#35 - So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish: A Father’s Search for Meaning After Loss

This week’s caller, a father who lost his son to suicide eighteen months ago, speaks with rare clarity about grief, meaning, and why skepticism doesn’t have to harden into despair. The premise is simple and brave: if consciousness is a function of the brain and ends when the brain stops, how do we live with love and purpose anyway?

We trace the moment death moved from abstract to intimate, and how that shift rewired his priorities. Together, we explore the boundaries between belief and evidence, the role of expertise in a world drowning in noise, and the difference between orthodoxy and honest inquiry. It’s a grounded look at life and death through the lens of neuroscience, traumatic brain injury, and the humility to say “I don’t know,” paired with the courage to keep asking.

Along the way, fear of mortality gives way to something sturdier: presence. Not as a slogan, but as a practice that slows time and fills ordinary moments with weight—coffee with a friend, fresh air on a hard day, a laugh that lightens the room. He describes a pilgrimage to wild places, carrying a small portion of his son’s ashes to mountains and lakes his son hoped to see. No grand promises—just a vow to live fully, love fiercely, and make meaning in the world we can still touch.

If you’re craving real talk about death, grief, science, and the fragile gift of being alive, press play. Then share this with someone you love, subscribe for more honest conversations, and leave a review to tell us what presence looks like in your life today.

Book Recommendation: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Maybe the most emotional book recommendation we’ve had yet.)

If you’d like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.

Memorial Jewelry by Nia Emberly
Transform ashes into pendants and bracelets that carry love every day.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Chapters

• 1:01 Sponsor: Nia Emberly
• 1:36 Episode Intro
• 4:39 The Call Begins
• 7:54 Why Talk About Death At All
• 9:19 Losing A Son To Suicide
• 13:11 Hitchhiker’s Guide, Grief, And Tribute
• 16:35 What Happens When We Die?
• 21:51 Belief, Evidence, And Thresholds
• 27:28 Are We Orthodox About Science
• 31:47 Trust, Expertise, And Noise
• 35:25 Miracles
• 45:22 What's one experience?
• 48:39 Voicemail

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 6:35

Hey Zach. Hey, how's it going?

SPEAKER_03: 6:38

Good. How are you?

SPEAKER_00: 6:39

Good. Sorry to throw the I don't know if it's a wrench or anything, but it's kind of it's kind of fun to do like an old school phone call.

SPEAKER_04: 6:46

Yeah, no, that's fine. Yeah, I'm good with that. Just usually it's the it's the whole video and you gotta have boom mics and stuff like that these days. Everybody's high tech.

SPEAKER_00: 6:55

Totally. When I first started the project, and when I was just interviewing friends and and from there, I had this room, which I'm recording from now, but I have the soundproofing up and I had two microphones and I had it this all like perfected and it was gonna sound great. And then I started doing these anonymous calls, and I can't tell you how many people I've had tell me, oh, I just love the kind of crappy phone call sound. It just makes it feel real. And I'm like, cool. So I spent all this time and money making it sound really good on my app and you just really appreciate the phone call. So it's very interesting. But I have gone back and forth about doing it through Zoom or you know, it's something where we can see each other, but there's there's something I I talked about this with someone recently. Just about kind of like the dance of doing a phone call, which like we're so now used to the visual cues of being able to see another person and when they're like starting to stop talking or whatever. And it's kind of like going back to when you didn't have that, and so we're it's this kind of like back and forth.

SPEAKER_04: 7:58

I think there's actually something uh more intimate about a phone call. Yeah. In a way, what's happened now is that the the video side of it has become you are presenting yourself. Yeah, you know, it feels like a bit of like an interview.

SPEAKER_01: 8:12

Totally.

SPEAKER_04: 8:12

I think there's a little bit of formality to it where a phone call is like two two people chatting, and yeah, I I love that old school stuff. And I think we're seeing it with video too, is that you know, highly produced videos out and and and rough cut, you know, very you know, behind the scenes videos in.

SPEAKER_01: 8:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 8:27

I think it is this kind of move toward some sort of authenticity and people seeking something that has a raw edge to it. And I think it's great.

SPEAKER_00: 8:35

Yeah, totally. I think you're right. There's there is an intimacy to it, even though it's like more disconnected, although it feels more connected. And I and I think the other aspect of it is everybody's tired of doing Zoom calls. You know, like yeah, I I'm like, I want to do something in person, or or at least this feels different. So um yeah. It feels different.

SPEAKER_04: 8:55

Yeah, it was novel. Zoom was novel in 2020. Five years later, Zoom is like going to work, right? It feels like work. Yeah, and a lot of people a lot of people are a little sensitized to how they look. And yeah, so you get into this whole like, am I looking at myself? And like it it does create a little bit of, well, I just think self-awareness and um even just self-consciousness that a telephone call doesn't.

