Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 630: Cody Delistraty

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Cody Delistraty, author, journalist, and speechwriter, joins the DTFH! Read Cody's new book, The Grief Cure, available wherever you buy your books! You can also learn more about Cody and The Grief Cure on his website, Delistraty.com. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg and Duncan Trussell. This episode is brought to you by: This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self. Tushy - Use offer code: DUCNAN at checkout to get 10% Off your first bidet order!

Hi, it's me again, your best friend, the person who lives behind your house secretly, Duncan Trussell. Today, we have an incredible podcast for you. I got really lucky to find this amazing book by Cody Delestrati called The Grief Cure. As most of you probably know, I have lost some parents. It happens when you get around my age. In fact, you know, I remember something I heard Chogim Trump Rinpoche say, which is like, once you get to a certain age, everyone just starts dropping like flies. This is a happy way to start an episode, but it's true.

And more than likely, you've experienced loss, maybe not of a parent, but even just of a pet. I mean, sometimes that can feel as powerful, especially if your dog breastfed you. Sorry, I had to cut the camera. Just thinking about what that was like, you know? I was the run of the litter and that's not fun. Having to push the other puppies away but they nip you, they nip your

cheek and then no more milk. If you've lost anybody, there's a lot of great books to read, but I would start with A Grief Cure cure not just because it has some more modern takes on grieving and the future of grieving but also because it looks into the history of how humans have dealt with Death and just learning that just knowing that stuff It I think could be immensely helpful Especially if you're one of the grieving people out there who's gone completely bonkers, as most of us do. There might be some explanations in there for you about why these days when you lose somebody you can feel completely wobbled.

Especially the fact, and I just found this out today, spoiler, bereavement leave, you only get five days. Lose a parent, five days, and then you're back at the fucking office. Wow. What a slap in the face, huh? That's just like Lucifer just draping his festering demonic balls right over your heart. So I'm sorry, that's probably not the best way to describe the book. Cody if you're watching this forgive me for saying that but you please you must order this book The Grief Cure. It's everywhere. It just came out about a month ago and you're going to love it.

Before we jump into the podcast, got some dates coming up. If you're listening to this the week of August 8th you can find me at the Helium Comedy Club in Buffalo from August 8th to August 10th. After that I'm gonna be at SideSplitters in Tampa Florida. Come see me there we added an extra show on Thursday. So if you couldn't get tickets that's how you can get tickets. I'm gonna be at the Wilbur November 1st. You can get tickets there also. I'll be at the San Diego Comedy Store coming up. All those dates and many more are at dunkintrustle.com. All right, let's jump in to this awesome podcast

with Cody Delestrotti, author of The Grief Cure, now available everywhere. Cody, hi, great to meet you. Hey Duncan, good to be here. Welcome to the DTFH. I wanted to, it's kind of a weird way to start a podcast. You've written this wonderful book on grief, the grief cure. We've both been through something that so many others have.

We lost both of our moms to cancer. And I wanted to talk to you about Westworld. Have you seen Westworld? I saw half of the first season, I heard it got less good as time went on, but I loved the premise. Right, and fortunately I think this probably happened in the first or second episode.

I can't remember when exactly, but one of the androids sees a picture of something outside the theme park. I don't know, it's a city, a car, whatever, and she goes, I don't see anything at all. Because they don't know how to react to whatever it is out there. They've been programmed They just don't have the capacity to understand anything outside of the time period therein So they just don't see it at all now You talk about how you lose a parent and you quickly begin to realize that no one

knows what to say. So you get the, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. And they feel uncomfortable saying that because they know they're just regurgitating the only sentence that they know to say when something like that happens. And I loved that you were shining, that you shine a spotlight on the, I guess you could say, I don't know,

grief illiteracy in our, at least in this country, maybe in some other cultures I like to fantasize they're completely comfortable with the reality of death. But here, when, not only when you are confronted with the ultimate reality, but when those around you are confronted with it, it's like being in a video game, and you've run out of dialogue lines to say to the NPC, we just don't know how to respond.

So what are your thoughts on that illiteracy, grief illiteracy? I mean, firstly, those are really good. Evan Rachel Wood impression is very short, but it was shockingly solid. But secondly, I mean, that's an enormous question. I think we really get in the US, the UK, a lot of Western countries,

we really get stuck in what you're describing really. And it's really like a vicious cycle where the person who wants to confront the griever is weary of sort of aggravating or reopening the wound or pushing too far. So there's a real top level superficiality of, oh, I'm sorry, OK, like that sort of thinking, as you're saying, and then the griever doesn't want to be a burden.

So they don't want to push it either, but usually both parties are really, uh, they would love to act in good faith and they'd love to be there for each other. They just don't know how. And we follow this, this sort of BS social script basically that you're describing. And that's a relatively new phenomenon is what I find so interesting, because really in the early 20th century, you didn't have that. The history of grief in the West is so fascinating. In the late 18th century, you have this historian called Fully Barreese, who's talking about, he called it the era of tamed death. When death was super accepted,

super integrated into life, people would almost always die at home in their bed. They'd be surrounded by loved ones. They'd be usually in control of their death. Death also just happened so often because of high mortality rates at that time. And then you get to the early 20th century, you have Freud proposing that a certain kind of grief can be really solved to some degree in the therapist's office. You have a rise in happiness culture. You have this really interesting phenomenon, especially in the U S where during

World War I, there's so much death that I mean, American women used to wear black crepe. They used to wear the black morning gowns upon death. And I found these really interesting historical archives that showed President Woodrow Wilson when he wanted to really drum up more interest in the war effort, because he had run on a relatively isolationist platform and there wasn't a lot of excitement about going in the first world war.

