In a world racing toward smarter machines, empathy speakers and authors Rob Volpe and Maria Ross get curious in this limited subseries about what only humans can feel, do, and be — and why that’s our greatest competitive advantage. Enjoy this limited subseries on The Empathy Edge.
Mortality, Impermanence & Why It Drives Everything
We may be the only species that lives with the conscious knowledge of our own death. Maria and Rob sit with an uncomfortable truth of human existence: that we are finite, and that knowledge shapes how we love, create, grieve, and find meaning. Something AI cannot even register.
We explore what it means to be a time-malleable species – aware of the past, present, and future in ways no other animal appears to be – and we are most when time starts to run out. We look at evidence of grief in elephants and chimps, asking whether mourning requires mortality awareness or whether it’s something else.
Rob asks Maria about her own 2008 near-death experience from a brain aneurysm, and together they wrestle with the near-death experience as a pivot point: the moment when abstract knowledge of death becomes real, and life suddenly looks completely different.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
“One of the fundamental aspects of the human experience is knowing that death’s coming, but we all, as humans, deal with that knowledge very differently.” — Rob Volpe
Episode References:
- Rob’s project: Cross-generational conversations: form.typeform.com/to/Mf5GDlYT
- Rob’s newsletter: Hardwired to be afraid: readingbetweenthelines.beehiiv.com/p/the-only-thing-we-have-to-fear-is-the-story-fear-tells-us
The Empathy Edge:
- Ashley Jones: How to Courageously Lead and Support Through Grief
- Stephanie Sarazin: What Is Ambiguous Grief and How To Show Up
- Ron Gura: How Technology Helps People Navigate Grief and Loss
- Jane Goodall Institute on chimp grief: news.janegoodall.org/2019/07/24/now-we-must-redefine-man-or-accept-chimpanzees-ashumans
- Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever: cnn.com/kara-swisher-wants-to-live-forever
- San Junipero episode: Black Mirror: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Junipero
- Rebooting My Brain by Maria Ross
- My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
- The Tibetan Book of the Dead
- Upload
Washington Post:
- Perspective piece by a hospice worker: wapo.st/4oPoZGp
- 7 Things to Know about Death, per Death Doulas: wapo.st/4oSLOZU
About Maria Ross:
Maria Ross is a speaker, author, empathy strategist, and host of The Empathy Edge podcast, now in its sixth year. She believes cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™, and has spent decades helping leaders balance empathy with accountability to drive better results, stronger teams, and lasting impact. She is the author of four books, including the award-winning The Empathy Dilemma, a Forbes.com contributor on Workplace Empathy, and creator of two LinkedIn Learning empathy courses.
About Rob Volpe:
Rob Volpe is the Founder/CEO of Empathy Activist and the creator of The 5 Steps to Empathy, which he chronicles in his award-winning book Tell Me More About That: Solving the Empathy Crisis One Conversation at a Time. He is a recognized thought leader, speaker, and consultant in the improvement of communication and collaboration in organizations of all sizes in all industries.
Connect with Rob Volpe:
Website: robvolpe.expert
Book: Tell Me More About That: Solving the Empathy Crisis One Conversation
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rmvolpe
Facebook: facebook.com/EmpathyActivist
Instagram: instagram.com/empathy_activist
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books: Red-Slice.com/books
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Courses! Leading with Empathy and Balancing Empathy, Accountability, and Results as a Leader
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Ross 00:03
Welcome to the Empathy Edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross. I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator, and empathy advocate, and here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business. Welcome again to the special Empathy Edge sub series called What does it mean to be human, with conversations between me and the amazing empathy activist and author and speaker Rob Volpe. Rob, welcome back. Episode two,
Rob Volpe 01:01
Maria, it’s so good to be back. I’ve been dying to have this conversation with you today.
Maria Ross 01:08
That is such a dad joke, and you’re not even a dad. I love it.
Maria Ross 01:11
Yeah, today we’re going to talk about mortality, impermanence, and why it drives everything, and our core question is, we’re going to be talking about death, so I should say that’s a trigger warning for anyone listening, that we are going to be talking about death and near death experiences,
Rob Volpe 01:29
all things related to death, and if hopefully you listen to the first episode and it was very stream of consciousness about consciousness, and we’re going to probably be stream of consciousness about death and grief and all the things and how it affects us and the way we view our lives and the world around us and all the things,
Maria Ross 01:50
yes, and so our our core question is we, as far as we know, we are the only species that lives with the conscious knowledge of our own death, so what does that do to us, and is that actually an element that makes us human?
Rob Volpe 02:05
Well, I had a very lengthy conversation with Claude about this topic a while back, when you and I were first talking about doing this, and Claude feels that yes, that is the thing, and but seriously, the philosophers and researchers do think that that awareness that we’re going to die someday is a big driver of like all the decisions that we make, and I don’t know about you, but I was pondering, like, the, you know, as I mentioned last episode, like, I’ve got three cats, and like, they’re 15, and they’re getting a little rickety, as 15 year old cats do, and like, are they aware that this is the end, or is it just, you know, Thursday, how I’m showing up, or the, you know, we’ve all seen those videos of the whales pushing their, you know, when they’ve had a dead calf, and that just heartbreaking beautiful mother child bond, but you know, pushing their child’s other calf through the water for a while. Heard that, that lasts for.. I don’t know the exact, but it’s not just like five minutes, it’s like a day or more, they
Maria Ross 03:17
mourn, right? Yeah, there’s that evidence of grief in other mammals, like chimps or elephants,
Rob Volpe 03:22
but then you forget about it, like, does it just right? We don’t know, we
Maria Ross 03:26
don’t know, we don’t know if that is mortality awareness or something else, but you’re right, it is heartbreaking, because it very much mimics a human’s experience of death, there’s grief, there’s sadness, there’s wailing, sometimes, you know, and so, but I think one of the differences is, as we look at other species versus what it means to be human, is number one, do they change their life as a result of that death?
Rob Volpe 03:52
Yeah, and
Maria Ross 03:53
they mourn, but there’s no element of future thinking. We’ve talked about this in terms of time, right? We understand there’s a past, a present, and a future, whereas many other species operate only in the present.
Rob Volpe 04:08
Yep,
Maria Ross 04:08
except those who plan for the winter, right, plan for
Rob Volpe 04:13
the hibernating,
Maria Ross 04:13
the hibernating, yeah,
Rob Volpe 04:15
storing people that live in cold climates. In other words, yeah, I mean, but is that instinct that’s just telling them, like, this is this is the cycle of the year, and I have to do this, and is there a marking on the cave wall where the bear is hibernating, that’s, or the den going, oh, it’s the sixth winter that we’ve done this now. Yeah,
Rob Volpe 04:36
and I’ve gotten smarter, and how I, how I plan, that’s a, it’s a great question. I don’t, I’ve not come across anything that says we’ve seen evidence of that.