SPEAKER_00: 9:18

Yeah, well, yeah, I love it. Yeah, we're here, and I'm glad you're an interesting case for the podcast because you're the first person to ever leave a voicemail, and then we exchanged a few texts, and that has led to now doing a full call. So you're the first person to double dip and do a voicemail on a call. And I'm I'm I'm really excited about it. I think you have an amazing story to talk about. So maybe just kind of briefly, I am always very curious why someone would be interested in having a conversation about death.

SPEAKER_04: 9:49

Well, uh I've always been, I thought, a bit of an armchair philosopher in life. I was somebody that grew up without any spiritual traditions in my family. My my dad grew up Catholic himself, and it never really took for him. So he always called himself a recovering Catholic, which the term that he used for it, and did not uh did not take us to church. And my mom was never religious, and so I've I've considered myself more sort of philosophical throughout my life. But I've always been really interested, just interested in the topic of life and how we get things out of life. And certainly death was very theoretical to me for most of my life. I I didn't have a close experience with death. I think what's interesting about humans is that when death is even one and a half steps away from us, it is still very far in a way. Yes. You know, we hear about death all the time.

SPEAKER_01: 10:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 10:42

Hear about, you know, again, the the classic one person's death is a tragedy in a million is a statistic, is that we we know death is going on all the time. I had people die when I was a kid from accidents, and uh knew a friend, uh close friend who died by suicide, a few other people who weren't as close to me that died by suicide when I was younger, but they were not my immediate circle in my life. And I think there's a huge difference between death touching you in those ways, and then you know, when I lost my son to suicide last April, it was just an entirely different context of death. And death sort of came to my life and visited me in a way that was incredibly unexpected and incredibly shocking and incredibly traumatic. And so, of course, then when I he became aware of your podcast and the topic, you know, it has in the last 18 months since he died, it has really made my life so much more focused on the concept of what do you do with your life? What does life mean? What does death mean? So it's it's just become much more of a really relevant topic for me from a sort of intellectual curiosity, you might say, or again, a sort of philosophical thing, to something very intimate to me now.

SPEAKER_00: 11:57

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I think we have somewhat similar backgrounds. And I usually I don't ask any questions and I just want to say something here because I think you're so incredibly right about this one and a half degree or degrees or whatever we want to call it of like separation. Because even to some extent, you know, I've lost grandparents, but that's still almost not immediate enough for it to like really have an impact. And so I think uh this project for me to some extent has been very much a philosophical endeavor and exploring that side of it. And then when I kind of opened the doors up to talking to people completely anonymously and started hearing these stories, I think it shifted things. Not that I know what you've experienced and what you've gone through, but I I think that's actually a really profound insight on how, at least in our society, in our culture, we look at death. It doesn't really, and I don't want to say it doesn't matter, but in some extents, we act like it doesn't matter until it's that one degree away. Brilliant statement.

SPEAKER_04: 13:02

That's hopeful. It was my experience that I sort of thought I knew what life was like, and I thought I knew what death would be like, or what I thought about death. Yeah, but I had no idea until you know, with my son, just being that close to you. So I think if a spouse or you know, a parent or a child dies, it's just such a different experience. And with some people, it's their animal, like their their pet that's that that's literally like their best friend.

SPEAKER_01: 13:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 13:30

It it isn't even necessarily human always, but death, death just you know, when it's that close, it really is just an entirely different kind of experience. And it sort of takes over your life for a while when you get into deep grief and it and it sort of wrecks your life in certain ways for a while, and everybody gets sort of broken by it to a degree. That's just different. Yeah. And again, yeah, you know, your your grandparents die, and it's like, well, she was 80, and yeah, yeah, she had a great expected. And it's part of the natural order, but this sort of like death when it comes to you unexpectedly, you know, whether it's an accident, something like suicide, which is which adds a whole other level of trauma, that's that's you know, just a different animal on top of it. But it it just is a different experience, and it's really changed me so fundamentally as a person around what I think about life and death, and really what the meaning of my life is changed dramatically 18 months ago. And it's still changing, and it's not done changing, but it just set me on a different course.

SPEAKER_00: 14:30

Yeah. Wow, I'm super excited to dig in and hear more of the story. Like from what I know from your voicemail and just from our little interactions, the these are the things that people need to hear. I think these are things that we need to talk about as a culture. Maybe just to kind of get to know you a little bit, obviously keeping the anonymity and everything so you can feel comfortable saying whatever. Maybe just like a rough idea of where you live, city, state, and then your favorite book and why.

SPEAKER_04: 14:58

I live in Georgia uh in the US, uh, originally from Pennsylvania, and I'm in my mid-50s. And what's my favorite book and why? That's a tough one. I've had many over my life. Probably the one that is most relevant to this conversation is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

SPEAKER_00: 15:16

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_04: 15:17

Which is a Douglas Adams book, very well-known book, but it connects to my son's death because he quoted a line from that series of books. There's a whole series of books. The Hitchhiker's Guide is the first one. But they are sort of wildly satirical science fiction books. And what I did love about the series and always really enjoyed was it just did not take, again, sort of the universe very seriously or life and death very seriously. It was just a wildly satirical, fun sort of thing, hooked fun at all sorts of things. But my son actually ended his email that he left us when he died with so long and thanks for all the fish. Somehow is a I knew you were gonna say that. A sort of yeah, it's a sort of pun. It was the last message from the dolphins for those that don't know the story. But the dolphins were the smartest species on the earth and knew that the earth was going to be destroyed and decided to leave of their own accord. And before they left, they kind of sent this last message, which was misinterpreted as just a very complex trick that that they were trying to do by the humans, of course, because we don't get it.

