Based Camp： People Don't Know How to Die Anymore
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about grief and how it affects us in the context of losing a loved one or family member. We also discuss the role that grief plays in our culture and why it's important to mourn.
Transcript
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They are using the amount of pain that person's deaths caused their children as like a judge of the quality of that relationship.
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And so they want you to experience pain as a sign that relationship was a meaningful one.
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Worse, when they expect this emotional reaction from you and when you have this emotional reaction, you are affecting.
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I'm affecting my entire family, my wife and my kids most of all.
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It's saying not just they want me sad, but they want my kids to feel this grief.
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Because this is where you can turn something into a traumatic event, as we've discussed in other episodes, by making it contextualized as traumatic.
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This is going to be an interesting, if sad episode, because we lost one of this show's first and most avid watchers.
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She watched every episode a few days ago, which was my mom.
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She passed away suddenly and unexpectedly a few days ago.
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Since she passed away, I have experienced a very interesting phenomenon.
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You have experienced the phenomenon of what we might call morning culture, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, where, interestingly, there's a very bifurcated reaction that we get from people when we tell them.
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Like, how are you even on the phone with me right now?
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Like, how could you be telling, you need to be like, no, get off the phone right now.
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Like, don't, you know, don't handle, process your pain.
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And they kind of, there's very much this expectation and feeling that you get from these conversations.
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That you should be pulling out your hair, crying, rending your clothing, gnashing your teeth, right?
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Yeah, I need to be doing whatever North Koreans were supposed to do when Kim Jong-il died.
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Where you get, the moral police come after you if you are not mourning correctly and loudly enough.
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This brings me to a confluence of really interesting phenomenons, right?
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Like, why specifically do they want me to be demonstrating emotional pain?
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What are the reasons why people feel emotional pain when somebody dies?
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And if we are intentionally building our own culture, a culture by our value system,
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what would a person actually do when a person dies, when a parent dies?
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And then in addition to those things, I want to cover the concept of what lessons I learned from my mom.
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Because I think that's a really valuable thing to convey to the audience.
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That might be a whole, like, a whole other episode.
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She is not someone who can be wrapped up in even one episode.
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Let us talk about the culture of especially mourning in the context of losing a loved one or family member.
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Like, why do people feel sad when somebody died?
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And they can really be isolated to better understand if they're bringing you any utility
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or they are in any meaningful way honoring the person who died.
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So the first is you are sad for anything that they did not get to experience, right?
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There's a feeling of regret over what they didn't complete because you know what they wanted
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And so that can be things like seeing their grandchildren grow up or something like that, right?
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And I think that this by far is the biggest reason that people mourn, is regret over things
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that they won't get to do with the person in the future.
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The reactions they won't get to have from the person, essentially missing the person.
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People are mourning their own lifestyle changing to a great extent, right?
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And the things that they're like, I think that this form of mourning is entirely selfish
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The first form of mourning, and we'll get to other forms, I don't know, I can understand
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why you would take some time to reflect on the regret of the things the person isn't going
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to get to experience, but it really has no utility.
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By that, what I mean is the person's already dead.
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You're not going to be able to fix it by fretting over it.
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And so what you're doing is you're allowing that person to, for something totally non-efficacious
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to negatively affect your mood and worse, and this is something I always say about sadness,
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sadness hurts the people when I show sadness, when I publicly show grief, especially if it's
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an unaddressable grief, right, that disproportionately hurts the people who care about me most, because
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So it's like knowing that you have a bad cold and then running up and French kissing someone.
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And there was that great study that you were looking at how families, how emotions travel
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throughout the families or how stress travels throughout the families.
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So I recently found a study that I found really interesting that measured throughout the course
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So they, the researchers orchestrated, I guess, like a conflict inducing activity for a family.
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And then they, throughout this activity, the duration of it at several points, they measured
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So I guess they made them spit like in the middle of this.
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And they found that families do have high correlations in cortisol levels.