And there's all these feminists and, or early feminists and women's rights activists who were marching basically against it, saying, our husbands are gonna to die in this war. What's the point of this war? And they would be in full black morning on hot Manhattan days. And he said, what if instead of wearing your black morning, you just wore a little armband and it had a little,

a little gold star that showed if someone died, who is close to you. Dispense with the black, maybe don't even march. Just sort of keep it to yourself. And you hear then the UK too, the keep calm and carry on ethos. There's a real shift that I really identify as happening because of war, frankly, and wanting to keep death out of the public sphere. And then it just only amped up through the 20th century. You have this guy, Jeffrey Gore, who's an English anthropologist who went around the UK in the 1960s and 1970s and found that fewer and fewer people were talking to even their neighbors about their loss. There was a real sense of

this was having health issues on people. Sorry, this is quite a long history. I love it. No, this is amazing. This is what's great about your book. This is so great because, you know, we need, I need, I shouldn't say we, I always pluralize, I'm such a pussy, I always say we because I'm afraid to say I need it. Learning this stuff is, for me, it just helped a lot, just that alone because when you are in grief land and you're no longer in like

America land though the put you know, which isn't it fascinating that those things are separated too, right? They shouldn't be separated. They should be that that should be the same world It's Susan Sontag wrote about the land of the healthy and the land of the sick. What if those were the same, you know Oh my God. It's like, okay, I'm not gonna go, I'm gonna try to, I'm thinking of how to compress this. I got in a little bit of trouble because somebody did a vlog reviewing a hotel at Disney World,

this Star Wars hotel, and just talking about how it wasn't true to lore and a lot of other stuff. I only watched like two minutes. It was like the vlog itself was longer than the first Star Wars movie. I don't have time to watch that. But one of the complaints was it's not true to lore. And I'm looking at videos of this hotel, right?

And it's just like, you know, people in cargo shorts walking around a spaceship. It's like if anything takes you out of the Star Wars experience, it's a dude in cargo shorts with a lightsaber. I'm sorry, I, I, I, my imagination isn't powerful enough to turn that into a Jedi. It's just never gonna happen. But when, when, when you are living in a, in whatever you want to call it, default reality might be a cooler way to say it than America land, you buy in. And the Woodrow Wilson thing really explains a lot to me. Because if you look at war

and the military industrial complex, really you're talking about industrialization is what you're talking about. You're talking about post-industrial society, and we need people to value work war Sacrifice for the machine over their own lives just for the damn thing to function and so suddenly It's like someone presses a button and you realize holy fuck I am NOT on the Millennium Falcon

I am not on the Millennium Falcon. You look around and you realize, holy shit, everyone is fully committed to this facade that has been constructed in the abyss. Some kind of plummeting theme park plummeting through the abyss with an invisible sniper with bullets made of cancer heart attacks diabetes car accidents just taking out moms and kids and Uncles randomly and we're all supposed to be walking around like keep calm and carry on

Just just from time to time someone you love more than anything in the world who breastfed you will from time to time, someone you love more than anything in the world who breastfed you will disappear eternally. And it's at every level too as you're identifying it's at the interpersonal, the discussion with the neighbor, the awkwardness, and then it's also it there's no federal law for bereavement leave in the US. The average time off is five days in the US. Five days. You, your mom, and it's only one if it's for a close friend or a chosen partner, like an unmarried partner. Five days though. Like my, I mean, I wasn't finishing college when my mom died, but my dad worked for the state government. Five days is like, you can sort of rearrange her side of the bed and her nightstand.

You can't fully grapple with grief. Like it's wild. So yeah, it's absolutely, as you're saying, it's baked into every aspect where it's this real ethos of get back to normal, get back to life, get back to work is a big one. And you see that in so many things. You see that in the misinterpretation of the five stages of grief, this idea that you'll get to acceptance, this mythical notion of closure. It perme just, it permeates pop culture. It truly is everywhere.

Okay, the five stages of grief, which you talk about. I love it. And it's the first time I've ever seen an indictment of the five stages of grief, which is also vindicating. Because the five fucking stages of grief is the most ridiculous bullshit. But you see a thing like that, and you're like, I wonder which stage I'm at right now

and you know if you look at out of the world nothing is like that there is it you know nothing that is organic has some clear cut stages it's like and with grief the you know the the you get tricked into thinking okay I've made it to four, or whatever, and with grief, suddenly, you're just, the floor drops out. One day you're fine, walking around, you're like, holy shit, you know what? Maybe that five day thing makes sense. And then the next thing, you're just on your bed, sobbing,

just because you thought, you know what, I'll never smell that house again that I lived in for so many years. And you're just sobbing, but you were fine, and then you're sobbing. And then you start grieving for the grief, and then a few years pass, and you're like, yeah, you know, I lost a parent, we all do at my age.

And then, boom, it hits you hard on some day, because the fall is coming, and it reminds you of taking a walk with them. And it seems it's seemingly endless. Yeah, it's absolutely everywhere. And I don't hold at fault Elizabeth Kubler Ross who came up with the idea of five stages of grief because she originally in her 1969 book on death and dying,

she wasn't even talking about people grieving. She was interviewing terminally ill patients in a Chicago hospital. So those people, how do you grapple with your own death? And I really had different stages, different iterations I should say maybe, in how I considered the stages of grief. Because at first, that was the only thing I knew.

I was like, my mom died, I had been a good student. I was like, I'm gonna be a good griever as well, right? So I know closure, I know five stages, then looking at the five stages more, you start to realize what you're saying. There's really not a linearity to grief. There's really not a movement through it. There was a really interesting study in 2007 that found that a majority of people do tend to hit those things in grief that Kubler-Ross had mentioned, like depression, bargaining acceptance.

But the big issue with it, and she did eventually come around to, to say, yeah, there's some application to grief. But the big issue for me is that it's so often read as prescriptive. It's read as a blueprint. And I was talking to a psychiatrist who said she had a client come to her and say, yeah, I've been grieving. And I've been trying to get my husband to get me really mad because I want to get to the anger stage faster. Right. So it's this idea that like, you can just check it off, boom, boom, boom, get to acceptance and then, you know, back to work, you're good to go.

And that's just not as you're saying so correctly, that's just not how grief functions. That's not how it works. And to believe that it does is to really slow yourself from the real work and the real grappling. I do think it comes from a good place, comes from this collective desire. If I can say, oh, I'm angry too, you're angry too, there's some feeling of camaraderie, but yeah, it can't be viewed as a blueprint because that doesn't exist in grief.

When you... What was the amount of time between your mom's diagnosis and when she passed away? Four years. So she got sick when I started college. Same for you? Just about maybe five. What kind of cancer? Breast cancer. Yeah, metastatic melanoma for my mom. Very light-skinned blonde. Yeah. Blue-eyed woman. Yeah. Yeah. So you get so, and you remember the first, the call where she, or were you with her in person when she told you? I was the first person, I was there when,

so she was dropping me off my first year. I was studying abroad through this weird program and we were outside of a pizza place and she felt a lump under her clavicle. And she said, she told me, she said there's a lump under her clavicle. And she said, she told me, she said there's a lump. She was super fit. She was always trying to eat healthy. She was a dietician by training.

