Cody Delistraty (on grief)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert experts on experts. I'm Dax Randall Shepard, I'm joined by Monica Lilly Padman.

Hello there.

Welcome to the program, Welcome to armchair Experts on Experts, we have a very articulate and mind-blowing vocabulary guest today.

Yeah, he knew a lot of words.

Our guest is Cody Dell'Estradi. He is a journalist, a speechwriter, and a former culture editor for the Wall Street Journal. And he has a book out now called The Grief Cure, Looking for the End of Loss. And he did a million different things that people try to overcome grief.

Yeah, it's a cool journey, he went on.

Yeah, an adventure, a grief adventure, he could have also called the book Grief adventure. I know it's too late, it's already in print, but....

Maybe that was taken.

Might have been taken, but it is called the grief cure. Looking for the end of loss? You're going to fall in love with Cody. We did, he's so smart and interesting.

He's an armchair expert.

What really flies?

Time I was saying, I've lived here for 13 and a half years. Wow, yeah, that's pretty nuts.

You live in New York City.

Brooklyn Yep.

We like Brooklyn.

Yeah, it's not so bad, right?

I'm debating whether next time I go, if I'm going to stay there, I've never done that.

I've had a lot of L.A. friends defect. Yeah, I feel like that's a yeah.

Will you scoot over to this microphone?

Yep, get in position.

Because I want to hear your thoughts on Brooklyn. I would hate for them to not be included.

That's fascinating, salient to all.

Have you been to L.a. Crocodile?

Yeah, in Williamsburg. Yeah, yeah, very big Black Rock intern date spot, though.

Explain that to us. What's that? is that a finance reference? Tell us that?

Like 22-year-olds who have too much money and are like, trying to go to like, TikTok'd up spots.

Oh, that's really interesting.

Cody, you already know, like you've already said six or seven words, I don't know, and I have a lot of guesses why I love this. Well, go slower.

Okay, la crocodile.

Is she doing that correctly?

I don't want to libel any restaurants in Williamsburg if this is on.

Well, listen, I loved it.

I thought it was great, it's a beautiful ambiance.

Beautiful ambiance, the food was delicious. This is Liz's favorite restaurant.

Okay, well, that holds.

It's beautiful.

Yeah, and we went there, but that does make sense.

Did you see rich 22-year-olds God?

I didn't notice that.

What's the hallmark? As I said that, I was like, What is that even?

Well, but what's interesting is that's such a company town reference, right? Did you say? Blackstone? Yeah, I think you have to have some proximity to the Financial district to even know the major players, yeah.

I got in yesterday and was listening to a bunch of older women complaining about a teamster strike and I was like, you're like, I've arrived these people.

Ayahtzee, ayahtzee.

Ayahtzee It's a big issue right now, big, big issue.

Big issue in the city.

Could shut down everything.

But it was big, like, why can't we just get NCIS back off the ground? It was like the problems of life.

As soon as you enter LAX, you will hear people on their phone talking to their agents. There's always some sort of conversation that is so cliche.

Well, I got into a dust up with a guy on a flight home from Austin with Monica.

Oh yeah.

And we were headed back to L.A. I was really getting into it with this guy. And then out of nowhere, he's like, Oh, you were great in moderating that panel last night. And I was like, Oh, Christ. And then he opened his laptop and I looked over his shoulder.

Yeah.

A high powered attorney to treat people anywho. Do you think the fact that you are a culture writer has aided in your keen observation of that clientele? Sincerely, is that your innate nature, or do you think living in that space has made you acutely aware?

My favorite kind of writing is profile writing, where you're sitting down and you're just trying to get the observational details. That one detail that really sings and tells you all you need to know. It's like a great short story where it opens in the first few sentences and you say, Oh, I understand this character. That's what I love to do. Also, it's weird to be on the couch having you guys be like observing moi.

Yeah, you're supposed to be finding some great analogy that will summarize the entire experience.