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In fact, step-parents had lower levels of correlation in cortisol levels with the rest
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of the family, like with the kids, than biological parents.
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And they found also that mother's cortisol levels predicted father's cortisol levels, predicted
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children's cortisol levels, predicted mother's cortisol levels, which also suggested like mothers
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are the onus is on mothers to stop the cycle when people are getting stressed out because
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they are the, the driver of the feedback loop, essentially, which is really interesting.
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And I think that that happens on a broader sense with many emotions.
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So what they're really saying, because I think that people, they talk about grieving and they
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talk about, you should do it for this reason and this reason.
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And they're not really thinking about the cost of it.
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If I am doing this big public grief display, and it seems really genuine because when somebody's
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grieving over the death of a loved one, there's not really that much you can say to them because
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I want you to know that I'm here for you and send you something beautiful in a moment
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But, and often the person who died wouldn't want you to be sad.
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Like they wouldn't want to inflict that on you.
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But worse, when they expect this emotional reaction from you, and when you have this
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emotional reaction, you are affecting, I'm affecting my entire family, my wife and my
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Most of all, it's saying not just, they want me sad, but they want my kids to feel this
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And this is where, this is where it gets really scary, right?
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Because this is where you can turn something into a traumatic event, as we've discussed in
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other episodes by making it contextualized as traumatic.
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So we were actually really lucky to not be at home when we heard the news about your mother.
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And I'm really glad for that because our kids didn't see us go through the initial shock.
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It's not that we don't show any emotions around stuff like this, but we work really hard to,
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we see having those emotions, experiencing those emotions as a negative thing that we
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are working to overcome and to recontextualize.
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And then I want to talk about the final reason why people get really sad.
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I'm just talking about like the natural reasons you feel sad when you lose someone.
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As we talked about in other episodes, people have an internal self-narrative.
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And within most of those self-narratives is I am a good person or I am a good son,
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or at least I'm not heartless or something like that.
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Or it could be like, I have a good relationship with my mother or my siblings or something like
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If one of your last interactions or if on reflection, you were not those things to that person,
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you have now permanently lost the ability to correct that.
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When I see people who I've noticed have had the hardest time overcoming specific losses,
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it's because they treated that person really poorly in some way or in some way that they,
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there's this one guy we know who just all the time talking about his ex-wife.
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And then we talked to other people about their relationship and it turns out he's just constantly
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And I think that really to an extent drove that.
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And I think had I not treated like we really worked to give my mom access to her grandkids
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to treat her well, even when she could sometimes be a difficult person as all parents can to
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And I think that lowers a lot of potential grief I could feel over not being in alignment with
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This explains the daughter from California syndrome, which is a phrase in the medical profession to
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describe a situation in which a hithero disengaged relative challenges the care a dying elderly patient
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is being given or insists that the medical team pursue aggressive measures to prolong the
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Here what you see is the people who are least able to deal with the death of a loved one
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are not the ones who were closest to that person in like a meaningful sense.
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They are the people who knew they should have been closer to that person, but weren't, and
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now need that person to stay alive so that they can make up for their own failure.
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You will feel a lot less pain when somebody dies if you knew you were there for them in
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the way that you should have been when they were alive.
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So I actually do think that this form of emotional pain is useful because it has a positive effect
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They weren't living up to the self narrative of the type of person they want to be in their
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And through the emotional pain that they experienced there, that can act as a lesson to make sure that
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they are not treating other people in a way where they would have this form of regret if those
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Okay. So it's basically, Oh, but my trip, my character arc wasn't complete.
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And therefore it's this like huge prompt of, Hey, you need to start rewriting the script right now
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because you're not like, this isn't working either be a better actor or bring in new people
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or something like that, but it's helpful. So we see emotions as helpful when there's signals
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that you need to change course. And once you take the action, actionable feeling. So if I'm like, I did not
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close things up with my mom, that I might have this action of, Oh, I need to go and be nicer to my dad.