Maria Ross 04:48
Yeah, where there’s that
Rob Volpe 04:49
adaptive learning,
Maria Ross 04:52
right? And for us, time is malleable, and I told you, I came across this great quote by Madeline Langle. That says she’s the author of A Wrinkle in Time, among other things. I suspect humans are the only animals that know the inevitability of their own deaths. Other animals live in the present, humans cannot, so they invented hope, which I love. Because you said someone in our survey answered that what it means to be human is to have hope.
Rob Volpe 05:18
Yeah, they identified that was the thing that it means to be human, my friend Anita. She was like, it’s about having hope, and yeah, which is driven by this adaptive life that we’re living, knowing that it’s finite at the end, and I guess the what’s interesting, and maybe we can unpack a little bit, it’s like, how, how much does that drive people on their day-to-day life, or is it this thing that’s simmering beneath the surface, or when they’re thinking about, like, kind of life goals, or the things they want to achieve, they’re maybe setting intentions for the new year, and they’re probably not going, I might die this year, therefore I need to get this done, this done, but you’re aware, you are aware of time, you know, you’re aware of how much time you might have left in your career, or a change you want to make in your career, or your family situation, because you need something different, and I think that underneath all of that is, or if I was doing a research interview, I’d be laddering up to, like, I’m gonna die someday. That’s kind of the ultimate of what it all leads to, that, and paying taxes. Yeah,
Maria Ross 06:32
exactly. Well, and I think you know the fact that we, as humans, have that ability to look at the past, be in the present, and look to the future is great, but we often, as humans, also have struggle to be in the present
Rob Volpe 06:47
so much. I mean, there’s, you know, how big is the self-help industry, and it is, you know, so much of it is focused on be present, you know, yoga, breathe, ground down into your body, be in this moment, be aware of your surroundings. That’s what all of that is. And so we are trying to disconnect from our brain that’s running amok of like I’m going to die someday, so I got to get all these other things done. Go, go, go, go, go.
Maria Ross 07:16
Funny you say that, because I actually just found something today called the default mode network, or DMN, about the human brain, and it says when your brain isn’t focused on a specific task, this network activates, it constantly wanders through past regrets, future worries, and self-referential thoughts. This means your resting mental state is naturally geared toward mental time travel rather than staying present, and it says evolutionarily a relaxed, content ancestor was an easy target. So, the brain rewards anxiety and anticipation, because predicting and preparing for worst-case scenarios kept humans alive.
Rob Volpe 07:57
That makes sense.
Maria Ross 07:58
Now, I will say, though, I think at least our culture in the United States, or maybe you know Western culture, is particularly bad about dealing with death, dealing with grief, right? I’ve done several episodes on this podcast with experts in grief, talking about this, and I can link to them in the show notes, but this idea of this inevitability that none of us like to talk about, and none of us like to think too much about, until to your point, maybe you’re faced with a terminal illness, or maybe you’ve just turned 90, or you know it’s not 17 year olds don’t think they’re ever going to die, right? Like,
Rob Volpe 08:36
yeah, it’s that that inevitable or invincibility,
Maria Ross 08:40
yeah,
Rob Volpe 08:40
of teenage years, young adult years, and then all of a sudden it just, it hits you in the face, right? In one way or the other, you’ve lost somebody, something happens to you, you’re like, oh, wow, okay,
Maria Ross 08:54
oh, that could happen, yeah,
Rob Volpe 08:56
that this could happen, and that can cause a reflection and a pause. It’s really interesting, the default mental network, default mode network. So, like, yeah, where does your brain go in default mode, which is different from factory reset, but in just default mode, when you’re vegging out, I suppose, and
Maria Ross 09:17
it can’t – it literally can’t stop,
Rob Volpe 09:20
it can’t sit still,
Maria Ross 09:21
cycling, yeah,
Rob Volpe 09:22
yeah, which, and when I’ve, as an addition to my newsletter, which we can also link in the show notes, where I talk about judgment and being judgmental, which is, you know, dismantling that’s part of the first step, and it really is, it originates from that parasympathetic nervous system, and always being on the lookout for threats.
Maria Ross 09:45
Yes,
Rob Volpe 09:46
and way, way back in time, it was the, you know, ruffling in the rustling in the grass, and that could be a predator of some sort, or it could be another tribe. It was, I told. Talking to isn’t in our conversation. I was just having a conversation with someone yesterday, so it wasn’t. We didn’t talk yesterday, but was having a conversation with somebody about this idea of being able to identify other at one point in time there was some crossover between hominoids, Homo sapiens. Thank you. And we needed to be able to identify, oh, that’s a Neanderthal. I don’t know, like that’s not good. I don’t really want that for the preservation of my species. Yeah, the species. And so anyway, this is so ingrained in our brains, and that threat detection and making judgments, and we do need that, but there’s the turning off the sort of casting aspersion at somebody that you’re saying is a threat just because of a past experience you had with someone else that maybe looks just like them or is from the same sort of class or demographic group, so this default mode network makes to me makes sense on this really base fundamental how we’re wired into humans that you would be going back through, and it goes back to that adaptive learning, like okay, I really shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have said this. We’ve probably all reflected on tense conversations or encounters that we’ve had,
Maria Ross 11:29
and that’s kind of.. I think that’s kind of linked for this idea of like knowing our own death is going to happen, facing our own mortality. Do we, as humans, some of us adapt to that, some of us don’t, right? Some of us just go through and live our lives, and it’s this abstract thought. But then, as you get closer to the possible event, you start to ponder it more. You start to think about what changes should I make, what should my third act be, what do I want to do before I retire. I actually had this conversation with my husband a couple weeks ago where I said something kind of disturbing to him, where I said, you know, if you think about it, when we talk about going on vacation in the summer, right, or we say we’re gonna, we’ll do it, but we’ll do it next summer, right? I said, in reality, I’m 53 I probably have a good quality 20 to 30 summers left, if I’m lucky, and when you put it in those terms, like I only, let’s say, you know, I hope I have more, but in terms of quality too, right? Like, you only have 20 summers,
Rob Volpe 12:36
yeah,
Maria Ross 12:37
to plan your summer vacations, your dream summer vacation, that starts to make you panic a little bit, it
Rob Volpe 12:44
does, and you’re like, that’s not that many, it’s less than I’ve, and I’m 57 so it’s like, oh, that’s less than I’ve had already.
Maria Ross 12:54
Yes,
Rob Volpe 12:55
so I better, you know, the British expression, faffing about, I better stop faffing about and like do the things that I really do, the thing right, and
Maria Ross 13:03
so, and then we have this perception that people that have near-death experiences all get in that mindset of, like, oh, I’m going to completely transform my life, I’ve had this epiphany, and I’m going to do all the things, and I’m going to go climb Mount Everest, and I’m going to go visit, you know, Japan, and I’m going to go do all these things. When in reality, that doesn’t always happen to us, because life still gets in the way.
Rob Volpe 13:28
Yes, and I know, and your regular listeners probably know that you have a little more experience on that than some of the rest of us, and I want to talk about that in a second.
