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Speaker 1: from How Stuff Works dot Com? Stuff you should know
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Speaker 1: to the podcast. Josh and Chuck. Here a couple of
Speaker 1: staff writers at how stuff works dot Com. How's it coming, Shuff,
Speaker 1: It's going good, Josh, so Chuck. I hate to tell
Speaker 1: you this, but there are people who are setting themselves
Speaker 1: on fire all over India right now. Have you heard
Speaker 1: anything about this right now? Possibly very lately. By right now,
Speaker 1: I mean lately. No, I didn't know that. It's it's
Speaker 1: becoming something of a widespread trend, actually terribly. UM. I
Speaker 1: read about one guy who's a tea vendor. You know,
Speaker 1: he just sells tea like you know, you buy a
Speaker 1: hot dog right on the streets of New or This
Speaker 1: guy just sells tea. Um. And apparently he fell in
Speaker 1: the bad graces of a local representative of the local government. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the guy was kind of being abused by this guy,
Speaker 1: the the government official. Um, and in retaliation, he doused
Speaker 1: himself in kerosene and set himself on fire in front
Speaker 1: of the guy's house. That'll show him, yeah, pretty much. Um.
Speaker 1: Now the guy lived, but he has burns like over
Speaker 1: his body. And at this point you kind of wonder
Speaker 1: that all right, well, which is worse? You know? Right?
Speaker 1: It sounds like a terrible way to go. And and
Speaker 1: the whole thing, uh kind of reminded me that of
Speaker 1: an article i'd written into called is there a Worst
Speaker 1: Way to Die? When I was I love this article.
Speaker 1: It was like, uh, it was really interesting to write.
Speaker 1: I talked to um, a funeral director, I talked to
Speaker 1: a an E. R. Doctor, and I also spoke with
Speaker 1: the guy who is the director of the Ernest beck
Speaker 1: R Foundation. We'll talk about that in a minute. But um,
Speaker 1: because there's no there's no quantifiable way to say, yes,
Speaker 1: there's definitely a worse way to die, and here it is,
Speaker 1: it's all subjective and even worse, there's um, there weren't
Speaker 1: any you know, nationally recognized poles out there. I actually
Speaker 1: contacted Gallop to find out if they'd ever asked that question. No.
Speaker 1: I I wanted to find out what the data was
Speaker 1: if they'd ever taken that poll, and they said that
Speaker 1: they never had. I found one that was pretty close,
Speaker 1: a gallop pole that was about UM, fear of dying,
Speaker 1: not the worst way to die, and um. Astoundingly only
Speaker 1: of the people polled said that they were afraid to die. Interesting,
Speaker 1: and I think a really logical follow up question would
Speaker 1: have would have been, how often do you actually think
Speaker 1: about your own death? Maybe we should have conducted our
Speaker 1: own pole. Maybe we will, we will, We'll get it
Speaker 1: up on the site in no time instead of quiz
Speaker 1: corner fear of death corner. Um. But while I was
Speaker 1: researching it, I came across the impromptu poles about the
Speaker 1: worst way to die. Immolation is usually ranks up pretty high. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say, so burning to death not good, not
Speaker 1: good at all. I would say drowning is probably up
Speaker 1: there too. Drowning is up there too. Um. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: usually uh, they're usually interchangeable at the top. What's your
Speaker 1: what's your worst way to die? Boy? Uh? I don't
Speaker 1: know if I could say the worst method of death,
Speaker 1: but I think that anything where I died alone would
Speaker 1: be the worst way. That is very funny that you
Speaker 1: bring that up, because I was doing extra research for
Speaker 1: this podcast and there was a British pole um from
Speaker 1: April this past April, and uh, the majority of the
Speaker 1: respondents said that their worst death was a dying alone. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like Isaac ky Is, God rest his soul. He just
Speaker 1: passed a few days ago and I think they found
Speaker 1: him in his home jam with a treadmill going and
Speaker 1: something is mundane said. It just seems like the most
Speaker 1: depressing way to go. You know, you're lying there, your
Speaker 1: treadmill still alive right next to you, and there you are,
Speaker 1: right and and surrounded by no one. Right. Or Elvis Presley,
Speaker 1: as you know, I have Elvis on the brain after
Speaker 1: writing about Graceland and uh, you know Elvis famously died
Speaker 1: in his bathroom reading a book and no one found him,
Speaker 1: you know, for hours, So he was just laying there
Speaker 1: in his bathroom. Yeah, so this the second worst aspect
Speaker 1: of death that people came up with was not enough
Speaker 1: access to pain relief, right, which is a big thing
Speaker 1: to like if you basically there there's a really good
Speaker 1: way to answer this question is by changing the wording. Uh,
Speaker 1: is there the best way to die? I think you
Speaker 1: would find across the board dying um in your sleep
Speaker 1: would probably be the best, most highly rated way to go.