She worked in a hospital. Like she was on her game. So we were like, oh, this is fine. This is gonna be nothing. You know, she's in her early fifties. And then over the next few months, she had trials and they said, she has stage four metastatic melanoma. We need to start doing some trials.

We did experimental trials at NIH, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. We did, I'm from Spokane, Washington. And so we did some stuff at home in Spokane, other stuff in Seattle. But yeah, it was four years. How, for you was the, it was four years and how did it sort of evolve as far as treatment and expectation? Um, okay. Yeah, it was, uh, well, you know, what's interesting about it is like you, with these kinds of things, like I, I, if we are in Vegas, I would bet a million dollars that you have a much better memory than I do.

But with these- I don't know about that. There's something with trauma where it really, I have very fracture- Snap shots. It feels like someone took a Polaroid while walking very quickly. So you have a sort of like a swiftly blurred, right?

Yes! You can, yeah, I don't know. You remember it forever. walking very quickly so you have a sort of like a swiftly blurred right you can yeah I don't know you remember forever it was I was in a restaurant eating Obama has just been elected he's giving a speech phone call from my mom I'm gonna die like it's the doc, you know, she had had a tumor removed from her breast years before and it just, the doctor was like, you're gonna die. Like this is, you know, there's like, we didn't have your doctor, our doctor is up

in North Carolina, he's like, you better just pick out a coffin. Geez, really? Yeah, hardcore. Hardcore. Wow. And God, do they teach that in medical school? It's not bedside manner.

My God. And your mom, that's fascinating, though, that your mom was that forthright with you, too. Yeah, which was one of the beautiful things about her is that she had somehow avoided the conditioning to make it seem lighter than it was and to tiptoe around it. She knew that ultimately it's better just to tell the truth

and it's gonna be devastating. But then it didn't happen as soon as the doctor said. It was four years. It's a long time when you're talking stage four stuff, which it sounds like your mom was too. She was doing chemo, but she's also doing like holistic stuff and lowering sugar intake. And so. But. I want to talk about those years in between when you find out and when they pass on for you. Because here you are, you're in school, man. Like you are like, and you're kicking ass.

Like you, it seems like you're like a fish to water. Like I was doing okay. I was doing pretty good. I don't know. Not that not one percent. You're doing better than me, my friend. But you know, it's like, it seems like, this is an exciting time for anybody.

Yeah, of course. And suddenly the shadow of death falls over this primary experience. So how did you, in which I think this is the beginning of grief, like people think grief happens when the body, when they drop their body, but grief happens way before that. So you're having to contend with this ultimate reality and default reality and my god the shame that I would feel for the thoughts that would spring into my mind of like you know this is supposed to be a good time for me and I like all I can think about is like you're gonna

die and so did you feel anything like that? This episode of the DTFH was supported by BetterHelp. It's incredible how like I've got some things that I have to do every week or I feel like an asshole like if I don't make it to the gym if I don't do my 700 push-ups a day if I don't do my like 200 pound kettlebell slinging exercise, you know the thing you throw a kettlebell hundreds of yards through your yard at the flag of whatever country you think is the worst country. These are the things I have to do or I just don't feel right.

But it's incredible. I don't know what your self care thing is. Maybe you take long baths or eat rose petals or stare at the moon while you're wearing Hawaiian shirts, which actually I've heard is great for your skin. It's funny how like what often gets left out is just basic therapy. Maybe it's not as exciting as covering yourself in blessed rose petals and a bathtub filled with holy water. But my God, it sure helped me. And if you're thinking about giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a wonderful choice for you because you can do it all online.

That means no going to a therapist's office and sitting there and having, like, what magazine do you pick to read while you're waiting to go into therapy? The whole thing is awkward, but Better help lets you do this all from home. You just fill out a brief questionnaire, get matched with a licensed therapist. They make it easy to switch any time you want to, which can be really important. Why not try therapy? Make it part of your self-care regimen. You can still take those holy water baths but they're gonna feel a lot better if you're going to

therapy. I guarantee it. Never skip therapy day with better help. Right now go to betterhelp.com. That's H-E-L-P. Better help and use use Africa Duncan to get 10% off your first month. That's better help.com. Thank you. Better help. Yeah, there is. I mean, there is just a real push and pull between my mom and me, where she really wanted me to stay in school and really, you know, push forward, continue on. There was definitely still a belief that she was going to get better, but I was really

reluctant to stay. I wanted to just drop out. I wanted to go home. And I did go with them to Maryland, to Seattle for these trials and many nights spent sleeping on cots in hospital rooms and that sort of thing. But really when she, when it became clear she was going to die, really didn't happen until a few weeks, a few months maybe before she did.

And at that point I went home, she was not doing any more trials. I just talked to all my teachers. I said, I'm going to do my finals later. I just can't do this right now, but I definitely harbor a lot of regret for. Not having left earlier, but it's hard too, because those were her wishes that I not do that. So there was, um, it was a bit because those were her wishes that I not do that. So there was, it was a bit of a strain dynamic in that. And again, this all has its roots in grief illiteracy. It should, in some fantasy utopia, a thing like this occurs and

utopia. A thing like this occurs and people aren't programmed, you know, what does the hero do in movies when the hero is dying? What does the hero say to their friends? Go on without me! Leave me here! It's built into us this fucking war mentality. Like you die alone, the other soldiers need to go ahead and like kill more people. And this is like what the hero does. So, to be dying and to say, and I don't know, like my mom would similarly want me to live my life, but I don't know how much of that was actually live your life and how much of that was the right thing to do is to die alone, not literally alone, but you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. And on the other side of it, because it isn't built into our system, because we prioritize career, work, production over

human connection and fundamental human experiences that are not Replicable. Thank God. I mean you only lose one mom it you Again, you end up in these bizarre predicaments that I think Probably are relatively new. I don't know the history of that. Do you know anything about the history of when someone dies? Being with them during that process or I mean it just happened so much quicker in the past the history of that. Do you know anything about the history of when someone dies, being with them during that process? I mean, it just happened so much quicker in the past, right? Like medicine is such the big... You get the cancers our moms got, they're gone in

weeks probably, right? Months. Like now there's no... So yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I don't know if there's, I'm not sure. Like it's one of those things. Yes, I regret it to some degree, but also I don't know how it would have played out had I dropped out, if that would have been more stress for her. It's one of those things that you can play over and over again in your brain, but you only get to live life one way and you only get to sort of imagine the other way that it could have been lived.

