The Deathbed Doctor: Weeks Before Death, Patients Start Having Visions! | Dr Christopher Kerr

What if everything you thought you knew about the final moments of life was completely wrong? Dr. Christopher Kerr dives into the realities of dying and what over 1,500 patient interviews reveal about human consciousness. Dr. Christopher Kerr is a pioneering hospice physician, neurobiologist, and CEO who has spent nearly three decades studying the profound psychological and spiritual experiences of the dying. His groundbreaking research on end-of-life dreams and visions challenges conventional medical views on mortality and grief. His bestselling book, Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End, aims to destigmatize the dying process and reframe how we understand the end of life. Trigger Warning: Please note there are mentions of grief and death, including the death of children within this conversation. In this episode, he explains: ■ The Reality of Death: Dying is a gradual, peaceful dimming of the senses rather than a painful or terrifying medical event. ■ End-of-Life Visions: Over 80% of patients experience remarkably vivid, comforting dreams and visions of deceased loved ones as they approach death. ■ The Shift in Priorities: Dying individuals stop caring about worldly achievements or legacy, focusing entirely on relationships and ensuring they are not a burden to family. ■ Healing Old Wounds: Terminal patients frequently experience profound psychological transformation and resolve deep-seated childhood trauma in their final days. ■ The True Meaning of Life: Human existence is ultimately defined by our capacity for interdependency and love rather than individual accomplishments. Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:11 Why I’ve Interviewed Over 1,500 Dying Patients 00:03:29 Do Dying People See Their Loved Ones Who’ve Passed? 00:09:14 The Interview That Changed Me Most 00:11:31 How Deathbed Dreams Differ From Normal Dreams 00:13:46 Is This Biological or Spiritual? 00:16:03 Are Dying Patients Just Delirious? 00:17:04 The Biggest Misconceptions About Death 00:18:25 Do People Really Have Regrets When They Die? 00:19:17 What Dying Patients Actually Care About 00:21:29 Are We Chasing the Wrong Things in Life? 00:26:39 Is Dying Painful? 00:27:42 How Dying Patients Find Peace 00:28:42 How Modern Medicine Has Changed the Way We Die 00:31:37 Making Peace With People Before You Die 00:32:45 Lessons From the Dying You Can Use Today 00:33:43 Facing Extreme Regret at the End of Life 00:39:03 Ads 00:41:12 Do Dying People Want More Time? 00:42:48 Is the Longevity Movement Missing the Point? 00:43:50 What Determines a Peaceful Death 00:44:30 What Happens When People Die Alone 00:46:53 How Dying Brings Unresolved Trauma to the Surface 00:48:17 Is There Life After Death? 00:51:00 Psychedelics at the End of Life 00:51:41 Should We Worry About Having Regrets? 00:52:51 What Caring for the Dying Taught Me 00:53:26 How to Cope When Someone You Love Dies 00:59:05 Losing My Father 01:03:36 Ads 01:04:46 How Hope Changes as We Die 01:07:05 Do People Stop Living Once They Know They’re Dying? 01:07:43 Do We All Die Alone? 01:08:52 How Death Can Heal 01:10:08 Why We Need to Stop “Fighting” Death 01:12:29 My Cancer Diagnosis & How It Changed My View of Death 01:15:45 What Is the Meaning of Life? 01:17:03 How Death Is Different for Children If you’ve been affected by the themes in this episode, support is available. UK: Cruse Bereavement Support - cruse.org.uk The Compassionate Friends - tcf.org.uk US: The Compassionate Friends - compassionatefriends.org The Dougy Center - dougy.org International - findahelpline.com Follow Dr. Christopher Kerr: Facebook - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/9WpG1ky Instagram - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/3UJBOLb LinkedIn - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/6uC41Jv YouTube - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5YduPEb Book: Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life’s End - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/53Kcbph More information on his studies and patient videos can be found at: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/4vkysI3 To contact: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/91kvvNr The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ Shop The Diary Of A CEO collection: https://thediary.com/collections/shop ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 Sponsors: Pipedrive - https://pipedrive.com/CEO Cometeer - https://www.cometeer.com/steven using code STEVEN for $30 off

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  As a founder building a business when I was in my early twenties, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that I wasn't good at, and that thing was finances. Finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called Zero. Zero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses, and it brings accounting, payments, payroll and analytics all into one place, even for people that don't love doing finances. Zero wants to do the financial work for you, but its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record because Zero wants to help you understand what's happening in your business and increasingly, and this is maybe the most important thing, is help you make decisions.

• 0:45Steven Bartlett?

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• 1:04Speaker 01

  You've interviewed 1,500 people as they're about to die. And what our research has shown is nearly 90% of people start to have very intense dreams or visions as they get closer to death, and it's unlike anything they've ever experienced. And what's fascinating is these events don't resemble delirium. When we ask them to scale it zero to 10 on the degree of realism, it's always a 10. So it feels like this actually happened.

• 1:28Steven Bartlett?

  Tell me about those people.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Would it help to see a video? So after doing this for 30 years, what I've come to understand is we've lost our way with dying. There's such a lack of information and that void is overwhelmingly filled with fear and mistruths compounded by the fact that doctors don't have these discussions.

• 1:47Steven Bartlett?

  Can you list them for me?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  First, I don't see people bringing up regret towards the end of their life.

• 1:52Steven Bartlett?

  They're not thinking about, do they regret something?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  No, hell no, no, it's gone. Death is this unbelievably truthful place. You're stripped to the bare bones of who you are. And if you think of the best version of yourself, it was never achieving something. It was being a son, it was being a brother, it was being a friend. And then the big myths are that pain is expected, and that's actually not true.

• 2:13Steven Bartlett?

  It's less painful than people think.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, by a mile. But it's damning how little conversations there are to address that issue. And then next, this is one that fascinates me. You're going to see why.

• 2:24Steven Bartlett?

  And also, we have these six handwritten cards of lessons you've learnt from caring for the dying. We'll go into the full list, but from everything you've experienced, do you think there is life after death?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  This is probably the most remarkable thing of all. So I think.

• 2:42Steven Bartlett?

  Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 3:16Steven Bartlett?

  Dr Christopher Kerr. You spend three decades of your life experiencing something that most of us probably spend our lives trying to avoid. What is it you've done for the last three decades?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  I was trying to avoid it too, but more by accident, I ended up becoming a hospice doctor.

• 3:37Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  A hospice doctor cares for that individual who is no longer deemed treatable.

• 3:44Steven Bartlett?

  So you've spent 30 years caring for people that are going to die shortly?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:50Steven Bartlett?

  And you started interviewing them?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Probably 1,500 at this point.

• 3:55Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you start interviewing people that were about to die?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Because their perspectives matter. I arrived at hospice completely unprepared to be a doctor of the dying. Medical school prepares you really to defeat death, not to care for those who are dying. But my colleagues, particularly in nursing, were much more attuned to what the actual patient was experiencing. What I've come to understand is what the patient perspective is the one that matters. And that when you start to see patients as people, you start to understand that they have these rich emotional and personal lives, and that's what matters at the end of life.

• 4:34Steven Bartlett?

  How much research have you done? Because I've got, I think, 15 research papers here that you've published.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've done a lot. And we do very important things. So we rule out confusion states. We've viewed, done studies on post-traumatic growth to see whether, within these negative experience of dying, was there actually positive gain? We've looked at the effect on children.

• 4:54Steven Bartlett?

  When children die?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. And we've looked at the effect of these things on bereavement, you know, those left behind, how did that influence their bereavement?

• 5:02Steven Bartlett?

  And you've also done a lot of research on the visions people see as they're dying and the dreams they have in the days leading up to their dying.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the focus. The vast majority of people, nearly 90% of people, start to have very intense dreams or visions, and the overriding theme is that they're seeing people who they've loved and who they've lost. And very specifically, it's those that have loved them unconditionally, purely. And those that didn't aren't there. Dying is progressive sleep. Your sleep architecture changes, your sleep cycle changes. And ever more, you start to have these kind of inner experiences. It makes sense, right, that as you're dying, you're going to be reflective, you're going to be introspective. And they usually become more prevalent towards the last kind of week or two of life.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And what was very interesting, the frequency of these events increases as people approach death. So it's all been an attempt to really humanize the dying process. So take it from a medical model, which looks at organ failure and management of disease. And instead, let's look instead what the patients are actually experiencing towards the end of their life. And what's fascinating is when you measure what themes bring them the most comfort is seeing the deceased.

• 6:21Steven Bartlett?

  So if I'm passing away, the thing that brings me the most comfort is seeing my deceased relatives?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:29Steven Bartlett?