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I need to go and be nicer to my wife. I need to go and be nicer to my kids because if I lost any of
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them, then I wouldn't be the type of person that I aspire to be. So that emotion is useful. The
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emotion of, I won't get to have these experiences with this person in the future. That's pretty much
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an entirely selfish emotion. There's no real utility to it. The emotion of, they won't get to
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experience these things in the future. There are ways, and we can talk about how you might be able to
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twist that emotion to an advantage, but there's also no real utility to it. And then there's the
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final emotional set, right? Which is where we talk about it societally, which is some societies and
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cultures use the amount of mourning that you're showing as a way to judge how emotionally attached
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to that person you were. And because people will get more emotional normally if they come from a
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culture that indulges in emotion when somebody who they were closer to dies than when somebody who
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they were further away from dies. Right. And so that can be used as a proxy for how much the other
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people in a person's life actually cared about them. Right. Yeah. Like you didn't really love them
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because you're not really crying right now. Right. And through not showing an emotion in a way,
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you are sending a social signal that people didn't actually have people who were that close to them.
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Now, I think this is super interesting. So we saw, for example, some time ago, there was
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the famous billionaires die in a submarine accident issue. And one of the stepsons of one of the people
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who died on this Titanic seeking submarine had a stepson who at first, you know, was, I think,
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publicly saying, well, please send your prayers to my father. I hope he makes it through because it
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wasn't known for some time if everyone had died. And then a few days later, he spotted at a concert
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and he caught a lot of flack for that, including from celebrities. So high profile flack. And I think
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the belief was how dare this person have fun? Their stepfather just died. And I think that's really
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interesting because if I died, I would be thrilled if my kids were smiling in two days. I'd be
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thrilled if they were getting on with their lives. And when I think about what would really honor
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people, at least like what I would want people to do if I died is look at my objective function,
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look at the missions that I cared about and see how they could contribute to those in some way.
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If you really cared about me, you would be doing what I would want to be done in the world.
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Yeah. So they're using the pain that this person caused other people. That's just so twisted when
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They are using the amount of pain that person's deaths caused their children as like a judge of
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the quality of that relationship. And so they want you to experience pain as a sign that relationship
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was like a meaningful one. And this pain, let's talk about it. Even though we don't think like
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negative emotional pain has like a huge negative value, it does tremendously affect your ability to
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be efficacious in the world. When you are mourning, you are not efficacious. When you are really indulging
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in these emotional states, you are not moving towards the things that matter. And this is where I think
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we get to our cultural reaction, which is something that Simone was saying there, right? Which is when
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we think about how we relate to death, like whether or not I would mourn my own death, like whether or
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not my deaths would be a bad or a good thing. The question is, did I, out of the things that I feel
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like I have an objective function, like what I think is good in the world, what I'm trying to complete,
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I have a number of tasks that I have set to complete with my life. And the sadness of my death
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is measured by the number of unfinished tasks that I had left against the number of tasks that I
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completed. And to that extent, like that's how I would measure like how quote unquote sad I would
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be, like the amount of regret I being dead, not feeling regret would feel, right? Oh, it's bad that
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I'm dying now versus it's good that I'm dying now. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, one thing I was saying with
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Simone is I think that culturally, like we're building our own culture for our family. I think
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the first step, because different cultures have different grieving processes is to judge whether
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the person who died had a good or a bad life. And again, this is a very Calvinist sort of culturally
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informed thing, which is the idea that you have the elect and you have the not elect. I think many
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cultures, they judge everyone's life is good or having matter. And I just don't think that's true. I