SPEAKER_01: 16:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 16:21

And it was so long and thanks for all the fish. So he had put that in his email. That that book has always meant a lot to me, but because he referenced it, I'll I'll say it's probably my favorite book. So what I do now is I actually find copies of it at places like Goodwill, and then I put an inscription about him in it, and I put them in the shared libraries. It's kind of a little a little gift out to people. It kind of spreads that book. And the book is really about not taking ourselves so damn seriously. It is part of what that book, and it's sort of part of who he was. He was so wonderfully silly and didn't take himself seriously, and was the the most humorous and sweet person, and he just was silly all the time. And I think that is such a heartbreaking goodbye message in a way.

SPEAKER_01: 17:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 17:04

Um, but it also reflects who he was in a way about someone who just didn't want that burden to be on us, too. Like, I mean, to sort of a wink in a joke is kind of you know very hemis.

SPEAKER_00: 17:15

Wow. So I've never read the book. I say this every freaking time I ask someone their favorite book, and I'm like, oh yeah, it's on my list. It is on my list, but I just this is such a wild tangent. But I was just doing a Peloton ride, and one of the songs that came up was, I think it's called So Long and Thanks for All the Fish by A Perfect Circles. And I was like, that is such a weird title for a song that has to have a reference to something. And so I went down, and literally this happened, this was within the last week or two. So it's weird that like the synchronicities and stuff, but um, I went down the route with all of like isn't the universe that's just.

SPEAKER_03: 17:54

Oh, it's wild that stuff happens. It's hooked it up and you do what it was.

SPEAKER_00: 17:58

Yeah, it's wild. Thank you for that recommendation. I and I also I love the idea of putting I mean I literally started tearing up with you know, you putting an inscription in and putting it into those kind of lending libraries. I think that's such a fantastic idea, and what a fantastic way to share your child with the world. I think that's so beautiful. I'm I'm really excited for this conversation. I don't think I've tiered up this early in a call before. You're really crushing it so far, but maybe we can at least see where this conversation goes, leading with the question of what do you think happens when we die? Yeah, it's uh And I guess you already did kind of answer this, but yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 18:36

Yeah, but it's the greatest question that there is, right? I mean, it it is the most profound question that there is, in a sense. I mean, I guess the sister question to it is why are we here to begin with? Yeah, you know, why are you born, right? Yeah. I mean, there's sort of a a couplet there, but what do I think happens when we die? I again I'm a sort of super rationalist kind of person and never found any of the spiritual sort of stories, the spiritual solutions that are provided there, the suggestions, whatever you think of them as very compelling. And so I actually, after my son died, I've been reading up on the brain. I've I've always been interested in the brain and how the brain works and all of that, and become very interested in the topic. And I look to science for myself to try to give us the best answers that we can. I feel like we're standing on the back of great science all through history, good and bad science, actually. Science that we tried stuff and it didn't work and we didn't do it well, and then and then it would fix itself because science is not the truth, science is the pursuit of truth, right? Of figuring out what's really going on. And so I look to that and say, as far as we can tell, the consciousness derives from the brain, it is electrical signals in the brain, and when the brain is no longer functioning and the brain no longer works, it goes away. And that seems to be the evidence that we have. You know, there's many, many other things that people have experienced. There's many things that people have made claims about, and there's many, again, spiritual ideas about what might happen beyond that we probably don't understand. So certainly you have to always leave. We just don't know the answer, obviously. We just have to go with what's kind of what's out there. I think what's most interesting about you know, looking at the evidence of, you know, what does it mean to be yourself? There's some really fascinating work on traumatic brain injury over the years that has been done. And there's a famous case, you may have heard of it, because a lot of people have at one point or another. There was a guy that years, like I don't know, 150 years ago, had a hole driven through his head and he survived. It was like it was like a metal rod that went through his head. And he was a famous case because he was one of the first times that there was traumatic brain injury, but the person lived, and his personality completely changed. He acted entirely different than he had before. And as we've looked at that over the years, it looks pretty clear that when you damage the brain, when you change the brain, whether this is through, you know, processes like mental illness or medication, right, psychedelics, or through some kind of damage, you know, your brain has changed, and that this idea that we are just something that lives outside of it, right? We are just the spirit and we are kind of inhabiting this body is pretty deeply ingrained in our culture. There doesn't seem to be much real evidence that that's true. And I understand why people want to believe it. And of course, having lost my son, you can imagine the action of, right? That, like, you know, hey, we're gonna be together in eternity, we're gonna see each other again, we're gonna spend all eternity with people that we miss. I mean, there isn't a there isn't a more compelling idea to those that have had deep grief and that have a loss, and all of us through our life at some point or another will lose someone that we don't feel like we can lose. It's a pretty compelling idea. But for me personally, I just can't buy into it.