  And I've got a graph here which shows the dreams of the dead that were most comforting. I'll throw that up on the screen.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, we measured on a scale what brought them the most comfort. And you can see it goes up between the living and seeing the dead. Would it help to see a video?

• 6:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  What happened was we videoed patients early because we knew that our audience, particularly a medical audience, would have a view of what a dying patient was, that they were either compromised or feeble minded. And so it became very important to capture them on film. So this is Paul. This is actually three weeks before his death. And he kind of covers all the bases. So very vivid, these dreams. Very little is said between the dreamer and the person in the dream. What you'll notice in all these videos that's striking is the absolute absence of fear. So these dreams never deny the fact that they're dying. They almost transcend it.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  And they really sometimes have trouble to find language for what they're seeing, but they know how their left felt, which is they're kind of put back together.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  I've probably had 15 dreams about her, maybe, somewhere in there. She always wear, I dream the color most like, and she always wears a beautiful light blue. It could be a suit, it could be a gown, it could be a dress, but it's always light blue. And a couple of times she's gave me the little beauty pageant wave, and a couple of times she sort of, always with a smile, doesn't, only one or twice I've ever heard her voice. But she always kind of lets me know that she's fine.

• 8:10Steven Bartlett?

  So in the lead up to his death, he's having, what, 15 dreams about his deceased wife?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:15Steven Bartlett?

  What do you make of that? Like, what does that mean?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, honestly, my view of this is changing. I would have told you before, when I started doing it, that this was a rekindled memory.

• 8:28Steven Bartlett?

  So it was just a memory?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like looking at a picture.

• 8:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Right. And recalling the imagery. There's a couple of features that stand out that suggest there's a lot more than that, that there's almost this continued consciousness. And one is the detail that's rekindled is remarkable. 95-year-old man, he lost his mother when he's five, and he talks about smelling her perfume and hearing her voice. The other is that often these interactions, and you're going to see this in other videos, there's communication. So they're not, they're not in still form. Again, not like looking at a picture.

• 9:05Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe his wife is still truly accessible? Or are you saying that the memory of her is accessible through his dreams? Because they're very different propositions.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  I don't know what this means. I don't know if this, I wouldn't be so bold as to say this speaks to an afterlife. What I am more convinced of is that those who have loved us are never gone, they're accessible to us. And what is fascinating to me is that at the end of life, when people are neurologically compromised, they're fading, they can't move. The remnant of function is still this core sense of being connected and loved. And that remains. It's like we enter the world and leave the world with remarkable symmetry. You know, you come into the world and the infant doesn't know language, undeveloped

• 10:00Speaker 01

  brain, but it knows its mother's love, it knows it feels connected and secured. And at the very end of life, it's kind of the same thing. They're diminished, they're less capable, but what they're feeling and sensing, even without language, is the same thing.

• 10:19Steven Bartlett?

  Was there one particular video you got with a patient that was approaching their death that was most persuasive to you as it relates to believing that consciousness continues, or that our loved ones aren't really ever gone?

• 10:35Steven Bartlett?

  They are able to be summoned back into this world.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Definitely the ones where people have injury or harm for having lived and they've struggled with that, often for decades. And no matter how much therapy, talk, therapy, medication, they've never found peace and they find it in the end in these experiences. So, an old veteran who suffers with survival death and PTSD, in the last, late days of life, he's brought back to those who died overseas and he's comforting. And I think some of the most remarkable ones, of course, are the children who do this so differently. But just the fact that there's so much innate ability

• 11:22Speaker 01

  within us to heal these harmed and broken pieces. And for children who do this in ways that are absolutely inspiring, they're often not dramatic, they're very, there's no great epiphany, no gate reveal, these are moments of just having lived and mattered, they're sitting around a kitchen table. If you want, we can show Florence and she's an example. She's lost her husband and she's lost her daughter. And this is five days before her passing.

• 11:53Steven Bartlett?

  Tell us about the dreams.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  But the other night, I fell right into a sleep. We were like sitting at the kitchen table, laughing, I could see their faces. I could tell in full force, we were laughing, we were talking, we were eating. It made me feel like that whole 12 years had never existed.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Because it was so real that it was, he was there in a present.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  And seven years since my daughter was born. It was like we were always together, never separated.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. How does it make you feel about the prospect of dying? How does it change your life?

• 12:35Speaker 03

  I'm there.

• 12:37Steven Bartlett?

  When you see something like that, people might say, you know, because they are aware that they're going to pass away at some point, they've been given that diagnosis, that prognosis. Presumably, yeah, the end of their life, their family, these are the things that would be on their mind. And if they're on their minds, they'd be in their dreams. So, is it, is it the process of death that's provoking these kind of dreams or visions? Or is it just the case that, you know, you dream about what you think about? And obviously, these people are thinking about the end of their lives.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, the only rebuttal to that is when you ask them these, these sorts of questions, the thing that gets the most distressed is when you refer to them as dreams. Because these are unlike anything they've ever experienced. So, they're not dreams in the sense they're not metaphorical, they're not fantastical, they don't require interpretation. I've never had a patient say, hey, what do you think this means? They're given this sense of knowing and they'll often say, I don't normally dream, or I don't recall my dream, or no, this was virtual, this was a happening. So, they have no doubt. When we ask them to scale it, zero to 10, on the degree of realism, it's always a 10. So, it feels like this actually happened. And those of them who are having these

• 13:52Speaker 01

  experiences in the wake state, you can watch them. They're looking right through, they're looking at the room, they're petting the dog that isn't there.

• 14:00Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, so some of them have these visions?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  50% occurring when they're awake, yeah.

• 14:05Steven Bartlett?

  Even if it's quite some time before they pass away?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  No, it's usually measurable within weeks, a couple of weeks. And it picks up as, as you get closer to death.

• 14:15Steven Bartlett?

  And when it gets closer to death, how do these visions change or evolve?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Become more immersive. So, again, dying is progressive sleep. So, they're living more in this other state where they're deeper and deeper asleep. So, they spend more time there. And they'll often wake up, it's interesting, and wish they were going back into that other state. Oftentimes, they're just warmed by reunion of what they were experiencing. And time and distance go away. So, their decades are moved and they're recalling very vivid memories of a dog they lost in childhood, for example.

• 14:51Steven Bartlett?

  So, do you think this is a biological, physiological thing in their brain, a bunch of chemicals that are sloshing around? Or do you think it is spiritual?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  I'm also a PhD in neurobiology. I've spent five, six years studying the brain. So, I, I, I'm drawn to that. No one knows. And I'm good with that. I, I think you could, you point parts of their brain here and say, you know, love lives in this certain areas, certain neurotransmitters, you know, are correlated with happiness. You can take all the pieces and you can't make the whole. I can't show you where love is. I can't recreate love in a dish. And I can't create this. I think it really goes beyond brain function into something else.

• 15:42Steven Bartlett?

  So, you think it is spiritual?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  I do, very much, yeah.

• 15:45Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe there is a soul?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:48Steven Bartlett?

  And so, you would posit, I guess, that lives beyond the physiology of the human body and brain?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:54Steven Bartlett?

  Half of Americans say a dead relative has visited them.

• 16:00Steven Bartlett?

  And the answer here that has that 53% of votes is, have you ever felt a dead family member visit you in a dream or in any other form? 53% of people say they have. 34% say in the past year, they felt the presence of a dead family member. And 28% say in the past year, they've told dead family members about events in their life.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, we remain connected.

• 16:24Steven Bartlett?

  15% say in the past year, they've had a dead family member communicate with them.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  All the data has always suggested that, at least in this country, there's a higher degree of spiritual orientation than you would expect. But that's always been the case.

• 16:40Steven Bartlett?

  When people are in their last days, do they become more religious and more spiritual?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Yes. We know it because of what they focus on. They tend to think about these big things. And again, they tend to be about relationships. They ask these better questions. We've looked at this question of religion and we've have not found that being, having a religious belief changes how you experience these end of life events. It just doesn't seem to matter.

• 17:08Steven Bartlett?

  And most dying patients report end of life dreams and visions. The stats here show that 80% of healthcare professionals have witnessed or told, been told of one. This, I didn't realize it was so many people that are having these end of life dreams and visions. I didn't realize it was 80%. And, and you know, again, we, people might think this is because of delirium, because of their illness.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  No, it's a good question. And that's what our studies did that was smart, is we sorted out the patients who are delirious. So, we screened them every day before they did a questionnaire. Again, these are approved by a university. So, it has to be witnessed, you have to have consent, you have to be cognitively intact. So, before they did our questionnaire, every day, they had to get a screen for delirium. And these events don't resemble delirium. Delirium is very disorganized. And the biggest difference is most people are left frightened or distressed by delirium. These events are recalled with acuity, they're based on real happenings, and they're left with a feeling of comfort, not distress or fear.