And it's unclear exactly what it would have looked like. But I was grateful to get to be home toward the end of her life. And I had a really, a lot of meaningful experiences. It was incredibly high stress in that anytime I go out to the grocery store, I definitely have my phone on, this volume on very loud. And I tell my brother, if she has real trouble breathing, like you need to call me immediately. There was just a sense of any time she could die. But in the few days before she died, her, my mom, my dad, my brother and I sat down,

her brother and me sat down at our kitchen table and I basically interviewed my mom for two days. She was really having trouble talking by the second, really having trouble breathing, but it's something she really wanted to do. It's something I really wanted to do. And we got to really get into questions as trivial as what's her favorite ice cream flavor to favorite movie to as significant as what would significant is, um, you know, what would

she tell my brother and me on our future wedding days? Um, and that felt, it was so valuable and it felt like, um, like I'm loathe to use the word closure cause I don't think there's such thing, but it gave us a real sense of, uh, connectedness really toward the end and unity as a family and that was one of the most valuable things I got to do in those final days. Very brave of you. I don't know. No, when I did this podcast that ended up on the Midnight Gospel that we used for

the last episode and see this is the last episode and see this is I'm very impressed with you because You Oh, you're a very brave person you confronted this situation in a way that I Did not have the courage to do. After your mom passed on, you start reading memoirs, you really wanted to work with the grief. And yeah, I think some of it was misplaced, I think a lot of it, but yeah,

I was pretty keyed in, pretty locked in. There was a confrontation there, a confrontation was happening that a lot of us don't have the guts to do and you know I like all of my spiritual bullshit it went right out the fucking window all of the oh my god the instructions from people I I love and respect all the Ram Dass teachings on death and all of the stuff of like feel it be with it Love yourself all of it out the fucking window. I didn't want

anything to do with it and People will come up to me and say oh that last episode of the midnight gospel with your mom It's so much to me and And I love that. But the truth of it is that she knew we were gonna do a podcast. Because we did two. We did one when she had a few years left to live and then another when she was about to die. And that second one, oh, Cody, I'm downstairs

in the guest room of the house, on my Kindle, reading the Hunger Games. I don't even like those books but I am fixated on the Hunger Games all of a sudden. Just I'll just sit down. This makes sense on a mattress on the floor reading the Hunger Games. Mom upstairs you hear the oxygen pump. You hear that fucking sound that metronome of death And then I remember she called to me. She's like, it's time. It's time to do this.

And my heart sank. I didn't want to do it. Because I knew it would be our last podcast. I knew it would never happen again. So I did not have the courage that you had. And that to me is really impressive. If it makes you feel better, and I think this is much more aligned

with sort of your experiences, it took me something like four years to listen to those audio files. There was a real confrontation of a real internal conflict and a real sense of I'm confronting the proof of her death if I listen to this. And that took a very long time. I really just, I really shut myself out from being with other people.

I had this sense that I didn't want to be a burden. I had this sense that I need to, um, you know, quote unquote move on. And yeah, so I don't know, it happened to us at different times, but I think it happened to both of us. This also hunger games. It is so fascinating what we read in grief. I remember I woke up the morning after my mom died and I read David Sedaris's me talk pretty one day at our grocery store while having French toast or something. I was just having to pretend like this is a normal day.

Like nothing, your mother didn't just die and you didn't just see her corpse in the bedroom at 11 PM last night and the coroner came it's no, no, it's a, or the body bag guy came. Nope. It's just a regular day. And so there's this total as sort of, I think you're saying to this splitting of, of the brain and of the mind where one side's over here, one side's over there. And yeah, you can know the Ram Dass things to do and things to be unified with the universe, but to actually do that

is a matter entirely different. That's right. And the body bad guy. See, these are the tiny blasphemies that people who haven't experienced this don't understand. So here you are, this place that is, that you, your that is that you Your mom is your I don't know if you if this is the place you grew up or it is Yeah, okay, so here's the home you grew up and this is maybe where you breastfed

This is where you learn to walk. This is and there's a smell to specific to your parents house and there is a feeling when you come home that to your parents' house. And there is a feeling when you come home that, folks, you still have parents on this side of the veil. You probably take it for granted. I sure as fuck did. But there's a feeling you get when you come home. A sense of, yeah, sure, you are annoyed

by your parents probably or whatever, but it's a kind of relaxation that you might not get other places ever again. I don't know but Suddenly in the midst of this Temple to your past a body bad guy shows up a dude comes in who doesn't use he's just on the clock Dude with a van a dude with a fucking van pulls up shows over folks A dude with a fucking van pulls up, shows over, folks. Okay, and I hope you enjoyed your childhood.

Great, where's the body? Zips it up, plops it in a van. You don't know where it's going. He's driving down the fucking, he might stop it in and out. He might get a burger. Who the fuck knows? That's your mom.

So these blasphemies appear that just are so jarring that it makes you feel like you're in a dream or something. Oh yeah, I mean the surreality of death is hard to overstate and we see it so often in pop culture but you never see the face usually in newspapers and magazines. Death is always there but it's always a little depersonalized and so to see it really up close, really personal, it feels your mind can't really find where it belongs. And so, oh, I've seen it before in fiction, it must belong in fiction. I mean, this is the literal wall.

You hit the wall. It is an invisible boundary in whatever this thing is that we're all sharing, where there's clearly something else going on here, but we just can't wrap our minds around it. And the choices you are confronted with The choices you are confronted with upon losing a parent are pretty interesting, right? Because like, if suddenly, you know, like, have you ever been to a rave, Cody? Not like a real, I mean, I've been, yeah, I'll say no.

We should go sometime. Where are we? Are there the good ones in Austin? I have no idea. I feel like I'm too old, I didn't do this five years ago. You'll act like we're cops. My friend used to do that. This is like 23 Jump Street or something. At concerts, cause we're both old, we go to,

he loves going to concerts, he's old. And we go to concerts and he would love to like say very loudly, I'm not a cop, I'm not a cop. And everybody would be so freaked out. But you go to a rave and you're on ecstasy, the music is incredible. Everyone looks so beautiful because the lighting sucks, it or not sucks, it's designed so you can't see anything

really and then it's the raves over you gotta go outside and you look around at all the people that seem like beautiful elven alien angels and they look fucked up oh it's like same with like a club or something to right yeah Jesus Christ we're all dying what have we done to ourselves this is what happens with death for For a second, the lights come up and you look around and you're like, this is, what the fuck is this thing? This is modernity? This is

advanced civilization? Holy shit! We've gotten nowhere! Maybe we've gone backwards! And then, you gotta figure out a way to get the lights to go down a little bit if you wanna reconnect and get back out there in the world. But I still feel like an outsider outside of with people like you in the grief club.

