You Don’t Have To Find Out You’re Dying To Start Living

Thank you all.

If you don’t recognize me, it’s probably because I’m wearing clothes.

But I wanted to come. I have a very special message that I just felt called to bring to you all today. And where’s the camera? And you, if you’re watching this, I just want you guys all to know that you are going to die.

Thank you all for having me. I appreciate it.

Isn’t it interesting how normally, in a different group of people, that statement is negative? It’s like an insult. It’s the worst thing you could probably say to somebody, especially somebody young: “You’re going to die.”

Instead of it being an absolute truth, like you’re an audience, or there’s gravity, or you are a human being. It’s literally one of the only things that is an absolute truth in our entire life. Except we, for some reason, have designed our lives in a way where we run away from it.

We’re afraid of it. It’s scary. So much so that I believe we have designed our lives in a way that we distract ourselves to the point where we just spend our lives trying to forget that one day this is going to happen to us, even though we know, because all of us have been touched by it, that eventually it happens.

So we have this culture, right? We’re culturally afraid to talk about death. Death is taboo. Hence why it’s such a nice, intimate gathering here. If this were something else, we could be in a huge 30,000-seat auditorium.

But the forward thinkers, those of you guys who are willing to be comfortable in the uncomfortable, gather here today to talk about this because it is such an important part of our conversation that we’re not having.

We should be open and willing to confront our mortality. And what I want to talk about today is how, in doing that, for me, it’s helped me live a better life. And how I believe that if we can learn to be comfortable in the uncomfortable, like all of you, maybe the talk of our mortality can actually influence the way we live.

I also find it interesting, you know, I’m in the entertainment business. Just look at the way we’ve been socialized in entertainment as a whole. I mean, look at how we view death in media.

There’s an entire sector of the film market that makes billions of dollars off all the different glorified ways that people can die horrible deaths by psychopaths. It’s a genre film, right? People go see these genre movies where they sit for an hour and a half and watch horrendous things happen to people.

But then they never stop for a second and think, “Well, what if that was me? Or someone I care about? Or my mom, or my wife, or my girlfriend, or my child?”

We’ve numbed ourselves so much that we’re just kind of living in this place of detachment.

And I just want to offer maybe a different look at things, because this is really kind of how we think about death. It doesn’t take more than signing into your Twitter feed to be overwhelmed and bombarded with death and dying, unfortunate situations and circumstances all over the world.

We’re also living in a time where there’s so much information coming toward us at any given point, it’s overwhelming. So I’m actually personally trying to avoid Twitter as often as I can, because this is what I see: this idea of sadness and pain.

But what if there is another option? What if there’s a different way of looking at it?

Because many of you are science-based people, I’m just going to give you some stats, because you all know them anyway.

Sum all that up. Basically, since I put on that slide, like 15 people around the world have died. Again, back to the fact that it’s an absolute truth.

So why are we running from it? What are we so afraid of? Why have we designed our lives in a way that helps us forget the fact that one day we’re not going to be here anymore?

Well, it’s probably the unknown, right?

This is me. That’s a real bowl cut, by the way. Some of you remember that. And if you’re my mom’s age, you’ve probably done this to your child, and I hope that one day they forgive you, because she literally put a bowl on my head and cut it.

So I grew up in the Bahá’í Faith, and I’m going to talk a little bit about my faith today because it’s a huge influence on why I’m doing the things that I’m doing and believe what I believe.

If you don’t know anything about the Bahá’í Faith, at its core, it is the most recent world religion, where essentially we believe that God is an unknowable essence and He, it, she has never left man without guidance. And the entire purpose of religion is simply to love and help us remember that this is not the end, that this is the beginning.

Essentially, we believe that God sends a different messenger, or prophet, or teacher to humanity to basically help us evolve to one day live in unity, which I know we are very far from right now.

That said, there is a central teaching of the Bahá’í Faith that is very much focused on the afterlife, which I will get into in a little bit.

Growing up, I found, maybe it was because of my faith or maybe not, I was always drawn to the idea of wondering what happens when we die.

I remember being very, very young and having experiences with my grandparents or with other elderly people, and just being young enough to remember and be cognizant of the fact that they were closer to death than I was, which is a weird thing for a young boy, I think, to even be aware of or to think about.

When I would go visit my grandparents, a lot of kids my age hated it. “Oh, you know, I’ve got to go.” And I remember looking forward to it in a lot of ways, asking them questions.

I also remember every time I would leave that I would wonder if I was ever going to see them again.

And it probably didn’t help that my grandmother was Jewish and always said, “I might never see you again.”

Those with Jewish grandmothers know what I’m talking about.