And here I am being summarized.

Which of the major banks are we immediately imbuing on you?

Major banks, yeah.

If we were a bank, you mean?

Yeah, because there's all these like popular fucking investment banks and stuff.

Oh, you guys don't remind me of a bank at all.

I know, but that's the fun challenge is like.

I like that game, yeah.

Right, like, you're a writer.

I don't know Banks well enough, though, that's so tough.

Like, I can already tell you, I can do anything automotive if necessary. Within five seconds, I would say Cody's a Studebaker.

Wow, what's that?

What does that mean?

Studebaker is a very idiosyncratic, stylish, cool car.

That sadly went under, but nobody bought it. No, no.

They did. Studebakers were huge in the 50s, and then Avante was this very sexy, weird car that they made, but very idiosyncratic and stylish.

What color?

Wow.

Beautiful, weird colors. You could get a peach studebaker. you'd love a studebaker. You should look them up. I'm going to look it up.

You should be flattered. Yeah, I was going to rail against snap decisions, but now I'm very pro, yeah.

Yeah, and I bet we could do it if we met a group of people, we could say what studio it was.

Yeah.

This is so off track, this is fun, though it's a fun game, yeah.

I think I'm probably Wells Fargo.

Yeah, great pick. yeah, really good pick.

We're also just intellectualizing, like judging people, too, which is kind of funny. Yeah, yeah.

It is it's ourselves, so we can do it.

Yeah, exactly. And if someone is saying they're not surveying their surroundings and trying to categorize it into something familiar, then they're a liar, yeah.

That's all they are. It is interesting what one's framework is for. How do you make sense or make meaning out of another person or a new place you're in? Yeah, yeah.

Do you have go-to analogies you like?

I probably do. That's probably a good question for my girlfriend, where she'd be, like, you're always saying that. But I don't have the self-awareness at that level, I guess, to know that.

But even in your writing, you don't notice any patterns emerge or police yourself, like, Oh fuck, I made that analogy before.

Oh, I'm always calling people a color.

I'll have to think about that. I notice in other things. The way the New Yorker will describe a building, it's not a low building, it's always low slung. Like, there's sort of ways in which....

That's a great distinction. Low slung.

I like that.

Which is chic, very poetic.

Nothing can be pedestrian. Precisely, that's just the operating principle, right, yeah.

We all rail against cliche. That is the dream.

Yeah, so even if they're describing like a public toilet seat, there's going to be some flair there.

There was a great piece where it was talking about Flo Rida and it said his number one song on a Rubenesque beauty on the dance floor.

Wow.

And I was like, That's great Rubenesque. That's a subscription tier, Thesaurus find.

When someone covers culture, which you did, what is the full scope of that domain, what could fall under that umbrella?

Yeah, so I was freelance for a bit and then I was at the Wall Street Journal for about four years. My favorite thing to cover was books, but also would do music, art, even something like NFTs, that's sort of art related. But also businessified, which was more salient to a place like the journal. My passion has always been in books and publishing industry and literary spots.

And so for that, would you do profiles reviews?

Profiles. Yeah, I loved one I did with Michael Lewis, that was an exceptionally fun one.

Have you done sedaris?

No, but I interviewed him for a different piece. That was about how fashion brands are trying to leverage books as a means to bolster their own brand. So there's lots of celebrity book clubs that kind of thing. And interviewed David Sedaris about it, and he was hilariously dismissive. We ended up talking about the jell-o that he was eating, and then he said, This is another fad, and it comes and goes like a poorly cut trench coat or something like that.

He's perfect.

And I was like, That's a guy who's made it.

Also, if I think of a masthead for culture, just the term culture, I kind of think Sedaris might be the perfect mascot. An observation?

Observation.

Oh my god, I can see the New Yorker cartoon of him in a very flashy plaid outfit. I love that. And so you would also go to music.

Go to art, yeah, go to shows, go to theater.