But what about you? How are you integrating back into society? Other than writing a brilliant book that helps people like me, how has your integration into society been? helps people like me. How has your integration in the society been? Yeah. Um, yeah, no raves. We got to do, we'll have to do a Texan or New York rave. That sounds good. New York will be probably better if I had to roll the dice.

Probably a higher, higher quotient like a little Bushwick move or something. Right? Um, yeah, I mean, I wrote this book, it's really a journey and really there was a sense of wanting to explore both things that I was interested in as ways to grapple with grief and then also technologies and medicines that I'd seen as being something that we might be grappling with in the future and wanting to have those conversations now. So I was interested in everything as sort of small as laughter therapy, this idea that grief is really physiological and that you might be able to have a cathartic experience through forcing your body to do certain things, i.e. laughter.

And then I was also interested in artificial intelligence and I started looking at this very early. I was a little frustrated honestly when Chad GPT took over the news cycle because I was also interested in artificial intelligence and I started looking at this very early. I was a little frustrated honestly when Chad GPT took over the news cycle because I was like, wait, I was on this so early. But this idea of, is it healthy? Is it smart? What do we get out of it if we're recreating the deceased? I recreated my mom as a chat bot. And I mean, ultimately with so many of these things, I found some of these technologies, I found, yes, there's value in parts of it. A lot of the value comes in the time it really provides for reflection. So what are the questions I would want to still ask my mom if I

was able to bring her back? What are the things we would want to talk about? What is what's been left unsaid and less so maybe finding value in the actual experience of having this technologically aided conversation. And then looking also at very future things like, um, optogenetics as a means toward, uh, memory deletion. It's used for all sorts of things. It's in brief, Optogenetics is basically the introduction of a light sensitive protein into usually a neuron.

And through that, you can turn the neuron on or off using a external fiber optic. And so you, there's really fascinating study about, I think in 2014 at MIT and at UCSD that basically erased, created and then erased memories in rats. So they'd like shock them in a certain area of a maze and still a fear response to that area. They wouldn't go there and then they would optogenetically take away that memory. Rats would go back to that space.

And there is an article- You know, that's good news for people who like to torture rats, cause it's like, you know, they always avoid the shocks. You always have to remove your shocker to a different part of the maze. You can't just enjoy what it's great. I can't wait to get that from my rats.

No, you don't understand, they're terrorists. These rats are really bad. And yeah, and there was such a fascinating science magazine article that came out right around that time that said, are humans next? And then eternal sunshine, the spotless mind. And it really got me thinking. So yeah, my integration was really in this exploration

of what ended up being very individualized ways of grappling with grief. And then the book really zooms out in the second half and asks, is this the future that we want? Is this the way we want to be grappling with grief? Are there instead new ways of thinking about community, about legitimizing broader and newer forms of grief? Are there ways of looking to the past and past ways of grieving and ritual and other cultures in order to, um, to improve

the way that we grapple with things. And there's psilocybin and there's, um, bibliotherapy that I write about. So it was the process. Tell me about the, what's the bibliotherapy. Uh, it's relatively rare. There's not many, uh, bibliotherapists, but it is as any, um, a Hellenophone would know it is a book therapy and the word, I don't know a Greek speaker. I'm not sure.

I need to send in an email to my guests. Like guys, I'm dumb. Like you got a dumb. I don't even know if that's the word. I'm going to sound really stupid if that's not the word. Wait, we need to look it up. It sounds like hello phone. I'm like Greek speaker word. Is it a Greco phone?

Oh my God. Are we going to need to delete this? Greco phone? A person who speaks Greek. I really had to think about that for awhile. So we'll just say a person who speaks Greek. Um, what's Greek? Maybe we can cut that.

Hey, what's Greek? He's kidding. I think I understand that. Oh my gosh.k. Okay. Um, what's Greek? Maybe we can cut that. Hey, what's Greek? Just kidding. I think I understand that. So funny. Oh my gosh. Maybe. Okay. Um, abject silliness. Um, yeah, it's book therapy. And so I met with this woman called Ella Bertude, who lives with her cat outside of Brighton, England, has an amazing energy, incredible aura. And she basically had a therapy session with me for an hour where I talked about my mom, all the things I was struggling with. And then she gave me book prescriptions, so things to read and to, that would kind of specifically help with my version of grief. And I found that very moving because I think a lot of us get really stuck in

our head that especially because it's something that's so privatized, but that grief is something that we don't share with others. Grief is something that's new because it's new to us. And reading something as ancient as Cicero mourning the death of his daughter, Tulia, is Cicero mourning the death of his daughter, Tulia, you know, 2000 years ago is so incredibly moving because you just realize there's this community of humans throughout history that have always dealt with loss, that have always had grief. And so I found bibliotherapy in that way really unlocked a feeling of community. And also it gave me a sense of the degree to which grief is always a story. And my mom was a very religious person. And I think that I had, I sometimes struggled with, not always believing the

same things that she did and thinking and sort of coming to the realization through certain other books. So she did such a good therapy session because she picked up on this, but gave me some books that there's one called some by David Eagleman that looks at, I don't know if you've read it, but it looks at dozens of different possible afterlives in a sort of, he's a Stanford neuroscientist in a really fascinating way. And it really got me to think there really is no capital T truth, the stories that are valuable to us or the stories that

we need at any given time. And I found that really empowering in that regard too. So yeah, bibliotherapy, hopefully it is indeed Greek. I don't know. But that, that for me was really opened up my eyes in a lot of ways and art too, I would say. I don't know if we want to talk about that, but I found that to be a real perspective shifter too. I don't talk about art on my podcast. Greece and art, those are the Duncan... No, no, no, no. You're not gonna rope me into your New York liberal art thing. I don't even know what it is. Not interested. No, I mean, what I love is all of these, well, most of them. I'll tell you, definitely art. A lot of the, it's great because in your book you're, you're pointing out things that I think a lot of us maybe do instinctually, you know, that we don't even realize what's