Literally, like, “You might never see me again. Come here.”

But I had already been thinking about that. I had already been interested. I remember asking them about their love and their marriage.

Then later on, when my grandmother died, sitting with my grandfather and asking him how he fell in love, and just filming. As soon as we had cell phone cameras that worked, I remember taking it everywhere and asking questions and filming.

I was just drawn to it, which I also realized was not necessarily a normal thing, because a lot of young boys, especially teenagers, would run from it.

There was no vocabulary to even have a dialogue or a conversation with a young man about death or dying, or grandparents and wanting to get to know them. It wasn’t a thing. We weren’t socialized to converse that way.

This is my Uncle Louie.

Well, he’s not there. And he’s not here, so okay, we’re going to just go back. Let’s see if we can make this work. Here we go.

Well, thanks, Uncle Louie.

He was very funny, so he would like this, especially when you hear about the story I’m about to tell you.

This was actually going to be a picture of me at my high school graduation with my Uncle Louie.

I found out that my Uncle Louie had stage four lung cancer when I was 20 years old. I didn’t get a chance to know him that well growing up. He lived in Florida, and we lived at the time in Oregon.

I remember, again, this same feeling of, “I need to go.” I remember asking my dad, “Can we go see him?”

So whenever we flew there, we got to know each other. We spent a lot of time together. Golf was his religion.

It was this kind of beautiful experience. It was my first experience getting to know somebody who was actually dying of a disease, not just of old age.

A few months later, my dad called me. I’ll never forget. He said, “Uncle Louie’s only got days to live. He’s in what they call hospice.”

His wife, my Aunt Donna, wasn’t doing very well. He said the family was struggling.

And I’ll never forget this moment. I just had this calling. It was like a prompting. And I said, “Dad, I’m going to go.”

I just felt like I needed to go. So I booked a plane ticket.

It was like a young kid saying, “I’m going to go fight on the front lines.” Like a debate champion saying, “I’m going to go join the Army tomorrow.”

I had no idea what I was doing or what I was getting into. I could just tell that my heart was telling me I needed to go, and I needed to be with him, for whatever reason.

I remember getting there and seeing him in hospice, and walking into a hospice for the first time, and also feeling a tremendous amount of love. These were some of the kindest, sweetest people I had ever met. The attention and the care they were giving to my uncle Louie was so beautiful.

The problem was that he wasn’t letting go.

It was a weird thing for me because I’d never been with anybody as they were dying.

I’ll never forget, even the hospice nurses had pulled my aunt aside and said, “There’s something going on. He’s not letting go.”

They had him on the highest doses of pain medication possible, and things just weren’t working. It was uncomfortable, to say the least. The family didn’t know how to handle it.

I remember being very calm in that situation. It was almost like, I don’t know, I’m sure many of you have the same feeling, but it was almost like being cool in the fire. I just felt like I was supposed to be there.

I remember asking, “Has he said, is there anybody he’s been fighting with? Who can we call?”

So I started calling people that maybe he had unresolved issues with and getting them on the phone and holding up the speakerphone, because I knew he was still there, but he was in this process where he was seeing things and talking to his sister, who had passed away when he was young. He was in, as we all call it, transition.

And then that didn’t work.

At the very end, he had finally gotten closer. I had spent the night with him the night before and let my aunt go to sleep. The hospice nurses had come in and said, “Okay, he’s mottling. He’s getting much closer.”

His breathing was very labored.

I remember asking her, “Does he have any music? Is there music that he loves or likes?”

She said, “Yeah, he’s got his old Frank Sinatra album in the car. It’s like a mixed CD of all the things that he loved.”

So I ran out, grabbed the CD, put it in my computer, came back, and started playing music for him.

And as soon as I did, he took his last breath.

It was my first experience watching somebody’s soul leave their body. Holding his hand, he took his last breath.

I looked over, and my aunt was just sobbing.

Suddenly, in that exact moment, the song skipped halfway through the song. It just skipped on its own.

I looked over at my aunt, and her sad face had turned into one of joy, and she was laughing.

It turned out the song that it skipped to was the song that they had their very first dance to. There was no shuffle. It happened mid-song.

It was unexplainable.

And that rocked me.

I knew that there was more, but that just shook me to my core. This idea, like, how the hell did that happen? How did the song skip?

And then I just let it go, and I said, “All right, there’s got to be something more to this.”

That experience would shape my entire life, and it’s a huge reason why I’m here today.

Every religion in the history of the world talks about death. Every prophet, every messiah, every religious teacher. It’s almost like we have been asked to prepare ourselves for this thing, but yet we don’t really listen.