Maria Ross 13:39
Okay,
Rob Volpe 13:40
but back to that idea. So, okay, you’ve got 20 to 30 good summers left,
Maria Ross 13:47
right?
Rob Volpe 13:47
What are you gonna do?
Maria Ross 13:48
I mean, I think that’s the question, and I think that’s why I got, you know, a little bit annoyed with my husband when my plan for what I wanted to do this summer slightly changed, and he was like, well, we’ve got next summer, and I’m like, do we do we have next summer, like, who knows, right?
Rob Volpe 14:04
There are those, like, magnets and cards that say nothing is guaranteed, like, which is true, and anything could happen,
Maria Ross 14:12
right.
Rob Volpe 14:12
It’s, I want to dive into your story and situation in your book, which I loved, in a minute, but something, so I’m starting to research, as you know, starting to research how we can get people across generations to talk more about,
Maria Ross 14:29
about it,
Rob Volpe 14:30
about death, but also just about those sort of senior years, or the fourth quarter, or the golden years, like there’s so many different ways I hear it described, and we’re really uncomfortable, I think. care.com had done a study a couple years ago where they found that people that are in their 40s to 60s, so basically Gen X, our group, we’re more afraid to talk about death than that, our elders. People in their 70s, 80s, and older,
Maria Ross 15:02
right,
Rob Volpe 15:03
and they are more concerned about the death and mortality of the people that they care about, about their loved ones, certainly their children, but their friends, their family members, they’re worried about, which might explain, you know, we both have Italian families, and there’s all the, like, I’m really worried about so and so’s weight or their cholesterol, or like, whatever the situation is. Yeah, set out of love, but it’s just always like the worry.
Maria Ross 15:33
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 15:33
and even my grandma lived to be 104 My other grandmother lived to be 97 so they really got up there, and
Maria Ross 15:41
yeah,
Rob Volpe 15:41
Grandma, who lived to be 104 I talked with her about death a few times, and she was kind of like, okay, like, let’s, yeah, that she wasn’t eager for it, but she wasn’t afraid of it either,
Maria Ross 15:56
right,
Rob Volpe 15:57
and I think when you get that many, you know, trips around the block or around the sun, you start to just, you’ve seen a lot and experienced a lot, and and then the body is starting to not perform the way you want it to. Life gets harder,
Maria Ross 16:15
yes,
Rob Volpe 16:16
and you just start to be okay with it.
Maria Ross 16:17
Yeah, I mean, some people, yeah, for sure. I think,
Rob Volpe 16:21
yes, I do know. I’ve hear stories now about people that are like kicking and screaming and not well into old age, yes, beyond the average. And yes,
Rob Volpe 16:32
we would euphemistically say, oh, they lived a good life. Yeah,
Maria Ross 16:34
yeah. Well, and again, kind of coming back to the core question here, which is like, is that one of the fundamental aspects of the human experience, is knowing that that’s coming.
Rob Volpe 16:45
Yeah, yeah,
Maria Ross 16:46
but we all, as humans, deal with that knowledge very differently. So, it’s not necessarily a human experience to make the most out of life, because you know that it’s coming, and it’s not necessarily the human experience for everybody to talk about it, but yet it is the human experience that, whether we admit it or not, we, we know it in the back of our minds.
Rob Volpe 17:09
Yeah, and I don’t think any
Maria Ross 17:11
other species really does.
Rob Volpe 17:13
I don’t. I’m not an
Maria Ross 17:14
animal expert or behaviorist, but you know,
Rob Volpe 17:17
well, Domino’s right in front of me, rubbing her jowls on your cat, my cat domino. Yes, thank you. Just clarifying, not the game, the cat domino, and she’s rubbing her jowls against a couple of books, my laptop, all the whatever she can get them on. I don’t think she’s thinking about death right now.
Maria Ross 17:40
No,
Rob Volpe 17:40
or like, I gotta make this the best jowl. I’m gonna be
Maria Ross 17:44
the best cat I can be.
Rob Volpe 17:46
She definitely doesn’t do that, but I
Maria Ross 17:49
have heard this interesting little.. I have not.. I’ve never owned a cat, but I’ve heard this interesting thing about cats from other cat owners, that when they do get old and they’re ready to die, they go off.
Rob Volpe 17:59
They do
Maria Ross 18:00
on their own, they must know instinct.
Rob Volpe 18:04
Yes, they, they say vets will say that cats do know when it’s their time, and they’ll start to, yeah, they’ll isolate themselves because they’re, I think, partly because they’re incredibly vulnerable. I don’t know if there’s. I’m removing myself from the pack,
Maria Ross 18:23
right,
Rob Volpe 18:24
or the tribe, if you will.
Rob Volpe 18:26
When we had so previous cats, sets of cats that I’ve had, we had a pair, a bonded pair that passed in 2011 and the female, she died after recovering heart failure after surgery. She was 17. It was really, really upsetting. But then the male, he was 15. He lasted for like two more months, and he just shut down, and the issue, like, he had kidney issues all of a sudden, which he hadn’t really had before, and I was, I think, that connection that they had,
Maria Ross 19:04
yeah,
Rob Volpe 19:05
was keeping that at bay, because he had another cat feeling to boost him up, and you know, I just weren’t enough.
Maria Ross 19:17
Well, and that the interesting thing about that is, there’s also those stories you hear about couples that pass away within months of each other, right? And part of it is, did they die from a broken heart? Like, were they so bonded? The one story that always sticks with me is the story of Carrie, actress Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia, and then her mother died two days later.
Rob Volpe 19:37
Yeah, because they
Maria Ross 19:38
were so close,
Rob Volpe 19:39
close, and she was just so distraught, we presume, yeah, in there, but yeah, yeah, you hear that, and so when Jake, the 15 year old cat, two months later, he starts hiding behind the sofa and wouldn’t come out, and that was this, we knew that was this. Behind that, he was ready, but oftentimes they’ll say cats will go and they’ll get into the litter box and they’ll pass there. It’s a safe, secure space where they can have that transition, or if they’re outgoing, how do they
Maria Ross 20:13
know? How do they know it’s happening?
Rob Volpe 20:16
Well,
Maria Ross 20:17
I mean, again, I know you’re not an expert, but I’m just like, no, fascinated by those.
Rob Volpe 20:20
It’s a good question. I mean, I jokingly, when you people are like, ‘Oh my god, I was so sick I could have died. Like, yeah, when you know when your body is sick, I would think animals would have that same self-awareness of even though cats, in particular, mask pain quite a bit, but they know that it’s there, they’re making a choice,
Maria Ross 20:42
right,
Rob Volpe 20:42
on whether they’re going to vocalize or not,
Maria Ross 20:45
right.
