Death Is Not The End/Remember Me transcript:

Lo Carmen: On the top of a hill in the small coastal town of Otsaku Japan, alive with wildflowers and cherry blossom trees, stands an old white telephone booth with a disconnected old fashioned black rotary telephone inside. This is known as the phone of the wind - Kaze no Denwa. Grieving survivors of the 2011 Great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which took the lives of almost 20,000 people, including 1,400 inhabitants of this tiny town, were invited to use this phone booth, dreamed up and created by garden designer Itaru Sasaki as what he calls a sort of a bridge that connects the world of the living to the world of the dead. He initially created the phone of the wind as a way to communicate with his dead cousin in the year before the disaster, but when he saw so many people in his town were suffering from the terrible loss of life, Sasaki opened it to the public.

Visitors who make the pilgrimage, over 35,000 people from all around the world so far, will wander through the beautiful, wild, landscaped garden of Bel Gardia until they happen upon the wind telephone, where they can pick up the handset and hold a one way conversation with the ones they've loved and lost, bringing news or just saying the things they never got to say.

The longing to communicate with people that we love doesn't disappear when they're gone. This is some of the English translation of the audio that we heard before. Bear in mind, this is Google Translate. It might not be the greatest, but I think we can get the gist. He said, ‘When I'm at home, I'm getting dark. I can't find anything to do. I love what's like a diamond ring in a diamond box. I will treasure your body. It is my pleasure to know you. I'm happy to have had you as my wife’. The speaker also tells the interviewer, ‘It's a place that embraces the living as well as the dead. That's what I felt. This telephone box is also a place that embraces me.It embraces the victims and many other people’. The creator, Sasaki, and his wife have dedicated their lives to creating a beautiful natural environment for healing from grief and spending time in contemplation. There's a library of the woods, a forest stage for lectures and concerts and a wild sprawling giant tree house and play area that's equally popular with children and adults that was created by neighborhood uncles as a way to work through their losses.

Sasaki says that cultivating imagination and nurturing sensitivity are important steps towards healing for the ones left behind. And the wind telephone simply won't work for those lacking in either. His advice for transcending grief is that we need to create a new relationship with the dead, and he believes the wind telephone can be a part of that process.

Now people from all around the world have taken it upon themselves to create their own versions of wind telephones. They're popping up in public parks and nature preserves all across the USA and the UK. 

There are wind phones in Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, Denmark, and the first Australian one recently appeared in Perth. His creation inspired the international bestseller The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, and MetaQuest created a virtual reality game based on the experience of visiting the phone booth.

When somebody we love dies, we tend to surround ourselves with photographs and other physical mementos of them. But to be able to actually communicate in some way, to hear their voices, or to have some kind of interaction with them, is a profound and intimate experience. People save voicemail messages and play them over and over. They keep texts. The poet Jim Harrison wrote, ‘Death steals everything, except our stories’. But maybe there's an answer to that.

There's a growing field of digital services that cater specifically to the afterlife and preserving memories in ways that are interactive and designed towards keeping those that we've lost present. If this sounds like something out of Black Mirror, that's because it basically is. But if you've ever wished that you could just hear the voice again of somebody that you're missing, hear them tell a story or a joke or that you could ask them something, inventor and digital entrepreneur, James Vlahos might have a solution for you. Way before we were all mucking around with AI, this is way back in 2019, he developed a chatbot version of his dad, who was dying, and nicknamed it The Dadbot.

James Vlahos: Do you remember the old commercials with the Reese's peanut butter?

One character has chocolate and the other character has peanut butter. They smoosh it together and it's an accident, but then they take a bite and they think, This is delicious. This is a somewhat inappropriate way to explain what we're talking about, but it was the combination of my father's illness and then working on a book about conversational AI, like these were completely separate tracks of my life and they had an accidental collision. And gave me instantly an idea. 

Lo Carmen: Have people been very enthusiastic in receiving it? 