• 18:06Steven Bartlett?

  Acuity?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Acuity, there's sharpness.

• 18:09Steven Bartlett?

  What are the other sort of fundamental misunderstandings people have about death that you've spent your career trying to confront and reverse?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Oh, there are many. Dying is a process, death is a moment. It changes over time. The big myths are that pain is expected or anticipated, and that's actually not true. Pain isn't, and the pain that is there can be resolved. The other misconceptions around eating and drinking, people stop eating and drinking, it doesn't hurt, they're not eating and drinking because they're, they're dying. Something happens in nature that we don't die in want. So, it just kind of dwindles. And dying is really like a dimming of the shades. It's gradual. You start to lose function, do less. If you have the flu, you know to go to bed, it just doesn't pay to

• 18:59Speaker 01

  do. Sleep is preferred. And most people die in sleep. The key is to die, you have to be able to sleep well. But to sleep well, you have to be comfortable. And what people tend to think is to be comfortable, I mean, you need to be physically comfortable. But you also need to be psychologically at peace, existentially at peace. So, the holy grail for us, the vital sign that matters for us is comfortable sleep. Because you can't sleep if you're in discomfort and you can't die if you can't sleep.

• 19:29Steven Bartlett?

  There's that famous study by Bronnie Ware, who I think was a palliative nurse in Australia, who interviewed people on their last days and asked them about their regrets. Have you ever done any research like that to understand?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  No, and I really have trouble with the study.

• 19:43Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. First of all, it wasn't empiric, right? It was, it was based off of conversations. And that's not my experience. I don't see people bringing up regret towards the end of their life. Now, if you ask people what, if they had regrets, I'm sure they would give you an answer. It's like if I asked you, what's your favorite color? You have an answer. But you don't go around thinking, oh, this is my favorite color. So, regrets, and this shows in our quantifiable study, don't come to the surface, actually. A lot of that gets let go of. I can honestly say, I've done this for nearly 30 years, and that's not what I hear.

• 20:22Steven Bartlett?

  So, let's take a look at this, because I think this is quite important. And I, funnily enough, had this conversation with my fiance yesterday when we were talking about what actually matters in life. So, here, we have 11 things that medical students say they think will matter to a dying patient at the end of their life. And then, you're going to tell me what actually mattered when you did an empirical, peer-reviewed study and asking patients with days to live, what actually mattered to them?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Well, the first one the hospice patient cares about is not being a burden. They become selfless. They don't want to tax their family. They don't want their illness to compromise their life. They want to spend time with them, but they don't want to, to interfere with their living. You would think as people are close, nearing the end of their life, they would become more and more self-focused and they become other-focused. And what's really interesting is actually, this aligns well with that Science of Happiness work, right? Which says that the happier people derive meaning from doing for others rather than doing for self. These better features kind of come to life at the end.

• 21:35Steven Bartlett?

  If I've got a relative who's passing away, if this is the thing they care about most, not being a burden, is there something I can do as the loved one or the relative to ease this concern for them?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it's aligning your wishes with their hope, which is your wish is you actually want to be a presence.

• 21:54Steven Bartlett?

  And you're, and letting them know that you're not a burden?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:57Steven Bartlett?

  They're not a burden. Okay. Number two?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  They want time.

• 22:01Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so they want to be around their friends and family.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:04Steven Bartlett?

  That's what they care about.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Again, fundamental here is its relationships, right? It's what it's about.

• 22:10Steven Bartlett?

  And the medical students thought it would be.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Feeling that life was meaningful.

• 22:14Steven Bartlett?

  Again.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  I think this is wonderful. This is one that fascinates me the most. So you're in your twenties and you're on this journey of development and that you've had this impact of some sort. The door shut and they're not living in the rearview mirror and they're not wondering whether they had meaning or not.

• 22:34Steven Bartlett?

  This is very relevant because me and my fiance were in a car the other day and it was yesterday and we're talking about this and she turned to me and said, like, what's your why? And having sat here on this podcast with a guest a couple of weeks ago who asked me to close my eyes and imagined it was the last day of my life, the only thing that mattered in that moment was who was around my bed and what they thought of me and were they safe and secure? And it didn't dawn on me in that moment where I visualized being on my deathbed, my legacy or the impact that had had or the achievements I'd accomplished. It's made me really reconsider what my why is. Cause really if in the last moments of my life, what I'm concerned about is who stood there and what they think of me.

• 23:16Steven Bartlett?

  And when I say what they think of me, it's like, do my kids think dad was a good man? And did he leave us with lessons and principles that so we can live a good life too? That seems to be most important. So it was just interesting because we go through life and we read Instagram and LinkedIn and it tells us like, what's your why? What's your legacy? What impact you want to have on the world? What's your purpose? What's your passion? And these are all things that are very self-focused. But actually it appears to me as you've described, that actually in those moments, it's about others.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and there's good work on this, right? Is the brain's ability to predict what makes us happy is horribly wrong. What we predict makes us happy is never sustainable.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Right? And what's important is to kind of de-want what matters.

• 24:01Steven Bartlett?

  Do you want what matters?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, because.

• 24:03Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Well, we're on this treadmill of things that we think are going to make us happy.

• 24:07Steven Bartlett?

  Job promotion.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:09Steven Bartlett?

  Car.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  And they're not sustainable things. And that's proven over and over and over and over again. Belonging, connection, meaning, those, those are the things that, I mean, we're fundamentally meant to belong to one another. If you think of the best version of yourself, it was never achieving something. It was being a son, it was being a brother, it was being a friend, it was being a fiance, or boyfriend, whatever. It's those things that make us important. And ultimately what you find out of this research is the enormous value of interdependency.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  And that's the whole deal, whether it's in the physical world, the natural world, the ecosystems, but as humans, we're, we're, it meant to be interdependent. And that's most clear in moments of vulnerability. So you posed yourself the question, kind of last day stuff. You're immediately vulnerable.

• 25:07Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Right? And what you did is you pulled in all these other people that matter to you.

• 25:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Because we're defined only by our relationships. That's the only surviving thing, not by these other things that seem in a transient sense important. And that bears us out. And what's beautiful is their concern shifts from self. And I mean, hope changes in that way, right? It's hope for cure, then just hope for others. It's just this really wonderful story about who we are.

• 25:39Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because the things you're saying, a lot of people will sort of intellectually understand and believe that it's about the relationships in these last moments, but therefore it's about relationships through our life. But then when you look at how we allocate our time on a weekly, monthly basis.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  There's a disproportionate.

• 25:53Steven Bartlett?

  There's a disconnect.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:55Steven Bartlett?

  Because we're, we're allocating our time towards accomplishment or achievement or money or promotions or cars, whatever.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:00Steven Bartlett?

  But then in the final hour, it's all about something else. And if I even reviewed the allocation of my time this week and day, I'd be like, well.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, dying is the death is this unbelievably truthful place. Right? Pretense goes away. All the superficiality goes away. You're, you're stripped to the bare, bare bones of who you are. And what you end up finding is that we're more alike than unlike. And there's a universality to being human and it involves being connected to one another. You know, our struggle is to remain humane and we go through this together, not alone. And that's again, there's a symmetry you see at the beginning of life and you see it at the end of life.

• 26:46Steven Bartlett?

  Politics falls away?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  I just sure as hell hope so.

• 26:50Steven Bartlett?

  And it's, it's interesting because so many people spend their lives getting agitated. The reason I say that is because you said we're more alike than we believe.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 26:59Steven Bartlett?

  And so when you're bare bones, you're not really thinking about the left, the right, this politics, this political issue.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  What you end up seeing when people are, are most vulnerable, you, you see beauty, you see love, you see tenderness, you see vulnerability. There are some awful humans that have lived a bad life, but in the end, when you see them in a more vulnerable state, I, I, I think you see their better nature. You see tenderness, you see expressions of love. There's a lot of pretense that people have to work through, personas that they present and illness kind of strips you of that. It's this great leveling effect to be sick, that what matters to you two weeks earlier doesn't matter to you now.

• 27:44Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so medical students thought the third would be pain symptom management and according to your hospice patients.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:51Steven Bartlett?

  They agree.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  They got that one right.

• 27:52Steven Bartlett?

  And what does that mean? That's just their concern is not being in pain.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  I mean, unfortunately, there's not a lot of conversation about what to expect. We just completed a study on this. If you were told you had a terminal disease, I guarantee one of your first overwhelming thoughts is a suffering.

• 28:07Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  And unfortunately, it's damning how little conversations there are to address that issue in terms of what to expect, when to expect it, what you're going to feel and reassure people. And these honest conversations actually don't take away hope, they restore agency.