Rob Volpe 20:45
And so I would imagine that they are, they’re aware. Even when I was a kid growing up, we had two cats, and one of them got really sick. He was having a really bad day. We took him to the vet to get like shampoo, flea shampoo, flea treatment, or whatever, and the vet forgot to wash it off. Oh my gosh, he came back, and all of a sudden he was like foaming at the mouth, and he wasn’t walking straight and bumping into everything. He was having a toxic reaction to it, and he, we took him back to the vet, washed out like they, whatever, gave him some a shot. We cleaned him, washed and washed him, and he was, he and the other cat, they weren’t, they weren’t close, they weren’t enemies, but they were not tight. But Lucy, the other cat, she sensed the Garfield was sick, and she came, and she sat with him while he was like all wrapped up in the blanket, and just like goodness, so miserable. So, I think they animals are able to sense, yeah, they are, and I think to know,
Maria Ross 21:52
yeah,
Rob Volpe 21:53
and then to do what they need to do,
Maria Ross 21:55
yeah.
Rob Volpe 21:56
I don’t know, we keep ourselves going, I mean, we’re obsessed with longevity, yeah, point of like not wanting to die, we’re biohacking ourselves. I mean, not wanting to
Maria Ross 22:06
die, let alone not wanting to age, like that’s, you know, the whole other thing. And so, again, that’s like a very.. I feel that that’s one of the many aspects that are is very uniquely human.
Rob Volpe 22:17
Absolutely.
Maria Ross 22:19
Experience.
Rob Volpe 22:20
Can we talk about your experience.
Maria Ross 22:22
Sure, so
Rob Volpe 22:24
I’ll have you give the quick notes, but I will say you wrote a really lovely book, Rebooting My Brain.
Maria Ross 22:33
Yes, and
Rob Volpe 22:34
it’s available. I bought it off of Amazon. It’s available in the usual,
Maria Ross 22:37
all the suspects, yeah, all the
Rob Volpe 22:39
places, and you recount your, you know, the subtitle. How a freak aneurysm reframed my life. So it was 2008 in Seattle.
Maria Ross 22:51
Yeah, it was 2008 in Seattle. And the Cliff Notes, did they still say Cliff Notes? I don’t even know. The Cliff Notes, the brief version, I still say
Rob Volpe 23:00
it. The version for any younger listeners who don’t know what Cliffords are. It’s basically like Googling the answer or asking at GPT. It was
Maria Ross 23:08
like our version of AI. Yeah, exactly. It was a condensed version of a larger book. Yeah, so I had some symptoms that developed a year after we moved to Seattle, and I had a very severe incident of a very sudden what they call a thunderclap headache that actually seized up my neck and my back and caused my head to spin, and I was able to go to the doctor, I was able to somehow drive myself home, but go to the doctor, who said it might just be stress, you know, go do some acupuncture, go do yoga, go to some physical therapy for your neck, so about a month and a half of symptoms of what eventually turned out to be a brain bleed, and so it ruptured, and luckily my husband had come home from work early that day, so he was able to get me to the hospital, and they discovered the ruptured aneurysm, which caused it’s basically a form of stroke, because anytime you have blood where it’s not supposed to be, that’s a form of stroke, right? So the doctor saved my life and had various misadventures in the road to recovery, but eventually got back on my feet again, and had even what some of the doctors called a miraculous recovery, based on the type of injury that I had, which normally it’s called a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and for that type of injury I think the statistics are four out of seven people have permanent disabilities coming out of that. Now, I do have cognitive issues that I’ve had to develop strategies for, and I went to therapy for to overcome, but other than some eye issues, because of the hemorrhaging in my retinas, I had no physical damage. I can still walk, I can still drive, I don’t have seizures, any of the things that normally go along with a stroke or a brain aneurysm. So, yeah, so I, I wrote that book, and as you, as you mentioned, you know. It that is my experience, but the unique thing about my experience, unlike a book like Jill Bolte Taylor’s A Stroke of Insight, I don’t remember the moment of my aneurysm rupture.
Rob Volpe 25:10
Sure,
Maria Ross 25:11
and so I lost a month of my life. I don’t remember the month of August 2008 at all, like
Rob Volpe 25:17
you were in a medically induced coma. I was in
Maria Ross 25:19
a medically induced coma for a few days, maybe. Like, I’m not really sure how long I was, and so a lot of that period that I talk about in the book is from other people’s observations,
Rob Volpe 25:29
right? And
Maria Ross 25:30
then the small snatches of memory that I could remember, but so I, I didn’t sort of live in my near-death experience, right? Like,
Rob Volpe 25:39
yeah, this isn’t a story where you saw the light, saw the light in the tunnel, yeah.
Maria Ross 25:44
And to be really, maybe a little blunt, if I had died, I probably wouldn’t have remembered it anyway. Like, it wasn’t like it was something with me as I died. Do you know what I’m saying? So, but yeah, and so that whole recovery journey, and then writing the book, a lot of that reflection came way after, of like, oh, wow, I almost died, right, but my husband, who had to witness it all, it was very traumatic for him, and stayed with him, and still stays with him for a long time, so I guess you could say, in a way, I was spared that kind of knowledge of what was happening, and I was even in denial about it, because brain injury patients are infamous for being poor at self-assessment. They think they’re fine, they think they can go out and just get up, and like, they just had the flu, it’s fine, I’ll shake it off, or I’ll figure it out. And even during that time of recovery, there were very tough love conversations that therapists and neuropsychologists had to have with me, of like this is actually where you’re at.
Rob Volpe 26:48
Yeah, you were very honest in the book about some of the out there moments that your friends recounted, and then also you put in some of the notes from the therapists and the doctors, and
Maria Ross 27:01
yeah,
Rob Volpe 27:01
they were basically like, she’s fooling herself, yeah, she’s living in La La Land, yeah,
Maria Ross 27:07
she’s not getting on a plane to Spain as, as planned, you know, six weeks after her
Rob Volpe 27:13
Spain will fix me
Maria Ross 27:14
episode, yeah, so, yeah, so it’s interesting, because I, you know, it’s only upon later reflection that the magnitude of it and the significance of it hit me, but going through it, it was more one day at a time, and that’s the thing, is like I was saying earlier, when I started coming back out into society again, people were like, oh my god, are you changed, like, are you gonna go visit the pyramids, are you, you know, are you going to change your life and do something different? And I’m like, I just want to walk around the block with my dog at this point, like I don’t, I don’t have these grand life-changing plans.
Rob Volpe 27:53
You’re fixated or focused, I should say. I was focused, yeah.
Maria Ross 27:56
I just had to take one literal step at a time, like I was, I was physically weak, I had to get my, my balance and my muscle tone back up after six weeks lying in a hospital bed, right. But, so, yeah, that was a lot of pressure, and that’s that’s the interesting thing about us and our relationship to death, is we kind of look to these people that almost died as gurus that they know what it’s going to be like, and I, how do I get me some of that, like, without dying, without the dying, nearly dying part, right? And it’s like, I have no answers for you.
Rob Volpe 28:29
Yeah, you know,
Maria Ross 28:31
and that’s the thing, I think that’s a uniquely human thing, about like, we want to know. I don’t think a raccoon or a giraffe wants to know what’s going to happen after they die, because they don’t even necessarily realize they’re
Rob Volpe 28:43
even aware that they’re dying, or
Maria Ross 28:45
or that they’re going to,
Rob Volpe 28:47
or they haven’t assigned a big deal to it.