James Vlahos: Yeah, I'd say there's, you know, a couple categories of reaction. There's the, ooh boy, this seems a little bit weird kind of reaction, and are you trying to, you know, You know, reanimate the dead and what, what exactly are you up to?

I get all that. Like there's a lot of science fiction around this kind of thing. And people have that in their mind a lot as their reaction to the concept. And the truth is the closer people get to the actual product of Hereafter, the less, you know, scary and weird it seems. When they start to realize like, oh, this is just a great interactive way to record family history, hear the voices of loved ones, be able to get at it and not have it locked away somewhere. Hereafter AI, the premise is that first we record your life story, you know, the favorite baseball game and the day you dropped your ice cream in elementary school and what your grandfather did for a living, like to record all those stories. That's part one. And then part two is to have interactive access to it. And that's where you're imagining sort of the kid or the grandkid or the spouse or whoever it is, like the member of the extended family that wants to hear the stories that somebody recorded and they can, you know, ask basic biographical questions like tell me something about your childhood or what you do for a living and then they hear through their device or through their phone the answers that were recorded.

So, it's a, it's a conversation of sorts. It's a simple conversation, but where you get to kind of find out what you want to ask about of your loved one, about their life.

 It's actually, it's a bit of a misconception that we would only be kind of recording, I don't know, recording people on their deathbed. In a lot of ways, like when you get someone who's 65 or 70, or they've lived a lot, they have a lot of stories they want to share, but you know, they have all of their faculties with them.

They have their physical health for the most part, and it obviously varies. You know, there are bees who are sharp as a tack, but you just, you don't know how long you're going to live. You don't know exactly what's going to happen with your mind. So, yeah, it's good to, you know, you have an app that you start using in your thirties or twenties or thirties.

Yeah, just, you know, kind of log memories as they come along. Then you could even, you could talk to an earlier version of yourself, like kind of get your perspectives on things. 

Lo Carmen: Yeah, that would be amazing. Like those, uh, articles or books they have. What would you tell your 17 year old self? 

James Vlahos: Yes, yeah, exactly.

Or the letters that, like, you know, it gets mailed back to you 10 years later or 20 years later. It's a letter to yourself from the past. 

Lo Carmen: I wonder if there's many people that will, um, record confessions. You know, kind of deathbed confessions that won't come out until after they're gone. 

James Vlahos: I don't know. I mean, this is on a tangent, but I just listened to an amazing podcast called The Apology Line, which was…

Oh, I listened to that.

James Vlahos: You listened. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, this whole thing of like being able to call in and just apologize for whatever small or major sin you're guilty of. 

Lo Carmen: I mean, gosh, it could really work amazingly like that for perhaps family members that had lost touch with each other. There's so many ways you could utilize this.

Lo Carmen: Do you call it an application or a service? 

James Vlahos: Maybe a service is the best way to put it. 

Lo Carmen: Imagine there could even be a time when, for example, if you were diagnosed with a terminal illness, that it might be suggested by the medical team that it's something you might want to look at. It seems like there's a lot of interesting things opening up for ways to discuss leaving more openly and more positively.  

James Vlahos: Yeah. You know, this all, it started with me recording the stories of my dad, of course, and, you know, I'd say for him, like in all honesty, it was something where when we began, you know, the elephant in the room was of course, that he was terminally ill. So, there was a little bit of a cloud hanging over the whole enterprise.

But, you know, I feel like he found it satisfying overall. He'd know he was sort of laying this down, that these facts and memories weren't being lost. And it also just kind of gave him a chance to take this perspective on his life. And maybe not in quite as dramatic a fashion, but I've noticed with other people, even younger, that, you know, Everybody begins the process like slightly apprehensive, like, okay, how's this going to go?

Like my life story, that seems a little bit daunting. And when they get done, you know, remember one client saying like, ‘Oh, this kind of felt like therapy. Like there's something, yeah, that just felt good about laying it all out’. 

Lo Carmen: I asked James how he felt about holograms, whether that might be somewhere he was interested in evolving to down the track.