SPEAKER_01: 21:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 21:42

And that's been again a hard journey to take because to say to myself, if I only believe, then I would be comforted that I'll see my son again.

SPEAKER_01: 21:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 21:52

And to not be able to cross over into that is just sort of the nature of who I am. It's not right or wrong, it's just this is how I operate. So it's been, but it's been interesting to sort of ask myself, right? Can I make myself believe it? And I haven't been able to.

SPEAKER_00: 22:07

Yeah. I I don't want to by any means say that I understand what you've gone through because it is incredibly traumatic and difficult. And I can't even begin to fathom what it's been like. What I want to say is that I think we can line up in very similar ways, of that's kind of how or why I started this project is I just couldn't get past kind of the science and the logic. And I might be chiseling away at it. It's interesting to get to talk to someone else who is aligned so similarly. And I'm curious because I think in your voicemail you talked a little bit about, and it seems like you've talked about it here again too, of kind of going on the journey because it would be fantastic to believe. I'm sure, and just and almost in any extent, right? You know, whether it's heaven, you got to see your son again, or if you, I don't know, I I I already mentioned I don't know much about response. I should probably learn more about religion. But if you looked at kind of all the different religions, I'm sure there's, you know, even in reincarnation, and I don't want to say that this is how reincarnation works because I definitely don't know all the ins and outs of it, but I think probably it would make sense, even if you didn't get to see your son again, that it would be beautiful to believe that your son gets to go live at something else again. Like that's definitely a really beautiful thing about that. And so I'm curious what you feel like it would take to believe in something. Like, is there anything that you feel like if this happened or if you know, I think that's really interesting to think about. And I and I think that's partially because it's a question I ask myself all the time. What do I need to believe in something?

SPEAKER_04: 23:45

Yeah. And I think what's fascinating about human beings is that we are very it first of all, again, to me, it goes back to brains. Everyone's brains are very different. We we have a very large range of sort of neurodiversity across humans. And some people, I think, need less to reach a certain threshold of acceptance or belief. I just think they just need less.

SPEAKER_01: 24:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 24:08

And some need more. I do think in my case, and I do think this is shown through history, when you're not indoctrinated as a child into very specific religious beliefs, yeah. I think your threshold goes up generally. Again, these are all very broad statements. Totally.

SPEAKER_01: 24:22

Totally.

SPEAKER_04: 24:22

I think it's pretty common to accept that your threshold of credulity to believe these things is higher in many cases than someone who grew up with this being just the truth. Like they were told this is the truth from the time they were born. I wasn't in that, in that category. So I do think my threshold is higher. And if you said what would it take, it would probably take some sort of you know, experience for me that was unexplainable and deeply powerful that would convince me that the rules of physics of this world, that we again, all the all the sort of science that we've learned and what's gotten us this far, you know, in our journey as humans, turns out that there's you know something clearly beyond that. You know, of course, this would be your classic a ghost shows up and talks to you, or uh, or a god does, or whatever we we would think, like someone comes back from the dead, or whatever it might be. There's and people have had many different kinds of experiences that I would just say the miracle side is clearly there are people whose experiences are I had some kind of miraculous experience, and it convinced me that X, Y, or Z is true. Yeah, I would say it would have to be something pretty compelling. And despite, for example, and you mentioned synchronicity earlier, just the strangeness of how recently you learned what so long and thanks for all the fishmen, and then I bring it up and I was gonna say it. Those sorts of things happen all the time. And again, some people see those as evidence, some people call that evidence. So if that's evidence, there's something going on, there's an angel. Yeah, the universe is conspiring somehow. Right, right, right. And there's and again, it isn't to say there isn't. Like none of this is to dismiss the fact that we don't really know a whole lot of things, right? We're we're very limited sensory-wise, like there's all sorts of things happening in maybe other dimensions, right? In other parts of our structure, you know, either metaphysically or sort of, you know, like at the micro level. There's all sorts of things going on we sort of don't understand. So that's all fair. But I will say in my 55 years of life, I either just have blinders on and I just can't experience these things, yeah, is one possibility. So things of things of this nature that would convince me that something bigger is going on and that there's real reason to believe are happening and I can't see them or I'm blind to them. Or, you know, what my experience has been is I simply have not had any experience that says to me, you know, we're outside the realm of what sort of science can understand, and there's a really compelling reason for me to accept that there's just something more going on here than human beings telling ourselves stories and looking for patterns because we are pattern seekers. That is what humans are, right? We just seek patterns and we're seeing patterns, but you know, that doesn't mean that, for example, there's a god inside that tree that fell, you know, uh, or and he was doing something. These are things all through history we have sort of confused at various points, right? What is correlation, causation, and we we do anthropomorphized things, which I think is the term that means we sort of apply human characteristics to things that aren't humans. We do a lot of weird projections on things. So I mostly look at it and say, look, you know, I can only do what most people do. Take the experiences that you've had and say, you know, what seems to make the most sense. And for me, you know, the scientific explanations that are out there are not perfect, but they're the best that we've got. And they they do explain a heck of a lot of things, yeah, including how we got here from many spiritual traditions that are long dead, many gods that are long dead that nobody cares about anymore, that nobody talks about anymore, and that nobody mourns these gods, but we are very concerned about the gods that we have right now, right? And that these are really important, and we got to make sure that we're we're really respectful of this god, but we laugh at the at four, you know. So I was gonna say, you're not mourning Zeus over there?