Maria Ross 28:51
Yes,
Rob Volpe 28:51
they recognize that it’s part of the cycle of life, like it is what you do. Again, I’m not in their brains, so I don’t fully know what’s happening.
Maria Ross 29:04
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 29:05
but you, you would imagine that, I guess that’s the downside of having a curious mind, is that you’re constantly wanting to know, or you need to make yourself feel better about whatever is about to come. Okay, so Maria, the thing I noticed when I was reading the book, like you, and it links to what you were just saying, like you didn’t actually really even talk about the fact that this was a, like, that you could have died, and how that aspect changed your life until probably the last 3040 pages of the book.
Maria Ross 29:40
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 29:41
what? Talk to me a little more about that, because it did at some point you did realize, like, yeah, I almost died.
Maria Ross 29:49
Yeah, you know what’s really interesting. I think it was a lot of the research for the book that I did two years later that is, is really where it brought it home, right? I. Think I still had a very, you know, hopeful view, even a year out. I wrote this very poignant blog post a year after the injury. I mentioned it in the book about my thoughts about everything, and how grateful I was, and how things could have gone in so many other different directions, and I was just thankful that things lined up the way they did, so that I was still here, and that I did kind of, I did still have this understanding that I was given a second chance, and then, but the, but what to do with that really didn’t start to be a question for me until I was fully, and you never fully recover from a brain injury, but until I was kind of fully functional again, if that makes any sense.
Rob Volpe 30:43
Yeah,
Maria Ross 30:44
so I had these deeper thoughts about, you know, what could have happened. I don’t know, but I think a lot of the work that I did, going back to interview my, my neurosurgeon, my neuropsychologist, when they were giving me the information, and also I was doing my own research, that’s where I was like, huh, this was pretty bad, and I think I sort of had like a second wave of God, what do I do, what do I do with this, what does this all mean, right? And again, kind of going back to our topic, I think that’s the other thing is, is we as humans try to find meaning in grief, in death, in despair, in suffering, and my husband’s much more of a pragmatist, and he’s very much like this thing happened because it happened, like there’s.. it’s not because anybody did anything, or even in his view, there was no, there’s no divine intervention, right? He’s like things just happen because they happen, and they’re they’re random, and they’re they’re indiscriminate, and sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t, right? He’s just got a very.. I am a little bit more religious in my beliefs, and a little bit more faith-based, but given what happened to me, it’s hard to argue that he’s necessarily wrong, right?
Rob Volpe 32:03
Yes,
Maria Ross 32:03
because what makes my life any more valuable than someone who didn’t live 10 minutes from a trauma center or whose husband didn’t come home in time? Right?
Rob Volpe 32:13
Right.
Maria Ross 32:14
So those were the questions that I was sitting with, which again I think is a uniquely human thing.
Rob Volpe 32:21
Yeah,
Maria Ross 32:21
yeah, your cat wasn’t like,
Rob Volpe 32:23
why me?
Maria Ross 32:24
At least we don’t, at least we don’t know that your cat wasn’t, but yeah, and so I just find that fascinating, like it’s almost like part of this of the journey of being human is we kind of almost have to tell ourselves stories to cope, and whether that story is a religious belief or a superstition or a, oh, you know, it was just not your time, or it was their time, or whatever other story like that is a very uniquely human thing, is that we, we build a story around things that maybe don’t go our way, or go our way, even in the face of suffering.
Rob Volpe 33:04
Yeah, yeah. And it is the.. it.. I mean, we tell stories. It gives us structure, meaning, purpose to everything. It helps us, yeah, feel better about,
Maria Ross 33:18
yeah,
Rob Volpe 33:18
whatever the thing is that happened even in that near death experience, and even in actual death, like can’t make sense of why one person lived to one age over another, or there’s so many things that go into it,
Maria Ross 33:37
right.
Rob Volpe 33:38
Okay, and so, Maria, you mentioned, though, that Paul, your husband, it sounded like he, he’s carrying it differently, or he reacted. So, talk a little bit about what you’ve observed in the way it maybe has affected him.
Maria Ross 33:51
Yeah, so, like I said, I don’t remember the month of August 2008 the most traumatic part. He remembers all of it, including finding me on the floor unconscious and calling the ambulance and having the ambulance come and try to figure out what was going on and intubate me and do all the things, and then he was there when I was on, hooked up to all the machines in the induced coma, so he saw everything, right, he experienced everything, I was blissfully unconscious, right, slash, he
Rob Volpe 34:21
had to live with fear and concern of not knowing what was going to happen.
Maria Ross 34:26
Yes, exactly.
Rob Volpe 34:28
Okay,
Maria Ross 34:28
exactly.
Rob Volpe 34:30
And so now we’re 1718, years, yeah, 18 years out,
Maria Ross 34:36
almost 18.
Rob Volpe 34:37
How does it show up now?
Maria Ross 34:39
You know, I still mark the day, I still mark august 4 as my, you know, day I almost died, and I, it shows up different because I’m back into my life, and it’s again kind of, we were talking about it early with this time malleability, like how quickly we forget, right, of the amazing. Interesting aspect of all of that was that I had this completely clean slate, and I could build back up, you know. It was like no schedule, no commitments, no whatever. And how quickly that comes back when you’re officially back at it, right? People give you grace, and you give yourself grace when you’re, you’re declaring that you’re in recovery mode, no matter how bored you might get, right, but then once you’re not in that anymore, there’s expectations, and there’s expectations of yourself and expectations of other people, and we so quickly can get back into those habits, right, I do work differently now than I used to work, and luckily I work for myself, because if I worked for a company, I definitely wouldn’t have been able to deal with that stress and overwhelm, but you know, I try to, to varying degrees of success, as you’ve been the recipient of manage my schedule and try not to over commit, that’s actually where I’m getting myself into trouble this summer is, I’m over committed to a few things, but I know my capacity a little bit better than I used to, and so, and I think I’m a little bit more.. I always was kind of in tune to special moments, I was always sort of the nostalgic one, but now years later, with an iPhone camera by my side, I, you know, my, my son’s always like, why do you take pictures of everything, and I’m like, because you’ll be thankful I did.
Rob Volpe 36:29
Yeah, yeah. Well, and even, I mean, you talked about memory gaps, and like that, you’re not going to remember everything. I don’t know if we want to remember everything, but
Maria Ross 36:40
right,
Rob Volpe 36:40
you’re not going to remember all of it, and if something were to happen, you’d have access, or some sort of stimulus to help, maybe prompt a memory.
Maria Ross 36:49
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 36:50
so you had a really interesting perspective on bucket lists.
Maria Ross 36:56
Yeah, I did.
Rob Volpe 36:58
So, can you share with everyone? Yeah,
Maria Ross 37:01
I mean, again, very uniquely human for us to even create bucket lists and talk about things we want to accomplish, right?
Rob Volpe 37:08
What is, yeah, and what is a bucket list with the things I want to accomplish before I die?