James Vlahos: There's kind of the question looming over all of this of how far do you want to go, and how far should you go, and how far is too far to go. There's a line there somewhere where you're no longer, you know, we think of ourselves as a very high tech tool for remembrance. And at some point you're becoming, it's not just remembrance, but it's recreation somehow of a person.

And that obviously feels creepy and weird and too far. But where exactly is the point where you've done too much? For me, sometimes it's when I, when I think about the hologram, that doesn't sit quite right for me, but

Lo Carmen: When Tupac appeared as a complete surprise at the end of a set by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg at Coachella, 15 years after his death, it really freaked a lot of people out. Dre had commissioned what was then called a holographic effect to sing two songs, one of which Tupac had never sung live before, so the entire performance had to be created from scratch, including because Coachella didn't yet exist when Tupac died in 1996.

His appearance fanned flames of bewilderment in the audience, Billboard's assistant editor wrote a piece about how the general vibe in the audience was uneasy, uncomfortable and confused, especially for those that were high, after all it was a rock festival. Questlove tweeted at the time, ‘That Tupac hologram haunted me in my sleep’.

Prior to his death, Tupac had had an obsession with Machiavelli and wrote lyrics about returning after his death, resulting in many conspiracy theories and weird rumours that he'd come back, Jesus like, or Machiavelli like, or like rising like a phoenix from the proverbial flames – or gunfire.

Like Elvis, there have been claims that he faked his own death. He was apparently spotted selling DVDs in a market in Glasgow, smuggled into Cuba after his faked death with the help of former president Fidel Castro, or that he reinvented himself in Mexico, Africa or New Orleans. There are also people that have claimed that Elvis was an extra in Home Alone.

And there was apparently a 1997 Gallup poll that showed that 4 percent of Americans still thought that Elvis was alive. In some way, the believers were right - a multi sensory immersive Elvis Presley hologram show has just launched in London, following on from the highly acclaimed ABBA Voyage show, which took seven years and cost 140 million dollars and was so successful, it's been on tour for the past three years. 

Another AI ‘remembrance technology’ company, Storyfile, premiered their technology with an interactive hologram of the founder’s mother, at her very own funeral, where she appeared and answered questions, much to the surprise of the mourners. 

His mother was a Holocaust campaigner and it was important to Storyfile’s founder to create something to serve as a kind of keeper of the historical memory.

Storyfile have also made an interactive hologram of Sam Walton, the creator of Walmart, known as Mr. Sam the Hologram, which is so realistic it makes people who knew him misty eyed - They're now considering using the hologram for employee training, or maybe even as Walmart greeters. When someone asked the Sam Walton hologram how he felt about being a hologram, he answered ‘I'm not sure’.

The company has also been working on tombstone holograms, where you could be standing at the headstone of somebody, and they might just pop up and tell you about themselves, themselves. 

But what if you prefer the idea of possibly being able to actually return from the dead, to tell your own story in your own way?

Way back in 1920,  73-year-old Thomas Edison was working on a spirit phone. He told Forbes  “I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us. If this is ever accomplished it will be accomplished not by any occult, mystifying, mysterious or weird means, such as are employed by so-called mediums, but by scientific methods.” He believed his electrical impulse based machine would have the ability to detect the personalities of the deceased and that they would be able to send messages from the spirit realm.

“If the units of life which compose an individual’s memory hold together after that individual's ‘death,’ is it not within range of possibility to say the least, that these memory swarms could retain the powers they formerly possessed, and thus retain what we call the individual’s personality after ‘dissolution’ of the body? If so, then that individual’s memory, or personality, ought to be able to function as before.

“I am hopeful, that by providing the right kind of instrument, to be operated by this personality, we can receive intelligent messages from it in its changed habitation, or environment. If the apparatus I am now constructing should provide a channel for the inflow of knowledge from the unknown world—a form of existence different from that of this life—we may be brought an important step nearer the fountainhead of all knowledge, nearer the intelligence which directs it all.” Unfortunately his spirit phone appears not to have been completed and scientists who searched his lab after his death could not even find a prototype but the not entirely dissimilar concept now known as cryonics,  first described in a 1930s science fiction book, really took hold in the latter half of the 60s when  a young man named Robert Ettinger read this book and thought, ‘Well, that makes sense to me.Why on earth is this not being done?’ And made it happen.