SPEAKER_02: 28:09

We're not real good at yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 28:11

I mean, you know, why don't you take Zeus seriously, Zach? Why don't you study whether Zeus could be the god that's really the real one? Yeah, and it's it's an interesting bias, right, that we have is that you said you don't know much about religion, so do most people who are religious.

SPEAKER_01: 28:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 28:26

How many of us have looked at the other 50 major religions, right? Not the 10,000 that have been through history. Yeah, we don't tend to do our good research, and then we tend to kind of believe what we like to believe. Yeah, I will say that that's been a real journey for me as a human is recognizing that most people aren't really as interested in the truth as they're interested in what makes them feel good.

SPEAKER_01: 28:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 28:49

And I feel like that can explain a whole lot of things about what we believe, religious or not, right? Yeah. Yeah. In all sorts of contexts.

SPEAKER_00: 28:56

Can I ask you a question? And I don't want it to feel like I'm pushing back on you. This is just a legitimate question that I ask myself all the time now is are we also in some ways indoctrinated to science? A couple hundred years ago, people were really still convinced, and I know there apparently are people now convinced that the earth was flat. But I am curious, do you ever think about do we put too much faith in science?

SPEAKER_04: 29:22

So I think the danger is actually the term orthodoxy is a good term to think about what is dangerous in any thinking system.

SPEAKER_01: 29:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 29:32

Is that orthodoxy is sort of the this is right because it is established and right.

SPEAKER_01: 29:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 29:38

You don't want to ever, whether you're thinking about science or thinking about religion or thinking about anything, is if you go your company like this is the way we've always done it, that's orthodoxy, right?

SPEAKER_01: 29:46

Yep.

SPEAKER_04: 29:47

And you don't ever want to have that become the reason that you believe anything. You don't believe you shouldn't believe anything because it's just said. Yeah. Now that said, the flip becomes okay. So this is now we're in the world of do all your own research. Can I really effectively, in a sense, doubt every single thing that I'm being told?

SPEAKER_01: 30:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 30:08

And start from the beginning of like, okay, so someone said that there's gravity. Okay, so now I gotta go out and test whether Newton was correct and you know, try to jump out of a tree or drop things out of a tree and in multiple places, right?

SPEAKER_00: 30:18

You can't just do it at one spot and say, okay, this works. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 30:22

Maybe it just works in my yard. Yeah. So I think we're in a time, in a period, where there's a lot of breakdown of institutions and trust in institutions.

SPEAKER_01: 30:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 30:31

There's a lot of questioning of everything, right? This is the old like fake news, and everything is like just just noise and propaganda. It's right to say you should ask questions, right? And all of that. The problem is we do not, as individuals, have the ability, the time, the energy, the expertise to sort of prove, right, all of these things to ourselves. So to some degree, the question becomes, who are you gonna believe? Yeah. Sort of the the broader question. Like, who are you gonna believe?

SPEAKER_00: 30:57

Yeah, you have to believe in something.

SPEAKER_04: 30:59

What I what I think I've come to believe is that I do need to defer to expertise wherever I feel like it's just out of my kitchen. And the problem in this world of complexity and technology, and everything is so complex, is we honestly each know very, very little in terms of deep knowledge about anything, right? Totally. You and I consider talk about a million topics that neither of us really don't know much of anything about.

SPEAKER_01: 31:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_04: 31:24

We're all sort of, you know, dilettantes in a lot of ways in these topics. So I also have to say, like, well, let's take the best information we have. And I do think that what science has shown over the years is that the reason we still don't believe the earth is flat is because a bunch of people who may have, in many cases, lost their lives or their reputations, etc., chose to do the tests and do the work and say, nope, that's not the case, even if the orthodoxy was that the earth is flat. So you always have that danger. So whether we're talking about today, vaccines or whether we're talking about any topic you can bring up today, yeah. There's always going to be people saying, Well, that's just orthodoxy. You're just believing what somebody said to you. But you know, you you have to at some point trust expertise. I think a huge problem with our society today is the sort of destruction of trust in expertise.

SPEAKER_01: 32:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 32:12

And we have gotten to the point where we're questioning what your uncle says on Facebook at almost the same level that what the CDC says about you know transmissibility of disease, and we're just kind of lost. So I understand why everybody's confused and I understand why we're all questioning things. And yeah, and we're all gonna have to find who we're gonna listen to because we can't each quote do our own research. Good lord, like you know, ask Chat GPT, it's gonna hallucinate half the answer anyway.

