Feb 26, 2026

What happens when a high-level military intelligence analyst applies strategic data analysis to the mystery of death? In this episode, Jeff sits down with Don Winner, a former Air Force linguist, intelligence operator, and investigative journalist to discuss his transition from spying on global signals to investigating Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). In this episode you get the full background on the guest to really understand the mind of someone who has cracked the secret to life after death.

After a health scare involving his 92-year-old father, Don turned his professional analytical skills toward the “data” of the afterlife. Having investigated thousands of NDE accounts, Don breaks down the startlingly consistent patterns—from the “tunnel” and “the light” to life reviews and telepathic communication—that suggest our consciousness continues long after the heart stops.

Key Topics Discussed:

How intelligence collection techniques can be applied to spiritual experiences.

The universal “milestones” found in NDEs across cultures and history.

The difference between “Fear Death Experiences” and true NDEs.

Why modern medicine is creating a “revolution” in our understanding of the afterlife.

Chapter Timestamps

00:00 – Meet Don Winner: From Middletown to the Air Force

05:13 – Living with ADHD and the “Dopamine” Brain

10:50 – Becoming a Military Linguist: Level 6 TS-SCI Clearance

21:33 – Signals Intelligence: The Art of “Hand Jamming”

31:35 – Lessons in Analysis: Identifying What is Truly Useful

45:17 – Strategic Intelligence in Panama and Beyond

1:42:32 – The Catalyst: A Father’s Question About Death

1:48:33 – Analyzing NDEs: A Fact-Based, Bias-Free Approach

1:51:35 – 300,000 Years of Oral History and the Story of Gilgamesh

1:52:28 – The “Universal” NDE: Tunnel, Light, and Ancestors

1:55:41 – Fear Death Experiences vs. True Flatline NDEs

1:58:30 – Predictable Patterns: The Mechanics of the Soul

1:59:18 – Spirit Guides and the Transition Process

Podcast Interview with Don Winner

Host: This week’s guest is former US Air Force intelligence officer and investigative journalist Don Winner — known from shows such as 48 Hours, Dateline, Nightline, the Discovery Channel, the BBC, and others. Beyond his work exposing criminal networks and catching serial killers in Latin America, Don is also a leading researcher of near-death experiences, building one of the most comprehensive NDE case archives anywhere. He brings military precision, investigative rigor, and a rare depth of insight to his study of what happens at the edge of life. In this week’s episode, you’ll learn about all of that, plus so much more.

I reached out to you out of the blue — we’d never met before this — and I’m super glad we got to connect. Thanks for joining today.

Don: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate you.

Host: As far as topics, the podcast always starts the same way, so if you’re okay with it, let’s do that.

Don: Whatever you want to do.

Chapter 1: Meet Don Winner — From Middletown to the Air Force

Host: So, Don, where are you from?

Don: I’m from Middletown, New York, which is in the Hudson Valley region, about an hour’s drive north of New York City.

Host: About an hour — with traffic or without?

Don: Anywhere between two and a half hours or 45 minutes, depending on the time of day. If you happen to be going south in the afternoon when everybody’s leaving the city, you’re fine, but if you’re going into the city when everybody’s going in… New York City has a population of about eight million people, and that jumps to about 15 million every Monday through Friday during business hours. There’s a huge commute. A lot of people who live up here — firemen, policemen, healthcare workers, guys who drive subway trains, guys who do trash removal or plow the streets — all the services the city needs, but they live up here because living in New York City is incredibly expensive. Anyway, that’s the point — about an hour north, depending on traffic.

Host: Is it a pretty rural area? I’m imagining more farmland, more grassland.

Don: The city of Middletown has about 25,000–26,000 people. It’s an incorporated city — basically a very small town. It’s surrounded by shopping malls, Walmarts, strip malls, in the surrounding area called the Town of Wallkill, which is much more business-oriented and less residential. There’s also a junction of two major highways — 84, which runs east-west, and 17, which runs up into New York State — so it’s kind of a crossroads. The history of the town has to do with railroads; back in the 1800s, the rail lines all came together at Middletown, which brought a lot of industry and factories to town.

Host: Do you still see a lot of those roots? I feel like these old industrial towns often still carry remnants of that through the culture.

Don: Yeah, the brick buildings have all been bought up and turned into apartments. There used to be a knitting factory that made women’s stockings — now it’s apartments. There’s a brewery that was an abandoned building when I was a kid, now turned into apartments too. It was an old beer brewery that went out of business because of Prohibition — they shipped beer all over the place, then Prohibition killed them. It sat abandoned since the ’20s, and they turned it into apartments after I joined the military in 1980 — relatively recently, but it sat there for 60 years. It’s a brick building, it’s not going anywhere.

Host: That kind of speaks to the feel of the place. All right, so you’re in Middletown — did you stay there until you left and joined the military?

Don: Yeah, at 18 years old I graduated high school in June, and then I left to report for basic training on the 18th of September. Took a couple months off and went straight into the military.

Host: Were you a good student in high school?

Chapter 2: Living with ADHD and the “Dopamine” Brain

Don: No, I was absolutely terrible. I had the attention span of a butterfly, and if I wasn’t interested in something, I didn’t care. I’d do things like read the entire book in the first week of class — incredibly frustrating, because I have a relatively high IQ and I’m very inquisitive, and if something interests me, I’ll eat it alive. But if I’m in a room with 30 other students and the teacher’s going at the pace of the slowest guy in the room, I’m just like, “No, man, I can’t do that.” So I basically didn’t go to high school — I spent my time playing frisbee, hanging out, goofing off. Interestingly, I graduated with a Regents honors diploma, which New York State does, and I have no idea how, because I basically didn’t go. This was an era with no internet, no digital attendance tracking — teachers would take attendance and notice I never came to class, give me crap about it, but then I’d walk in and take the final exam and ace it most of the time, because I was hanging out in the library getting interested in economics — reading every economics book available, reading the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. There was one teacher who really busted on me for not coming to class, and I ended up correcting his final exam because he had mistakes on it.

Host: That’s funny.

Don: It’s amazing what you can learn — I could learn really well, but I was a terrible student for “the machine.” I just did not do well on the treadmill at all.

Host: This tracks with my understanding of you. It’s amazing what you can learn by reading tangential information and understanding what’s going on in the world. You talked about reading the Times, the Journal, economic periodicals — you just learn a lot about everything if you spend time reading quality publications.

Don: My brain feeds off of dopamine. If I get interested in something, I’m going to eat it alive — dive into it, consume everything, learn everything I can about it, until I’m interested in something else, and then I’ll wander over there. That’s just kind of the way I approach it.

Host: So how did following the dopamine hits — which I can heavily relate to — lead to you joining the military? I can see you in the library, skipping school, which is super interesting, by the way. So you’re skipping school, going to the library, consuming information that interests you — how did that end up connecting to the military?

Don: My best friend at the time, Joe Phillip, came up one day and said, “Hey, guess what, I joined the military — I’m going to join the Air Force, fix F-4 jets out at George Air Force Base in California,” which doesn’t exist anymore. I went, “You did what now?” He’s like, “Yeah.” I said, “Why the hell did you do that, Joe?” He goes, “Well, think about it — you live in a barracks, you’ve got a job, they teach you how to fix airplanes, for Christ’s sakes they even give you uniforms, they dress you.” I was like, “Okay.” Because I really wasn’t set up to go to college — I knew I needed some kind of structure, because I knew from my own experience in high school that who knows what would have happened to me if I hadn’t joined the military. So I said, “Let me go talk to the guy.” Long story short, joined the military, did 20 years.

Host: You said you knew you needed structure — was that something someone told you, or were you self-aware enough to recognize that yourself?

Don: I just knew that left to my own devices, it wasn’t going to go well for me. I just knew I needed some kind of structure. If you don’t show up for work in the military, that’s called AWOL — kind of a big deal, you can be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for not showing up. That structure — it’s not like, “Well, we’ll fire you,” it’s, “No, bad things will happen.” So yeah, I needed that structure.