Maria Ross 37:12
I mean, I’m sure my dog Bean has one in her head, but you know, her bucket list is like, when is she going to fill up the peanut butter again. No, I think I’ve even before the injury, I had this very cynical view about this whole live your best life movement, right? Because to me it seemed very unhealthy, and I know the intent of it was pure, and the intent of it is like you just be your best self, right? But I felt like it was a very shaming and blaming way to make people live, like by implying they’re not living their best life, it’s that they’re living their suckiest life right now, and that’s a lot of pressure, and so this equates to bucket lists, because it’s just like how after that experience for many years I couldn’t set goals anymore, it was really hard for me to set goals because I felt like I was putting too much pressure on myself in case I failed, and I had never been that way. I’d always been sort of a type A overachiever, and but I was like, why am I doing that to myself again? I’ve got this one life, and now I have the second chance at this one life. Why am I going to spend it trying to measure myself against an expectation that I have set that I might fail at, so it was really hard for me to set goals. So I started setting broader goals, and I didn’t necessarily have a bucket list at the time. I had a, like, oh, things I think I want to do right, and so I kind of tried to make my goals and bucket lists more abstract and less, less of the smart goals, right, specific, measurable, actionable, whatever, but just, you know, do you have one person in your life who’s a good friend that you can go and lean on, right? Do you, can you enjoy one moment with yourself, and do you know, indulge in something that you really enjoy that fills your cup. So I started making my bucket list about that. Now, okay, again, 18 years on, I do have the, like, I want to get to Japan, I want to get to Greece, I want to, you know, do all these other.. I want to do another TEDx talk, I want you to know, I want to do all these things, but I just feel like, again, as humans, we’re doing it to ourselves to make ourselves miserable, and again, you could say the flip side to that is like, but goals are great, and ambition is great, and dreams are great, and hope is great, and all of that is true, but I think society and culture is making us feel bad about something that we don’t need to feel bad about all the time, right? If you want to make a change in your life because you want to be healthier or happier, or you know, I want to be more audacious, I want to, I want to suck the marrow out of life, that’s all great, but to just go into. It of like, you know, hey Rob, you need to live your best life. It’s like you’re like, I was fine, I didn’t know I wasn’t living my best life, right? And so I think that’s the pressure and the overwhelm that I still to this day try to resist because of the experience that happened to me.
Rob Volpe 40:16
Yeah,
Maria Ross 40:17
but that said, again, we were talking about limited number of summers, there’s things I do want to do. I’m just not going to like berate myself if I don’t. I’m not going to like spend all this money and time trying to attain the thing and hire, you know, follow the gurus and go to the conferences and read the books and all the things.
Rob Volpe 40:36
Yeah. Well, and you check off some of those things on your bucket list,
Maria Ross 40:42
yeah.
Rob Volpe 40:42
And then, you know, I think bucket lists are ever changing and malleable based on,
Maria Ross 40:48
yeah,
Rob Volpe 40:48
situation, or what. You know, I’ve already done this, you know, one of the ones that struck me, I really appreciated the having somebody that really just truly knows you, whether it’s your spouse, partner, or just a close friend that you can really share, yeah, okay, I can, you know, count a number of people that would qualify, so I’m very like fortunate and done, I got that one,
Maria Ross 41:14
yeah,
Rob Volpe 41:15
about the importance of nurturing it,
Maria Ross 41:17
yes,
Rob Volpe 41:18
they’re there for you, and that they know when you pick up the phone, and they’re like, “Oh my god, what’s wrong? Like, yeah, it’s hearing your voice, something’s up. Tell me what’s happening. Yeah, and then you also had, though, sleep by the ocean.
Maria Ross 41:32
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 41:33
can hear the ocean and the breeze and everything, and you know, I’m like, done that, but I do that again. Yeah, exactly. There’s kind of an unlimited number of times. Well,
Maria Ross 41:45
and they don’t have to be grand gestures, that’s the thing. It’s like you could be in Chicago, near Lake Michigan, and maybe do that. I don’t know if you can get a place where you can hear the lake, but.. and I know that’s not the ocean, that’s a lake, but my point is, like your water, right? So it doesn’t have to be the big, like, no, I need to go on a cruise to Croatia, and although Croatia is on my list too, but you said something, though, that is intriguing to me, which is this idea of refilling the bucket list when you, as you knock things off, and that again kind of goes back to that very human trait of hope,
Rob Volpe 42:20
yeah,
Maria Ross 42:21
right. So, I’ve done
Rob Volpe 42:22
or defying death because, oh, I can’t die yet. I’ve still got three more things on my bucket list, still
Maria Ross 42:28
things on the list. So, but yeah, do you know anybody who’s ever done all the things on their bucket list and hasn’t replenished it in a way?
Rob Volpe 42:36
I think some of the elders that I’ve talked with, and it’s not that they’ve like, oh, I’m given, but they also get some perspective on it, like for them that bucket list really is focused on that one that you had about spending the time with the people that know you or that care about you and that you care about and prioritizing that.
Maria Ross 43:00
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 43:00
I think that’s the big piece. I do. I will say, you know, our elders today, some could be baby boomers, or then the generation beyond that. I don’t know, we’ve gotten more materialistic as we’ve gone along, and there’s FOMO and social media, and you know, living this sort of perfect life, so I think it makes it harder for us now at younger ages to have that amazing bucket list, and so you know there are things that I definitely want to do. Well, yeah, there are things that I definitely want to do, but it’s really, as I say, that I’m like the things that I would like to do.
Maria Ross 43:43
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 43:44
before I pass, I was gonna say,
Maria Ross 43:46
would you feel regret if you were dying tomorrow and you didn’t accomplish those things or didn’t do those things?
Rob Volpe 43:53
No, no, I’ve had a really remarkable journey with death since 2020 with people that have died close to me, a really good friend of ours died suddenly in actually it’ll be next week, like June 2020 so six years ago, and it was just like out of call, we got a call out of the blue from one of our mutual friends, and it’s just they were like Carrie’s dead. What, but she was 47 I think, at the time. And it turned out later on that she, when we were able to get the autopsy report, because we were real family was really guarded about what happened. We were getting bits and pieces.
Maria Ross 44:38
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 44:39
but in California, you can order the medical examiner report or the autopsy report, and so we jokingly, a group of us called ourselves the Fancy Drews. We wanted to get to the bottom of it, and it turns out that Carrie died from alcoholism, chronic alcoholism. She was a high when. Known as a high functioning alcoholic,
Maria Ross 45:02
yep,
Rob Volpe 45:03
and she hit it so well, and once we understood that, it was like, oh yeah, like we saw all the things, so that was like kind of the first big one that hit us, and I mentioned in the other episode I work with an energy healer, and so I think it was, yeah, it was probably six or eight months later. It was 2021 and I was having a session with Maria. It was May, I remember it was May 2021 and she was like, ‘Right,
Maria Ross 45:31
your energy healer, Maria, not me.
Rob Volpe 45:34
Yes, yes, healer, Kirsten Marie, we love us in Sausalito.