• 28:24Steven Bartlett?

  So what is the misunderstanding?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, that it's far worse than people think, that there isn't a pain, rarely a pain we can't manage.

• 28:33Steven Bartlett?

  It's less painful than people think.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, by a mile. Yeah. That's probably the, the biggest myth.

• 28:39Steven Bartlett?

  About death and dying.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And honestly, it, it's compounded by the fact that doctors don't have these discussions.

• 28:47Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. So number four, in terms of what hospice patients say matters most to them?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Peace with God.

• 28:54Steven Bartlett?

  Being at peace with God. Hmm. And presumably just the religious ones, right?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  I know, it's peace with a belief of something larger. I've asked patients this and they'll say, what I would say is that I don't know. It's an existential feeling that doesn't necessarily have to be attributed to a belief or a God.

• 29:13Steven Bartlett?

  Now, is it because they're concerned they're going to go to hell or that they're going to get, they don't know?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  I don't hear that. I'm sure there was a time when judgment, the role of judgment played in, but just to be at peace.

• 29:24Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Universe, existentially.

• 29:27Steven Bartlett?

  And is there a way to become at peace that, that patients will ask for?

• 29:31Speaker 01

  I don't hear, but I imagine it's to ask for forgiveness in part.

• 29:37Steven Bartlett?

  And the medical students you interviewed thought number four would be being mentally aware.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yes, and that does come up, right? So here we are.

• 29:44Steven Bartlett?

  That's number five.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:46Steven Bartlett?

  In what hospital? Okay.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  And then the next is, is dying at home. And this is tragic because 80% of Americans want to die at home and about 30% do.

• 29:58Steven Bartlett?

  Why is that?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  It, it's really reflective of mostly our, our medicalization of dying. As a country, we underinvest and care for at home so that people end up having to go into the hospital and the death that they fear is the one they get. The more tertiary or advanced a hospital is, the more aggressive treatment there is. It's part of the death-defying approach of medicine. There's always something you can do. They die in units and they die in those sort of, and the irony is the more they get, it actually hasn't been shown to enhance life.

• 30:33Steven Bartlett?

  The more what they get.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  The more care, more aggressive care they get when they're dying.

• 30:37Steven Bartlett?

  So you're saying that we, we kind of drag it out a bit unnecessarily sometimes?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  I think medicine does its best to defy death. And unfortunately, it, it often denies it even when it's obvious, when things have become futile. And if medicine can't appreciate death when it's objectively there, they're certainly not going to pay attention to the experience of the dying. And I think it's complicated, but we've lost our way with dying. You know, dying used to be in the home and in the community, in connection to our church. And in the last hundred years, it's become institutionalized. So death is now like a rumor. You know, it's something that happens somewhere down the line, probably to somebody else, but it's not proximate to us like it used to be.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  So you take all these factors together, the fact that we've institutionalized dying, the fact that medicines becomes, you know, technically focused and no longer artful. We don't, it's not okay to be there for presents. I mean, people can't die of old age anymore. You know, you gotta have about five diagnoses. So it's lost its grace. It's lost its humanity.

• 31:44Steven Bartlett?

  So if someone knows they're going to die, you would recommend they usually didn't come to a hospice and they.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  No, I get into a hospice so you can die at home.

• 31:53Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, versus.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  So hospice is more likely to align your wish to an outcome. Hospice is this, it developed out of our communities as, as an answer, as a rebuttal to the way dying were traditionally treated in a hospital.

• 32:09Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So what is it about dying in a hospital that is? Worse than dying at home.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  I don't know where to begin. What matters to the dying patient is familiarity, to be connected, to be where they live, the things that make them comfortable, the people they love. They don't want to be woken in the night. They don't want to be poked. They don't want IVs. They don't want another scan. It goes down to what will make you comfortable, what matters to you in the end. And being at home with your people is what matters to people.

• 32:42Steven Bartlett?

  Makes sense. So number seven, having care directives followed. What does that mean?

• 32:49Speaker 01

  And making sure that what you want to happen is going to happen.

• 32:52Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yep. And this one is, this is interesting, I think, resolving conflicts.

• 32:57Steven Bartlett?

  So medical students who are asked about what matters most to those that are dying, they ranked the seventh thing that would matter as resolving conflicts.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Hmm. And what's interesting is these two, right, is was life meaningful and resolving conflicts? And the dying patient's kind of all good. They, they, they don't want to be, they're not a problem to be solved.

• 33:19Steven Bartlett?

  That's interesting. You're right. That is the most interesting takeaway so far is living people think the dying will be really concerned with the legacy and what they accomplished. And did they have any beef with anybody? But dying patients.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  And, and that's why I have trouble with that regret literature. Okay. Because that's not what they're saying. They're not focused really on the, the negative aspects of having lived, right? They're trying to preserve what makes them them. And what makes them them is their family and being in their home and being at peace with their God.

• 33:49Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, that speaks to what we should be thinking about in our lives day to day to some degree.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Well, and again, there's a bridge between these two things. It's not that actually, the idea that this changes in death actually isn't all that true. I think we're aware of it in dying. Dr. Santos at Yale does this wonderful work on happiness. If you go upstream and you do goods, you do that, like her sort of work on happiness, you reveal a lot of the same truths.

• 34:15Steven Bartlett?

  Well, we also live in a commercialized world where we're exposed to marketing and we're told what matters every day when we turn on the TV or open our phones. And we're told that the Louis Vuitton bag matters, where we clap when someone gets the promotion. So there is an element of sort of socialization that orientates our values towards being more materialistic and I guess shallow to some degree.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Those things are transient and non-sustaining. And one of the things that comes out of this happiness work is the, the importance of savoring and savoring things of worth, like our relationships.

• 34:47Steven Bartlett?

  Are there any people that were days from their own passing that were truly unhappy because of the way that they'd lived their lives?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you die how you live, right? You can't reinvent it. It's not rainbows and flowers. I've certainly seen that and I've written about them and their people who had done wrong and they were fearful of dying.

• 35:09Steven Bartlett?

  Fearful of what?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Well, in, in several cases, they had been raised Catholic and they were worried about judgment. And the one case was actually a police officer. So he thought that he, because he'd been raised with confession, that he had to tell everybody all the horrible things he did wrong. And it was kind of interesting. We had a reporter from the New York Times and she got an earful. He just had to be cathartic and say everything. He's trying to unleash his sins, but it's very rare.

• 35:36Steven Bartlett?

  In that case, you've got a police officer unleashing their sins. Could that not result in legal consequences if they say things that?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so, because he talked about beating up witnesses and things like that. I never thought of that, but it's certainly true.

• 35:51Steven Bartlett?

  And nothing was done about that?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  No. And unfortunately, what was interesting is we had a criminal, a guy who had spent more time in prison than out at the same time. And actually he's on film and he had regrets, true, but they got addressed at the end.

• 36:07Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's one of those beautiful things. So about 12% of our patients report dreams that are distressing or uncomfortable. They're not all comfortable. And again, it's not surprising you're going to die the way you lived. And, and what we got wrong was those are sometimes the most transformational. Those are the ones where they find healing.

• 36:28Steven Bartlett?

  He had a dream about some of the bad things he'd done.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:31Steven Bartlett?

  And that.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Caused a transformation. Dwayne.

• 36:35Steven Bartlett?

  And he'd committed crimes in his life.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:38Steven Bartlett?

  What kind of crimes?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Two attempted murders, two murders, sorry, but both were self-defense on the streets. Somebody were trying to rob him, sort of thing. He'd lived on the streets most of his life, but he never, again, he never reckoned with the things he had done wrong. And this is his reckoning.

• 36:54Steven Bartlett?

  And how many days was this before he passed away?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  12.

• 36:59Steven Bartlett?

  12 days.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  My dreams, man, you know, my nightmares, I don't like them. I think it's because my, my past is coming back to me, you know, from doing wrong. Because I'm not going to say I'm the perfect guy when I was out there, because I was ripping, running the streets, you know, doing wrong to individuals. And now they know my symptoms. They know I'm sick. So now they want to try to hurt me, you know? It was like they were jigging a knife, you know, trying to cut, cut out, you know? My neck, where my cancer was at.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:42Speaker 04

  Stop, stop trying to fight, you know? I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you know? Trying to fight this guy off from hurting him. It's scary to me. I'm not a bad individual, man. Well, I don't cross a lot of people in my life, you know? And I need help. I need help, you know? I don't, I don't want to live my life being out in society walking, have to look over my back, man. I just want people to forgive me and please know that I was sick at the time when I was

• 38:21Speaker 04

  doing certain things that was hurting them and their families, you know? That's all I want. I don't, I don't want them to look at me as a bad individual because I'm not, you know? I need help.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  What ends up happening, he can't sleep. And again, going back to this idea that it's very hard to die if you can't sleep. He ends up waking up and he asks to see his daughter. And she comes on the film and what she describes is for the first time in her life, he holds her for minutes and says how much he loves her and that he's sorry for what he had done. So this negative experience that was happening when his eyes closed brought this reckoning and this ask for forgiveness, which of course she gave.