Host: That’s super interesting, and I respect that you had the self-awareness at 17 or 18 to recognize you needed that in your life. So you joined the Air Force —

Don: Air Force, yes.

Host: — and did you end up serving with your buddy, or going somewhere different?

Chapter 3: Becoming a Military Linguist — Level 6 TS/SCI Clearance

Don: I didn’t know anything about the reality of serving in the military — only what I’d seen watching the Vietnam War on TV as a kid, war movies, comic books about World War II. But the way it works is, when you walk into a recruiting office and say you’re interested, they give you a series of tests to figure out your capabilities — math, spatial reasoning for mechanics, electronics, computers, language, all kinds of things. I did well on all of them. Then they bring you back into the recruiting center to decide what career path and job you’re going to do. There were six different guys there, each with a pitch — “We need security policemen to defend the airplanes and bases,” or — this is 1980, so the computer field was brand new, no PCs yet, but it was a thing — “We think you’d be really good working with computers.” There were others for electronics, radars, fixing planes. But the last guy said, “You’ve done really well on this language aptitude battery, we’d like you to be a linguist.” I said, “What’s that mean?” “We’re going to teach you a foreign language and you’re basically going to go spy on people.” That one came with a $2,000 bonus and two stripes if I completed training and made it to my first duty assignment. And $2,000 at that time was a lot of money.

Host: What year are we talking?

Don: 1980.

Host: Right, so $2,000 from 1980 to today, especially coming out of high school — that feels like so much money.

Don: Oh, I was in Korea, I bought a killer stereo system because they had all the stuff from Japan — I was rocking Zeppelin, brother, big speakers, Yamaha M-80 amplifiers, one for each channel. And I bought a camera — a Nikon F3, I was really into photography.

So I turned to those other guys and said, “Do any of you knuckleheads have $2,000 and two stripes on your arm?” They said no. I said, “I’m going with that guy.”

Host: Did you look at any of the other branches?

Don: I had friends who’d joined the Marine Corps, my father was in the Navy reserves during the Korean War, and my best friend had joined the Air Force, so I just started with the Air Force. I didn’t really know the difference — I just went downhill, you know.

Host: I like that — just follow the path where the water goes.

Don: My plan otherwise was probably going to be washing dishes at the local restaurant and drinking beer at night. Not much of a plan.

Host: Glad you took this approach. So you join the military — was it a surprise? Did you ever have one of those “what did I get myself into” moments?

Don: No, basic training was relatively easy — basically just shut up and do what you’re told. I was young, didn’t have aches and pains like now, was in good shape, physically active. If you just do what they tell you, they don’t yell at you, they yell at the other guy. So that was easy. Then it was off to language school for a year, and I had no idea what to expect. The way they do it: everybody takes a language aptitude test, and the better you do, the more in-demand the language they put you into. The guy who did the absolute best went into Arabic — this was right around when Jimmy Carter was president and Iran had taken the embassy, so they were scrambling to train Arabic linguists. The next tier was Korean and Chinese — I went into the Korean group, since they were also looking for a lot of people for Korean given North Korea had been a problem since the ’50s. So it was off to the Presidio of Monterey in California — beautiful place — for the entire year of ’81, studying Korean Monday through Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. — verbs, adjectives, vocabulary, Chinese characters.

Host: How did that work with your propensity to consume information? Was it a struggle?

Don: It was surprising that I had the ability to learn language and follow along okay. My attitude was day by day — I remember calling my parents and saying, “I’m still here, they haven’t washed me out yet.” They had block tests — a hundred lessons, with a big exam every 20 or 25 lessons — and if you passed, you moved to the next block. It was kind of a survival thing; the washout rate was pretty high. But I made it through. It was just simply: do the work. You’ve got to learn the language — that’s the job. So I did.

Host: So then you’re in California, but you didn’t stay there forever.

Don: That course was kind of the civilian side — getting a hotel room, day-to-day conversation in the language. The next six months was at an Air Force base in Texas — the military side, doing the classified listening-in-on-communications side of the job. It’s called signals intelligence — you’re listening to those signals, collecting, recording, transcribing them. That’s where I got my security clearance — a Level 6 TS/SCI clearance, by the end of 1981, beginning of 1982.

Host: Can you tell me what TS/SCI means?

Don: Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information. Compartmented just means you have to have a demonstrated need to know. The classification tiers — confidential, secret, top secret — basically describe the damage that would be done to the United States if the information were disclosed. Then you have caveats after that — for human intelligence versus signals intelligence versus overhead imagery from satellites, and so on — different ways the information is channeled and kept from people without a need to know.

Host: Level six — is that like a stripes-on-a-black-belt kind of thing, the higher the number the higher the level?

Don: Yeah, a Level 6 clearance at that time — and still — was pretty high, kind of the gold standard, where most people top out. I found out later in special operations there are a few levels beyond that, and tighter compartments too. There are two basic reasons to classify information: if you’re collecting it, you want to protect the source, because if the other side knows you’re listening to their communications, they’ll stop using that channel. The other side is operational — protecting plans like “we’re going in at night, coming from the north, fast-roping out of helicopters” — you don’t want your guys to get shot before they get there. And there’s industrial stuff too — protecting new technology you don’t want anyone to know about until you need the element of surprise.

Host: Can you talk about the different types of intelligence — your area was signals intelligence?

Chapter 4: Signals Intelligence — The Art of “Hand-Jamming”

Don: Ever listen to a scanner — a police scanner?

Host: Yeah, a buddy of mine had one growing up.

Don: So imagine hooking up a recording to that — you’re listening in, recording it, making notes about what’s going on, writing a little report: “There’s an accident on Highway so-and-so.” Military communications, especially at the low-level tactical level back in the early ’80s, weren’t that different. A lot of the communications were relatively low-power, VHF, not a lot of watts behind the signal, designed for tactical units just a few miles apart — you weren’t thinking about being 50 miles beyond the DMZ during a training operation worrying about anyone listening in.

Host: So your job was to take this information, listening live or recorded, and make notes of relevant information to paint a picture for someone to understand?

Don: It comes down to collection, processing, and reporting. The collection is in real time — you’re doing what we called a hand scan: as it’s being said and recorded, you’re following the conversation, and if there’s anything dangerous to our forces — an attack, something blowing up — you push out a report immediately. Then the rest of the job, when you’re not actively recording, is transcribing the tapes you or someone else recorded, and shipping that information back for longer-term analysis based on many sources.

Host: Why is it called a hand scan?

Don: We’d call it ham-jamming or hand-jamming or scanning — because imagine somebody listening to our conversation in real time, with a scratchy yellow legal pad, trying to write down everything as we’re saying it. You’ve got to follow the conversation and get the gist, not necessarily word-for-word — but if it’s a military unit saying, “Okay, we’re going across the border right now,” well, now we’ve got a problem.

Host: Did you develop your own system for taking notes, like court-reporter shorthand?

Don: Yeah, you develop your own little symbology — they teach you the basics, but you pick up your own things that work better for you.

Host: Makes sense — like taking notes in college and organizing them. How long did you do this job?

Don: Korean, until 1986 — six years, my first enlistment. I went to Korea, which at the time was a one-year remote tour, meaning your family doesn’t go with you — considered a hardship tour. Training was a year of language school, six months in Texas, then nine months of on-the-job training in Korea (categories 1, 2, 3 for both transcription and collection), so by the time I was finally a fully qualified operator, I had three months left on a one-year tour. So I extended — did two years back-to-back voluntarily, just to actually gain real experience as a fully qualified linguist. Spent ’82 to ’84 in Korea, then was assigned back to Fort Meade, Maryland, at the National Security Agency as an analyst — now analyzing the stuff pouring in from collection sites around the world.

Host: I bet that gave you a new appreciation for quality reports coming in.