Okay, help me on the art experience, because that's one I just really can't find any toehold in.

You sound like my brother.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is he older?

He's two years younger.

And he's a Philistine like me.

He's not a philistine, he's super into music. There's something about art, I think, and this is shot through so many people's experience with art, especially contemporary art. This I could do that ethos.

My kid could paint that, right.

And there's sort of a misunderstanding of a you didn't b. If you have an understanding of art, historical lineage. These things are connected, and some people are more valuable than others because they were originators of it. And then also just like, Oh, a Rothko is two colors, okay? But what is the experience that you feel like you're falling into this? And so much of it is the reflection of yourself? A Robert Ryman, Just white. It's just paper, and someone would say, you know, it's paper, yeah.

The person that claimed to feel transcendence by looking at it would be right, and then the person would be like, Guys, get real.

And there is a little pretension implicit in the sort of, well, I had a more profound experience than you, yes.

Also, placebo effect, groupthink. You're around other people that are being ood and odd. Yeah, so count me as one of those people. But I don't say I could do it because I can't do anything.

I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth. Oh, no, no.

But I do think most people could. I don't go so far as to say I could do it, but I do think most people could probably do that. I only came to appreciate Picasso when I went to the museum in Barcelona, where I don't know if you're aware of this one. But he starts with the exact replica of a very famous medieval painting. And then you go through the room. And he does eight versions of it that eventually evolve into total cubism at the end.

Oh, I've seen that, but I don't know what it is.

I was 19 with my girlfriend on a Eurorail pass and I was like, Okay, I'm going to give it up to Picasso. I at least needed to know he could do the photorealistic version first. And now I see, wow, the cubism painting really has everything the other one had in it. It's just I have to look harder.

It's very European of you two to love the figurative. It is was a C.I.A. op to some degree abstract art in the U.S. So this view of we have greater creativity. And it was against Russian art, Russian art and communism and this. Oh, they're stuck in these strictures and these formal lines, but not Americans. And that's the same with writing, too.

Oh, that's interesting, I didn't know that.

What a fun history to learn, but also it's really fun to think the Cold War produced so many bizarre outcomes. So then, at one time, we're saying, we're fully liberated as artists. On the other end, the communists are exploiting our treatment of Black jazz musicians and bringing them over to communist countries. To say, like, here, we love you and we treat you well.

Or you have to go to Paris to see Josephine Baker.

There's all these weird ways art's being leveraged in the Cold War.

That soft power that gets pretty intense and has ripple effects to now and to you and I. Walking into a museum.

I think you're perfect for your job because I can already tell from talking about you that you could be wandering through any one of these environments. You just described an art show.

Very articulate.

Yeah, very articulate, very New York, and I'm saying that in a very positive way.

We love New York. Steuben Baker, Steuben Baker.

Steuben Baker That would be like the Polish version or something. Yeah, the Steuben Baker.

It sounds like a generic brand bakery in 1920s Warsaw.

Where'd you go to school?

I went to NYU and Oxford.

So, history, and.

Political science So I did Poli-SCI undergrad, which was really me, not having the cojones to just do English or history. I thought, hilariously, it was like, political science that'll get you a job, which like, No. But I mean, I did love the philosophy of it, Rousseauian philosophy or Hobbes or those kinds of things. And it ended up being very quantitative, very math based. And that's not really my interest, nor my strong suit.

What is the Oxford experience like?

I was just there for a year, I just did a master's and MST, but it was great. It was something I'd wanted to do for a long time and I was really excited. I was studying really modern French history and studied with this fantastic scholar called Robert Gildea, who's written a lot of books on French history, mostly in the 1960s.

Well, no. First of all, the name itself, Pompidou. I miss that one in history.

I mean, it's the museum in Paris, the contemporary art, your favorite? It's called the Pompidou. Yeah, there's some Picasso's there, yeah.

Oh, scandalous.