SPEAKER_01: 32:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 32:40

I don't know if you get like where does the source of your confidence in things come from? And it's a tricky problem.

SPEAKER_00: 32:47

Yeah, that was a great answer though. It's true. Half the time now it feels like anybody tells me something, I don't know if I can believe that. And so then it's like, do I need to go do my research on that? Like, what were your sources? I think it used to be a very common statement of like believe half of what you see and none of what you hear something like, isn't it something like that? And now I'm like, I don't even know if we can believe what we see now with AI and and all this stuff. It's so it it has generative video AI.

SPEAKER_03: 33:15

Yeah, since AI and video, which you will not be able to tell the difference very, very soon. So it's only gonna get weirder.

SPEAKER_00: 33:21

Yeah. So yeah, we're in this weird place where it is really hard because we have so much access to information and so much access to disinformation. And you're right, it's hard to figure out. And so you gotta trust in who you feel like you can trust in. I think that was a great answer.

SPEAKER_04: 33:39

I do want to kind of like call it the signal noise problem right today is you have a lot of noise. What's the signal, what's the noise? And boy, just just unraveling that. Good luck, everybody. It's gonna just get again wilder as time goes on.

SPEAKER_00: 33:54

Yeah, it's so true. So I'm curious because obviously we have a lot of similar beliefs. I keep on saying that. And so you've had this loss of your son, and you said you've gone on this journey and how great it would be to be able to believe in that, you know, a heaven or whatever, but you kind of fall back to science, which again, you know, I fall back to science a lot. And when I fall back to science, that leads me to fear, anxiety, and all of those feelings around death. You know, nothingness and quote unquote me being gone that freaks me out. But it seems like you've done some journeying, some exploring, and come to this realization. It's what makes sense, it's what it's what's presenting to you as what's real. But you also seem to have some peace around it. And a situation that I think most would say it's a really hard place to have some peace around it after what you've been through. And maybe that's not true, but so it is that true that there is peace around it. And if so, like I don't know. I'm not necessarily asking you to give me the uh the 10-point plan of how do I get there, but how did you how how have you found peace around that?

SPEAKER_04: 35:04

Yeah, it's a great it is a great question of you know, how do you reconcile your own mortality, right? Yeah. And the power of believing you live forever is that you you get to sort of perpetually ignore the mortality problem in a sense. Now, I and by the way, I don't think most people really do this. Even if you believe you live forever, people still don't want to die, which is really interesting, by the way.

SPEAKER_01: 35:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 35:24

Because you think, well, you're gonna be with Jesus, you know, it's gonna be awesome. So, like, why don't we get on with it? It it doesn't really seem to work that way for a lot of people. I can't be in their heads because I don't have that belief. But but in a way, thinking that you're immortal, that your soul is immortal, or whatever you feel that vehicle is that you're gonna carry on, you know, I think for a lot of people it's very comforting. Again, it's it's clearly very comforting for a lot of people. I never had it, so I I never, first of all, had that idea. I also just don't have a strong fear of death that I that it sort of threads through my experience in my life. I again I think this is about jealousy for everybody. A little jealous. And I'm also just not somebody that's had a lot of anxiety. And oddly enough, you know, some of the mental illness that my son struggled with before he died came through my family and comes through my uh my genetics. And yet I was very lucky that very fortunate that I just don't have struggles with those sorts of things ever. I haven't my whole life. And then losing him, you know, when you think about how you get some peace with death, like oddly, again, you know, losing someone like him who is just a better person than me, flat out, and and just a person that the world should not be able to do without, and that I don't feel like I can do without. I think both my wife and I have commented that if we ever had any fears about dying, it sort of is like it's taken that fear away again, not because I believe I'm gonna see him again, but just because I recognize that everybody dies and even amazing people die, and you're gonna die. And that's just that's the journey. And most importantly, what it's done for me has just made life feel so much more precious for whatever time that I do have, yeah. And really focus me in on like what matters, man. What matters?

SPEAKER_01: 37:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 37:11

This is the only shot I have. That's the best thing that I understand is like I got one shot. What do I value? And I've figured out that I've spent my whole life really, really taking everything for granted. Yeah. Which we pretty much all do in Western culture. It's hard not to.

SPEAKER_00: 37:26

Yeah. It's kind of what we're we're not directly taught it, but we're directly taught it.

SPEAKER_04: 37:31

Well, and we're adapters. What the fascinating about human beings is we're so adaptable that you adapt right to the next level. I don't I don't know if you remember the old Willie C. Kate, he's a comedian where he did a piece on flying on a plane. He was talking about the like the first time they ever put Wi-Fi on a plane, and people were on a plane, you're flying through the air, you're sitting in your chair, you've got your drink, and now you can get on the internet, and the first thing you do is be like, gosh, this internet is slow. In other words, we we immediately consume whatever it is that we have, and then we look for the next problem or the next challenge or whatever, right? So we we just tend to take things for granted because we consume anything around us and make it normal, right? So it's normal to be super healthy, it's normal to get out of bed without pain, it's normal to be able to go to a doctor and get immediate help, take a drug for your pain, you know, problems. It's normal to have a good job. Like you just start, and I had six incredibly healthy kids and this great life, and I just took all the like, oh, this is just how it is, right? That's what we do as humans.