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think sometimes people have lives that didn't turn out to matter. That didn't turn out to have a
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positive effect on the world. And it's important. I think that through judging their deaths in this
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way, first, that allows you to process, you can think through their life and you can put them in
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one of two categories, right? If you put them in the good category, like they wanted to positively
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impact the world and they did positively impact the world. And especially if they did most of the impact
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that they were planning to have, and they didn't leave that many untied threads as my mom did,
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then you can better emotionally categorize, okay, I don't really need to feel that bad over the
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things they didn't get to experience. She didn't get to experience her grandkids growing up, but she
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could largely know what that was going to look like to some extent, right? She accomplished the
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things she wanted to accomplish in her life. However, the reason why it's good to also have this
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negative, oh, their life did not reach its potential is that then you can relate to their death in a
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different way, which is you relate to their death as something to learn from. Oh, this person
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actually ended up getting addicted to meth and then did a bunch of really terrible things and hurt the
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people around them. Then you can start to say, okay, let's still give their life meaning through
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taking it as a learning experience. Like where were the choices they made that pushed them into a
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timeline in which their life became non-efficacious to the people around them? And how can I not make those
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choices and how can my kids or other people in my family not make those choices? So you're still
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drawing something from the death. And then the other thing is to think about is did you treat that person
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the way you would have wanted to treat them? And if you get negative emotions from that, you should
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learn from those negative emotions in your current interactions with people. But Simone, I'd love to hear
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what you think of this system and what you think of other cultural ways of reacting to death.
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Yeah. One thing I was thinking about when you were talking about this and the idea that people really
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need to be dramatically mourning is that both in ancient Egypt, but even still today in some cultures,
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you can hire professional mourners, which is so crazy that like in ancient Egyptian funerals or
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funerary rites and traditions, you would have like literally professional mourners who would like-
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Oh, this was true in like Victorian England too. And in ancient Rome, I think?
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Maybe in ancient Rome. I know for sure Egypt. I also remember like one of my top favorite TV shows,
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The Moaning of Life with Carl Pilkington. He travels for the episode they do on death to Taipei
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in Taiwan where he hires a professional mourner. And then she shows him like how to do it. And he's
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really bad at doing it. And she's like getting frustrated. But I think it's really interesting
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that in some cultures, you would hire someone to do that instead of do it yourself.
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In Korea, you have this, but you also will hire people to come to your wedding and stuff like that.
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There are professional wedding attenders. It's to make it look like one, your social network was
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larger and the emotional impact you had on people was bigger. Like you had an emotional impact on a
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wider array of people. And that's a quality of your life. One of the most interesting things that
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I've had some people who I've known, who have been, they've really told me that they see like
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your scorecard at life being the number of people who show up at your funeral.
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And potentially how famous those people are as well.
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And I'm like, wow, I really, that is almost like a negative scorecard for me. How many people did I
00:20:08.880
Oh, I don't think people who throw, who show up at your funeral have necessarily been hurt by your
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passing. I think there are people who want to get together with people who cared about you and
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Yeah. But here we're talking about this performative mourning that you see across cultures.
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And I think you might be misinterpreting this morning. I think actually that it's more along
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the lines of for many people, the kind of mourning that is societally expected and that is seen as
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expressing love and dedication to the person who has died just can't, it's not natural for them to
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do it. It doesn't feel right to them. And so hiring someone helps with processing the grief and making
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you feel like you've checked the box because you can't do that yourself. Like everyone processes grief
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differently too. I think both culturally and genetically, we deal with grief in different ways.