going on. But, you know, you're reading like, I don't know, maybe this isn't the best author to check out when you're grieving, but Edgar Allan Poe, who did live during a time when people were more before Keep Calm and Carry On, you know, and Annabel Lee, that it's actually a very creepy poem if you think about it's like essentially a guy going and laying in a sepul- Mausoleum I don't know how to pronounce sepul-cur, but I don't know what either don't look at me, but The which in a weird way like I guess you could say

you know Which in a weird way, I guess you could say, you know, books at one point were technology, were super advanced technology. Printing press and just the whole thing itself was- Spreading ideas en masse, it's an incredible technology. Incredible data storage mechanism. And now, you know, I'm revolted by the idea of turning memories off, revolted by the idea of turning memories off. Revolted by that. That is, to me, something that for sure

the military industrial complex has their fuckin' eyes on. Because what's worse than when one of your troops gets all butt hurt because their friend got blown off. Blown off, that's a different kind of butthurt. Blown up, because then you could just turn it off. Just fucking turn it off. And God, the possibilities there for fighting enemies, just erase the memories of why they're fighting, terrifying.

But the AI thing in particular, essentially creating digital clones of those who have passed beyond. I don't know, did you see a video just popped up? I think it's in Japan maybe. Maybe you could find it. Can you show him stuff? Well, it won't show up on Riverside.

Okay, I'll describe it to you. Grieving mother loses her kid. Virtual reality. Replicate loses her kid. Virtual reality. Replicate the kid. So you see... This is in... I mentioned this. It's the Korean documentary meeting you. Oh my god! Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's brief in there. Yeah, but it's wild, right? Ooh! And I see shit like that and I think of pet cemetery. You know, I think of like, you know, you can't bear the grief and so what do you do? You go and bury your kid in a cursed graveyard and yeah, they're gonna come back, but it isn't gonna be your kid anymore. It's gonna look like your kid and maybe have some, you can project your kid onto them to some degree, but that's not your kid anymore And so to me I I've thought a lot about it the AI

possibility and how just based on the Grief of literacy in the world and how unbearable it is Initially how much that is going to fuck people up to to even have that option, is gonna fuck people up. And, and, and, and it invites you to kick the can down the road. Which, oh my god, with grief, I kicked that can so far down the road, I kicked the can down the road until I was having rage outbursts for no reason, kicked the can down the road till I had insomnia, kick the can down the road till I had just a somewhat invisible, prolonged nervous breakdown.

And that's all from doing the feeling is not so great. I wanted to be really careful throughout too. I was really leaning on being a journalist, being a reporter, and not wanting to advocate for anything, but also not wanting to be unfair to anything either, any possibility. So the book really lays out these things like AI, like optogenetics, as here's what's going on, here's what people say, here's what detractors say, here's what proponents say. And hopefully it inspires kind of a real thinking on the part of the reader of, is this something

I want to deal with? And I agree with you that anything, oh my gosh, memory deletion, I mean, you talk about with war. I mean, war has been a place in which machines have been leveraged to emotionally distance humans from their actions for the last hundred years. I mean, Nazis were getting PTSD from having to shoot so many Jews that they created mobile gas chambers and vans. There we go. Like just this separation and deleting a memory as a possibility. I mean, most of the neuroscientists I talked to are saying, the human brain is so incredibly complex.

It would be very hard to do this anytime in the near future. But I talked to one at the system neuroscientist, neuroscience, who was saying, in 15 years, we might see a rudimentary version of this, um, starting to appear in humans 15 years. That's very soon. Like we, we will be, it will be within our lifetime. So these are things that really merit whether we believe him or not is a different question, but these things really merit, uh, conversation. And even if it's not about the thing itself, even if it's not about optogenetic self, it helps really think about what do we want to do with our grief? Do we want to get rid of it? Do

we want to quote unquote cure it as the sort of slightly winking title says, or do we want to see that the kind of the real cure is being present with others and being present with ourselves and finding communities and really grappling with this in a much more engaged and sustained way than most anyone does in the US or the UK or a lot of the West. Yeah, but how? I mean, to me, the ultimate problem with all of it is that it's not just like inviting people to communicate, to find community, to connect regarding this. But to me, the problem with it is the confrontation with death is a confrontation with modern society as we know it. The, you know, as a journalist, you have to train to be an observer.

You have to train to not let yourself get sucked into the emotional components, or you'll take sides, and now you're going to have some kind of angle, some kind of slant, that it could be some form of propaganda accidentally accidentally or who the fuck knows what. And so journalists, and I'm so sorry to say this, I didn't like that movie Civil War and I think it was trying to sort of elucidate the way journalists are watching disasters unfold and their participation in that has to be purely like an outsider looking in and like maybe that's I don't know what I don't know I'm not gonna get into some shitty stoner. I haven't seen it but as a

journalist you'll like it but the but I think that also social media is inviting us to be observers it's inviting us to be observers. It's inviting us to sit on the sidelines and watch other people's lives. And in doing that, you might actually think you're living their life when you're just sitting on the sidelines. And so the reason I don't see how grief literacy

will ever happen is for grief literacy to happen, the discussion of value has to happen. And for a discussion of true value to happen, consumerism has to naturally get challenged because our value system is based on transactions of matter. And, you know, the trope, the hacky cliche thing is on your deathbed, the trope, the hacky cliche thing is on your deathbed, nobody's like, oh,

how much money is in the bank again? Oh, you know what, I've got another month to live. That's enough time to get a new Ferrari. Wish I'd bought that car, yeah. Yeah, no one's saying that, no one's saying that. Like 90% of the time, everyone is saying, please give me more trucks People are saying you know you're feeling

The same things we feel once they pass on regret regret because where we placed our attention and what we valued in the face of death has no value at all. And there's a sense of being scammed, being conned, being tricked and motherfucker that is a huge part of grief. So yeah, I don't know.

Without completely revaluing everything we've been taught as valuable, I don't see how you can even start the conversation in a way that could create some kind of shift. This episode of the DTFH has been supported by Tushy. Water, water everywhere. But I use paper to wipe. That's a quote from one of my favorite poems, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Tam- Tamiel Saylor Telleridge, who was writing a very epic poem about a ship full of men who refused to clean their asses in a civilized way, but only used toilet paper.