Speaker 1: People don't want to feel pain now, people don't want
Speaker 1: to be afraid or alone. Now. My worst death kind
Speaker 1: of combines all these except for the pain part. I
Speaker 1: don't think pain would be involved. Um plane crash, right,
Speaker 1: I'm actually I'm flying to Malta a week or so
Speaker 1: from now, and yeah, I'm not looking forward to the
Speaker 1: to the plane ride. Uh. In My big problem with
Speaker 1: with dying in a plane crash is if you're at
Speaker 1: thirty thousand feet or something like that, it doesn't happen instantaneously.
Speaker 1: A good minute or two headed straight to Earth at
Speaker 1: like eight hundred miles an hour. But even that takes
Speaker 1: a minute, maybe two, maybe three, depending on how high
Speaker 1: up you are. And buddy, you're totally aware of what's
Speaker 1: going on the whole time, right, You've got a solid
Speaker 1: minute to three minutes to think about you know, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm going to die, right, And the panic and the
Speaker 1: hysteria just I would say with everyone on the plane,
Speaker 1: it's not If you're by yourself, it would be bad enough.
Speaker 1: But you have hundreds of strangers that you were probably
Speaker 1: annoyed with just moments earlier for one reason or another,
Speaker 1: and you're all going through this. So at least you're
Speaker 1: not going to die alone. But I'll tell you what,
Speaker 1: if George Gallup asked the people on a plane that
Speaker 1: was going down if they fear death, I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: that the percentages would skyrocket that had to be hastily performed. Pole. Yeah, exactly. So, UM,
Speaker 1: you know, basically, check our our our approach to death,
Speaker 1: our fear of death, um, and some theorist size uh
Speaker 1: is a result of a kind of sanitizing of death.
Speaker 1: Of UM, basically, our our desire to not look death
Speaker 1: in the face, not think about death. UM. Becker Becker
Speaker 1: and the anatology A lot of Ernest Becker's views his
Speaker 1: his whole field was called the psychology of death, right
Speaker 1: and UM. In Becker's opinion, UH, culture, every aspect of culture,
Speaker 1: from our lazy boy recliners, to Nascar, to whiskey to
Speaker 1: guitar hero to the climbing the corporate ladder, whatever it is,
Speaker 1: it all serves to distract us from thinking about our
Speaker 1: own mortality. So culture, as has been created to distract
Speaker 1: us so we can throw ourselves into it. Um. That's
Speaker 1: Becker stands. The problem is, is we In Becker's opinion,
Speaker 1: he he died many, many years ago, UM at age
Speaker 1: forty nine. Sadly, I wonder if he saw that one coming.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but I'll bet you if there was
Speaker 1: ever a human who is walking the earth who was
Speaker 1: cool with it, or it was Becker and he died
Speaker 1: of cancer too, So I mean he knew it was coming. Um.
Speaker 1: But in Becker's opinion, we we know that death is coming.