• 39:09Steven Bartlett?

  And what do you make of that? Like, again, I'm asking you this, the same question I asked you earlier. It's like, what do you think is happening there? Is that a spiritual thing? Is that just him, you know, approaching the end of his life and feeling remorseful? So he's having.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Oh, no, he didn't have conscious control of this. I don't believe that for a second. This was happening when his eyes were closed. I think that he was carrying at a very deep level. He knew the wrongs that he had done and that something was forcing him to find peace. And it did.

• 39:41Steven Bartlett?

  Something.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Something, yeah. I think truth. I think somewhere in him, he couldn't joke and conjive around it. Dying brings, brought this to a surface and he needed to find peace. And it was wonderful for her. It changed her completely. And what ends up happening was she ends up spending every night with him and he ends up passing comfortably.

• 40:09Steven Bartlett?

  I am, have a stat here that genuinely shocked me. It says that sales teams spend about 50% of their time on admin and manual CRM updates rather than selling. That is deadly for their bottom line. And that is part of the reason why a decade ago at my previous company, I switched to using Pipe Drive, who are our sponsor. If you've never used Pipe Drive, it is an intelligent AI-powered sales CRM. And they just launched new meeting intelligence features, like an AI note taker built right into the CRM. Pipe Drive now automates more of the admin that stops you from doing the work that you love to do best. Before your meeting, it pulls deal history, email records and previous conversations into a single brief, so you're prepared. And it joins your meetings with you. It's in there to take notes, so you don't need to.

• 40:50Steven Bartlett?

  And it turns those notes that it takes into accurate auto draft CRM updates. A hundred thousand companies are already running their sales on it. You can sign up at pipedrive.com/CEO where you'll get an exclusive 30-day free trial instead of the usual 14 days. Absolutely no credit card needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/CEO to get started. If you're in sales and you run a sales team, I don't think you'll regret it. You'd think the former president of Nespresso would be a pretty hard person to convert to a new coffee company, but just one sip of Cometier Coffee made him invest.

• 41:30Steven Bartlett?

  But let me tell you the reason why I became an investor. So I had a big box of this arrive on my desk in the London office. And then I'd say within about an hour and a half, the Slack channel that we have starts blowing up with people asking, what the hell is that thing that's been left in the kitchen? It is unbelievable. So instead of trying to make it yourself at home and balance the flavors, they flash freeze it at the perfect moment. So all you have to do is pop it out of here into a cup, pour hot water on it, and it tastes like nothing you've tasted before. You can also make delicious iced coffee drinks as well. Just pour it in. No machine, no brewing with plastic and all that nasty stuff. And you can get $30 off your first order at cometeer.com/steven today.

• 42:13Steven Bartlett?

  That's cometeer.com/steven. So back to our board of things that actually mattered. We're on number seven.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Number eight. Feeling that life was meaningful.

• 42:25Steven Bartlett?

  So just to zoom out once again on this, were they given 11 options or were they given lots of options?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Lots of options.

• 42:32Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. And these are the 11 that they actually picked.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:34Steven Bartlett?

  So number eight is they cared that life was meaningful. But this is particularly low relative to the others.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so is this one.

• 42:43Steven Bartlett?

  Living as long as possible.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  And you want to know what? I've never had a dying patient say, I want to live as long as possible. What they want to do is live as well as they can, as long as they can. But unless you've been sick, that's not the goal.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Which is antithetical to the way medical world looks at patients, right? Is that we keep going at all costs.

• 43:10Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, there's some stats that I was reading here about how many years people spend sick on average. I think it was in the United States, if I have the stats right. Yeah, it says up to sort of 11 years of our lives are lived in poor health. So although our health span is, you know, in the Western Pacific, 68 years, or in Europe, 66 years, we spend about a decade in poor health.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:34Steven Bartlett?

  And actually, what you're saying to me is that people care more about their health span, how many years of good health they have versus their lifespan, which is just how many years they're alive.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  And I think that's a perspective that's very hard to understand in health. But it's hard work being sick, you know, and it's hard on those you love. So it makes sense to me.

• 43:53Steven Bartlett?

  What about this, um, obviously a big subject at the moment is this longevity movement, people wanting to extend life and live forever and all these kinds of things. What is your perspective of seeing, of interviewing thousands of people that are dying? How has it shaped your perspective on longevity?

• 44:07Speaker 01

  I think that there's a risk of some illusion. There was an article in Science recently, 55% of lifespan is determined by genetics. And it doesn't leave you immune from circumstances of disease and whatnot. I worry a lot of the lack of evidence around some of the efforts. And I think the focus really needs to be on living well. And if you look at the blue zone, folks, I mean, that little lady in Japan or Italy isn't waking up in a cold plunge and measuring her creatine. She's just living well. They move, they eat more plants, they're highly social, they take time to down gear

• 44:51Speaker 01

  through prayer, meditation, what, music, whatever.

• 44:54Steven Bartlett?

  When you think about all the people you've met who were days from their death, are there some who were more at peace with it because they had accomplished more? Like, what, what is the corollary in terms of those that were most at peace with leaving this planet?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  The love given and received, that's the only thing that matters. I, I've seen people who have led remarkably simple lives, but they were pure in the love that they were able to experience.

• 45:26Steven Bartlett?

  And so they were happier to leave.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. You want to live in a way that you can die well, and that means loving well.

• 45:35Steven Bartlett?

  And have you experienced the opposite, where someone had nobody there?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Oh, um, I've had some very bad experiences, people who were, one of them I've written about, who was taken as a child into a home situation that was really for kids with a lot of complexity and had never seen or experienced love and the emptiness she felt. I never forget what she said to me, she was watching somebody kiss on a screen and she goes, you know, I look at that, I've never understood that. And her dying, what was empty.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  And regretful.

• 46:11Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean? Take me into the.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Just that she never, she knew she never was loved. She knew she was denied love, denied love by parents. She was misused by men. So what she knew of love hurt her. And she was aware enough to know that.

• 46:28Steven Bartlett?

  And there was no one there when she passed away?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  No. No.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  It's interesting though. She had one very interesting dream. She had a man who had wanted to marry her, but she had been so taken advantage of that she was doubtful. And as soon as he asked her, she moved out of their apartment. And as a way to self-protect.

• 46:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  At the end of her life, he came to her and told her that he really did love her. So she was, she was shown some version of it that was soothing to her. That was it.

• 47:11Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of people, because of sort of early traumas, are somewhat avoidant of love. You explain that she moved out of the apartment when someone tried to propose to her. I could almost relate to some degree. I remember in my early years of my, in my early teens, I was extremely avoidant of commitment or relationships or whatever. And I remember this particular person turning around to me after I pursued them for four years, telling me that they would now want to be in a relationship with me. And I remember immediately dissuading them after pursuing them for four years.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's for sure, I think.

• 47:43Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, but also a lot of it roots back to our, our early models of love and connection and relationships. So, well, we modeled it in a healthy way.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:52Steven Bartlett?

  And this kind of brings me to the point around sort of overcoming trauma and wounds. How does the, the process of dying help us confront our earliest traumas or the traumas that have held us back in our lives? Have you seen evidence of that?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Oh, lots. I've seen it in this end of life process. And again, I think this is the most meaningful, for me personally, the most meaningful ones that I witness. So I've seen a man who had lost his arm at the age of eight, and he was from an impoverished family. And developmentally, his whole identity was, how was he going to be independent and be able to be a provider, et cetera? And at the end of his life, he sees himself lying in a bed and everyone who he worked with came by him and told him he was the best worker they had known. A mother whose child was in prison for drug offenses and her, her identity as a mother is being questioned.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  And at the end of her life, her parents come to her and tell her she's loved and she was a good parent.

• 48:56Steven Bartlett?

  In a vision? Not, not physically?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 49:00Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  No, but again, there's something in us that's innate that can heal these kind of broken pieces of us at the end that make us whole. So a lot of, again, I come back to it, the most inspiring people are the people who have been harmed and often from nothing of their own doing, but that find peace in the end.

• 49:22Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think there is life after death?

• 49:26Steven Bartlett?