That was what excited my grad advisor most. He's like, Ah, love between a businessman and a president, yeah.

I like that.

So what was Pompidou getting out of the exchange?

He was getting friendship with a major business person. I couldn't really find any like super smoking gun, like any transfer of money, or like ostensibly was getting donations or something like that. But yeah, there's more to be researched. I wrote 25 pages on this.

Oh, ok, so long past Jewish exile.

Yeah, they were on good terms with the Rothschilds at that point. OK, you're making me remember this was in 2015. Yeah, good job.

Why did it only take one year to do a master's?

It was idiotic. I should have done a few. I had such a fun time there and with friendships in new cities, it's like nine months, that's when you start to actually make pals.

What was your hurry, do you think?

It's expensive. And then also, I just really wanted to write and write the things I wanted to write, which were not academic. And it was kind of a zero sum game. I didn't have a lot of time to do both.

And are you from New York?

I'm from Spokane, Washington, small town near Idaho. Do you know it? Yeah, Yes, yeah, it's great.

I've driven several times from Seattle East to Jackson Hole, and I've driven through Spokane.

What were the hot spots you hit?

Oh, I flew by on the highway. I've just seen the exits for Spokane many times.

You probably saw my high school. It's under the overpass, it's not under the overpass, that's the skate parks in the parking, but it's right there.

And what did Mom and dad do? Because you're clearly a dreamer and a fantasy boy.

Can I blurb that in the book?

Dreamer and a fantasy boy I'm on a boy kick I called.

Yeah, cookie boy.

Sleepy boy Amy Poehler, Sleepy boy, bedtime boy, because she likes to go to bed a lot.

I'll take it.

But I've been to Spokane, yeah, it's not crazy metropolitan, it's virtually on the other end of the spectrum, yeah.

I went through sort of an evolution where I had this, oh, I don't like it. I got to get out, really push against it. And then now, as I've sort of zoomed out and gotten a little perspective, I'm like, I really love it there. And it's something that I do miss. And I feel like that's classic to a lot of people.

You got to get out.

And then you're like, Oh, it's great. We have an incredible bakery, we have a beautiful waterfront. A lot of my friends still live there. It's wonderful to go home.

What did Mom and dad do in Spokane?

My dad's a toxicologist, he just retired. He studied marine biology and, interestingly, decided on a landlocked city in eastern Washington to work for the state government.

And what would he do, find dead animals and figure out what killed them? No.

His dream was really to be an academic, and so he brought a lot of that to the job and was doing a lot of editing of papers. Now it's very in vogue, and there's always a piece in Atlantic or the Times about it. But microplastics, things like that, right?

So it wouldn't have been beyond him if they found like 600 dead fish on the shore for him to come in and try to figure out what toxin had entered the ecosystem.

I honestly wouldn't need to get him to sit on the couch next to me to answer that one, but that was sort of his thing.

No one really knows what their parents do.

Also, I can acknowledge I'm in a weird mood where I'm taking you in so many different directions.

No, it's great.

I'm just trying to figure out what a toxicologist does in Spokane, because there's not the population to support that level of specificity.

So there is the Hanford site, which is a nuclear waste facility that is a few hours west of Spokane, and so he would make several trips there. It's on a Native American reservation. Parts of it, there is a lot of trickiness.

Did he have a mini lab in your basement or anything fun?

Not that I knew of, there could have been a secret door or something, but we had a relatively low, slung house.

Okay, so dad was smart, and then what did mom do?

Mom worked in exercise physiology so she would help people who'd had issues with their heart rehabilitate and get back to being able to live well.

And did they meet in college?

Dad is a few years older than my mom. And he ended up doing two master's degree, and the second master's degree was essentially his way of just going to spend time with her. Oh, lovely.

Yeah, at U-dub.

No nice, though, go huskies. They met at University of Wisconsin, L.a. Crosse, and my mom went to University of Wyoming undergrad.