Don: Yeah, it’s quantity and quality — different sources covering the same thing from different collection facilities give you a better idea of what’s going on. But the most important thing there was learning to be an analyst. Most people at NSA are civilians on a GS pay schedule — GS-7, 9, 11, 13, 15 — and they have a “professionalization program,” basically a school system: take certain classes, pass them, move up levels, open promotion tracks. That was available to us military guys too, so I signed up for everything I could get my hands on. There was also the National Security Operations Center, NSOC — a 24/7 facility, big room, lots of computer screens, no windows, no natural light, kind of like a casino so you don’t know what time it is. I volunteered as a backup for guys on shift there, covering the desk when someone had an appointment or was sick — it’s like the hub, the entire world represented, with different desks covering every part of the planet.

Host: Is NSOC at Fort Meade?

Don: Yep.

Host: Where does the information go from there?

Don: It’s all part of the national intelligence structure — intelligence is really simple: find out what people need to know, find it out, write a report, send it to a decision-maker, and the decision-maker decides what they want to blow up and when. That’s what it comes down to.

Host: Hard to poke a hole in that.

Don: When I became a journalist later, it was exactly the same thing — get the information, do the analysis, write the report, put out the news article, and people read it. The only difference is you’re putting it out to the public instead of a military decision-maker. The process is the same, if you’re doing it right.

Chapter 5: Lessons in Analysis — Identifying What Is Truly Useful

Host: Earlier you said this was where you learned to be an analyst. Was understanding what’s interesting or useful to your audience part of that?

Don: It comes down to the scenario. I remember, as a student in some of these classes, they’d give us a stream of intelligence reports as they came in — without telling us what was going on — and we’d speculate as a class. With each new report, the picture clarified, until at the end it’s like, “Here’s what was really going on.” One scenario: a Navy operation, turned out to be about a sunken Japanese WWII ship full of gold that another country — I think Chinese submarines — were recovering. We had no idea what they were doing at first. The point of it as an analyst or reporter: you’ve got to know what you know, know what you don’t know, factor things in. There was one real situation — I won’t go into details — that came down to: we were able to determine that the decision-maker on the other side hadn’t made up his mind yet. That’s why we didn’t know what they were going to do — because he didn’t know either.

Host: That’s a tricky situation to be in.

Don: That kind of stuff happens all the time.

Host: Does information like that “treasure hunting” scenario ever make it to the public?

Don: That one was an old training scenario from the ’60s, used to teach the concept — not real-time. It’s an example of how information trickles in and you have to figure it out as you go.

Host: Got it — that’s a training example, not a live event. So you spent time at Fort Meade, and then?

Don: At the six-year point of my first enlistment, I had to decide whether to get out or reenlist. At that time, the Air Force would say: if you reenlist and want to do something the Air Force wants and needs, they might make that happen. I’d already done Korean training, two years in Korea, and time at Fort Meade — and a lot of the older guys I worked with had been doing “Fort Meade–Osan Korea–Fort Meade–Osan Korea” for a full 20-year career, the exact same job over and over. I didn’t want to do that for 20 years. So I found out about the Peacetime Aerial Reconnaissance Program — same job, but flying on airplanes, earning flight pay, and every mission flown counted as a combat mission, earning air medals that helped toward promotion.

To set the scene: Oliver North, Iran-Contra, Central America, Ronald Reagan as president, before the Berlin Wall came down — right in the middle of the Cold War, with big concern about Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union pushing weapons into Cuba, which was supplying guerrillas throughout Central America. There was a real push for Spanish linguists, but the military had few professionally trained Spanish signals-intelligence linguists with real experience. So I said, “I’ll reenlist if I can go back to Monterey for Spanish, back to Texas for the technical side, through survival school in Spokane, and then to Panama to fly on C-130s.” They said, “Perfect, that’s exactly what we need.” At the same time, I decided that if I reenlisted once, I’d commit to doing the full 20 years. So I went back through Spanish training, survival school in Spokane, Washington, and shipped off to Panama in 1987.

Host: Why survival school — was that a requirement?

Don: If you’re flying on C-130s, there are two kinds of relevant training. One is combat-military-style: what if you get shot down and become a POW, picked up by partisans behind enemy lines — based on guys getting shot down in Vietnam all the time, parachuting into jungle they don’t know, looking for a Big Mac they can’t find. You learn food aversion, escape and evasion, what to eat, how to move, how to communicate.

Host: Because Big Macs aren’t available in the jungle.

Don: Right — you’re surrounded by protein, just not in the form of a Big Mac. One of the biggest things they teach is food aversion — the word of the day at survival school was “muck it on down,” don’t worry about it, just get the calories in because you need them. After that school, you’ll eat anything.

Host: Do you still have a little of that in you?

Don: A little — if it’s a survival situation, protein is protein, bro.

Host: People will do whatever it takes to survive. So, Spokane — that’s on the other side of the country from South America. Was survival school specific to certain environments?

Don: There are specialized survival schools for arctic, jungle, water/ocean ditching environments — but every air crew goes through that general school. They also have a “POW camp” there, for the recon guys specifically, since there’s a much higher chance that intelligence collectors operating close to hostile countries get snatched during peacetime and pressured into propaganda admissions — remember, this was the height of the Cold War. So there was some additional specialized training for people in my role.

Host: Thanks for going down that rabbit hole. So you go through training, end up stationed in Panama — how long did you stay?

Don: I was in Panama off and on from 1987 until I retired in 2000. The first tour was three years, 1987 to 1990. During that time was Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama to remove Manuel Noriega. I’d like to say I didn’t have to invade anybody — I was already there. I was actually standing on the tarmac for some of the famous footage when they finally captured Noriega at the Papal Nunciature in Panama City — they put him on a Blackhawk, flew him to Howard Air Force Base, walked him across the tarmac in handcuffs (I think it was DEA), and put him on the plane. I was right there — my little window into history. They used to call him “Cara de Piña,” pineapple face, because of acne scarring as a teenager.

Host: I’m guessing there’s more there. The recent Venezuela situation — does that hit close to home?

Chapter 6: Strategic Intelligence in Panama and Beyond

Don: We’ll come back to that. So 1987 to 1990 in Panama. After 1990, I was assigned back to Fort Meade, but not to NSA — to a worldwide deployable unit. The idea: you’ve got linguists from different “shreds” (specialties) — Arabic, Korean, Spanish, etc. — all assigned to this unit, and our operations superintendent, Bob Kohari, would get on the phone and find things for us to do. Our unit motto was “anytime, anywhere.” One year I spent 300 out of 365 days deployed — I’d come home Friday afternoon with a duffel bag of dirty laundry, wash clothes, maybe eat, and show up Saturday morning to deploy somewhere else.

One cool example: an operation with the USS America, an aircraft carrier battle group leaving Norfolk, steaming past Bermuda toward the North Atlantic for a “workup” exercise — they wanted to practice interoperability with national-level intelligence collection units like ours, and wanted a liaison aboard. I volunteered, while everyone else wanted to fly missions out of Bermuda and sit on the beach. As a result, I got to do a “trap” — landing on the carrier via a COD (carrier onboard delivery) aircraft — and spent about 10 days aboard, helping coordinate communications and crypto for the exercise.

The most interesting part: when I first got on the ship, a Navy commander was giving me a tour, and a guy walking by got greeted as “Morning, CAG” — the Commander of the Air Group. I just nodded. Then he stopped me and said, “That’s not one of my flight suits — who the hell are you?” Everyone who flies on a carrier works for the CAG, and he knows every flight suit and insignia, but mine was unfamiliar. I explained who I was, and he said, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do” — pulled off all my Velcro name tags, rank, insignia, unit patches, stuffed them in my pocket, and said, “Don’t wear any of that. I want you to get the full experience of being on an aircraft carrier, because this is probably the only time in your life you’ll get the chance. You can go anywhere you want — you’ve already got access to the secure spaces from your clearance. If anybody questions you, tell them to talk to me.” I’d basically been given the golden ticket. I ate breakfast with the swabbies, lunch with the chiefs, dinner with the admiral — I’d just show up at the admiral’s mess and they’d sit me down. I went everywhere I could think of, asking people what they were doing, and they’d just explain it because they had no idea who I was.