Noted philosopher, futurist and former CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Max Moore, one of the two long running facilities in the USA, describes cryogenics as an ambulance to the future. In response to doubters he has said ‘It really annoys me when people assume that this is some kind of scam. Usually if people come here and actually look at what we do, they change their mind. They see that, oh, we're not just taking money and not really doing anything, and people seriously believe that, you know, we don't do anything. Well, actually, we have these very expensive storage vessels, and we do a lot of science here, a lot of research. We publish case reports on our website, which even when we screw something up, we say so.

We, you know, we don't try to make up the fact that we were perfect all the time, because we're not. We're still learning as we're doing things. So everything we do, We do possible to show that this is, you know, a legitimate operation. It's been going for a very long time now. We're getting more and more patients per year.

The number is going from, you know, one or two a year, to five or six a year, to ten or eleven a year. And I think one day we'll look back on today and we'll just scratch our heads and say why is it that millions of people just threw their lives away or people burned or buried their loved ones when they could have cryopreserved them?

Another noted futurist, Michio Kaku, being interviewed about his thoughts on cryogenics stated ‘One day, we're going to thaw out one of these individuals. And we'll find that the person is nothing but a dead blob of protoplasm. The other question is, in the future, is it possible that this technology may come to fruition? The answer is obviously yes, we don't know what the future is going to bring us, who knows, but at the present time, at the present time, our best guess is, this is quackery.’

Just outside of Phoenix, Arizona, around one hundred beloved pets and 120 patients, they're called patients because they don't regard them as dead people, are stored head down in a state of biostasis in aluminium pods, similar to a giant thermos - that's aluminum pods if you're in America - suspended in liquid nitrogen indefinitely. 

The concept of cryogenics is fairly confronting and hard to believe so I had a conversation with Peter Tsolakides, who has just opened Australia's very first cryogenics facility in Holbrook, New South Wales, which I've always known as the town where you stop for a sandwich as you're driving on tour between Sydney and Melbourne, or where you stop when you're driving with kids and you want to look at the giant submarine. The facility hadn't quite opened when I had the conversation with him, but it is open now and it has the ability to store around 200 people. I've asked Peter to explain to us all what cryogenics is. 

Peter Tsolakides: It's the preservation of the human body after legal death, at very low temperatures in liquid nitrogen, in the expectation that future medical technology science will be able to restore the patient back to full health in a young body. What really happens is very simply, after legal death, and I keep stressing legal death, special chemicals, mainly medical type antifreezes, are washed through, it's called a perfuse, through the patient's body.

The patient is then cooled in stages, to about liquid nitrogen type temperatures, which is about minus 200 degrees centigrade. And then stored in liquid nitrogen in a special insulated container. Because we're at very low temperatures, basically all chemical and biological activity ceases, So the patient can remain in this state for hundreds of years without any deterioration.

Lo Carmen: Basically suspended. 

Peter Tsolakides: Suspended. That's, that's the whole idea. We use the word, sometimes many people say frozen, but it's basically suspended. It's slightly different to being frozen. But let me also say that what we're hoping for is the rapid advances of science that we've seen before. We'll get to a point where we can repair the damage from aging process, the damage from disease and the damage also from the chemical processes that, that occur when we go through this suspension activity.

Its unlikely anybody will be brought back in an older body. The idea is that they're going to be brought back in a very young body, a healthy young body, and with all your facilities around you. Now we're talking about the science of maybe a hundred to two hundred years from now, you know, and maybe even more.

Lo Carmen: So the logistics must be one of the hardest things in terms of who's going to keep it going. 

Peter Tsolakides: As it happens, maintaining a cryonics facility is very easy. All you need is to be able to supply it with liquid nitrogen. 