Okay, you get out of Oxford, you come home how soon before you're employed by the Wall Street Journal?

So I worked at Charlie Rose for a little less than a year. I have photos with Bernie Sanders, Helen Mirren, Kazuyo Ishiguro, who is one of my favorite novelists. So all these people who I was so excited to meet, and my whole job was just to go through their entire oeuvre and write questions for Charlie. Oh, really.

So you were the researcher?

Yeah, and I would do huge schematics where it'd be like, this is what to ask. Here's an expected answer. Here's what they've said before. Here's where you could, like, push a little deeper to maybe get something else.

So you were strategizing as well.

Kind of, I mean, I was 23, so I don't know what I was really doing, okay?

So, forgive me, what's the first book you write?

This is my first book, this is the first one, this is my first book, yeah.

And you've written for everyone, You've written for the New York Times, you were writing on staff for the Wall Street Journal, you were in New York.

Editing Yep.

As you were doing that, are you feeling this deep obligation, like I got to write a book? This is what we do.

That's so interesting.

Not to imply that this is-.

I'd like to think not large percentage, it's. I had an idea. It came out of the death of my mom in 2014. I was really inspired to go do this research and find what I thought was quite interesting conclusions.

I can imagine that perhaps you thought you had a really well-developed muscle for your process of writing, that you had a system. And did you find that? The bigger window of time presented bizarre new challenges where you're like, why am I having a hard time staying on task just because it got longer?

Yeah, it's a great question, I think. Less window of time expanding, and more length and breadth of story. How do you maintain the reader's interest? Not over three, four thousand words, but over 200 pages?

Did it require a new version of discipline?

Yeah, and just passion. I mean, I don't have a P.h.D. but people who do P.h.DS and they write 100,000 words six-year dissertations. Like, you better really care about what you're writing about, and it's going to define you for X years after that.

You're either going to get to do it again or you're not based on that. It's a very hail Mary Pass.

Totally.

OK, so you just alluded to the birth of the idea, which is your mom died in 2014.

It was the year I was graduating undergrad. She found out she had cancer in 2010. She was dropping me off at college, and she felt just beneath her clavicle a little bump. She's super fit, super healthy, has a master's degree in being a dietician. She's on top of her game in her 50s.

Well, that also kind of a little bit explains the rush to get out of school, because time's limited and you need to be back.

Yeah, I think that's accurate. I've always had trouble parsing in my 20s. What's rushing through things and not being too aware of consequences and trying to just get things done? How is that related to thinking that I'm going to die soon, like my mom? Versus how is that? Just like being in your 20s and being a guy and being an idiot?

Yeah, I think I was more specifically meaning to my father. In 2012, he got diagnosed with cancer.

What kind of cancer?

Small cell carcinoma and what's so unjust about cancer is your mom really shouldn't have got that diagnosis. My dad was like 300 pounds, smoked, his whole life, was an addict. This was predictable.

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say that because the inverse of that is some people it's justified. They get cancer, which I wouldn't believe, but I do think it came as a greater shock.

Yes, no one deserves it, but there are certain life paths where, as an actuary, it becomes more and more predictable.

Totally, your insurance premiums are going up a lot.

Let's just say when I got the call from my dad, as heartbroken as I was, you know, I wasn't not expecting this call.

Oh yeah, we weren't expecting it at all. And there was a hope that was shot through those four years, especially toward the end. That became almost detrimental, where it was so much about solving.

Yeah, there's an illusion, probably, that her health would allow her, to quote, beat it.

Yeah, thank you for quoting, too, because it's like, you're victorious, okay, what?

I brought this up in the past and people push back. But I think if you've gone through, I've gone through with my dad and my stepdad. And yeah, I don't like the implication of they didn't fight hard enough.

Yeah, I don't know, I don't like to parse semantics that much. And if someone wants to say that they're a victor of their illness, that's fantastic and good for them. But I think it's the inverse of that. That's the trickiest part.