  Because one train of thought is that, you know, our bodies go into the ground or we're cremated and then we become dust and then the trees, you know, we become part of the trees and the bees and the birds, and that's it.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think we go on in a physical form, but I go back to this idea that there's the shared, seems to be the shared consciousness, that the love that we've experienced at early in life, and it's very interesting, it tends to be those who love us unconditionally and the other ones kind of go by the wayside. They're, they're inseparable from us and they become more present to us as we're leaving our physical form. So it does suggest that there's some sort of collective consciousness that goes on. And back to your survey on the bereaved, the fact that that many people feel that they're accessed by those who have passed is interesting. How do you see that?

• 50:20Steven Bartlett?

  I think that consciousness is a really fascinating thing. You know, I've interviewed lots of people on this subject and I never really thought of consciousness as a thing before, but I've got a couple of hypotheses around what consciousness might be.

• 50:33Steven Bartlett?

  None of them I can say I necessarily believe, but I remember one particular, I think it was a physicist telling me that he thinks maybe consciousness is the way that the universe understands itself. And he hypothesized to me that consciousness breaks itself into lots of little pieces, into fish at the bottom of the ocean and human beings that walk the land and birds that see from the sky. And it's consciousness's way of learning about itself and understanding itself is breaks itself into these living organisms. They send some of them to the bottom of the oceans and some of them to the top of the mountains and they all explore in it. Maybe explains why humans, but all animals are so fascinated by novelty. Reason we go on holidays is because we want to have new experiences. We go and look up in awe at things we've never seen before, like mountains.

• 51:18Steven Bartlett?

  And it's interesting, you know, I was telling the story about being in, I think Gibraltar or Malta, or whatever it was. And driving down the street after I'd had this conversation with this physicist and looking at tourists in a completely new light, because tourists are stood there for 10 minutes or an hour staring at something they've never seen before. And it's just, it's interesting to me that that's part of the, the animal experience is this fascination with things we haven't seen. So maybe this hypothesis that consciousness is this central source that breaks into lots of pieces and goes off into existence to understand itself is a, you know, is a plausible, not completely indefensible, but plausible idea. And then maybe when I die, I go, I return back to the source of consciousness.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  I like my version better. And you know what's interesting is that you should look at is the work that's done with psychedelics and dying patients.

• 52:11Steven Bartlett?

  Tell me about that.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Basically, when they give psychedelic drugs, which indigenous people have been doing for thousands of years, they come back structurally altered. First of all, their fear of dying dissipates. And they tend to see themselves as something larger, immersed within and connected to, to life at large. But they, they, they're at peace in a beautiful way. So they have this heightened awareness and they come back differently and they die differently. And that's like with this work, they die differently.

• 52:47Steven Bartlett?

  So back to our board here, what was the 10th thing? What matters most to people at the end of their life? Having finances in order. Hmm. Interesting.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  And the last one is resolving conflicts. And that's where I have trouble with the idea of regret.

• 53:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, because it's not that important to be.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  So if, so now invert this. So if you went to people and said, do you have conflicts? They go, yeah, I have conflicts. Or do you have regrets? Yeah, I have them. But when you actually rank one of them as priorities, it's not relevant.

• 53:15Steven Bartlett?

  Very interesting, very, very interesting. It's definitely changed my mind because you're right. Because we, you know, we go and talk, we talk about regrets at the end of your life and regret generally so often. We end up misunderstanding that to mean that regrets are the most important thing. And that you need to live your life in a way where you don't have regrets. But actually you're saying that having spoken to those that are dying, living their life free from regret seems to be quite low in their priorities.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's a symptom of our times, right? Which we, we become introspective and self-analytical. So if you, if you ask these questions, they're going to come up. But in the, in the lived experiences, are they actually relevant?

• 53:56Steven Bartlett?

  So we have these six handwritten cards.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  So these are the lessons I've learned from actually caring for dying patients. And probably the one that stands out the most is that love endures after physical loss.

• 54:09Steven Bartlett?

  Love endures after physical loss.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  So the idea that, and this is really what our research bears out, which is that people who have been lost often decades earlier are there for us at the end. And that that part of that dying process is this reunion with and to them, so that that survives.

• 54:31Steven Bartlett?

  And on that point, it's probably a good time to touch on the subject of grief. And how the dying process impacts the grief that those left behind experience.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we've done a lot of work on this. And a long story short is that how people die absolutely affects our bereavement. How we witness that changes our, our bereavement and it's measurable. So people who have had these experiences, who have watched their loved one reconnect, grieve very differently. And it's measurable actually in grief, how they remember, how they recall, how they get through obstacles, how they heal.

• 55:09Steven Bartlett?

  So if I want to grieve in the most healthy way, what dying experience is most conducive with that?

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Oh, seeing that loved one as rich in love rather than empty and defined by their physical dimensions. And I don't know if it would help, do you want to show the video of Jennifer?

• 55:27Steven Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  This is an interesting video for a couple of reasons, because these end of life events are not these great epiphanies or revelations. They're just about very real moments that are symbolic, usually of a relationship. And she's describing her partner, Patrick, who's at the end of his life and he has these experiences. But she describes what it means to her.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  Patrick was the only member of his family that knows how to make the sauce. And for all the years I knew him, he insisted something was missing.

• 56:01Speaker 05

  After his grandmother passed.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  After she had passed. This would be the Sunday before he passed. He woke up in the morning and I couldn't get him to eat. He wasn't hungry, total loss of appetite. And I'm like, baby, we got to make you something for breakfast. What do you want? He goes, I'm full.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Pat, you had a snack packed pudding yesterday. You're not full. And he's like, oh, no, I ate with Nana Dolores last night. He believed he made sauce with his grandmother the night before. Said he could smell it. He could still taste it. He was full from it. And she showed him after all these years, what he had done wrong, which is the very last step before you take it off the burner was to add a teaspoon of sugar. We spent the next seven and a half hours, because that's how long it takes, making his grandmother's sauce.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  He added the sugar last time Patrick ever ate. Every morning he woke up saying, is today the day I'm going to die? And I said, you'll go when you're ready.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  And he was ready.

• 57:20Speaker 05

  Did that dream help, help you accept that reality further?

• 57:26Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 57:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And not only the reality that he is gone, it's made me think of,

• 57:36Speaker 03

  maybe there is something out there after we go.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  So how she remembers him in death was that he was put back together by being with those he loved.

• 57:45Steven Bartlett?

  So if I know that one of my relatives is going to pass away, what should I be doing to, because you know, my first instinct in that scenario is to protect my family from the grief of it, to make sure that the grief process is as healthy as it can possibly be. And I'm not trying to, you know, deny grief in any way, because I know that it's kind of unavoidable from everything I've read. But is there things we can do as a family to insulate us from having a really negative grieving process?

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think one is obviously communicating and being open with, with each other and with what's happening. I think one of the worst outcomes we see in when death is denied. So if you see it, if it's forecastable and it's obvious and you're proximate to us, it's less of an injury than if it's denied, denied, denied, and then.

• 58:34Steven Bartlett?

  And then it happens.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Yes. And we see so much of that in medicine.

• 58:37Steven Bartlett?

  So this is a rule for life, which is acceptance.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, yeah. A third of our patients who come into hospice are dead in seven days. They didn't just didn't start dying seven days, they became aware of it. So what we do is we refer to this as medical harm. We deny them and separate them and deny their reality. So they're left to figure it out suddenly and acutely. And that injury is, you're robbing people of their agency, their time to spend the way they want to, the conversations they need to have. And the impact to the bereaved is enormous.

• 59:09Steven Bartlett?

  So acceptance, number one. Anything else?

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, presence.

• 59:12Steven Bartlett?

  Presence.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  And it used to be this way. It used to be death was in the home and it was in the community. It was shared and that shared grief is, is wonderful because we're meant to be mutually supportive. The opposite is sterilized death. So in an intensive care unit, in a gown, you know, anything that dehumanizes the process of dying is injurious.

• 59:34Steven Bartlett?

  So acceptance, physical presence.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:37Steven Bartlett?

  Anything else that helps the grief process?

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Loving each other, talking, sharing, acknowledging.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Anything that's repressive or denying about it, whether it's your own feelings, whether it's what's happening to the patient is harmful. Period. That's why death in the home is so different. You know, the person's seen as a, as a person, not a patient, right?

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  And the patients know this instinctively. That's why they want to get back home.

• 1:00:10Steven Bartlett?

  This was your father, passed away when you were?

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was 12.

• 1:00:13Steven Bartlett?

  You were 12 and he was 41?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Forty-two, I think, yeah.

• 1:00:17Steven Bartlett?

  He passed away of?

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Cancer.

• 1:00:19Steven Bartlett?

  Cancer. In what way was this formative?