Speaker 1: We're distracting ourselves. So the unconscious mind UH has to
Speaker 1: find an outlet somewhere, and usually that outlet is violence
Speaker 1: or aggression or war. So in Becker's opinion, if we'd
Speaker 1: all just go ahead and accept the fact that we
Speaker 1: are going to die someday and we don't know when
Speaker 1: it's gonna happen or how it's gonna happen, we'd all
Speaker 1: be a lot better off. We'd all basically chill, right.
Speaker 1: And I know, along those same lines of how we
Speaker 1: UH insulate ourselves from death as how, there's not as
Speaker 1: many open casket funerals these days. And I know back
Speaker 1: in the in the olden times, as they say, well
Speaker 1: as recent is the nineteenth century. Yeah, people would sit
Speaker 1: up with the dead. I know. That's a Southern tradition
Speaker 1: where you would literally have the body in your house
Speaker 1: or wherever they died, and uh, you know the family
Speaker 1: is just hanging out, yeah, for for days on it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of the points of that was to socialized
Speaker 1: children to death public viewings, right, Yeah. And plus another
Speaker 1: aspect of it was, um, usually it wasn't the home
Speaker 1: because most people died in the home because modern medicine,
Speaker 1: you know, just kind of went, you know, good luck
Speaker 1: with that pal see see in hell, that kind of thing. Um.
Speaker 1: And uh, nowadays, you know, in nineteen hundred, the average
Speaker 1: life expectancy was, um, it was like forty nine years old.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight, it's seventies seven, creeping up
Speaker 1: on seventy eight. If it's not, they're already. So that
Speaker 1: extra you know, twenty almost thirty years has really kind
Speaker 1: of um strung us out right. We are really interested
Speaker 1: in in squeezing every last minute out of it, even
Speaker 1: sadly beyond the time when the quality of life has diminished.
Speaker 1: So what are he's saying, Well, I'm saying, we have
Speaker 1: all these machines to keep us alive, to breathe for us,
Speaker 1: and we know that they're out there. Um, so we
Speaker 1: have thrown ourselves even further into this denial of death.
Speaker 1: It right, So the very things that keep us alive
Speaker 1: or distracting us from the obvious pretty much and the inevitable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there was there was another aspect when you brought
Speaker 1: up nineteenth century that I found really interesting. There was
Speaker 1: a trend. Have you heard a bereavement photography? Uh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was um Like, have you seen the movie The
Speaker 1: Assassination of Jesse James? I have not. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: famously a photographed and his casket uh you know, and
Speaker 1: the whole town came out. They had him on a
Speaker 1: block of ice. The whole town came and viewed the
Speaker 1: body and had their picture made with picture made were
Speaker 1: from the South picture had their picture made with the
Speaker 1: body of Jesse James. This is that what you're talking about? That? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's it's it's a photograph of a
Speaker 1: dead person. Um. For usually though it was of a
Speaker 1: loved one, and oftentimes they'd be on a couch sitting
Speaker 1: up looking like they were sleeping or in bed looking
Speaker 1: like they were sleeping. Sometimes their eyes were propped open
Speaker 1: to make it look like they were awake. That's really uh,
Speaker 1: it was kind of odd, but it actually still continues today.
Speaker 1: There are there is bereavement photography. Usually it's um used
Speaker 1: by parents whose child was was stillborn or died at
Speaker 1: a very very young age and this will be the
Speaker 1: only photo that they ever have of them. Is this
Speaker 1: the United States mainly, Yeah, it's um, it's you don't
Speaker 1: want to stay time, because clearly they're they're getting something
Speaker 1: from it, like I'm sure it poses like it creates
Speaker 1: a sense of catharsis or finality to it. And and
Speaker 1: plus they and say, well, this is what my baby
Speaker 1: looked like is for a short time as he or
Speaker 1: she was on earth, you know, Um, and it's a
Speaker 1: it's very sad, but I imagine that you can get
Speaker 1: something out of it. Who am I to judge exactly?