Lo Carmen: I can only imagine the other logistical issue is getting somebody from their place of death to the facility.How long do you have? 

Peter Tsolakides: It depends. Really you should get to somebody, well, really you should get to somebody immediately after they've been declared legally dead. What happens is, if somebody's about to pass away, we normally know we have about three days and we get this information from funeral directors before the person actually passes away.

What we would do is we would send a team of people to the person's hospital bed. Within that time period, they'll wait until the person passes away. As soon as they pass away, they sort of swing into action. The first thing they do is basically cool the body down using ice. That gives you time, that gives you another few hours.

And they also apply various cardiopulmonary, I can't even say it, cardioheart support. Pulmonary. Yeah, pulmonary support. They apply that, they apply anticoagulants, they apply things to open up the system so they can later perfuse you with various chemicals that I was talking about before. So, they do that, they get you to a location, it can be a funeral home, it could even be an ambulance, and at that point in time, they can start this perfusion process, which is what I'd call the stage one, and they can bring you down to about dry ice temperature, which is about minus 80 degrees.

If they can get you to that temperature fairly quickly, using the appropriate chemicals and things, you have about two weeks. After that, you're taken to the facility and you're brought down from that minus 80. to the minus 200 that I mentioned before with liquid nitrogen temperature, but you have some time.

It's that initial first thing, which is the most critical thing in all this. 

Lo Carmen: Am I right in understanding that you can either choose to freeze just your brain or your entire body? 

Peter Tsolakides: It's actually, it sounds very icky, but it's the head rather than the brain, but you can do the brain. It's a different process, but the brain is very different.

We don't do the head, but what can be done is the head. It's called the neuro. But we will do full body unless there's a very special situation that we believe it would be better to do a neuro on the person. A neuro is easier but, you know, there's also a lot of, you know, icky sort of feeling about doing something like that. Taking your head off and doing all this. 

Lo Carmen: It's very science fiction

Peter Tsolakides: I know. But I mean the whole thing is very science fiction. Very. Well, let me put it this way. It is from science fiction, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of science now that says it's very possible. The first part is reasonably well known, you know, getting somebody suspended.

The second part, we don't know what's going to happen in 200 years time. But, there's a lot of scientific activity that's going on that really says it's possible, it's possible to do it. But there's no guarantees, there are no guarantees here. I mean, the last thing I want to do is somebody say, Oh, Peter just said that it's going to happen for sure.

Nobody knows. 

Lo Carmen: But I guess, what have you got to lose? 

Peter Tsolakides: Yeah, that's basically the idea, what have you got to lose? A lot of people are working on, for example, curing diseases. Billions of dollars are being spent on curing diseases. Technology, computer technology, nano, AI, low temperature operations and low temperature activities on the human body, cloning, a whole lot of things that are going on at the moment that really say they're at their emergent stages. But in 200 years, they're exactly what somebody in cryonics needs to be able to bring them back to life at that time. But again, no guarantees. It's, it's more like a bet. You're putting a bet in there that, It will happen.

But versus your alternative, you have one alternative of death. Unless you're very religious, you have one alternative that means nothing will happen, and another alternative says a chance that something will happen. 

Lo Carmen: Conversely, what is it that you hope to gain? Is it Are you fascinated by the future? 

Peter Tsolakides: Yes, for me personally, and a lot of other people, we're fascinated, but it's a curiosity thing.

It's what will happen in the future. There's so many more things that you want to do in your life. How will events play out? What will the future look like? I'm an optimist, so I'm thinking of the future as a fairly positive place and I'm looking at what happened the last 200 years and I'm saying I'm thinking the same will happen in the next 200 years.

But I'm an optimist and most people involved in cryonics are optimists, so they want to see the future, they want to see how things develop, they want to just do things too. 

Lo Carmen: So would you say the general demographic is people that are fascinated by science?

Peter Tsolakides: It's, yes. You know, there has been some studies on what the demographic is and basically it's STEM type science technology background, or fascinated by it, as you said. 