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think it, it shaped life in certainly ways that I wouldn't have chosen.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  And that I don't understand.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  The one thing was that, you know, that that sort of loss at that sort of, at that point in your life changed the trajectory of your life. You just, you don't just lose the person, you lose the world the way it's supposed to be. And for my, for me, my world went off the tracks pretty badly. It was a pretty bumpy road. But, you know, and it's so unusual because the last time I saw him, he was having one of these end of life experiences. I still can't make sense of it all because then after he died for many years, I could never speak his name. I couldn't certainly couldn't talk about the last time I saw him.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  So the irony that the thing I could never talk about is the thing that I now share with millions of people. I feel like I'm getting punked. Like I didn't mean for this to happen. And you wonder though, you know, that sort of loss does change, right? It, it changes what you're sensitive to in others, what you see in others, what you feel from others, how you want to help.

• 1:01:46Steven Bartlett?

  Does, does grief ever go away?

• 1:01:49Steven Bartlett?

  It doesn't.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  I think grief, there's a period where grief is unbearable. And it's like having this rock in your pocket. You know, it's there and other times you forget it. You lose the person in the physical form, but they still relate to you in other ways. It changes how you see the world for having known them. So they continue on in some way. We talk about grief in terms of what we lose, but not necessarily what remains. And a lot of that person remains and, and, and that's remembered. And I think grief is probably one of the most illuminating things that can happen in your life.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  It changes your life, the circumstances. I wouldn't be talking to you if I hadn't lost my father as a boy, for example. Wouldn't happen because the chain of events took place.

• 1:02:48Steven Bartlett?

  And you've interviewed 750 grieving families.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  I think there's a great expression that, you know, the, the trick is, the art is, is to carry grief in one hand, gratitude in the other, and be stretched by growth. You know, you don't deny the grief, but you learn how to be grateful. And somewhere there's peace there.

• 1:03:09Steven Bartlett?

  When you interviewed those 750 grieving families, did you notice a difference between those that really carried the grief well versus those that didn't carry it so well?

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but we were looking at a very specific question. We were looking at families who had seen these end of life experiences. And the best example I can give you is, so you have a couple and they've been married for six decades. And part of their shared life was losing a child, an infant. And the spouse is looking down at his loved one in the bed, the woman in the bed. And she, in, in her inner experiences, is holding this deceased child. And she's at peace. And that, that, well, one connects all lives, right? Living and dead, but it reframes dying from something that could be empty

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  and only defined by its physical dimensionality, what you're seeing. And it shows that it can be rich in meaning and love. Because the question always is, when you care for these families, is when that patient becomes nonverbal, when you become disconnected from them, is the question is, where are they and how are they? And if you're seeing that, that changes how you experience their loss and informs how you bereave. You view it very differently.

• 1:04:42Steven Bartlett?

  I've done almost 700 interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world. And one of the things you learn, which is unexpected, is that vulnerability is the doorway to connection. And after sitting here for two, three hours with a guest, I feel a deep sense of connection to them. And as they leave, what I get them to do is to write a question in the diary of a CEO. We've taken all of the questions from the diary of a CEO. We have put the question here on this card with the name of the person that wrote it. So you can sit at home, as I do with my fiance and my colleagues at work and other people in my life. Whenever we get a minute, we play the diary of a CEO conversation cards. And it is incredible what happens. These are great if you're in a romantic relationship and you want to connect your partner more.

• 1:05:26Steven Bartlett?

  These are also great if you're in a team and you want to bond your team together. And I have to say, they're also great for families that want to learn more about each other and that need a good excuse to spend some time in a digital world, in the analog environment, connecting human to human. It is remarkable what the right question at the right time can do. Go to thediary.com and you can get these conversation cards right now.

• 1:05:52Steven Bartlett?

  So that was the first point. Love endures after physical loss.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:58Steven Bartlett?

  Number two.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Hope never fades. It changes.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  And it's a very interesting thing.

• 1:06:06Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean? Sorry.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Well, when you're diagnosed with illness, you hope for cure. And then, you know, it's unbelievable how acceptance comes into play. And they kind of get through that and then they hope for other things. But the hope doesn't change. It just evolves. It's, it's fundamental and it becomes hope. I want to be comfortable. Hope I want to have time with my family. It becomes all those things that they become. That's all based in hope. So hope didn't go away when they find out they're dying. It just changed shape.

• 1:06:43Steven Bartlett?

  They just hope for something else.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  And then at the end, it's the most beautiful part is it becomes hope for others. And that's what you hear again and again. And it's just this wonderful story. Somehow we become less selfish. I found this when I was, when I tried to get the study approved. Many studies approved, the university would say, oh, you can't, you know, we want to sterilize the dying. They're never going to participate. They're dying, whatever they want to waste your time with you. And actually they all did and they even want to be filmed. And if you think about it, there's no secondary gain. They're never going to see, it's like the old man that plants a tree is never going to live under the shade, but somebody else is, right? And that's what, that's what we get from that. It mattered that they contributed.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  It mattered that they connected. It mattered that they were heard, that their words mattered. And that's a form of hope. So they've gone from cure when they were diagnosed and they let go of that. And then they think about things like comfort and having time with family. But then at the end, what they always hope for is other people.

• 1:07:49Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe that's the essence of us.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a better version of thinking. I think we live in a selfish space. I think we're robbed of that when you become a parent and whatnot. But I think in the end, I think it's wonderful that hope doesn't extinguish because cure has.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  The next is people don't stop living because they're dying. And when we did this study, looking at dying analogous to post-traumatic growth, the idea that within a negative adverse event like war, there's positive things like camaraderie. That's what we found with this is that people were growing and adapting. And this was measurable and significant according to post-traumatic growth scales right up into the last days of life. And it's paradoxical to the physical state. So physically they're declining, but psychologically and spiritually they're very much alive.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Number four, the dying leave us connected.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  This became very important and I wrote about this during COVID because so many people were removed from their loved ones, which was an unbelievable tragedy. And what I wrote about was, you know, when they're having these inner experiences, actually they're immersed and very much connected. We don't see people who have these experiences in solitary. We tend to think of dying as lonely in a solitary event.

• 1:09:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  And what happens is in our inner world, we're bringing people into us. We're reflecting on life. And in these end of life dreams and visions, we're just immersed with people who we love. So even though it looks like they may be isolated in an intensive care unit, when their eyes are closed, they're also surrounded in love. But then externally, the dying process brings people together. Lives stop, you know, that son who has a roaring job in California has to fly home to New York. It, it tends to stop the world and we focus on what really matters, which is each other. And that's very clear.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  The dying can heal what's harmed or broken. And this happens in a multitude of ways. There's that external peace, whether it's making peace with their God, making peace with their family. It's amazing how many families come together. And what seemed like an issue of contention goes away and dissipates. And they're able to see beyond that. It reshuffles your priorities in ways that you can't imagine. The grudge that was held on to is let go. So there's this healing process that's innate to dying. And I think internally, what we see again and again and again, people who are having negative or distressing dreams and visions,

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  they're often centered around harmful things. But they're often addressed within that process. So that somehow, and this is probably the most remarkable thing of all. They've lived this life with this injury and it gets addressed in the end. There's almost like this final justice. People like Dwayne, you know, who has wrestled with these demons his whole life. And then at the end, he's kind of made whole.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Lesson number six is there's a better story than the one we fear. And the best analogy I can give you is that famous Dylan Thomas, the famous poet. It's a message to his father, who is, who is becoming blind and dying, I believe. But he was healthy and it says, you know, you basically don't surrender, don't fight the dying of the light. And most of us in health can relate to this idea of the resistance of death. You know, that you're going to, this is the enemy to be fought. And you're going to muster all your strength and will, and you're going to overcome and survive. And that's not what happens to the dying. The dying aren't fighting against anything.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  If anything, they're fighting towards, and they're what they're fighting towards to get back to those that they've loved and they've lost. Horus is a great example. So Horus is, I believe, close to 90 years old and he's very near the end of his life. And I think what's beautiful about Horus is that his inner world experiences are so overwhelming that he actually struggles to find language for what the beauty that he's experienced is, the colors that are richer, his wife, the relief he feels in seeing her. And it really, it really highlights this notion that they actually aren't struggling against anything. If anything, Horus wants to go to this experience that he's having with his eyes closed. So if we could watch Horus, that would be great.

• 1:12:41Speaker 06

  She was always beautiful. She was, you know, she looked pretty.

• 1:12:55Speaker 06

  She knew me inside out.

• 1:13:05Speaker 06

  And maybe that, I'm just maybe words weren't necessarily just like each other. And it was actually what, uh, I was, one was thinking.

• 1:13:20Steven Bartlett?

  And he's describing a vision he's had there.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Oh, it's beautiful. And he describes this relief like paying a bill, like it's over. And the greens of the grass are greener and he's so emoted by it that he starts to get very tearful.