SPEAKER_01: 38:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 38:29

When you get broken in a way of like suddenly that world cracks open for you, and you are shown like how fragile the world is. On one hand, you can get either really afraid, yeah, right. You know, you can start fearing that like how fragile things are. And there's some of that for me, by the way. I have I have weird trauma where I worry about my other children dying by suicide. This comes from the trauma part of it.

SPEAKER_00: 38:54

I don't know if that I would call it classify that as weird. I think that is incredibly normal, but I'm no therapist or anything, but I feel like that's an incredibly normal response to have.

SPEAKER_04: 39:04

Yeah, but on the flip side, you also can say to yourself that because it's all so sort of fragile, and because in a sense, the everything is a miracle, right? So it's either the everything's a miracle or nothing's a miracle, tends to be the way that most people frame life. It's pretty hard to operate in the middle.

SPEAKER_01: 39:20

Yeah. We're binary creatures, right?

SPEAKER_04: 39:24

Yeah, we tend to be binary. So it's like I've always lived my life where nothing was a miracle.

SPEAKER_01: 39:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 39:28

And now, in a way, my son dying has helped me see that that everything's a miracle. He was a miracle to be alive at all.

SPEAKER_01: 39:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 39:34

All my other children are miracles. Again, my privileges in life are miracles. So I sort of look at it now as like I will have whatever time I have, I will make the most of it, I will focus on things that are valuable, I will do work that's important to me.

SPEAKER_01: 39:48

Yep.

SPEAKER_04: 39:49

And it's weird. It's like a strange gift, very strange gift, close to death, yeah, can can do for you. And you've heard this from other people, in which whether it's coming out of a war or you know, people go through some horrible experience like a 9-11 or something, and they were in the towers, but they got out. They they change in that they see the world differently. And many times you can see the world more clearly for yourself, and you can have these sort of powerful changes that are hard to get otherwise, right? Like you almost need sometimes these more extreme experiences, I think, to just sort of wake you up in a way. And for me, that's it's been a kind of waking up experience.

SPEAKER_00: 40:28

Yeah, I obviously I haven't been through something like that, but I have seen in doing this project, partially just talking to people who have had these experiences. But again, just I feel like I've been looking through the world with a lens of death now, which what I mean by that is essentially exactly what you're saying. I'm trying to view life much more preciously. And not that I didn't necessarily know that before. I mean, you hear those like idioms and adages of you only get to live once, and you know, this and that. We hear that stuff. But I think it takes actually looking at it closer. And sometimes, like you're saying, you've experienced kind of a full change because you've had this experience and that has fully waking you up. I feel like mine's almost like a flickering. Like I have to kind of remind myself. And not that I'm always kind of walking on eggshells, but just understanding, hey, you know what? This could be the last coffee that I get to have for someone. So instead of worrying about, hey, you know, I have all this stuff I need to do, and I've got this coming up, and I've got a call later that I need to prep for, I'm here for this coffee because this could be the last thing that I do. It just feels like it makes me much more present, too.

SPEAKER_04: 41:41

Living in the present is super hard. And that this is the kind of you know, certain experiences, extreme experiences, and I think this is true of like extreme sports and things like that too.

SPEAKER_01: 41:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 41:51

Is people who go through these extreme experiences when you jump out of a plane, you know, with a with a parachute on your back. You you are instantly transported into living in this moment.

SPEAKER_01: 42:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 42:02

And I do think in our society we we sort of seek these more extreme experiences, and things like experiencing death very close up, or being, let's say, close to death, is another way in which you you get woken up to I've spent my entire life living 20 minutes in the future, or you know, two hours in the future, or 10 days in the future, or looking backwards, and almost nobody spends any time in the present.

SPEAKER_01: 42:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 42:25

And um, it's the only place that we've got. Like it really is the only sanctuary that there is, and you're you're granted nothing, and you're granted no future, and you're promised no future.

SPEAKER_01: 42:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 42:34

At least again, that's how I see it. So yeah, it it really has been a kind of snap out of it and wake up. And again, I I think people can get it different ways. You're exploring it more as a kind of project, yeah, right. And other people just something happens to them and they have that moment. The classic is I realize that if I had been in the intersection three seconds later, I would have been dead, or whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_01: 42:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 42:57

Where people just get that snap experience. But you can also just teach yourself. I think you're also just doing what some people do as well, which is you're making a kind of practice out of trying to internalize the power of living in the present and being present, yeah. And how it also slows time down a bit, right? Because when we live in the future, we're sort of racing toward this future that of course never happens, right? So it is all very cliche.

SPEAKER_01: 43:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 43:20

But the reason it's cliche is like it's never it's always been true, but damn, it is so hard to do on a consistent basis, right? It's just very hard to make a practice out of it.