I don't even know if I believe what I said more than a minute ago.

Oh, what, you call a topsy turvy?

She actually put up the white flag about six minutes ago. Oh my Lord, how inappropriate of me.

Wow, that's, I think, a first. Why is it on?

Because someone was arriving to fix my windshield on my motorhome. This is the rudest thing I've never done. This. Can I answer this for one second? Oh, of course.

Let's listen.

Hello, hello, how are you doing? This? is Juan with Safeway? Hi there.

I'll text her for you. Do you want to tell me his number?

Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, thank you Rob.

What do we think that guy is as a car?

That was a real thin slice. I was only on with him.

That was a real thin slice. He was very knowledgeable, though.

This is a good new way of doing podcast ads, though. You're like, Hello, this is Safeway.

Wow, you even heard the name of the?

You're like, Oh, thank you for your promptness, sir.

Very integrated. This is Dan Shepard, right?

Yeah, you bet it is.

Okay, that was so rude, but I really didn't know what else to do because this is the second person that's supposed to come today.

Very fair. It's like the cable guy, where they give you a six-hour window.

We're leaving next week, so it's kind of a time crunch.

Okay, we were talking about a very serious....

I know it was the most.

It's like cancer.

But I know what I was saying. Knowing her diagnosis, I would have felt a little selfish to hang around in England for two years or three years.

But she had passed by then.

Yeah, when I was finishing NYU, she died, and that whole back and forth, where I was flying home pretty constantly, I was staying in the hospital. Especially toward the end of her life, I was taking final exams at the House. College became much more spokane located than Washington Square Park located.

You were pre-Covid satellite learning.

Yes.

I had a very hard time connecting with it. It took me a few months after my dad was dead, before I think I was like, Wow, yeah, he's really dead.

The surreality is incredible, you've never seen it before, you've never had anything like it, you've only ever seen it in TV and movies. And so your brain says, Oh, therefore, it must be within that realm, too.

And we just have no experience with it. And then all of a sudden it hits you and then there's no playbook and no one's talking about it.

Individual death, especially, too. The covering up in newspapers. There can be a mass of bodies, but very, very seldom is there a face, right? It's turned away. Susan Sontag was writing about this, too, of this covering almost for war propaganda to some degree.

What are Gold Star Veterans?

Someone who has a family member who's killed in battle in the U.

Well, that's fascinating, because that was going to be one of my questions, How is the social function? Well, hold on, I got to say, your mother dies.

I had a tough time with it, really. Even before the book. I was just surprised at the different ways that I grieved, that my dad grieved, that my brother grieved. I really thought grief moved in a certain way. A lot of the received wisdom was closure was five stages, you get to acceptance.

Yeah, so as you explore this topic, this is now where I'm curious, what is the social function of grief? And you already touched on it a bit, the history of how it's evolved.

It's a good kink.

Yeah, presidents, Patrician class, right, right, right. But what you cannot avoid? I just read one on the civil war. It's like, you can't meet anyone that hasn't lost four or five children. Abraham Lincoln enters the White House with two dead children.

So it's that tame death in the 18th century that we talked about. And then you get a covering up in public spaces, especially in the early 20th century. In the U.S. and the UK. You have this keep calm and carry on ethos, you have support our troops sort of ethos. And you have Walter Benjamin writing about how public spaces are really just fundamentally changed.

That's what I'm most aware of.

That ain't great, but I see it also as a move toward. People want to have these discussions, people want to have this out in the public sphere. We're seeing that in technology.

Well, you can easily see with that history, you just laid out how the issues compound themselves and they self-accelerate because as people are more removed.

One of the wildest things that I found in writing this book was not even in the research itself. But I traveled around the western hemisphere mostly because I was interested in my society of grief, but I was staying in a lot of hotels.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

If you dare.

I do think there's just kind of a very broad evolution occurring where I'm talking about addiction and being molested out loud. That's somehow cool now. 90's might have been wild if Howard Stern was talking about that, right?

