “Simply put,” as Whitaker and Mizlash write, “most things that we might want to know about the future aren’t much fun to bet on.” That leaves the sharps (sharks?), who are trying to make money by being more right than the next guy. Prediction markets would be great for them … if there was anyone for them to bet against. But without savers and gamblers to profit off of, the gains for sharps are limited. And if everyone else investing is also a reasonably smart sharp, isn’t that a signal that they’re probably right, and you’ll probably lose betting against them? Without much to offer sharps, savers, or gamblers, prediction markets are left with … no one.  There’s no harm in trying The main legal prediction market in the US, Kalshi, is pretty small but its predictive record is still decent. More to the point, limits in the power of prediction markets aren’t a good reason to ban them, as the CFTC is attempting. In fact, it’s hard to find any good reason to ban them. Six Democratic Senators wrote to the CFTC last year that “billionaires could expand their already outsized influence on politics by wagering extraordinary bets while simultaneously contributing to a specific candidate or party.” But billionaires are already able to place unlimited bets on stocks in industries like clean energy or firearms whose fortunes depend heavily on who’s in charge of the government; prediction markets would merely make the information driving those bets easier for the rest of us to access. The idea that these billionaires could swing elections just to make money on bets is similarly far-fetched, as the writer Maxim Lott points out: “the thing with election manipulation is that even the most powerful individuals are rarely in a position to tip an election. It’s much harder to flip an election than a sports match, because of the number of people involved.” More empirically, Britain has had a tradition of electoral betting dating back to before the Magna Carta and has had a legal market since 1961, without any of the horror stories the senators invoke coming to pass. They’ve done a decent job of predicting election winners, and you won’t find any wild stories about how Tony Blair won in 1997 because Lord Sainsbury really wanted to make sure his “Labour wins” contracts cashed out. But I agree with Whitaker and Mazlish that real-money prediction markets need a better value proposition to succeed, even with more reasonable regulations. I’ve been surprised at the vibrancy of Manifold, a prediction market that only uses play money. The whole point of prediction markets is that they make you have “skin the game,” something to lose if you’re wrong. All you lose in Manifold is “mana,” a fake currency. But the frivolity might be part of the point. Precisely because you don’t put real money up, it’s easier for people to have fun making silly markets and betting on silly stuff. It’s a free form of social media engagement, like arguing on Twitter or Reddit.  Maybe the more important thing is being simple and fun.

They did not break the mold when they made Glen Powell. That’s not to say the actor isn’t talented—after first really noticing him as a strapping baseball hunk in the filmmaker Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, I figured Hollywood would take quick notice of his charms. Since then, he’s vaulted to fame in movies such as Set It Up, Top Gun: Maverick, and Anyone but You. But he’s a familiar sort of star, the kind of big-screen hottie with a twinkling smile who can slot right into any old blockbuster. And Linklater uses that dazzling anonymity to perfection in Hit Man, a movie that’s well aware of what a looker Powell is, but equally cognizant of his chameleonic nature.Based on a Texas Monthly article about a real-life police contractor, Hit Man is an airy comedy (written by Linklater and Powell) that hones and deploys the lead actor’s on-screen image in ways I couldn’t believe. Powell plays Gary Johnson, an unassuming college professor who moonlights with the New Orleans Police Department as a pretend contract killer. He meets with potential clients, then helps the cops capture them as the clients arrange for him to murder someone. The film and article point out that the profession of “hit man” is basically an invented one—this is not a job that anyone can be sure is real. But America’s movie-addled idea of one is all that Gary has to be.Linklater has worked in every imaginable genre over his long career, but whether he’s making futuristic sci-fi like A Scanner Darkly or a true-crime drama like Bernie, his storytelling always has a sweet sort of shagginess to it. This is true of Hit Man, particularly in its first act: Gary, although friendly and handsome, is a pretty bland guy who stumbles into his part-time police gig almost by happenstance, and then leans into it like he’s taking an intro improv course. He buys clothes, wigs, and fake mustaches and affects funny accents, greeting each potential client as a new criminal stereotype (a biker dude, a Russian mobster, a fussy sociopath).[Read: Before Sunrise, 20 years later]It's fun to watch Powell slip into costume after costume, essentially a long-running joke to the audience about his versatility. Although Hollywood has been quick to cast him as the confident romantic lead, Powell reveals Gary to be a person who gets perverse joy out of pretending to be someone else (and doing a good job of it). Linklater, too, is having fun with the image of America’s everyman, creating a comedic noir where a seemingly mild-mannered hero has a shifty streak. The work Gary’s doing is also a little icky: essentially tricking people into confessing their murderous desires on tape, rather than catching them in the act.Still, the people Gary is ensnaring largely present as criminal lowlifes until he runs into Maddy Masters (Adria Arjona), a woman seeking Gary’s “hit man” to take care of her abusive husband. As in any good noir, Gary immediately falls for this beautiful woman, and that soft spot threatens to be his entire undoing, drawing him into a tangled web of actual criminality too tasty to spoil further. The film’s spiral into romantic drama wouldn’t work without Powell and Arjona’s crackling chemistry. Arjona has pulled her weight in stale supporting roles in a few bad action movies (Morbius, Pacific Rim Uprising), but this is a stunning star turn. She matches Powell’s charm and raises the stakes of what had been a more frivolous crime comedy.That’s what Linklater can do better than anyone when he’s locked in, though: turn a low-key, humorous indie into something more profound just through his mastery of tone and his trust in his actors. He’s been on an odd run of late, making adult dramas, such as Last Flag Flying and Where’d You Go, Bernadette, that felt leaden in their storytelling. Hit Man is his best movie since Everybody Wants Some!!, a testament to the strength of his partnership with Powell; it’s also just a sexy, fun movie for grown-ups that believes in its story rather than empty spectacle. One of Hit Man’s climactic scenes got awed gasps out of my audience akin to those Powell had earned for his aerial derring-do in Top Gun; this is a rare romantic comedy to see with a roaring crowd.

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