The best part: during nighttime combat takeoff and recovery exercises in the rain — full-afterburner takeoffs, with this long blue flame coming out the back of the plane, a real light show — I figured the best view would be from the bridge. I went up, found a really nice leather chair overlooking the flight line, and sat down with my coffee. Everyone on the bridge looked at me, then went back to their jobs. Turns out that was the captain’s — or in that case, the admiral’s — chair, which nobody sits in. But since nobody knew who I was, they figured if this guy has the guts to sit in that chair, more power to him. I watched takeoffs and landings, drank my coffee, and went about my business.

Host: Did you realize at some point whose chair it was?

Don: I knew exactly whose chair it was. I figured, worst case, they throw me overboard — probably not going to happen. There’s a power struggle on a carrier between the CAG, who’s in charge of the airplanes, and the ship’s captain, in charge of the boat. I was half-hoping the captain would walk in and ask who told me I could sit there, so I could say “the CAG did” — but that never happened. So I just enjoyed the show.

After that unit, I did seven years of night school while working full-time — first at Florida State University’s campus in Panama, then at the University of Maryland when I was at Fort Meade — classes two nights a week from 6 to 9 p.m. The military paid 75% of tuition, I paid 25% plus books, for seven years. Language training at Monterey counted toward an associate’s-degree level, but I still had to take most of the classes for the bachelor’s degree, which I finished around ’93–’94.

Host: Quick logistics question — how’d you attend Florida State classes while stationed in Panama?

Don: Florida State had a campus and classes right on Howard Air Force Base. It’s common — if you’re deployed somewhere, there’s often a satellite campus on base. At Fort Meade, for example, they used the high school campus at night for university classes.

After finishing my bachelor’s, there was a school called the Joint Military Intelligence College (JMIC) at the Defense Intelligence Agency, at Bolling Air Force Base — a Postgraduate Intelligence Program (PGIP). It’s designed for officers working toward major or lieutenant colonel who need a master’s degree to make full colonel — similar to how the war colleges work. The program was primarily for military intelligence officers, but had six slots, out of roughly 150 students, reserved for enlisted personnel — competitive admission. I applied, got selected, attended from ’94 to ’95, and graduated second in my class — there was an Air Force major I was neck-and-neck with, and I suspect (can’t prove it) the scoring on the last essay-format exam might have been nudged slightly so the highest GPA didn’t go to an enlisted guy in a room full of 150 officers. I understand it, but whatever.

That class was strategic intelligence — forget tactical, zoom out, look at the bigger picture, think longer-term. That was a real awakening for me, moving from minute-by-minute tactical thinking to strategic thinking. There was a professor, Mark Weisenbloom, who everyone hated because he used the Socratic method, making you think instead of handing you answers — I loved it, learned a ton from him and other excellent PhD instructors. It was like a finishing school for intel.

As a result, I got assigned to Special Operations Command South (SOCSOUTH), in Panama at the time — rather than going back to a plain-vanilla intel unit, they wanted to leverage the training they’d just paid for. I was in the intelligence section there for the next five years until I retired — intel work focused on Latin America and special operations.

Chapter 6 (continued)

Host: So you finished the DIA program and ended up working in Panama in special operations —

Don: Working in special operations was a real eye-opener. If it’s an Army unit, it’s “green,” Air Force is “blue” — a special operations unit with everybody assigned is called “purple.” Ours was primarily Army, maybe 80–85% Green Berets and Rangers, plus a smattering of Air Force and Navy guys and one or two token Marines. Really interesting to be around that community — guys like SEALs who’d been through all these filtering schools (airborne, ranger, Special Forces “SF tab,” Air Force combat controllers, Navy SEALs). All those schools really do is stress you physically as hard as possible to see if you’ll quit — can you still function, call in a fire mission, get the job done when everything goes to crap and the unexpected happens. These people had already been filtered five, six, seven times before showing up at a headquarters element, which is supposed to be kind of a reward — “now we’re going to polish you up so you can get promoted.”

The missions were incredible — everything from training with units from all over Latin America to real-world operations as situations came up. One example: a guerrilla group called Túpac Amaru took over the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, Peru, during a Christmas party — President Fujimori was Peruvian with Japanese heritage. About 12 guys with machine guns took roughly 300 hostages, including Americans, Canadians, Australians, basically the entire diplomatic corps stationed in Peru. We were instantly deployable — I had to keep a fully loaded duffel bag in my trunk at all times. No cell phones, just beepers; if the beeper went off with a certain code, it meant report directly to the airplane. This actually happened once while I was grocery shopping with my family at the commissary — beeper goes off, I say “Got to go,” and we literally left the cart in the store. They wanted a 10-minute response time from beeper to wheels-up.

We had a recall roster cheat sheet — different codes meaning different levels of urgency, up to “go to the airplane right now.” You keep your bag in the car at all times. We were considered the quick-reaction force for the Commander-in-Chief of US Southern Command — the only unit he could snap his fingers and have moving immediately, bringing communications, logistics, intelligence, and a combat element on the ground first, with heavier forces following.

So with Túpac Amaru, that’s when it escalates beyond our tier-two unit. National-level emergencies wake up the entire chain, and JSOC — the tier-one unit (Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, the 160th SOAR helicopter unit, the famous units) — takes over, and units like SOCSOUTH fall under them. I’d then be working not for the SOCSOUTH J2 colonel, but for the one-star general who’s the JSOC J2. That’s just how the structure works. We had lots of these situations pop up — often people taken hostage by bad actors in South America, and we’d go in, get them out.

Host: Did you deal with hostage negotiators in those situations?

Don: We didn’t do a lot of negotiating — find them, figure out a plan, go in, get the good guys out. It wasn’t like a downtown-hostage-standoff scenario. Those are bad people, and we’re going to do bad things to bad people and good things for good people. That’s really what it comes down to. Plus training scenarios and other work.

Host: You mentioned JSOC and SOCSOUTH — both commands but connected. How are the different commands organized?

Don: Geographically — SOCCENT is Central Command (Middle East), SOCEUR is Europe — these are regional second-tier units. JSOC is the big one, worldwide — for the major issues, like the recent Maduro operation, which would clearly be done by tier-one, not a SOCSOUTH-level unit. There’s also something called the JOC, the Joint Operations Center — the fusion center for all operational information, communications, logistics, personnel, and intelligence. When the Maduro operation was happening, I thought, “I would give anything to be in that JOC right now,” because that’s the focal point for all the operational and tactical information on aircraft, ships, drones, ground units. I saw the nighttime footage — two gunships, two Chinooks, five Apaches. You put the gunships first to eliminate anything that might shoot at you, the Chinooks fast-rope in the assault team to take the compound and get the target, and the Apaches fast-rope in a perimeter pattern facing outward to make sure nobody interferes. Snatch the target, load him on the aircraft, everybody pulls out. As soon as I saw that footage, I recognized exactly what I was looking at.

Host: Do you keep a close eye on that kind of news, given your background?

Don: If I’d still been in the military, I’d have been in that JOC, since Venezuela falls under SOUTHCOM responsibility — coordinated nationally, probably out of Florida or Puerto Rico, where the puppet masters controlling who’s doing what, where, when, why sit.

Host: Any thoughts on the Venezuela situation in general?