• 1:13:34Steven Bartlett?

  How has interviewing these people as they're leaving this world changed how you live your life on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis?

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I, I think a lot. I think cancer did more to change how I live on a daily basis, probably.

• 1:13:52Steven Bartlett?

  You had stage four?

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Stage four cancer.

• 1:13:55Steven Bartlett?

  Has it changed your perspective of you dying yourself?

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  I can tell you that I'm certainly not fearful of the actual process of dying.

• 1:14:05Steven Bartlett?

  Anymore?

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  No. Yeah, I'm not.

• 1:14:08Steven Bartlett?

  Were you before?

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's innate to us, right? It's why we survive, is we're meant to resist.

• 1:14:16Steven Bartlett?

  And what in particular has alleviated that fear?

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Oh, I think seeing so many patients, I think having to face it myself, the possibility myself, I had to wrestle that demon.

• 1:14:30Steven Bartlett?

  And where does the comfort come from?

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  Because it becomes less about self. It's very interesting. When you have a diagnosis like I had, first you're confronted with this enormous responsibility, this reckoning with the lives that you're responsible to. And you worry about their wounds and how they're going to be, particularly if you have people who are dependent on you. So I went through, that's what you first are confronted with. And then it changes you in a lot of ways.

• 1:15:02Steven Bartlett?

  What specifically has changed?

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  I was always restless. I could never sit. But cancer brought that to a stop suddenly. And it's a very weird thing because there's no period of adaption. All of a sudden you can't do, you're used to going into the world. And now the world has to come to you. And it forces you to do what I really could never do, which is kind of be more, more present. I rehabbed basically over many, many months on my farm. And I would gradually walk a little farther down the driveway than in the barn, animals walk in field than woods.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  And I can't quite describe this, but this one day I was there and I'm looking at these willow trees that I had planted decades earlier. And they were the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. And, uh, you know, the trees hadn't changed. I, I changed. Viktor Frankl talks about this in the book, Man's Search for Meaning, right?

• 1:16:14Steven Bartlett?

  He was a Holocaust survivor.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  And somehow he came out of that experience and was able to put a lot of definition around finding meaning. And he describes a day when one of the prisoners runs out and says, look at this sunset. And they all come out and they're all admiring it despite their despair and destitute. And the one says, look at what the world could be. And the point is, is that beauty isn't about doing or accomplishing, but it's internalized. It's the finding meaning in the experience. And I never got it, but I got it then when I got sick.

• 1:16:49Steven Bartlett?

  And on that point of meaning, which is the word on the front of your book here, what is the, the meaning of life? From everything you've experienced and all the death, loss, grief you've seen, what is the meaning of life?

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  I don't know about meaning, but I know the destination is always love. And I think that, um, we're meant to get there together. And we're meant to endure struggle together. I think that that's just fundamental. We, again, we're fundamentally interdependent and reliant on one another. If you think of the best parts of yourself, it's always in the context of love.

• 1:17:31Steven Bartlett?

  You wrote this wonderful book, Death is But a Dream, Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End.

• 1:17:38Steven Bartlett?

  Who is this for?

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Well, again, it was meant for a medical audience, but I think it's anybody who's caring for somebody. I think it's anybody who's wondering about their own mortality. I think what I find a lot of people are benefiting is people who have witnessed this experiences, but it's never been explained. And I think it's nice because it includes different types of patients. So it includes patients who are cognitively different, includes children, and each one of those is very unique.

• 1:18:08Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Christopher, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question that has been left for you, it's a question I often ask. What is one thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about?

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  The children.

• 1:18:22Steven Bartlett?

  Explain.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Children die very differently. I think that it's not so much lessons, but there's certainly inspiration. And I think it talks about what's innate in us.

• 1:18:35Steven Bartlett?

  How do children die differently from adults?

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Oh, well, for one, they don't struggle to find acceptance. It's, they're already accepting. They don't think in terms of finality of mortality. They just accept the state that is. So they don't talk in terms of regrets and what ifs. Children have this amazing ability to take care, to make themselves whole, to take care of themselves, to reassure themselves. So one of the ways they do that is they may not know somebody who's died, so who comes back for them? And often it's an animal. And children don't have the same distinctions, obviously, between the human and the animal world. And they come with the same message, which is that they're loved and that they're not alone.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  The other thing that's just fascinating is they become very self-informed by these inner experiences. By that, I mean, they end up understanding where they are. You don't have to tell them they're dying. They seem to put this together in remarkable ways. And far and away, the most remarkable thing about children is that they have this quiet courage and how they care for those around them. So they become so utterly selfless. It's almost hard to describe. I saw a young lady who was taking her pain medicine. She didn't want to take her pain medicine because she was enjoying being away and plugged in.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  But she, she was sensitive to what other people were observing and she didn't want her mother to see her grimace. Another one who was from Syria, she knew she was dying. Her parents couldn't talk to her about it, but she had already gone ahead on Facebook and said goodbye and given life lessons.

• 1:20:24Steven Bartlett?

  Do they have the same visions and dreams?

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, they do it better. And we could show that with Jessica.

• 1:20:31Steven Bartlett?

  So tell me about Jessica.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Jessica's 13 years old and she's raised by a single mother. And she sees this deceased friend of her mother's playing with her curtains. And she doesn't want to tell her mom because she didn't want to scare her. But it made her feel good because she was a good person. And again, she's not going to be alone. So they tend to look after, despite being children and being robbed of life, they somehow tend to worry about others and try to protect others. And that's what she does.

• 1:21:03Speaker 07

  I had a feeling that she was just coming and telling me that you're going to be okay. Everything's fine, but she didn't look at me. She was just looking, but I had a feeling if I called out her name, she would look at me. But I didn't want to scare my mom. I felt a sign of relief.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Speaker 07

  And happiness because she was a very strong person. And I know that I'm strong and my mom tells me all the time that I was, I'm like her. And you told me that you thought that, oh, mom, I saw an angel. That's how you said you felt and you said foul peace and then you're able to go to sleep? And then I was able to go to sleep. So it was really comforting. It was comforting, yes. You weren't afraid. I wasn't afraid of it at all.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  So children have this way of of self healing. It's remarkable. We have another children child on video who she creates this castle and she can feel the warmth, the light coming through the window and all the animals are well and playing. And when asked what the castle meant, she said it meant that there's a safe place.

• 1:22:17Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Christopher Carr, what a wonderful reminder of what actually matters.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:22:23Steven Bartlett?

  And also, when we think about how many of us ourselves fear our own death, it's quite quite high. It's about half half of people, men and women, fear their own death. But actually, I think through your research, through the books that you've written and through the studies that I have here in front of me, it's certainly made me think a lot less about the fear of my own death. Because you're right, people think of it as being this sort of painful, prolonged process. But that's not what you report.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  No, and actually, we've looked at that. And what they actually fear is isolation.

• 1:22:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  And being disconnected.

• 1:22:54Steven Bartlett?

  And more so than fearing our own death, we fear losing someone else.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Right. I have never come with the right way to frame it. But all of this comes back to this better idea that the concern is for others than more than self.

• 1:23:08Steven Bartlett?

  And that's a beautiful thing.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Steven Bartlett?

  Death is but a dream. Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End by Dr. Christopher Carr. I'll link this book below for anyone that would like to read it and dive deep into these subjects. They are illuminating subjects, again, because people in those moments of their life have such a wonderful retrospective clarity. But maybe it's just clarity.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe it's just clarity on what actually mattered the whole time, as you say. Thank you so much for doing this work because again, it's de-stigmatized a bunch of prevailing myths and ideas about the last stages of our life that probably cause us undue harm. Both to those that are left behind, but also to those that pass on. And it does, it raises more questions about the nature of consciousness and spirituality and religion and the afterlife and all these things, which I guess are

• 1:23:57Steven Bartlett?

  are individual questions to answer. Thank you.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:24:25Steven Bartlett?

  As a founder building a business when I was in my early twenties, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that I wasn't good at. And that thing was finances. Finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called Zero. Zero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses. And it brings accounting, payments, payroll and analytics all into one place, even for people that don't love doing finances. Zero wants to do the financial work for you. But its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record because Zero wants to help you understand what's happening in your business. And increasingly, and this is maybe the most important thing, is help you make decisions.

• 1:25:10Steven Bartlett?

  Finally, we have a partner who can enable us in a simple way for those people that are both left brain or right brain and enable our dreams. You can learn more about Zero by going to zero.com. Thank you to Zero. Thank you for sponsoring this podcast, but also thank you for helping me to scale my business as somebody that, quite frankly, has never loved finances that much.