Speaker 1: And and photography in general kind of has since it
Speaker 1: since it was created, has always had kind of this
Speaker 1: fascination with death, like breathment photography or outlaws. Um. Even
Speaker 1: even Pablo Escobar, you know there's that famous photo of
Speaker 1: him all bloated and dead on that rooftop and meta
Speaker 1: ying or a famous photo of Lizzie Borden's father, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of sideways on the couch. Yeah, face
Speaker 1: mashed in And what is it about as humans that
Speaker 1: wish that that photo wasn't so greeny, that you could
Speaker 1: make it out a little more, you know. But at
Speaker 1: the same time we kind of lets the imagination run. Well,
Speaker 1: we're a sick, sick, twisted species. We're afraid of her
Speaker 1: own death, and yet we love morbid photography of dead people,
Speaker 1: or at least you and I we don't want to.
Speaker 1: I guess we shouldn't speak for the rest of humanity,
Speaker 1: although you know, I'd say we're fairly typical. Um. But
Speaker 1: but back to the photography part. There's, um, there's this
Speaker 1: really cool exhibit uh by a German photographer named Walter Shells, right,
Speaker 1: and uh. He did this series called Life Before Death.
Speaker 1: And what he did was he went and visited people
Speaker 1: who were terminally ill, spent the last you know, a
Speaker 1: couple of days of their lives with him, got you know,
Speaker 1: took series of photographs of him, got like the one
Speaker 1: he's looking for, and then arranged to take another photo
Speaker 1: of them right after they died, and he juxtaposed them
Speaker 1: one right next to the other, and there's actually a
Speaker 1: really great spread on the Guardian the Guardians UK site.
Speaker 1: What he find it was it was it uplifting or
Speaker 1: was it depressing? It's very subjective. It's death. You know,
Speaker 1: there's no objectivity with death. We have no idea what's
Speaker 1: coming after this. It's all subjective. You're scared of it,
Speaker 1: you're not scared of it whatever. Um So it's definitely
Speaker 1: one of those things where you know you're going to
Speaker 1: take what you want out of it, and some are
Speaker 1: more startling than others. But it's it's really it's odd
Speaker 1: and it's oddly comforting. Yeah, i'd like to see that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you can see it on the Guardians side. But
Speaker 1: first don't forget to go to how Stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com and read is there a Worst Way to Die?
Speaker 1: It's a pretty cool article if I do say so myself,
Speaker 1: and stick around to find out which article makes me
Speaker 1: pretty excited. It scares the hell out of chuck. Right
Speaker 1: after this stuff you should know is brought to you
Speaker 1: by Visa. We all have things to think about, like, say,
Speaker 1: what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket,
Speaker 1: or whether to buy the three or six megapixel camera.
Speaker 1: But thankfully we don't need to think about online fraud
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Speaker 1: out for fraud with real time fraud monitoring and by
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Speaker 1: that for peace of mind? Safe, secure Visa. So Chuck,
Speaker 1: we're back. I know this. Uh, this article scares the
Speaker 1: hell out of you. I like it. Tell us about it.
Speaker 1: What's the missiplicity project? You want to tell everybody? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it has to do with dog cloning, cloning your pets
Speaker 1: and h kind of creeps me out. I know that
Speaker 1: you love your dogs like I do, but you want
Speaker 1: to clone yours? Do you want to have nine instead
Speaker 1: of three? Well, my dogs are never going to die,
Speaker 1: not if I have anything to say about it. But
Speaker 1: if they do, I feel comforted knowing that I can
Speaker 1: bring them back. Well, you better get a second job, buddy,
Speaker 1: It ain't you. No, I know it's not. I'm saving
Speaker 1: up already. Actually, it's like put kids through college, or
Speaker 1: you know, bring dogs back to life. Right, And we
Speaker 1: want to give a shout out to how stuff Works
Speaker 1: freelancer Julia Layton for creating a really cool article. You
Speaker 1: can check it out on how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Just type in what's the mis Simplicity Project For more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com? Let us know what you did.
Speaker 1: Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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