Bestselling author, journalist, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger joins Rachel Martin, host of NPR’s Wild Card Podcast, to talk about his book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. The discussion takes place before a live audience at the Kentucky Author Forum and was recorded on February 3, 2025, at The Kentucky Center in Louisville.

LISTEN HERE or on your favorite podcast app.

WATCH HERE on KET’s website.

Sebastian Junger is a bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and a special correspondent at ABC News. He was a guest of Kentucky Author Forum in 2016, when he discussed his book, Tribe. Junger has covered major international news stories around the world and has received a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. He is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film Restrepo, (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Junger has written for magazines including Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside and Men’s Journal. His reporting on Afghanistan in 2000, profiling Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated just days before 9/11, became the subject of the National Geographic documentary Into the Forbidden Zone, and introduced America to the Afghan resistance fighting the Taliban. Junger’s bestselling book, The Perfect Storm, was based on a true story and was made into a major motion picture starring Kentucky native George Clooney.

His latest book, In My Time of Dying, is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery. A near-fatal health emergency spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die.