We skip over the pages that talk about our death, and we go straight to, you know, how we can be happy or live a fruitful life.

This is a quote I love:

“To consider that after the death of the body the spirit perishes is like imagining that a bird in a cage will be destroyed when the cage is broken.”

That is essentially the Bahá’í belief about life after death.

But if you’ve noticed, we spend so much time here on Earth, in our lives, feeding the cage and not the bird.

“I have made death a messenger of joy to thee. Wherefore dost thou grieve?”

This is from Bahá’u’lláh, who’s the prophet-founder of the Bahá’í Faith.

This quote has altered the course of my entire life.

It’s also really annoying.

Sometimes, I don’t know if those of you who are spiritual or religious have ever read some of these scriptures and you’re like, “Come on. Give me the cheat code to feel this,” as if we were a video game.

Although Elon Musk does think that we are in a simulation. I will say that if we are in a simulation, there must be somebody or something that’s still organizing it, so I don’t think that he and I are that far off in our beliefs either.

The architect, exactly.

Yes, my favorite movie. I’m sure you and I can talk deeply about that.

Seven years ago, I was actually meditating on this, and I was at a really low point in my life. My acting career had stopped. It was nonexistent.

At three in the morning, I was thinking about this quote, and I wrote down a list of show ideas because I realized that I wasn’t being of service. I had been feeding the cage and not the bird.

I wanted to figure out, what am I really doing here?

I’ll never forget the three words that came up, that I just knew once I wrote them down were going to have a massive impact in the world.

They were My Last Days, a show about living told by the dying.

It came out exactly like that that night.

Little did I know that that would be the thing I spent the next seven years doing.

I really believe that we need to find a way to change the conversation, to start a dialogue. Very much what we’re all doing here today.

How can we get the idea of dying into a mainstream conversation to hopefully start to influence the way that people live?

It was a conversation that we were afraid to have.

At the time, this was seven years ago, YouTube had just gotten started, and it was basically cat videos and people making makeup tutorials and all kinds of things like that.

And I was like, “Okay, well, let’s make it YouTube-like. Yeah, let’s do that. People will watch that, right?”

Little did we know that nobody was going to watch that, at least that’s what they told me.

We partnered with our good friends at SoulPancake. It was one of their first shows, and we released My Last Days to the world.

And I had met Zach.

“My name is Zach Sobiech. I’m 17 years old, and I have osteosarcoma. I’ve been told I have a few months to live, but I still have a lot of work to do. I want everyone to know you don’t have to find out you’re dying to start living.”

Zach’s documentary, the week he died, was seen by 10 million people.

Zach wrote a song called “Clouds,” and he reached number one on iTunes and became the first unsigned artist to ever hit number one on iTunes the week that he passed away.

He proved a theory that I had, which was while we’re all afraid to talk about it, we all have a desire to learn about it.

The thing about Zach that was so interesting was, while he taught us all how to live, in reality, what he really taught us also was how to die.

It was the first time that I really saw how death and joy could be seen in the same sentence.

What was so interesting was everybody told us that it wasn’t going to work.

Well, it did.

Not only did it become one of the most watched documentary series in history online, it’s now gone on to be a three-night special on The CW every single year.

The CW has basically told us that they will keep it on as long as we want because it’s so important, and they believe that young people need to have this conversation.

So the work that we are all doing here is wanted.

Despite what everybody tells us, people are hungry and thirsty for this type of content.

I’m going to skip over the trailer. It’s all online. I was going to show you guys the trailer and get everybody crying, but I want to focus a little bit on why this is so important and how hungry I believe the general audience is.

I’ve made 25 documentaries over the last seven years, and every single one of these people exemplifies the idea that you don’t have to find out you’re dying to start living.

And what we found, besides the fact that tens and tens and tens of millions of people, I think we were close to 100 million views overall, have watched this show, is the letters that have poured in.

People have written that they didn’t commit suicide because they watched somebody who had so much less time than them choose to live so beautifully.

It’s become a cultural phenomenon, if you will.

It’s also one of the hardest shows that I’ve ever made in my entire life because it’s not reality television.

It’s reality.

This year was really hard.

I lost three dear friends, and Claire Wineland was one of them.

Claire, if you don’t know Claire, I encourage you to Google her.

She had cystic fibrosis, and she spent her time here basically speaking and trying to help people remember that death is inevitable, but living a life that we are proud of is something that’s in our control, and that we all have the ability to make our life a beautiful piece of art.

She taught me so much. I encourage you to look her up, watch her documentary.

Claire passed away after a double-lung transplant from a complication.