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And there's just some people who like naturally are going to lose it and go crazy and look like
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they're mourning properly and the way that in that very dramatic way. And then other people just
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won't. And maybe a way to still feel like you're societally checking the box is by hiring someone to
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do it in a very stylized way. The professional mourner from that episode of the moaning of life where
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Carl Pilkington learned more about death was totally not someone who would plausibly be a friend
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showing up at a funeral who was sad. She was dressed in traditional wear. She had a very
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style, a very stylized way of mourning. So I think it's more about checking a cultural box
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than it is. I think that's about cultural drift that you're seeing there. So I think what you're
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seeing is, keep in mind, cultures evolve over thousands or hundreds of years, whatever. I think
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initially what you had there is a culture where people began to, as they do in our culture,
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sort of attribute how good a person's life was or how strong a relationship they had with someone was
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by how that person is reacting. And then initially, like you can think in ancient Rome or something
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like that, where you would have a lot of people who they might not know. And this person is being
00:22:05.920
judged publicly. It's okay. Let's get as many people to plausibly mourn as possible. But then after that
00:22:12.560
happened, it began to become known that this was something you did, that you're supposed to hire
00:22:17.060
public mourners. And then it just became this derived cultural tradition, which no longer really
00:22:23.140
served the initial purpose of the tradition. I don't think that's a sign. I don't think that when
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they were first hiring people to do this, that they were doing it just to, in a way where it would
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have been obvious that these people didn't know the person. Do you disagree? Or do you think that?
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I think I disagree. I just think that this kind of mourning doesn't come natural to a lot of people
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and that there's still this feeling like you have to do something. And I think one of the biggest
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things that happens when someone encounters death, even if you are in a culture that has a lot of
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tradition, is this feeling of, okay, what do I do? I need to do something. But there's not that much to
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do aside from make sure that all the things that person did, or like basically wrap things up for
00:23:09.760
that person and replace any work that they needed to do. So I think, I think the mourning is a part of
00:23:14.380
that. Like, I think I'm supposed to mourn. Like, I need to do something, right? So what do I do?
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So I would agree with that. I think that cultures that give people a specific death
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task, a specific death task, they do help people process the deaths easier because they're like,
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okay, once you have done X task tied to the death, then the way that you're supposed to relate to
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that is over and you have emotional permission to move on without being a bad person.
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Like one of our friends texted us after we, we let them know that this had happened. And he was
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like, Oh, you know what one culture does is everyone sits on the floor. Like the family of the lost one
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dines on the floor for a week and then they get off the floor and they're supposed to get back with
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their lives. But I feel like there's that neat and there's the Victorian you wear mourning and then
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you wear purple and there's all these, the colors you wear, but yes, eat on the floor for a week or
00:24:05.420
wear black clothing or burn something or whatever, but you need to do something and it has to feel,
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and then it's done. And then I think that helps you understand that the thing has been done.
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This is why for our culture, I really want to focus on ensuring the things that are done
00:24:21.860
are specifically efficacious. So rather than just like wearing funny clothes, like you want to
00:24:27.040
actually end up better off than you were before. Well, this is the problem with the wearing funny
00:24:31.540
clothes solution is then you get some people who begin to associate that again with how much they
00:24:37.520
cared about the person. So like in Victorian culture, you'd have some women who would just
00:24:41.820
never change out of their mourning clothes. Like Queen Victoria. Yeah. Where they wanted to show like,
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I extra cared about this person and I am going to show that through an indulgence in this particular
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aspect of the mourning process. Reviewing the whole process efficacious throughout, then there is no
00:25:01.380
way that a person can negatively indulge in it. Yeah. And actually the Queen Victoria is a good example
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here because she did phone it in after Albert died and she used her mourning of Albert to justify
00:25:12.440
that. So she really hurt her nation by choosing to check out after her husband died and by indulging in
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her mourning that much. Yeah. She hurt a lot of people. She hurt an entire nation possibly. And of
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course her children, like her children, a lot of them weren't, you didn't get great outcomes. I think
00:25:29.800
she could have been a better mother to them. Like all these things, it wasn't great. Yeah. So if she had
00:25:34.600
by our cultural standards, the better way to demonstrate her care for him instead of through this
00:25:42.000
mourning theater is to judge what he valued and ensure that you lived a life that achieved as many
00:25:51.660
of those values as possible. Right. Yeah. And then I think the other way that we relate to mourning,
00:25:57.020
and this is a really interesting thing because it has to do with how we relate to our kids and how we
00:26:01.880
relate to elders in our society is us as a cultural group. I think one of the things that you relate to
00:26:09.980
mourning is using, oh, all of the successes I'll have in the future that they won't get to react to.