Anxiety and depression everyone talks about.

I just think, and again, I'm way out on a limb on this theory. But just as we all started watching commercials and television and it appeared everyone had really perfect lives, and then the shame of not having a perfect life.

And I have a lot of issues with it, and I have a lot of issues with diagnostic culture more broadly, which I know you guys have talked about on the pod before. But the addition of prolonged grief disorder to the DSM 5 TR in 2022.

And also that's just standard, like a grandparent versus child.

No, that's for a parent or spouse, I think, 5 days for a spouse. When my mom died, my dad had barely rearranged the books on her nightstand.

Get out to that nuclear reactor, yeah, bordering the reservation.

So that is one of the really liberating things about that kind of diagnosis. Of course, it has big opposition, yeah.

Let's get into that DSM thing because I think it's sad for us that all these things need a clinical definition before we feel unbridled from the shame. That's a bummer to me.

I agree, I've heard a really interesting argument, or I read it in the Lancet from the Harvard psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman, where he was talking about.

A disorder?

This is what he was saying and I thought it was interesting. I don't know if I fully agree, but he was saying, maybe that's just the way younger people are talking about it.

I guess it's my own disappointment with myself, which is if I meet someone who says something very shocking and provocative and invasive out of the gates.

It's less damning of diagnostic culture, maybe more of how we walk through the world. Am I going to be nice or not? Based on a doctor's note? That's kind of a crazy.

So how do they define prolonged grief disorder?

It's pretty complex, so the top line is grief, that doesn't change over time. That's how Mary Frances O'Connor, who's one of the proponents of it, explained it to me.

Even those words normal grief and pathological grief, what?

Also, is there a then accepted and insurance covered prescribed treatment.

There's a certain kind of therapy that a woman at Columbia has been working on, Naltrexone, that's in super early stages. Last I talked to the guy who's doing that.

Yeah, my own self-centered pushback on it would simply be you observe this outcome, which would be prolonged grief disorder, but within that pool of people experiencing it.

Right, and nobody's forcing you to get help, too.

I just think it would be so complicated. You're viewing the Down river end result of already a personality type that's dealing with grief. A lot of different roads could bring you to.

Yeah, I mean, this has been worked on since the 90's. But my feeling in researching it was that there's not a lot of therapies for it. Yet. There's so much more left to be learned.

So you would have qualified for this, I'm presuming.

Yeah, so I took a questionnaire that had been created by one of the people behind prolonged grief disorder, and it said you are a candidate to speak to a professional.

You know how to take the test?

I know how to check for and then add it up.

Well, conventionally, and by the way, it's crazy how often in pop culture we talk about the five stages of grief. I only really know the beginning being denial.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Now, on the surface, that feels right.

I went through three iterations of relating to it because that was all I knew. When my mom first died, I was like, okay to be a good griever, what do you do? You go through these things?

I was just going to say there would be this really strong pull to view it as linear. Which is like, you might be in denial one day, then angry the next, but you might go back to denial in a month.

Yeah, exactly, and just to view it, as there is a way I think is fundamentally flawed.

Right, like, if you hit all these markers, you'll be done.

Then you're a good griever, you get your gold star, move on with your life, get back to work, clocks up.

I've never loved closure because I always hear it in the romantic sphere. And I've had many friends tell me they're going to call their ex one more time for closure. This is a fantasy.

Yeah.

I think you think closure is I won't mind at all that. I'm not with this person anymore, and I don't think that is how it works.

With grief and loss, that is a form of loss, for sure, having a break up.

Well, you get to that. We're going to go through all your fun adventures. He had a lot of fun adventures. Believe it or not, this is all prologue.

Wow.

We're cutting all of it, we haven't started yet.

Also, even acceptance, I think that's a very opaque word. I accept that they're actually gone is one thing that doesn't necessarily mean I feel good about it or I am relieved of any sadness.