Don: It’s been a festering wound since the ’90s, when Hugo Chávez was first elected. When I was at SOCSOUTH, Venezuela actually reached out to the US government before Chávez took power, saying, “You’ve got to help us, this is going to be bad” — they knew what was coming, though I don’t think the US had a clear picture of what would unfold. Chávez was reelected something like seven times, brought a socialist agenda — the Bolivarian Revolution — and it turned into a mess. Maduro was his handpicked successor after Chávez died of cancer, and he’s been in power ever since. Now they’re laundering money for Russia, cozying up to Iran and China, trafficking drugs — Venezuela became a major cocaine pipeline into the US. There’s a long story there; I’ve actually written a book about it, soon to be published, on the history of cocaine trafficking and the development of drug operations in South America. To make a long story short, Hugo Chávez was a drug trafficker.

Host: You just casually dropped that you’ve written a book about this too. Can you give the quick version — is it something people can read soon?

Don: More chapters to go. I don’t want to do it halfass, so I’m taking my time. But you can trace the history of the drug war — I had an inside view of a lot of it. It starts with Pablo Escobar, and after he’s taken out, the FARC in Colombia wakes up one day in charge of a two-billion-dollar-a-year drug industry, basically taking over the country. Colombia, facing the loss of the entire country, went to the US, which came up with Plan Colombia — counterdrug battalions, which was effective, forcing the FARC out of Colombia and across the border into Venezuela. By the late ’90s, Hugo Chávez was in charge and welcomed the arrangement — became a state sponsor of organized drug trafficking, alongside figures like Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. They started flying cocaine produced by the FARC out of Venezuela.

Host: What’s the FARC, sorry?

Don: The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. So that cocaine got handed across the border to Mexican cartels via Nicaragua, which is where the really bloody Mexican drug cartels popped up in the late ’90s. Fast-forward, you add fentanyl, and then illegal immigration into the mix. As I started researching the Maduro/cocaine angle, it spread out into economics, oil, money laundering, fentanyl.

Strategically speaking: Trump wants to stop the war in Ukraine. Both Zelensky and Putin are, in different ways, profiting from continuing the conflict — so much money has poured into Ukraine that they don’t know what to do with it, and Putin can’t extract himself from the war in any coherent way, so both sides want to keep fighting. The only way to motivate Putin to stop is by cutting off the economics — and the way you do that is through oil.

Do you remember the headline that the president authorized CIA operations in Venezuela?

Host: I didn’t see that, but I believe it.

Don: That headline came out before the recent operation. I thought it was the stupidest headline ever, because of course the CIA’s been operating in Venezuela for 50 years. That headline itself was a psychological operation — that’s why there were Cubans guarding Maduro, because there was a $25 million bounty on his head, and all it takes is ten guys with guns deciding to collect it. The Cubans guarding him were the ones who died.

It’s all about shutting down the money. Venezuela’s money comes from illegal gold mining (an environmental disaster), oil, and drug trafficking. Shut down the drug trafficking — that’s why you’re seeing boats getting blown up. As soon as I saw the first boat blow up, I thought, “Whoa, that’s different — we never did that when I was doing counterdrug.” Gloves are off now.

Host: Why would they blow up the boat — was it carrying drugs, or oil?

Don: Drugs. They blew up a number of them. Shut down the drug money, shut down the oil money — there was an oil tanker, part of the so-called “shadow fleet” used to dodge sanctions, intercepted in the North Atlantic with a hidden, welded-shut compartment containing about 1.5 tons of gold from Venezuela and parts for drones. Trump’s enforcing the sanctions — they just seized the sixth of only about 16 vessels in that shadow fleet, which change registration, transponders, and painted names to launder money for Russia. If Russia doesn’t have oil money, it can’t continue the war in Ukraine — they’re already running out of manpower (look at Russia’s demographics, it’s astounding — they can’t sustain anything; that’s why North Koreans were brought in to fight, because Russia ran out of its own men, with roughly a million dead). Russia’s only real leverage left is nuclear weapons — in a conventional ground war, they can’t stand up to Europe or the US. So Trump’s approach is essentially: cut off the money, and the war ends.

Host: Interesting — so you think that’ll wrap up soon?

Don: Within about two months. And then what happens? Venezuela — Maduro’s now back on US shores. Then Iran goes off — you think that was an accident? That was a CIA operation; this is what the CIA does.

Host: The Iran situation was a CIA operation?

Don: The timing was classic. You’ve got operators on the ground working with the segment of the Iranian population unhappy with the Ayatollah regime, which has been exporting hate and terrorism for nearly 50 years — the vast majority of Iranians don’t think like the regime and want it over. CIA’s been organizing that for a long time. Venezuela goes first, then Iran — it lit up right afterward, like flipping a switch. With those two pieces off the board, the next is Cuba, which is also basically done because they got their gas from Venezuela, and that’s stopped — no solar, no wind, no fuel, generators stop, lights go out, people get angry.

So you take Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba off the board in one fell swoop. And Trump looks at all of it and sees a lot of good real estate — remember when he talked about the Gaza Strip and building hotels and casinos? That’s classically Trump — he looks at everything like a real estate development. Look at Cuba in the ’50s — hotels, casinos, beautiful beaches, a major vacation destination just 90 miles from Florida, before the revolution, the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis.

Host: That’s fascinating. Thanks for going down that rabbit hole.

Don: That’s what happened when I started writing the book — I started with “Maduro, bad guy, cocaine smuggling,” and it just kept expanding because you follow what’s interesting. If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right.

Host: All right, so coming back to where we were — you finished your education, finished your 20 years, how did that turn into your work in the private sector?

Don: After I retired, I got hired by a US military contractor to provide intelligence collection services for three-letter agencies throughout South America. That’s all I can say about that, since you sign non-disclosure agreements when you transition from military to civilian contractor work.

Host: Fair enough — and were you living in South America during this?

Chapter 7: The Catalyst — A Father’s Question About Death

Don: I did that for five years. In 2005, that contract ran out and terminated. I was in Panama and decided I wanted to stay there. I said, “Okay, I’m unemployed, no longer in the military, but there’s an opportunity here.” There was a large expat community in Panama — Americans, Canadians, Brits, Australians, Germans who spoke English but not Spanish — and they didn’t have a good source of news; a few people were trying but not doing a great job of it. I thought, “I can be a journalist.” Journalism is a very close cousin to intelligence reporting — same process: find out what’s going on, gather the information, analyze it, put it together in a format people can understand, and let them draw their own conclusions.

I made a conscious effort to keep bias out of it. In Panama, there are primarily three political parties, each with its own newspaper, radio station, and TV station, each slanted toward its own party and against the other two. I’d take a news report from one of these original sources, translate it from Spanish to English, credit the source clearly, and then add a separate “Editor’s Comment:” section, clearly labeled, where I’d give my own opinion — sometimes starting with something like, “Well, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Clearly my opinion, not hidden. If you agree, great; if you don’t, that’s fine too — I made a couple of assumptions: that the people reading what I wrote were smart, had their own opinions, and could draw their own conclusions. It’s not my job to push them one way or another, but I can tell them what I think as long as they know it’s clearly labeled as mine — commentary. About 85% of readers agreed with me, and even the 15% who didn’t still came to the site and read it because they appreciated the unbiased separation of news from commentary. Comments were wide open too — agree, disagree, whatever.

I was a one-man operation — ran the website, learned HTML, did all the sales, advertising, news collecting, reporting. At one point I considered expanding into every country in Latin America and decided against it — didn’t want that headache. I decided it would grow as big as it could get with just me running it.

That turned into reporting on serial killer cases — I got my 15 minutes of fame, ended up on Dateline, Nightline, did 48 Hours twice, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC in the UK, Discovery Channel.

One case: “Wild Bill,” William Dathan Holbert, and his wife Laura Michelle Reese. They murdered 13 people that I can prove I have information on; I got him to confess to six. When he was arrested and in prison, he got very religious — basically using religion to take over the prison social structure. I was talking to him on the phone and said, “Bill, I see you’ve gotten very religious now that you’re in prison.” He said yeah. I said, “Why don’t you tell me about this woman you murdered on this day, in this situation — where’d you bury her body?” He said he didn’t know what I was talking about — he never confessed to the others beyond the six. I know what happened to at least one, because I went to where he buried bodies, but that land’s since been bulldozed for housing developments, so those burial sites are probably never going to be resolved. I know he killed a German woman for her white SUV — stole the car, buried her behind the house he was renting on the western coast of Costa Rica, and sold the car. She was never identified — still an unsolved missing-person case, only known to have a European accent, possibly German.