And the thing about Claire that’s also so special is that her memory is going to live on in a massive way, not just from her documentaries, but because through a conversation, she inspired what will become one of the first young adult movies where two teenagers with cystic fibrosis get to have conversations like this about their mortality on the big screen, that I just directed, coming out in March all over the world.

So what’s really exciting, again, it’s just happening because people are hungry for it.

Then we decided to turn the script into a book because we really believed that people would want to read about it and not just watch it.

Last week, it became a bestseller in its first week.

So again, young people are thirsty and they’re hungry to have this conversation.

And next year, which I’m really excited about, we’re going to be taking another big step, and we’re bringing the story of Zach to the big screen with our friends at Warner Brothers.

It’s going to be a major motion picture. Zach is going to have a chance to now have his story told in a completely new way.

Because I’m over, I’m going to skip a couple things, but I want to briefly go back to this quote:

“I made death a messenger of joy for thee.”

I’m going to summarize this way faster than I was going to because I know there are a lot of amazing speakers here.

What in our life could be joyful that could be similar to death?

In the Bahá’í Faith, we’re told that for every physical law in the universe, there’s a spiritual counterpart.

So what could be the physical counterpart, or the spiritual counterpart, to death?

Birth.

I encourage you all to take this with you today.

What if birth and death are actually the same?

In the matrix, right?

Now, the matrix meaning the world of the womb.

A baby grows and develops. It’s encapsulated in a dark place. It’s at the perfect temperature. Everything has been designed to help this baby grow.

And what’s the baby doing in this womb world?

It’s growing arms and legs and eyes and ears. It’s growing all these physical things that it doesn’t need where it is. It’s going to need them where it’s going, but it has no concept of where it’s going.

It’s existing both in the womb world and, at the same time, in a completely different universe.

So if we asked a baby in the womb, “Do you believe in Mom?” the baby has no concept of Mom. It can’t see Mom. It can sometimes hear Mom if it’s really listening, but it can’t see her.

It has no idea that just an inch away is a vast universe.

This is my wife, and my son was actually in that belly when I took this picture.

Can you imagine trying to explain to a baby in the womb what exists just outside of it?

We’re finite beings right here on Earth. We can’t comprehend the infinite, just like a baby has no frame of reference to the magical world that’s existing just outside of it.

Imagine trying to explain to a fetus, “Oh yeah, there’s a solar system, and stars, and there’s going to be air so that you can breathe. Oh yeah, you’ve been developing lungs for 10 months.”

You could never do it.

Not because it doesn’t exist, but because we don’t have the capacity to visualize it.

And then one day the baby’s born into this life, but it dies from the womb.

So what if our death is really just our next birth?

And that’s really, at the end of the day, what I wanted to talk about and what I wanted to drop on the group.

I know that those of you already in hospice and end of life are already thinking about these things, but this comes from a deep spiritual belief of mine.

This idea that maybe death being a messenger of joy is also for the other side, in the same way that when my child was born, it was one of the most joyful experiences of my entire life.

So maybe it’s about shifting our thinking.

And I want to end with a quick story.

That’s a real picture of snot coming from my nose.

When my daughter was born, we chose to have a home birth.

My wife was in labor for 35 hours.

And what’s interesting is I’ve realized, having been through both experiences, how similar they are.

Hospice nurses. Midwives. Doulas. Death doulas. Hospices. Birthing centers.

Even the language: transition.

It’s almost emotionally identical experiences.

People waiting by their phones to figure out if it’s happened. Families coming together.

They’re mirrors of each other, the spiritual and the physical counterpart.

As my wife was going through her experience, I was right there praying for my little girl and holding my wife, and creating the experience, and playing music.

We were dancing and trying to just create this amazing environment so that when my daughter went through her transition from the womb into this world, she was met with all the love that she could ever, ever imagine, that would set her up for her entire life.

And as she came through, and I brought her in and put her in my ear, and I said a quick prayer, I had this realization that this was not going to be the last time I greeted my daughter’s soul.

Because as she came through that tunnel into the light, and I got to be there welcoming her with love and with prayer, I knew that one day after I pass, I really believe I’ll have that chance to be there on the other side welcoming her again.

And that completely shifted the way that I think about death.

So what I want to leave you all with is: your work is so important.

I know it’s hard to talk about with people. I’m sure conversations are awkward when you tell them what you do, for the most part.

But if you have beliefs like this, or experiences that are magical like I had with my Uncle Louie, I want to encourage you to share them with the world.

Because we are hungry, and we are more open now than we’ve ever been, for answers and for solutions.

Your work is important.

I see you.

And please join me in helping everybody learn how to be comfortable in the uncomfortable.

Thank you.