Lo Carmen: Was it hard to find other like-minded people?

Peter Tsolakides: No, it's easy to find them, but there's not many. It's like a small group, but a very tight group in the sense that you look around, especially these days with the internet and all the rest of it, you just look around who's interested in Australia. And there was a cryonics association of Australasia. I got involved with them about 10 years ago.

Worldwide, there may be about 4,000 people interested, worldwide. 

Lo Carmen: And what about how many people would be currently suspended? 

Peter Tsolakides: Currently around three to 400 people. That's all. That's all. Three to four hundred. Mainly in the U. S. The two facilities, Alcor and CI are the two U.S. facilities. They're the main ones that are, that are, you know, that have people in them. Doing it. Even for our situation in Australia, which is much smaller, we're not expecting droves of people to be lining up. Just looking at how people, you know, 

Lo Carmen: The people that do want to be involved, do they come up against much opposition from their families?

Peter Tsolakides: Yes, yes. Uh, not, it depends. A lot of people 

Lo Carmen: Because that's quite a large investment, isn't it? 

Peter Tsolakides: So yes, it is. Well, it's a reasonably large investment. The life insurance policy pays off at their death, at their legal death. So really what they're paying is the few hundred to whatever it is dollars a year life insurance that it costs to insure them for the hundred, maybe, let's call it $200,000 because there's some costs involved in being at the hospital bed and all the rest. So let's say about $200,000 they would need. But that could be 30, 40 years from now or whatever.

Lo Carmen: If just the head is suspended…

Peter Tsolakides: I understand. 

Lo Carmen: What do you envisage? What kind of body do you envisage? 

Peter Tsolakides: Well, here's the speculation part, and uh, it may not be speculation, is you can come back however you want. Right. Theoretically, I could come back as a woman. I mean, it's my brain.

 I could come back as a, as a dolphin, right? 

Lo Carmen: Like, so a body is a skin that you could slip into?

 Peter Tsolakides: Yes, that's right. The current thinking, is that the brain is the most important part. By cloning various parts of the body, you can actually put the brain in a new body, a new and young and healthy body. The brain is the you, in a sense, you know, you are the brain.

The rest of it is sort of, in the current scientific thinking, I'm about to say something that might be completely, no, I don't think I'm wrong, but I might be wrong. Too adamant in what I'm saying, but the rest of it, other than the brain, is superfluous and useless. But that's not 100 percent right, but let's say it's maybe 90 percent right.

There are parts that people think may still be the back of the spinal column, and these types of things, the top part of that. But, the brain is the most important thing in your body. The brain is you. The demographic is science, et cetera, background, not religious, optimistic about the future, and I'll have to say 80 percent men, 70 to 80 percent men.

Lo Carmen: Oh, really? 

Peter Tsolakides: Yeah, yeah, that's, that's the, that's the basic demographic, although there seems to be more and more women when I look at, you know, people who talk on Facebook and those sorts of things, but I think this demographic is still - and you're right, non-religious is probably one. There are people who are religious, but I'd say the majority are non-religious.

Lo Carmen: Do you think that thinking so much about the end of your life affects the way you live your life now? 

Peter Tsolakides:  Most people who are in cryonics tend to try to live fairly healthy lives. You won't find many people who are smokers or heavy drinkers or anything in cryonics because they do believe that life is important. Maybe also thinking they've got a potential out from death, they don't have to think about it. 

Lo Carmen: Has it been attempted yet? To bring somebody back? 

Peter Tsolakides: No. The best that it's done is, I think it's a rabbit kidney. Being able to take a rabbit kidney to liquid nitrogen temperatures, properly treat it, then keep it for a long time, and then bring it back and put it into other rabbits.

This is a scientific research organization, and it works, you know, the kidney does function in other rabbits. But again, what I'm saying is, what we're thinking of is not just something that just comes out of the blue. There's a lot of work coming on, which is very early. But you can just imagine in 200 years what that will be like, you know.

Lo Carmen: Yeah, I mean in the 1980s when I was in high school, I couldn't imagine that we would have phones that had videos on them. 