SPEAKER_00: 43:31

Yeah. It is interesting that you also bring that up because I am starting to hear more and more from my friends about how, you know, time just is going faster. And I've realized over the last couple of years, as I've kind of in tandem, you know, my meditation practice came out of having a fear of death. And so I jumped into mindfulness of death meditations. Like that's where I started meditation of just like, I need to contemplate this. But I I don't actually know if I feel like it's going really fast. Just being present helps with that. And I love everything that you just said because I think secretly everything that you just said is my mission with this project. You know, and if it was get over my fear of death, I don't know if that's ever gonna fully go away or ever go away or whatever, but there are so many benefits and they're what you just said that happen by looking at death and seeing it. And I'm hoping that this project helps wake people up to that a little bit. I just hope that maybe instead of avoiding death like our culture does, that we can look at it and start to wake up earlier and be more present and enjoy life instead of I think there's a lot of people that don't wake up until I don't think it's just retirement, but people get to retirement age and they have they look back and it's like, wow, you know, I didn't really live my life. I spent it working, I didn't necessarily realize what my priorities were.

SPEAKER_04: 44:54

Well, that's the classic. What you just said was sort of the deathbed story, right? Yeah, here, which is the classic, like, on your deathbed, are you gonna say you should have worked more, et cetera?

SPEAKER_01: 45:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 45:02

And it is oh again, all cliched, but yet super true to say, what are you gonna do today? And what are you gonna do that's valuable and all of that, and what what's valuable in the world? And I just think that embracing that the cycle of life and death that is all around us is there just is no life without death. Like as far as we know, yeah, and I and again, I've a lot of a lot of people disagree, billions of people disagree with me, such a you know, I'm only one one voice there, but it looks like when you look at the world, there's nothing that's alive that doesn't die, you know, as far as we can see in in nature. And so take it and and relish it and and celebrate it and know that it's miraculous. The thing that I've thought a lot about the last 18 months when I thought about my son dying and all of that, and I could easily get into this is awful, which it is, and like it's terrible, and why why him? And then the flip becomes what about the trillions of elasticists that were fertilized that never, you know, were born, that never made it about about half of fertilized eggs never mature, they don't you know connect to the cell wall, they just they just go away. So what about those trillions of people who just were never a person? And then what about everyone that died in in childbirth? You know, uh young children that died at birth, that died from preventable diseases, millions around the world every year die, you know, before they're five years old. The world is full of this. We don't like it, we don't like opening ourselves to it. But but bluntly, like that's the world, and the West, more than anyone, as a culture, we are so youth-centric, we are so focused relentlessly on avoiding what you can't avoid, which is you're aging every day, you're on the path, nobody gets out alive. And I just have found that I just don't find that a particularly scary thing. And those maybe like you that do, you know, I think the the flip of that story is to say, what a what a miracle that I'm alive. You know, what a what a powerful thing that I have to say.

SPEAKER_01: 47:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 47:03

Um, because that's the only thing we can all agree on, right? Is like you got right now, we've got this minute, we've got this conversation. That's what we've got.

SPEAKER_00: 47:09

Yeah, and that wasn't guaranteed. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04: 47:13

It wasn't.

SPEAKER_00: 47:14

Oh, that was beautiful. I have one last question for you, and it's something new that I'm trying. I kind of want to close each of these calls with a similar question. What's one thing you still want to experience in this life?

SPEAKER_04: 47:28

I want to experience going out into really wild country. I'm looking at Banff. I don't know if you know what that is, the boundary area.

SPEAKER_01: 47:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 47:38

Boundary National Forest area in Canada. It's on the border of Canada.

SPEAKER_00: 47:42

Beautiful. I've never been, but I've looked at it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 47:44

Like into some wild places that are still wild in this world. And part of that is from my own experience because I've always loved sort of exploring and and hiking and that kind of thing. But part of it is that when we go to those places now, I take some of my son's remains with me and I put a little bit here, a little bit there, in a way to just experience something that he can experience. So, you know, it's a journey of like I'm exploring the world. In part, he had the national parks on on his bucket list that he wasn't able to do. So there's there's more for me there where um it is both to experience it for myself and to celebrate that I have that great privilege to be able to do these things that others don't get to do.

SPEAKER_00: 48:28

Yeah, that's beautiful. And I think one thing I want to kind of say before we wrap up, I just I have a really close relationship with my dad. And so I would just say it it's it's so beautiful to hear this relationship that you had. It really is amazing. And I'm so grateful that you're willing to share twice now. I'm so grateful to you, for you, to you, whatever, whatever the right phrasing is, for being willing to do this and share it. And I think you're doing so many wonderful things in his memory and very grateful.

SPEAKER_02: 48:59

Thank you. Yeah, he was he was extraordinary. So it's it's all just trying to live up to being half the person he was. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 49:06

Thank you so much, and we'll definitely stay in touch. And I hope you have a good rest of your day. That was phenomenal. No, you're all good. I I was gonna say this happens every now and then and I never call anybody back, but I was like, I need to call back because I just wanna say that that was just a phenomenal, phenomenal conversation. Um very much enjoyed it.