Host: How did you go from running the website to solving murders?

Don: People would call me up: “Our friend is missing, we went to the Panamanian authorities, they’re not doing anything, can you help?” That’s how it happened every time — I call myself a one-trick pony.

Host: But why you specifically, the first time?

Don: Because I had the website, and everybody knew I was an investigative journalist. In the case of Wild Bill — after the invasion of Panama, the military forces eliminated Panama’s military entirely; they just have a police force now, tightly controlled, unable to act without a civilian prosecutor’s authorization. So in a remote area like Bocas del Toro, if someone’s reported missing, local authorities might do a token check, hear “she ran off with a guy on a sailboat,” and close the case. But the other Americans on the ground knew this particular individual was somehow involved, so I said, “Give me everything you know,” did my own investigation, and concluded beyond a shadow of a doubt that Wild Bill and his wife had murdered this woman, Sherry Hughes, to take over her property and business.

I went straight to the Panamanian Attorney General’s office — unlike the FBI, whose representatives at the embassy are limited to working only through their parallel Panamanian agency (the DIJ, Panama’s version of the FBI) and can’t go straight to higher officials, I didn’t work for anybody, so I could do whatever I wanted. Also, all the Panamanian political figures assumed I was CIA — I wasn’t, but I let people think what they wanted, because it meant they’d answer my calls and questions, mostly about political jockeying between rival figures who’d each tell me dirt on the others.

When I had the Wild Bill story solid, I walked straight into the Attorney General’s office: “Here’s what I’ve got — this guy killed this woman with his wife, here’s the information.” He said, “Interesting — can you come back at 4:30?” I came back, and he brought in the entire Panamanian press pack — all three TV stations, radio, newspapers, about 30 journalists. What I thought would be a private meeting turned into a press conference. I’d already published everything on my website before walking in — told myself I wouldn’t blow the investigation by publishing too early, but I hit “go” right before the meeting, so when the press conference happened, I could say, “All the information is on my website, take whatever pictures you want — what we need is to spread the word and find this guy.”

That turned into a manhunt. He was eventually arrested at the Costa Rica–Nicaragua border as he and his wife tried to escape. It played out almost like a movie scene — Costa Rican authorities caught up with him at a river border crossing, he escaped by boat up the river, Nicaraguan forces (who’d been listening to Costa Rican radio traffic) intercepted him with a gunboat mounted with a .50-caliber machine gun, ordered him to stop over a loudspeaker in Spanish, and when he ignored them, opened fire near the boat until he surrendered. Nicaragua arrested him and brought him to Managua; Costa Rica asked for their “serial killer” back, Nicaragua said no, milked the credit for about a week, then extradited him back to Panama, where he’s still in prison.

Host: That’s wild. And that turned into more cases?

Don: There was the Javier Martin case — a Spaniard murdering people on sailboats on the Caribbean side of Panama. I first heard about the case on a Thursday; the victim’s nephew flew down the next day, we did some work over the weekend, held a press conference Monday morning, and the suspect was arrested Monday afternoon — four days from notification to arrest. He’s still in prison, guilty — murdered several people, including a Frenchman named Javier Bouchard who was on a catamaran and also trafficking drugs.

You can search “Don Winner Panama serial killer” and find articles and footage from CBS 48 Hours, Dateline, Nightline going back years, including a 2021 article that still comes up.

Host: When we’re done, I’ll put together a list with links.

Don: The last one was Bryan Brimager, who murdered Yvonne Baldelli in Panama — chopped up her body, dumped it in the jungle, sold off all her belongings in Panama, went back to San Diego, and used her laptop to send spoofed emails to her relatives, pretending she was fine in Costa Rica. The emails actually traced back to his apartment in San Diego. In that case, I gave the FBI a key piece of information: he’d sold the machete he used to dismember her body on a local swap board in Panama — he’d cleaned it, but it still had her blood under the handle. They located the machete, took the handle off, found her DNA, and when confronted with that forensic evidence in San Diego, he confessed and took a plea deal — about 20 years, since it would have been logistically difficult to try internationally.

Host: How’d you find out about the machete?

Don: Same rabbit-hole focus — weeks of digging, forgetting to eat. I found a local Panama-based classifieds chat room — pre-Facebook, pre-Craigslist era — where he’d listed the machete for sale. The buyer asked, “What kind of shape is it in?” and he answered, “I’ve only used it to chop up one stripper.” That ended up presented in court. (I don’t actually believe Yvonne Baldelli was an exotic dancer — that’s just what he said.)

There was also another case before Wild Bill — a Panamanian man who murdered an American woman; that one never made national news because the murderer was politically connected, and Panamanian authorities tried to brush it under the rug.

Host: Incredible. So how does that turn into your work in near-death experiences?

Chapter 7 (continued): The Catalyst — A Father’s Question About Death

Don: Real simple start. My father is 92 years old. He had an incident — I had a doctor’s appointment about 40 minutes away, wintertime, and I asked if he wanted to come along since he wasn’t doing much. We drove down, I finished my appointment, and I could tell something was off with him — just wasn’t right. We got outside the doctor’s office, there’s a stone column under an overhang, and he leaned against it. I got in front of him: “Dad, are you okay?” He was staring through me, eyes unfocused, and that’s when he went down. He was wearing a heavy winter coat, so I grabbed it and gently lowered him to the ground instead of letting him fall hard.

We happened to be right in front of a building that included a cardiologist’s office, so I ran inside and used my “command voice” — projected loudly — “Help! Call 911, I believe my father is having a stroke, do it now.” Within seconds there were maybe 20–30 nurses and 5 doctors out there. To make a long story short, he had an undisclosed stomach bug, with diarrhea and vomiting, leading to dehydration, which caused him to pass out. He spent a couple of days in the hospital and then went home. A couple of weeks later, talking about the incident, he said the last thing that went through his mind as he was passing out was, “I wonder if this is what it feels like to die.” I thought, well, my 92-year-old father is thinking about what it’s like to die — is anybody shocked by that? That’s what prompted me to start investigating near-death experiences.

Host: Thank you for that background. So what was your next step — your dad poses the question directly, and then where did you take it from there?

Don: My dad had aunts and uncles when he was young — 10, 12 years old — who were very religious, but also very critical of him and my grandfather for not being as religious, and quite hypocritical, using religion to manipulate others for their own benefit. That left a sour taste in his mouth from an early age; he’s never been a church-going guy, but he’s also an amazing role model for morals, ethics, and values — has lived an impeccable life, would qualify for sainthood if he were in the right club, but he’s not. His favorite line has always been something like, “I hope that when the time comes, I’ll be pleasantly surprised to find out there is a God and a heaven.” So I decided there was a big question I could work on figuring out — and, rabbit hole, got focused, did nothing but that for a long time.

Host: You say your dad wasn’t heavily religious, but I think it’s hard for a lot of people to separate God, afterlife, and religion — they’re heavily connected. Just for context, would you consider yourself a religious person?

Don: No.

Host: Did you approach solving this the same way you approached your other investigative problems? It seems like you’re also very aware of religion in general — reading your book, knowing your fact-based approach, it lines up: there’s a strong attempt to keep conscious bias out of it.

Chapter 8: Analyzing NDEs — A Fact-Based, Bias-Free Approach

Don: Here’s the part I like about that angle: it’s not my job to tell anybody how to think about anything. And here’s the trump card — it does not matter at all what you believe. You can be an orthodox atheist who says, “Nope, you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you, that’s it, you’re done” — there’s no religion, no God — and it doesn’t matter, because you’re right that what’s going to happen is going to happen regardless. You can be Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Catholic, Jewish — doesn’t matter what culture or language. The data shows — and this isn’t me spouting nonsense — thousands, maybe millions of near-death experience accounts all point to the same thing. The same thing happens to everybody. Full stop.