Peter Tsolakides: That just, yeah, that's right. There's a lot of unanswered questions and I'm really interested to see how it all turns out.  I'm very curious to see what the future's like.

Lo Carmen: So what do you think happens when you die? 

Peter Tsolakides: Uh, without this, I think, that's it. Yeah. Nothing happens. 

Lo Carmen: You just cease. Nothing happens. 

Peter Tsolakides: Well, what happened before I was There's no soul or No. Before I was born, what happened? And when, after I die, what happens? Right. I mean, looking at this purely scientifically, the brain is everything.

I mean, if you were to get the brain and crush it under a hammer or something, then that's it. I'd cease to exist on that basis. If the brain ceases to exist, you cease to exist. Maybe in 200 years, I'll come back and see how good the philosophy was. 

I didn't really know anything about the things that we've explored in this episode and I must admit upon first hearing about each of them, I thought they sounded pretty bizarre and wacky and I wasn't really sure what the motivations behind them were.

But upon learning more, I can definitely see the appeal and the beauty and intrigue of them all. I love the optimism and excitement and creativity and philosophical curiosity behind the concepts that unites them all, along with the leap of faith that's required to commit to going deeper. There's an element of trying to outrun the finality of death or grief, of trying to reshape those experiences and take some control where we really have none.

And let's face it, that is probably what frightens us all the most about death. So why not try to wrestle with that in innovative ways? Why not turn the narrative on its head and look for alternatives? Staring what scares us straight in the eye and asserting our ability to be strong and hopeful is empowering, whatever form that may take.

From utilising something simple, like a disconnected telephone in nature, and a little imagination, to a complex, futuristic science factory laboratory designed to keep our dreams of the future alive. Learning about how other people navigate loss and confront their own mortality is making me think about what I want for myself. What my belief system is. Things we tend not to question ourselves about a lot, unless we're deeply spiritual or philosophical. I'm an atheist, happy-go-lucky rock and roll musician, so I probably need all the help I can get in that regard. I do believe that we can find our own ways to communicate with those who have died, and the combination of nature and an open mind can be a portal to that. I have a long-gone friend that I still see and feel in every gardenia flower that I pass. 

I believe that finding ways of preserving and sharing our stories is extremely valuable and important. We need a diverse library of humanity to learn from, to inspire, to warn, to witness. I do know that I don't want to live forever, even though it's tempting because there's so much that I want to do.

I don't want to be brought back from the dead, digitally or for real. I don't want to be a hologram. But I feel like probably the main takeaway that I've learned from exploring all of this is to keep each other close. Be who you want to be. Do what you want to do. Yeah. 

Sincere thanks to James Vlahos from HereAfter AI and Peter Tsolakides from Southern Cryonics. Peter would like to share this message with you. 

Peter Tsolakides: My guess is very few may be interested. But, if they're interested, they can let me know if there's any philosophical curiosity type questions I can help with that too, if they want anything in that area.

Lo Carmen: Now if you'd like to talk some more with some other interested listeners, you can head on over to my Substack newsletter. That's locarmen.substack.com … if you have anything you'd like to add, or suggest, or share or just want to put some ideas out there and communicate with some other people that might also be curious. I'd love to see a community grow there. You can look in the show notes for further information about how to get in touch or read more about anything that we've discussed in today's episode, I'll put links there as well.

Conversations have been edited for clarity and time. The repertoire on this recording is licensed by APRA AMCOS. I'd like to thank Judy Tuohy and Ten Times Media Group for the audio of The Wind Telephone.  It was written and recorded by me and edited by Aden Young and me.

The original theme music was composed and performed by Peter Head. The little grab of Death Is Not The End is a Bob Dylan song and Peter played the theme music from Remember Me, the beautiful children's film, earlier in the episode. The artwork used on the podcast was created by Craig Waddell.

Death Is Not The End is a Black Tambourine Productions production.

Thank you for listening to Death Is Not The End and see you on the other side.