And finally, they became so stinky that seabirds devoured all of them, leaving just their bones on that ship lost at sea. Coleridge knew something that many of us who use bidets know. We know there was PB, pre-bidet and PB, post-bidet. And the difference between these two eras in a human's life is the difference between the dark ages in post-industrial revolution society, to quote Carl Sagan. Because once you start actually cleaning your ass with a bidet, your life changes. And it's hard to go back.

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My hands are covered in poop, and I put them under a sink and I scrub. Why is your ass any different? Why are you creating a caste system with your body? Clean your butt. And I know you've probably looked up the days. You recognize you stink and you've looked at it and you're like, I can't afford that. I can't install that. That looks way too complicated for me. And this is where Tushy comes to your rescue. The sweet darlings over at Tushy sent me a Tushy bidet.

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For a limited time, our listeners get 10% off their first bidet order when you use code DUNCAN at checkout. That's 10% off your first bidet order at hellotushy.com with promo code DUNCAN. Hello Tushy. I'm never going to let you go. Thank you, Tushy. Yeah. I mean, just to add fuel to the fire of what you're saying too, with consumerism and grief and social media, you see this wild exploitation of collective grieving that companies and corporations do after a tragedy where Epicurious, the food site, said after the Boston bombing, they've deleted the tweet, but they tweeted, in honor of the victims of the Boston marathon, we'd suggest these,

uh, blue, these cranberry scones. And I know cheer and I know Cheerios after Prince died said like rest in Prince and they had Prince on a purple background with a Cheerio on the eye. And it's just this, it's just, it's so dark. When I try to be as optimistic as possible, I do see some kind of punching against that improbably opaque wall where, I don't know if you clocked it, but I think it was in about 2013, there was a rise of funeral selfies that became a big trend where, yeah, where young people were pretty self-explanatory taking photos of

themselves in front of caskets and at funerals at first. pretty self-explanatory taking photos of themselves in front of caskets and at funerals. At first, and obviously there was a whole chaos about it online and think pieces and you know, everyone had their say, but my first thought was, oh God, this is so exploitative. This is horrible. My second thought that I think is a little more nuanced and a little more accurate to what I believe now is these young people, especially have, we've all, we've always lived in a privatized death is elsewhere culture. Is this an attempt to bring death into their community, into the four in some way in, in this incredibly clumsy and awkward way, but is there, I mean,

you just see a slight move toward, or I hope toward being a little more open about it and there's been a slight rise in second spaces, I guess you'd call them like this thing called the dinner party, which gets together people between I think 18 and 45, uh, who've suffered a similar loss and they do it in person. They do it on zoom and it's just a place where everyone has kind of communal buy-in, they talk about it. So when I'm being as optimistic as possible, I do see a slight move away from that sort of death denial. But I think that as you're, as you're unfortunately correctly saying, it's still very much moderated

by the context of consumerism and corporate exploitation and those sorts of things. Yes. And I'm, let me, I'm so sorry, but let me, I'm gonna, this is gonna seem a little cynical. Please. Regarding the selfies. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's very easy to read it cynically. I love that you point, what did you call, it's called publicity grieving? Yeah, it's an idea that this wonderful Australian ethnographer came up with.

I'm glad that you pointed that out because I didn't have a word for it. And you know, I remember the COVID commercials were the strangest fucking things you've ever seen. Cause like someone at Oreos is like, how do we sell more Oreos with a pandemic? You know, shit like that. We know you're inside.

Everyone's dying. Maybe it's time for Oreos. Time to dunk these double stuff babies. You're like, oh, god. I mean, it really does feel like Gnostic. It feels like the Demi are just mocking us any time you see stuff like that. But as far as the pictures in front of the coffin,

I think you sort of, when you're talking about reading the memoirs, the realization that you could trick yourself into thinking this is dealing with it, when in fact it might be a distraction, and it made me think of something this Buddhist teacher, Chögyam Trampa said, describing the human experience. You're standing on a you're standing on a floor of razor blades. And you want to way out. And so what you do is you fantasize that there's a beam just above you that you can pull yourself onto and then you you then burrow into that delusion you burrow into it and make a little nest inside the delusion because creating a powerful distortion in the face of such

suffering seems preferable to dealing with the reality of standing on a floor of fucking razor blades. And so publicity grieving, the selfies, maybe even making an episode of my cartoon about my mom dying, maybe even writing a book and I I'm so grateful for your book by the way, but Maybe all of these things are just various ways of not Dealing with the reality of change radical drastic Change that is unavoidable is going to happen. And sometimes I worry that, and I don't

want to get, what's that book, The Denial of Death? I don't like that. All neurosis is based on the denial of death or something like that. But I think that's what the selfie phenomena is. I think that's what the public facing side of grief is. I think that's what, because if I can take a selfie of this, it digitizes it and waters it down a little bit. If I- Which shows you're still alive too, right? It's a proof of yourself. I'm here, that's not me.

And, but you know, this is why like the bizarre Instagram posts that happen during catastrophes where people are filming and behind them some horror is Happening. I think there's a false sense of safety. It's the modern way of sticking your head in the digital sand let's just fucking take a selfie now I can control it turn it into a 1080 by 1080 square and and and somehow it makes it a little less real. That's what I think. I do not see those as really proto and awkward admittedly,

but ways of trying to face the truth as we're so blocked off. We have so much denial in so many ways, but those are ways of like attempting as a young person can. Sunglasses for death. You view it as total BS. I view it as sunglasses for death. It's like a way to dim the reality of it to some degree. Because, you know, again, everyone listening,

I really hope that I don't sound as judgmental as I'm afraid I might because I am saying it because I did it. I'm saying it because this is how I coped. I mean, here's what you want. I was just gonna say there's definitely, I see the value in what you're saying of this radical this is reality. Don't try to bullshit around it. Don't try to dilute it. Like if you do that, you're just pushing your, as you said earlier, you're just kicking the can down the way.

I guess I wonder if there's some degree to which you can kind of do both. Can you look at it through sunglasses so that at least you can maybe continue the kind of not great metaphor to sort of like pull the sunglasses down your down your nose a little bit more. But, but is it, is that, is it an entry point, even as you're correct in saying

that, yeah, of course we need to be honest that it's all razor blades beneath our feet, baby, like that is that's life. That's death. We got to be real about it, but are there like oblique angles we can take to sort of start to see that? I don't know. Do you hear how angry I got? See, this is because I didn't do the work.