Absolutely.

So, yeah, what is even acceptance? although we do say in AA, acceptance is the answer to all of our problems. And I like it.

I believe in that.

In acceptance.

Yeah, and not that it fixes it.

That it's the panacea, though, that's interesting.

Well, for me, if I'm struggling with pretty much anything at this point, especially relationally, I've moved into well, I have to have acceptance.

I think the way Monica is using it and the way we'd be using it in AA is very much of the Buddhist lens. Which is the discomfort.

And it's really valuable in grief, too. I think where it becomes an issue is when you think, okay, this is the end game.

Right now, I'm better.

Exactly.

Okay, so let's talk about some of your fun experiments. I don't know if fun is the right adjective, but they're interesting to me. So one of them was chatting with an AI bot. I've heard this pitch.

Yeah, so I thought I was really crushing it because I was experimenting with large language models. Well before the chat, GBT was in the media sphere. And I was sort of frustrated when that all hit where I was like, damn, it kind of got me.

Cliche. We already talked about it, the mortal sin.

Exactly, but I was using mostly Project December. And Replica Replica is the most popular app in the Google Play Store and the Apple Store for AI companions.

Are you afraid it's raining outside? Why are you asking what I'm wearing?

That definitely got me out of any flow state that I had or hadn't entered, was very quickly burst by that. It has it's uses, I'm not trying to malign it.

Are you trying to feed in any of her actual words or like writing?

You're using her writing style. I interviewed my mom in the two days right before she died and that was extremely difficult, but it was something I'm really glad that I did.

Were you also recording?

I was recording it, yeah, and so I went through and found some of the most meaningful parts from that interview. And used that within the chatbot to give it a sense of her.

Prosaic is that the word?

It could work, it's a word.

Any word would work.

Hippopotamus Is that a word?

Rudimentary.

Yeah, rudimentary, relatively, I mean, it's still incredible. I found that I sort of dropped into flow states, which I'm defining as where I kind of could believe.

Yeah, I guess my immediate fear and I'm probably locked into the paradigm you're trying to break, which is I feel like it would prolong.

You're not accepting. Is that what you're thinking? A lot of researchers have said that it's a dysfunctional form of grieving if you're seeking out to that degree.

Now you couldn't do her voice, but now you probably could. I wonder how much easier you would have reached these flow states if you're actually conversing with her.

Or didn't ye give Kim K a hologram several years ago of her dad? Yeah, they talked and stuff.

Oh, wow, I didn't know that.

We can fact check that, but the tech is presumably there. But it ended up being very cathartic, and also the fact that the bot dies. That's really how that chapter ends.

Oh, it is designed with an end date.

Yeah, you pay for X amount, it's like five bucks. Then as you use it, it wears down and it gets basically less sensible and then ends up disappearing.

Because it wasn't like an intentional. We're weaning you off of your.

No, but I did find that I sort of had a jolt where I was like, Oh, yeah, she is dead.

Really.

Yeah, you know, there's another bizarre potential outcome to this, and this will sound really callous, but I think it is an outcome that's possible. Let's say I could feed in all the info.

That's interesting.

That kind of would be an unforeseeable outcome.

The sort of hagiography you create of the dead, where you're like, they have a halo around them and then you bring them back to Earth.

Oh yeah, there were all these problems.

It's so literal that when I dream about my dad, which is very frequently, it's always. He's like Dave Shepherd 1989. He's a wheeler dealer, car salesman, he's fucking all the time.

I think that's kind of great to some degree, though. I don't want to think of my mom, her face drooping from failed trials and her hair hyper thinned, I want to think of her skiing through the neighborhood.

I just wonder if it was really real and you were really spending time. You might go like, Oh yeah, I got rose colored glasses on a little bit. I want to spend some time here.

I don't know.

Okay, so that was the chat ai that you tried, you also. And this is straight out of eternal sunshine of the spotless mind you met with scientists that are looking at potentially.