Maria Ross 45:38
Yes,
Rob Volpe 45:39
been seeing her for 14 years, but she was like, you’ve never really dealt with death before, and she’s like, she was like, your grandmothers are not going to live forever, I don’t know what you’re thinking, and like, she’s, she’s just intuiting all this, yeah, yeah, and everything, she’s like, your grandmothers are not going to live forever, but you are not ready for this, and you need to get ready, and so she actually, I haven’t pulled it out. She suggested I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is, of
Maria Ross 46:12
course, of course, the Tibetans wrote a handbook on it,
Rob Volpe 46:15
400 pages long.
Maria Ross 46:17
We’ll link to that in the show notes too,
Rob Volpe 46:20
and they, it says in the book, and she even said to me, and I will say this to everybody, you cannot read this once and understand it completely, like they suggest, if you really want to understand this, you need to read it like 10,000 times, and that idea of it is a never-ending journey of understanding it, but it gave me a sense of understanding death and what happens after, and how you can move, you know, on and up. In Buddhism, I believe in reincarnation, and how do you move up to that next plane? And I remember, like, go towards the light that scares you, like, move toward that, because that’s the next level up, apparently.
Maria Ross 47:05
Wow,
Rob Volpe 47:05
and if any listeners know more about this topic and want to share, I would be really curious to learn more. But I read this over the course of the summer. I remember where Charles and I was just pandemic, Charles and I went on to Hawaii for the break up from everything, and I’m like laying on Waikiki Beach, like underlining meaningful passages in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I don’t know what people
Maria Ross 47:30
relaxation to each their own, Rob. Like, yeah,
Rob Volpe 47:34
yes, yes, yeah. But then weeks after that, my grandmother had a stroke in South Carolina, and she passed away shortly after that. She was 97 but it helped me, like the reading that it helped me with her passing,
Maria Ross 47:53
right?
Rob Volpe 47:53
And then some other people that we knew, and then my grandma passed, and oh my
Maria Ross 47:58
goodness,
Rob Volpe 47:59
died in late October, on Halloween, 204 lived on her own until the last six weeks of her life.
Maria Ross 48:09
Wow,
Rob Volpe 48:10
went into hospital with four different illnesses, came out of that, went into rehab, but it just,
Maria Ross 48:17
yeah,
Rob Volpe 48:17
it caught her body up to being 104
Maria Ross 48:19
yeah,
Rob Volpe 48:20
but I had the gift of being with her, and I don’t want to say coaching, but being with her while she was passing, and wow, and it was the most profound, beautiful thing I have ever experienced in my life, like, you know, the there’s an article, I think it’s in the Washington Post. I’ll see if we can find it, and I’ll put a gift link in the show notes, talking to palliative care nurses and people that have been with people when they’re dying, and seeing the visions of loved ones that are then helping them feel comfortable going on, and we had that experience. It was the past on early Monday morning Saturday night into Sunday of that weekend, and we’re there, and it’s like, you know, one in the morning, and all of a sudden Grandma starts tracking something moving across the room that I can’t see, and she starts calling out to her sister, who’s had been dead for I don’t know 40 or 50 years.
Maria Ross 49:27
Wow.
Rob Volpe 49:28
And then the next morning she talked about having seen my grandpa outside the window, and he’d been dead since, like, 1986
Maria Ross 49:38
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 49:38
want to say 86 Yeah, and all of those things were happening, and I was there with her for it, and if anyone gets the opportunity to be in that moment, don’t be afraid of it. It is, I’m, you know, as a gay man, we’re childless by choice. I will not have the opportunity to be there when. Somebody is born, but I’m in there when they’ve died,
Maria Ross 50:03
yeah,
Rob Volpe 50:04
and they’ve gone that the other out the other door, I guess, right, right, and it was remarkable, and all going to die at some point, like it’s just how this is, and so I think having that front row seat, and having the exposure to it, and reading about it, and it’s just gotten me a lot more comfortable,
Maria Ross 50:28
yeah,
Rob Volpe 50:28
with the idea. It’s not that it still doesn’t upset me, it’s not, you know,
Maria Ross 50:33
right, you’re still going to experience grief and mourning and all of the loss and anger and all the things, but just our culture is horrible about dealing with all
Rob Volpe 50:42
about it, death
Maria Ross 50:43
and grief.
Rob Volpe 50:44
Yeah, and I’m like, you know, look, I don’t want to die anytime soon, but
Maria Ross 50:49
yeah,
Rob Volpe 50:50
I’m okay. Yeah, I’m at a place of just, yeah, I’m good. I’ve done stuff
Maria Ross 50:57
well, and that’s the thing, where it’s again, that that ability to accept death is not necessarily uniquely human, because there’s there’s cultures that do it better than others.
Rob Volpe 51:06
Yes, and if
Maria Ross 51:06
anything, our Western culture seems to want us to age in reverse, like talk, not, it’s not even about denying that we’re going to die, it’s, it’s denying, like we said earlier, that you’re even getting older, and everything from, from, you know, consumerism to skin care to
Rob Volpe 51:26
biohacky surgery,
Maria Ross 51:27
yeah, all the things, and I’m not saying, like, I don’t want.. I’m living in a glass house, right? Like, I see an esthetician, I’ve had, you know, a little jab here and there, like I’m taking the supplements, I’m doing all that.
Rob Volpe 51:41
You look lovely.
Maria Ross 51:42
Well, thank you. But I, what I am saying is that when we start to deny or not deal with death, even while we’re pursuing those things of like, well, I just want to feel as good as I can feel or look as good as I can look for as long as I can. Yeah, it’s a healthier way to look at it than like the people that are like, no, I want to look like I looked when I was 21 right? You’re not gonna, but yeah, yeah, but to that point, it’s just again such a uniquely human thing, where there’s all these other species in the world that don’t even spend an iota of energy thinking about this or wasting time or money about it, right? Like it kind of boggles my mind the
Rob Volpe 52:25
most of the moment that they’re in.
Maria Ross 52:27
They are, because they live in that moment, right?
Rob Volpe 52:30
Yeah,
Maria Ross 52:30
like the I always joked with my, my dog that passed away, Eddie, who was a big character in the book. Yeah, I know, he, you know, I always say he’s the most hopeful being in the world, because he’s just constant, he’s living in a state of constant hope. Will they drop the food? Will I get a treat? Are we going to go for a walk? Are you going to pet me? Can I lay down here? Is that my bone? Like, it’s just a constant state of hope, and I’m like, God, love him. Like, if we all could live that way, right?