00:26:14.620
And a lot of people naturally, they grow up to some extent, trying to impress their parents or trying
00:26:20.960
to get approval from their parents and our culture, because we have this very unique cultural setup,
00:26:29.260
which is descendant worship, which is to say that we value the respect we earn from our descendants
00:26:38.260
much more than the respect we earn from our ancestors. So my mom, for example, does exist in
00:26:49.320
every one of her grandchildren to an extent, both culturally and genetically, right? So in a very real
00:26:55.700
way, it is an iteration of her judging me. But more important than that, viewing things this way
00:27:05.720
culturally has a lot of positive side effects. First, it causes me to focus really heavily on
00:27:12.200
the value set that I teach my kids. Because the value set that I teach my kids will be the value
00:27:18.960
set that I am judged by in a meaningful sense. That is so much more important than the value set that
00:27:26.440
whatever serendipitously your parents came to, right? The value set you're... And keep in mind,
00:27:31.880
I can teach my kids a value set, and they may adopt some other value set. What this also does is it
00:27:37.400
teaches me to value wherever they saw problems was in my value set. They are younger than me.
00:27:44.200
Presumably, I gave them every intellectual advantage I could, whether that's material they could learn,
00:27:49.960
whether the way that they emotionally developed. So if they believe that aspects of how I see the world
00:27:56.920
are wrong, unlike my parents, which had almost intrinsically less information than I have,
00:28:04.920
my kids have more information than I have. And any difference in information is due to how I did as
00:28:12.920
parent, right? So it teaches me to extra pay attention to where my kids disagree with me,
00:28:20.200
and potentially update my own mental models based on that, and my own goals in life based on that.
00:28:26.200
Which I think leads to a much healthier family dynamic.
00:28:30.920
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I like that framing of it. And yeah, I think my mother passed
00:28:37.080
years before yours did, and in a very different process. But the thing that has given me the most
00:28:43.720
closure, or happiness, or a feeling of resolution with my mother is seeing so much of her in our kids,
00:28:49.400
and in myself, when I became a mother, which happened after she passed. So like,
00:28:53.160
Talk about how you conceptualize time, and how that's changed how you view the mourning process.
00:28:58.200
Yeah, okay. The DR of it is that I essentially don't think that I'm a continuous person at all.
00:29:04.360
And I first discovered this upon receiving a letter from myself in the past, like five,
00:29:08.360
five years ago, and was like, whoa, I don't know who this lady is. And it made me realize that who we
00:29:14.200
are dies all the time, I'm going to wake up tomorrow a slightly different person.
00:29:18.280
And so the idea that someone dies is ridiculous, because okay, that particular consciousness ended,
00:29:25.000
but also, it was always ending, like they were always there's this constant renewal,
00:29:28.280
this constant change of who we are. And I also, because we have this sort of very mechanistic,
00:29:33.880
Calvinistic view of the world, we, we see everything that has happened, and will happen is,
00:29:40.200
and is happening all happening at the same time, it is all already happened, it is all happening.
00:29:45.080
And so when someone passes away, it doesn't undo the fact that they exist, or did exist,
00:29:50.120
or will exist, they are very much still here. And so the entire way to say that is that they still
00:29:55.320
exist when they existed within the timeline. And that our position in the timeline today is not
00:30:01.960
a privileged position in the timeline. And this is very important in how we see the world, how we see
00:30:07.320
moral good and everything like that. That's why I don't value sort of the state of people today,
00:30:13.320
whether it's their happiness or agency more than people in the distant future, in terms of the actions
00:30:18.840
and the way I try to judge whether or not I'm living a good life. But because I don't have this sort of
00:30:25.480
privileged position of the now, people who existed in the past, they still very much,
00:30:32.120
in a very real and material sense, still 100% exist last week. My mom is still alive last week.