I went through this process of looking at the data with no bias, just trying to figure it out. There’s a revolution happening right now because of internet access — YouTube, podcasts, databases, websites — more and more people talking about it. People who had an NDE 30 years ago used to stay quiet, afraid people would think the heart attack “got their brain too” and now they’re loopy. But now everybody’s talking about it, so that bias is fading. Combine that with modern medicine — I’ve had four heart attacks myself, open-heart surgery, carotid surgery, all kinds of health issues — and the level of medical availability we have now has never existed before in human history.

Three hundred thousand years of human history — easy to say, but you have to understand: writing was only developed 5,000 years ago. That’s 295,000 years of oral history where nothing could be written down because writing didn’t exist. What’s the first thing ever written down? Gilgamesh.

Host: Gilgamesh is the first writing? I didn’t know that — this is learning for me.

Chapter 9: 300,000 Years of Oral History and the Story of Gilgamesh

Don: Go read the Epic of Gilgamesh — this amazing, dramatic story, but nothing had ever been written down before that. So where did all that storytelling tradition come from? 300,000 years of oral history.

There’s a section in my book called “The Hunt” — a fictional scenario I created: a hunter-gatherer party in the African Rift Valley region, maybe 100,000 years ago. They’re out hunting, kill an animal, bringing it back, and one guy walking along a ridge gets struck by lightning.

Chapter 10: The “Universal” NDE — Tunnel, Light, and Ancestors

He’s dead — flatline dead. These are people who kill things for a living, so they know what dead looks like. They take the meat, hustle everyone else off the mountaintop to avoid more lightning strikes, and start preparing to carry his body back to camp. About five minutes later, he wakes up — and what story does he tell? The exact same near-death experience story that happens to everybody else.

When he tells that story, it becomes the most interesting story ever told around that clan’s campfire, repeated for generations even after everyone present that day is gone. And what are the basic elements? I died. I left my body. I went into the void. There was a tunnel. There’s a light. I went to the light. The being there knew everything — must be God. I went somewhere wonderful, so it must be heaven. I ran into my ancestors — grandmother, an uncle who died long ago. These are the classic elements of belief in an afterlife, the continuation of consciousness after death — you encounter a bright source of energy people now call God, but that’s just the word we assign to it. It’s always described as an impossibly bright light that doesn’t hurt your eyes — because a soul doesn’t have retinas, doesn’t have eyeballs, so you can’t burn out eyes that don’t exist. It’s a light you perceive but that communicates with you telepathically.

So that’s the classic experience: die, cross over, encounter the light, have your life review, sometimes get told your body is still viable and it’s time to go back — this was part of the plan you made before this life — reincarnation — and then you snap back into your body.

Host: A couple questions about this. Is there a consistent point at which an experience becomes a “near-death experience” — like the heart stopping?

Don: I had to draw my own data set for that.

Chapter 11: Fear-Death Experiences vs. True Flatline NDEs

There are a lot of people who describe “my life flashed before my eyes” — I’d call that a fear-death experience, not a true NDE. Like cresting the top of a roller coaster, or seeing a terrible car accident about to happen and thinking “we’re all going to die,” but then the airbags deploy and it’s not as bad as feared — in that moment, your soul kind of grabs the ejection handle, ready to bail, but there’s no actual flatline death involved. That happens a lot, and similar things happen with out-of-body experiences tied to a medical situation without an actual flatline death.

But for my own data set, I wanted actual dead people — the classic “shocked back to life” or similar scenario. There are countless ways to die — crushed by a car, drug overdoses, blown through a windshield and lying dead in the road while your consciousness floats 30 feet up. When you look at enough of these — and I’ve watched, read, and investigated thousands, to the point of being repetitive — both things can be true at once: the experience is highly individualized (it was their operation, their hospital, their doctor, their specific details), yet when you step back, the steps repeat predictably in the same pattern.

Chapter 12: Predictable Patterns — The Mechanics of the Soul

There are subsets — some people focus more on the life review, some have very brief experiences (a 40-second out-of-body experience on an operating table before being revived), but they still remember it.

Chapter 13: Spirit Guides and the Transition Process

Host: In those brief, abbreviated experiences, do the same milestones still happen?

Don: I tend to focus on the ones that catch my attention because they’re a little different, more in-depth, or sometimes funny. Have you heard the idea of a spirit guide?

Host: No.

Don: When you die and your soul leaves your body, a spirit guide is there to help you through the transition — reorienting from being in a human body on a three-dimensional Earth timeline. The funny one — and this happens often with people from a deep Christian upbringing — is one of my favorites: a guy dies, pops out of his body, looks around, sees his own body, realizes he’s dead. There’s a figure standing next to him, and he says, “You must be Jesus.” The figure — who had a sense of humor — says, “Nope, not Jesus.” “Well then, you must be God.” “Nope, not God either.” “Well, who the hell are you?” “I’m Drake” — just the guy’s name, not the famous rapper. “I’m your spirit guide, just here to help you transition — come on, we’re going this way, keep your hands and feet inside the car, it’ll be fine.” There’s a comedic element there, because the man was expecting religious imagery — that’s very common, since your brain is still adjusting from one side to the other.

Host: With an example like Drake, what’s your perspective — is this an actual afterlife experience, or, as I’ve heard one person describe it, more like the body being hardcoded with a way to “know what it needs to do to shut down”?

Don: There’s a chapter in the book called “The Science of Denial.” I took a hard look at that. When the medical field, doctors, and scientists look at near-death experiences, they focus completely on the physical body — like looking at a broken radio and concluding radio signals never existed. They explain it as insufficient oxygen, excess carbon dioxide, hormones, the body releasing survival chemicals as it’s dying. That works for some of it — but there’s a point where science can’t explain what unfolds, particularly the out-of-body experience.

Say I’m in a hospital room, alone, dying, while my family member is 200 feet down the hallway talking to a doctor I’ve never met — Dr. Jones, say, in charge of my care, but I have no idea who he is. It would be physically impossible for me to overhear that conversation. But unbeknownst to them, I die in the room and have an out-of-body experience — my soul wanders down the hallway and observes and hears the conversation. These cases of people seeing and hearing things they couldn’t possibly have access to happen with ridiculous frequency. There was one case where the person reported seeing a bald spot on the back of the doctor’s head, and a stain on his neck — information they couldn’t have known, since they’d never met him and were seeing him only from behind, from a vantage point near the ceiling. No explanation for it — but it happens constantly.

When I approached this — my own bias, opinion — I started off just generally aware of NDEs, not knowing much. As I investigated, it became interesting, then intriguing, then compelling, and eventually I went all the way through that progression to acceptance: this is just what happens, based on my analysis of the data. If you think I’m wrong, that’s fine — God bless — because it doesn’t matter what I think or what you think. Whatever happens when you die is going to happen. We all have an expiration date we can’t see. That’s why the book is called You’re Going to Die Someday, Right? — well, you are, and when it happens, you’ll find out.

Host: Something that stood out to me in the book was a line about describing the milestones, and then “the data stops.” How far do we get before the data stops for us right now?

Don: There’s a boundary you can reach. The only people we get to interview are those who die and come back because their body is still viable. If you’re instantly vaporized, we’re never interviewing you — you’re not coming back. The only people we ever talk to are those who were temporarily separated from their body, had the experience, and returned. There’s a subset of people who cross over far enough that they’re told, “If you go any further, you will not be able to come back — there is no return.” That’s the hard boundary. Anyone who’s gone past it has never been interviewed, by definition.

People who reach that boundary are often told things like, “You’ve got your kids, reasons to live, things in your life plan you designed before you were born that you still need to do.” It’s always presented as a choice — never a commandment. You make the decision to return, by free will.