You didn't do the work. No, no, this is good. I love a conversation, it's gorgeous. I mean it, I mean it. I'm telling you, this is because I didn't do the work. It's still in me. I'm still fucking pissed. I still have the childish sense of like, this isn't fair.

How is this fucking fair? It's like if my mom got kidnapped, you know and and someone in a van scooped her up and drove away people would know more about how to like Talk with me about it than they do if my mom fucking dies if and then just the universal problem of it's like Oh really? So this is oh, this is great Whoever designed this is really awesome. So you just you know Lose like somebody like your mom would be so proud of you and thanks to you don't get that like in you and This Doug Stanhope the comedian has this his wrote about mom's death and has some funny things to say about it

that are very dark but incredible. One of them being like the worst thing about losing a parent is you don't have anyone to call to brag to anymore. It's true. You know what I mean? No one gives a fuck. Your mom, you could call your mom and be like, Mom, I threw a frisbee farther than I ever have in my life. And they're like, wow, really? You lose your mom and be like, Mom, I threw a frisbee farther than I ever have in my life. And they're like, wow, really?

You lose your mom and you lose your grandma. I don't get told that I keep getting so tall anymore, which is gutting. Yes. Gut wrenching. But you, you're right. I'm being an asshole. And this is what you're saying.

This is one of the things that's beautiful about Brooke. It's like, yeah, OK, Elizabeth Kubler Ross. Yeah, okay, but maybe Maybe there you could find your own way to do it. Yeah the commonality being but do it Do it work like like like grapple with it grapple with it. Yeah lean into it Yeah, lean into it and I think that's way way than whatever the fuck. You're on razor blades, man. No, well, I don't know. I think that that's I definitely I understand that. And there's a section in the book, too, about this wonderful Buddhist hospital chaplain called Bill Crane.

And he talks about he's just he goes into these horrendous situations where the one he talked to me about was a mom had just seen her daughter die of an addiction overdose and was in the hospital and was shaking, couldn't move, could hardly talk. He didn't say a single word to her. He just sat next to her that whole, for hours, deep into the night. And he said that that was for, and he talked to her later and they both said that that was one of the most moving parts of her entire grappling with this loss because there is this sense of honesty of there's nothing to say. Like this is the worst. It is the seller of life and of life experience.

And so to have that kind of honesty, which is what you're saying, I think in so many words, there's a real profoundness to that. And there's a real honesty to that that actually can be valuable and can be comforting even in a really dark way. Cody, I know you probably run out of time.

I got time for you, Duncan. I have a prescription for you from the angry old man. An Rx. The angry, grieving old man. Hit me. Just popped into my head. Everyone's good. Get ready, everybody.

There's going to be a collective eye roll coming. You ever been to Burning Man? No. Do you been to Burning Man? No. Do you know about Burning Man? God, no rave and no Burning Man. Honestly, I seem like the lamest guy ever on this podcast.

You're killing me. Are you kidding me? You are fucking cool. Get out of town. I seem like, I just talked about raves and Burning Man. I'm sorry. I'm at the top of the lame list, my friend. You're old enough where you had like a cool

Burning Man experience. I feel like, is it cool still? Yeah. Isn't it just like, is it still cool? It's too big to not be. I mean, yeah, parts of it are probably dumb, but like. Sweet. But do you know about the temple at Burning Man?

Eliminate, elucidate. So they. Tell me all. So every year they get a new architect and an artist to build this incredible structure out in the desert. Oh, great. And people hang pictures of those who have passed on in the temple. And so you go in there and you're walking out,

they don't let the art cars get too close to it so you're in this loud, insane, essentially some kind of elf dimension. Ridiculous, bombastic, beautiful, psychedelic, but suddenly you just walk into the temple and the energy is extraordinary. And everywhere you look, dogs, moms, kids, grandfathers, you name it, grandfathers, you name it.

And the sound of weeping, the sound of people crying and grief counselors who are just volunteering there and not just like grief counselors from like Western psychology, but you know, Sufis and like they're all there. And I remember going in there and you know, Sufis and like, they're all there. And I remember going in there, and you know how it is with grief. You're like, I'm not gonna cry.

Like, I'm a little more John Wayne than these fucking girls. Right? You walk in and you feel it, and you realize what it is, like how incredible what they've done is, because it is, like how incredible what they've done is, because it is showing you, just like reading those books, this is a universal experience.

And I remember like sitting down crying. I have no idea who this person was, maybe an angel or something. And he comes and sits next to me and he goes, it hurts, doesn't it? And that was it. Arm around my shoulder, that was it. Oh, that was a big moment because to me, I'm sorry, I get it.

You, or you just want to connect, but it hurts, doesn't it? That sums it up. And think about what he's saying. He's saying, this is valid. He's saying, you don't need to get over this in five days. You don't need to get to closure. He's saying, this blows and this is life.

And we're connected in that. That's incredible. I do need to go. You gotta take me. Because then after that, you go to the orgy dome. The old one too. Oh man. Is it actually called the orgy dome?

Indeed it is. Indeed it is. It is a, you know, honestly, I have yet to go in there, but hey, maybe if we go, I'll take a visit to the orgy dome I'm a never nude. I don't want to I don't like taking my clothes off in front of my wife I'm not gonna take my clothes off in an orgy dome like maybe if I could do a fully clothed like I don't know Maybe you should take Tobias Funke instead of me then I think well, we we but I

Once I'll tell you more about it after I say goodbye. Thank you so much. Thank you for your book. On a personal level, thank you. Thank you so much for, and I'm sure so many of us out here are just like, Jesus, thank you. We all need it. Everybody.

And even if you haven't lost anybody, you gotta read The Grief Cure because it's more than just practical, personal ways that you can confront grief. The history, the many quotes, the treasure trove of other books that I now have to look at that you have introduced me to. It's a beautiful thing, so thank you. And it just came out, right, like three weeks ago? Yeah, it came out at the end of June in the US and in Europe, I think, like mid-July. Congratulations.

Thank you so much, and thank you for reading so carefully and having such a I could have this conversation for another six hours. So I really do appreciate it. Hey, we'll continue it in the Orgy Dome, man! You're the best. Thank you, Curtis. Thanks, Duncan. Appreciate you. That was Cody Delestrotti, Order is Booked, The Grief Cure. Thank you to our sponsors. Thank you for watching, listening. I love you, and I'll see you later on this week. Bon voyage.