00:30:42.520
She is still experiencing everything she went through last week. But this requires a different
00:30:49.720
way of relating to time than I think most cultures do today. And I think one really perverse thing that's
00:30:55.640
been elucidated to me through her death. And through how I've seen people react to it is
00:31:02.280
yesterday, my brother and wife had another kid. Or was it the day before yesterday?
00:31:06.200
This is on Friday. So yeah, three days ago now.
00:31:08.840
Yeah. And this happened like the day or two days after my mom died. And being kid number three for
00:31:14.520
them, a lot of people don't really care anymore. Once you get to kid number three, four, it stops becoming
00:31:20.760
such a big thing. People are like, oh yeah, another one, right? But when you think about it,
00:31:25.880
that kid being brought into the world is such a more meaningful thing in the scales of life and death
00:31:33.640
than an older woman dying. She had max 20% of her lifespan left, maybe 10% of her lifespan left.
00:31:42.200
She had very little efficacious that she was going to do from this point forward in terms of changing
00:31:47.480
the world, me knowing the trajectory of her life. And yet this new life brought into the world has
00:31:53.160
an entire lifespan in front of them, a entire 100% of their life in front of them. And it could be a
00:31:58.440
very long life. It could be a very efficacious life. And that's so devalued in terms of the happiness that
00:32:06.840
is bringing people when contrasted to the death of an elderly person.
00:32:10.840
So in other words, yeah, the reaction of people to your mother's loss is so much,
00:32:15.400
it's so disproportionate to the reaction of people to the arrival of a new child in the world that it
00:32:20.600
feels weird to you, especially considering that the life impact, the life experience,
00:32:25.320
the change to the world is so much more meaningful with this new arrival.
00:32:28.840
Yeah. And this is really highlighted for us as people who have a new kid every year,
00:32:33.080
basically people asking our kids age, I go with three, two, one, and we're about to do our next
00:32:37.000
implementation this week, right? Frozen embryo transfer. Yeah. Tomorrow.
00:32:41.720
Tomorrow. Ah, so again, another new potential life coming into the world. It is just interesting.
00:32:48.040
And I think morose as a society, how we have so devalued the lives of the next generation.
00:32:55.320
And while we aren't a society that practice ancestor worship, I do think that we
00:32:59.800
disproportionately value the lives of the old and undervalue the lives of the young and the
00:33:05.240
perspectives of the young. That. And I think that there's just a very toxic culture around
00:33:10.840
death that leads to a lot of negative impact. So I think one is we don't know how to deal with
00:33:16.920
death because we don't have a culture around it. My mom told me when I was younger, she said,
00:33:21.240
Oh man, I love how in Japan, when someone dies, like there, everyone knows what happens. Everyone
00:33:25.560
has a role. Like your neighbor brings you this and your family does that. And everyone knows what
00:33:29.640
happens. And here in the U S like no one really knows what to do. And another friend was telling
00:33:33.960
us how they work in, in, in the, they work with public schools and they have, they encounter
00:33:39.320
children's funerals because they oversee districts with a lot of students that do have premature and
00:33:44.520
very young deaths. And he sees families just spending thousands and thousands of dollars on
00:33:49.720
these elaborate funerals for these children that they've lost because they don't know how to deal
00:33:53.640
with it, but they're doing, they're going into debt. They're doing this to the detriment of themselves
00:33:57.880
and other siblings. Like they're hurting their own families and life's potential because of this
00:34:03.560
inability to know what to do that in this feeling, like you have to do something. So I feel like
00:34:08.280
there's a very toxic lack of tradition around death and mourning that is not through any like
00:34:15.640
open maliciousness because of free market forces. Obviously there are industries that have cropped up
00:34:20.040
around this that encourage people to spend their money away to deal with this.