Rob Volpe 53:00
Yeah, it’s like watching our cats move around the house with the sun, because they want to curl up in the sun, because it feels great, and that’s that’s their day,
Maria Ross 53:12
that’s their day, that’s their day, they don’t have to worry about paying a mortgage or anything, but so
Rob Volpe 53:18
we understand somehow in our subconscious low level consciousness that yeah this is all fleeting and so some people probably are like I have to accumulate everything and kind of want to take it with them I have a relative that I’m dealing with that right now and it’s like Grandma was always like, I don’t care what you do with that, you know? She, yeah, maybe she would have really cared, but she used to say, she’s like, I don’t care, I’m gonna be dead, yeah,
Maria Ross 53:53
yeah,
Rob Volpe 53:53
doesn’t matter, right? Bury me, cremate me, do this at the survey, like, whatever, right? It’s going to make you happy,
Maria Ross 54:01
right,
Rob Volpe 54:01
because she’s like, “I’ll be dead,
Maria Ross 54:03
yeah,
Rob Volpe 54:03
but we do have this reaction to it, where we’re suddenly like, “Oh, I’ve got to get everything done, and I think the pandemic really triggered that, and we’re seeing we coming out of the pandemic, I think we saw this renaissance of experiences, but even more now, Gary Vaynerchuk just did a newsletter, and he was talking about how much connection people are looking for in person.
Maria Ross 54:28
Yes,
Rob Volpe 54:29
wanting to do things with other people and be around other people, and that in a pushback against tech because we’re so isolated through technology, and technology will never die.
Maria Ross 54:45
No,
Rob Volpe 54:46
I mean, it does in some ways, like an iPhone doesn’t live forever, right?
Maria Ross 54:50
But I mean, that’s the thing, you know, again, kind of getting back to our whole root of starting the series, it’s like that’s a different mindset than AI has. Yes, and what are the beautiful benefits of being a human that we bring to our experience that AI will never be able to replicate, and that is one of them.
Rob Volpe 55:09
It for sure, for sure. And you know, even I was just thinking, like, yeah, my iPhone will die, but I can transfer everything over to a new iPhone,
Maria Ross 55:17
right? Right, or it’s up
Rob Volpe 55:18
in the cloud, it can get downloaded,
Maria Ross 55:20
its soul is portable. It
Rob Volpe 55:24
is, and I mean, would you want that?
Maria Ross 55:29
You know, did you ever see the series upload on Amazon Prime?
Rob Volpe 55:32
No, it ran for a
Maria Ross 55:34
couple of seasons a few years ago, and it was exactly that premise, is that it was a society. I don’t know if it was the future or not, where rich people could pay for their soul to get uploaded to a heaven of their choice, but you actually could still communicate with your relatives on earth, like there was a link, there was actually an evil, like telecom company behind this whole thing,
Rob Volpe 55:57
of course, we call it Starlink,
Maria Ross 56:00
yeah, it was, I think it was a Verizon, it was like Verizon or something, I don’t know what it was, but yeah, and it was a really interesting premise, because it was, it almost made it feel like you would never want that, as good as it sounded, there was obviously all these misadventures and horrible things that happened. It was a comedy, and it’s still on. You can still find it on Prime. The first season was phenomenal, and then it sort of.. like, I don’t know what happened. They kind of.. it kind of didn’t translate as it kept going. But again, it was like something where it’s like, wouldn’t that be great? And then.. and then it was a whole indictment of the haves and the have-nots, and how there were people that couldn’t afford it, and so they had, they had to say goodbye to their loved ones. There was nowhere for them to go and upload their soul into this other environment, right. And then there’s a whole evil plot by a giant technology company of like fleecing the poor people, make them think they can do it, but they can’t, like it was a whole thing. My point being that show you watch it, and you’re like, God, that sounds awful. Like, at first it doesn’t. Like, the first few episodes, you’re like, this is amazing, right? And you’re like, no, people, when they die, they just need to die. Like, it needs to just end there. It’s too messy if it.. if they don’t.
Rob Volpe 57:18
Yeah, yeah. Well, have you seen The Black Mirror, you know, the Black Mirror series. I
Maria Ross 57:24
know the series, I have not caught it yet.
Rob Volpe 57:26
Okay, so there is an episode called San Junapero, which is very similar to that idea of your, your existence getting uploaded, and it’s about two companions finding each other in this sort of space, but not realizing that they’re not actually in, in that reality, which I just kind of, spoiler alert, but sorry, it’s old, like, yeah,
Maria Ross 57:54
yeah,
Rob Volpe 57:55
but again, yeah, it is that idea of living for other and more current, and it just dropped on HBO Max. Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever is a series that ran on HBO or on CNN in April and May, and now all setting was six episodes, and she explores all of these longevity hacks and this desire to live forever, and she interviews, because apparently a lot of this industry that has grown up is actually funded by a lot of the tech bros or people that have made money in tech.
Maria Ross 58:22
Yep,
Rob Volpe 58:22
and so she’s interviewing them, and she’s looking at different cultures and what, what it means to age, you know. She admits she doesn’t want to live forever herself, but it, in that pursuit, is the journey of the series, and it was.. I’ve only seen the first two episodes, I think, and it’s really good.
Maria Ross 58:52
Well, we will.. we should put a link to that for sure. So, so kind of as we wrap up again, you know, as we said, folks, this isn’t a show about answering the questions, it’s about asking them, having the conversation, and we’d love for you to be a part of that conversation. So, let us know what you think. What are your thoughts on on the human experience of dying and grief and mortality? And based on anything we talked about here, you know, let us know. I’m on Instagram at Red Slice Maria. Rob is there at Empathy Activist,
Rob Volpe 59:24
activist, and if anyone is interested in participating and having a conversation with me about those senior years and having that conversation, there’s a link in the show notes to sign up to either answer a survey, talk to me individually. I would love, love, love, love to connect with you
Maria Ross 59:45
all. Right. Well, Rob, until next time. Thank you for this conversation. Until our next episode, episode three of our sub series. What does it mean to be human?
Rob Volpe 59:53
I want to say, as I started with a dad joke, I feel like there’s some like Maria, this is revised. Moved me, you brought me back to life. Did I reboot you? There we go. My brain is rebooted. No, this has been amazing. I do encourage people to check out your book, Rebooting My Brain.
Maria Ross 1:00:12
Thank you,
Rob Volpe 1:00:13
it’s really lovely. And is there like a PSA sort of thing, like if anybody’s feeling a sudden headache or something is off. Please, please, not only go to the doctor, advocate for yourself,
Maria Ross 1:00:26
advocate for yourself, and take brain injury seriously. Wear helmets if you bang your head really hard, don’t just try to sleep it off. Go see a doctor, go get a scan if you can, if that’s accessible to you. So many people live with brain injury impacts and effects, and never know it, because it was just like, oh, I fell off the ladder when I was a kid, and we just like shook it off, right? So, just brain injury can happen to anyone at any time, so if you ever feel like something’s off, advocate for yourself,
Rob Volpe 1:00:59
please,
Maria Ross 1:01:00
please, please, please, please.
Rob Volpe 1:01:02
Awesome. Thank you, Maria.
Maria Ross 1:01:04
Thank you, Rob. And thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of The Empathy Edge Podcast. As always, if you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate and review it, and please share it with a friend or a colleague. And until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit The Empathy edge.com There you can listen to past episodes, access show notes, and free resources. Book me for a keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news, and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red Slice Maria. Never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