Host: I have a thousand questions. What was the most surprising thing to you, looking back on this research?

Don: A couple of elements. The idea of hell, for example — you’ll be happy to know hell does not exist. It’s completely man-made, designed to create fear and control. A soul doesn’t have nerve endings — your soul could walk through the middle of the sun and be fine. Nothing hurts. Hell doesn’t exist.

That said, when you look at life reviews, people who’ve had genuinely difficult, traumatic lives will describe their NDE using the word “hell” — “I was in hell, going through hell” — because confronting the bad things in their life review, or the bad things that happened to them, was traumatic. But it’s always done in a compassionate way — like going to school, your soul learning and growing across multiple reincarnations.

Host: You’ve used the word “reincarnation” a couple times now — what do you mean by it here?

Don: Again, this is the data talking, not me. Before you come to a life on Earth, your eternal true self — the part of your soul that never leaves “the other side” — sends out a portion of that energy to live a life on Earth. You come up with a life plan beforehand: maybe you want to experience what it’s like to be handicapped, or face a chronic illness, or some other difficult situation, because there’s a lot to learn from it. Remember, time doesn’t exist on the other side — it’s not linear like here. Living an entire lifetime is basically like snapping your fingers; time is irrelevant there. An existence on Earth is considered one of the more difficult options — just look at human history, the Middle Ages, swords. You go through these experiences, learn things, come back, do it again, until eventually there’s nothing left to learn, and then you become a spirit guide for others — that’s where Drake comes from.

Have you heard of Jainism? J-A-I-N-I-S-M. It originated in northeast India, and it’s the seed cosmology for both Hinduism and Buddhism — both grew out of it. The problem with Jainism is it’s a really bad franchise — imagine a guy who makes amazing cheeseburgers on a street corner but has zero interest in opening more restaurants. Jainism never tried to recruit followers or spread. But if you look at what Jainism believes, it’s basically a photocopy of what you learn studying NDEs. Hinduism and Buddhism added elements to make it a more compelling, more “marketable” franchise — and the religions that survive and spread today are the ones that built the best franchises. There are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world — that’s a great franchise, a good model for growth, because that growth means power, control, money, influence.

Interestingly, Catholics have cut reincarnation out of the doctrine entirely — you only get one shot. And there’s a whole subset of Catholics who’ve had NDEs and were flabbergasted to learn reincarnation is real. One man described being shown something like a tapestry — an entire wall, where every block represented a life he himself had already designed and lived.

Host: Can he actually relive those, mentally?

Don: Relive them, yes — because the life review happens instantly, as a telepathic download, not like watching a movie. Your entire life, everything at once. This very conversation, you’ll be able to relive instantly when you reach that point in your own life review. And again, time doesn’t matter — you could take what feels like an eternity reviewing all those details until there’s nothing left to learn.

Host: Does the data suggest the reincarnations are always human lives, or also interspecies — plants, animals, bugs?

Don: I believe Buddhism or Hinduism tries to codify some of that, but here’s what I know for sure from the NDE data: the one thing we share with every living thing on Earth is that we’re all going to die — whether it’s a tree, a plant, an antelope, a worm in the ground. If it’s alive, it comes from the same life-energy source, which we call God — it’s all the same stuff. There are people who, as part of their NDE, after the life review and meeting their ancestors in the garden setting, have complete telepathic conversations with grass, flowers, trees. That’s a subset covered in the book.

Host: I have one more question, if I can. You mentioned the boundary that people can’t cross and come back. Do you have any data on people who narrated their experience right up to — but not past — that boundary, like someone in a semi-conscious state while dying, who narrates as they go and then ultimately does pass? Do those accounts differ from the ones where the person comes back?

Don: That’s a subset of people in palliative care — chronically ill, maybe with cancer — approaching death. There are instances where people kind of cross over partway and come back, while the body is essentially “waiting to give up the ghost.” Sometimes they’ll come back briefly and say, “I was just talking to Uncle Lou, who died 20 years ago.” These are like mini-NDEs as the body shuts down — like the soul has its hand on the ejection handle, ready to go, because the body — the “meat sack” we’re riding around in — has an expiration date, just like a gallon of milk. You’re not going to drink a hundred-year-old gallon of milk.

Host: This has been amazing. Is there anything else you want to cover before we wrap up?

Don: The biggest thing for me in the book is the historical, anthropological approach — the idea that ancient near-death experience stories were the seed for all these concepts. Why does practically every culture and language on the planet, no matter where, have some belief in an afterlife, a god figure, a soul, relatives in a “happy hunting ground” or equivalent? Where did that come from?

There’s a chapter in the book called “The Silence of the Denisovans.” There were — I forget the exact figure, something in the hundreds of billions of individual lives over time — Denisovans who existed for a very long stretch of human prehistory, and they never developed ritualistic burial. If you don’t believe in an afterlife, you just leave your dead where they fell. We have never discovered a single Denisovan burial — not one full skeleton, just bone fragments and teeth, despite an enormous population over hundreds of thousands of years.

Then come the Neanderthals, who coexisted with modern humans and Denisovans for around 200,000 years with no burials either. The first ritualistic Neanderthal burial — at a site in what’s now Israel, two caves about 50 meters apart, one inhabited by modern Homo sapiens, the other by a Neanderthal-hybrid group — happened around 120,000 years ago. I believe the concept of an afterlife was somehow culturally transmitted into the Neanderthal community from their human neighbors. After 200,000-plus years of zero burials, we suddenly start finding grave sites.

Here’s another striking one: when was the first time we ever found a ritualistic burial that included a weapon? The answer is with the advent of agriculture — about 11,000 years ago, still 6,000 years before writing existed. Prior to agriculture, as hunter-gatherers, if the group next door was a problem, you just moved on — there were enough resources that organized conflict had no payoff, no evidence of organized human conflict exists before agriculture. Once people settled, built houses, planted crops, accumulated things worth stealing, conflict became worthwhile — and that’s when weapons start appearing in graves. Earlier burials might include things like a stone hand-axe, but that was a tool for processing meat, not a weapon.

Host: How does the first identification of a grave site connect to belief in an afterlife specifically? Help me make that connection.

Don: Have you ever seen an animal bury another animal?

Host: I’ve never thought about it, but probably not.

Don: In the animal world, when an animal dies, it doesn’t get buried. I actually use “Rocky the Raccoon” in the book as an illustration. Imagine Rocky’s walking down the road one night, gets hit by a car, dies — he has a complete raccoon version of a near-death experience, leaves his body, looks down at himself, “Oh man, I’m dead,” meets a raccoon spirit guide. His body’s still viable, so he goes back in, shakes it off, thinks “that was the craziest thing that ever happened to me.” But what can a raccoon not do? Speak. He can’t relay that experience to anyone else — the story dies with him. That’s why there’s no raccoon pope, no raccoon churches.

If you can’t describe what happened linguistically — and I’m looking at this as a linguist — the story dies with you. I personally believe Denisovans lacked the particular anatomical structure required for complicated speech. You can do hand signals and gestures, but a complex, abstract concept like an afterlife requires real language. There’s a chapter in the book called “Words Can’t Explain” — even modern people who’ve had NDEs say there’s no human language adequate to describe the love, joy, compassion, vibrancy of colors they experienced. It’s not that it wasn’t happening to earlier hominids — it’s that they couldn’t record it or tell the story. That’s why I call it “the silence of the Denisovans” — I believe they had near-death experiences too, they were just a prototypical Rocky the Raccoon. They couldn’t tell the story. And if you can’t tell the story, as far as history’s concerned, it never happened.

Host: That’s so cool, I appreciate you breaking it down. This has really been fascinating — I’ve learned so much and I’m looking forward to diving into the book more. If it’s okay, I’ll put a link to your book and website in the show notes — what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Don: Email is best: don@winnernde.com — everything’s tagged with the same handle, “Winner NDE,” that’s my last name plus NDE. It’s also Winner NDE on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.