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 Younger. 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. Younger 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. Younger 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.

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