00:34:24.200
But our culture doesn't relate to death. And I think that this is a really important
00:34:28.120
thing that you're saying here. People see it as they go their entire lives without seeing somebody
00:34:32.840
die. Very frequently in our society. This is very rare, historically speaking. They just like,
00:34:39.720
death is a universally bad thing. It is something that is not supposed to happen. Like it's actually
00:34:45.720
almost not supposed to happen. Something has gone wrong when someone dies.
00:34:48.840
Something has gone terribly wrong. You go to a hospital because they are going to fix you.
00:34:53.560
If you are sick and you are ill, and they have failed when you die. It's just,
00:34:57.720
there is no, this is when it's okay to die in our society. Whereas most societies historically had
00:35:04.600
contexts where you were like, ah, yes, that's an honorable death. That death was okay.
00:35:12.200
Yeah. And I think one thing that may change how I relate to death and one reason why I'm
00:35:16.040
maybe so much more comfortable with it is early in my career, you're getting Malcolm Lord here.
00:35:19.960
I did work with a ME, a medical examiner. So I would go and collect brains for my lab,
00:35:25.320
because we were looking at a different brain morphology, but I'd get to read the person's
00:35:29.480
psychiatric files. So all of their interactions with their psychologist before they died, like
00:35:34.760
leading up to their deaths years, leading up to their deaths. So I'd get like a full profile on all
00:35:38.680
of their innermost thoughts. And I'd go and I'd get to see their body and I get to pick up their brain.
00:35:43.240
Then I'd then be taking that back to my lab. And so I saw a lot of dead people, like a lot of dead
00:35:48.600
people. And it may, I almost wish more people could have that experience so that they understand
00:35:56.360
that death is something that happens and it's all around us and our society covers us up. That was
00:36:03.160
one thing about the ME. If you're in the ME in a large city, something that becomes really clear to
00:36:07.080
you is just people are constantly dying around you. ME being medical examiner, right?
00:36:12.920
Yeah. And you just don't see it. Like if you're in a major city, there are people dying every single
00:36:18.600
day. There are rooms full of dead bodies every single day. And you just don't see it.
00:36:28.440
And it also, other learning from the ME, don't text and drive. Those were usually the most
00:36:37.960
Oh, and the other thing you learned is that fat is even like grosser on the inside than it is from
00:36:44.200
the outside. So don't text and drive and wash your figure.
00:36:50.040
Useful. It helps me. Motivation in two areas. Also don't, don't drink and drive. That's another
00:36:55.560
thing we could see in the ME. But actually texting and driving seemed to, that was like way more
00:37:00.280
people than drinking and driving from my memory. Oh gosh. Yeah. I think you're more impaired even
00:37:05.160
than when you're drunk, which is, it's insane that texting and driving is not more, I guess,
00:37:09.960
persecuted or prosecuted. You would expect texting and driving to be more prosecuted based on the number
00:37:16.840
This has been a fantastic toxin. Yeah. We didn't get into the lessons I learned from my mom. So we'll
00:37:21.240
talk about that in some other podcasts. And I really hope that if I was to die, that you wouldn't
00:37:26.600
go into this big performative mourning thing. I know that you care about me and that you'd focus on
00:37:31.240
our kids because that's what matters most to me. Kids first and foremost. And then second,
00:37:36.280
the way to honor you would be to carry forward your goals and mission to honor what you were doing,
00:37:42.280
to honor your work. And I hope you would do the same for me. Yeah. And remember, if you're ever
00:37:46.920
wondering what your husband would think of what you were doing or any success that you've had,
00:37:51.880
that what my kids think of you matters so much more than what I think of you.
00:38:06.280
I do not want to inconvenience you. But yeah, I also love your mom a lot. I know you do too.
00:38:11.640
And nothing will change the impact that she's had on us and nothing will take that away.
00:38:16.120
Yeah. And that's a really good thing. Yeah. She lives on.
00:38:19.560
And this is what she wanted to an extent. She was very clear in her will and everything like that.
00:38:23.560
Only celebrations of life. No mourning, no anything like that. So it's also not against her wishes.