Welcome to the show. I'm Greg McEwen and I'm your host for the What's Essential Podcast?

There are lots of shows on how to improve, on how to become successful, but there is only one show on what to do once you are.

This is essential because success itself can be a catalyst for failure.

This special, if it leads to the undisciplined pursuit of more, this show is about how to become successful at

success. It's for high performers who are on the edge of exhaustion.

It's for people who struggle with the curse of capability.

It's important because what got you here is not what's going to get you there.

So if you're a driven, hardworking, productive person who is running out of space,

but still wants to make a higher contribution, the What's Essential Podcast is designed

especially for you. So let's get to it.

Dr. Bruce Grayson, what a pleasure to have you join us on the What's Essential Podcast.

Thank you for being here with us today.

Well, thank you, Greg. I'm delighted to be here with you.

Now, you have written a book called After. A doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal

about life and beyond. Not everybody does that. Why did you?

Well, I grew up in a scientific household where all we knew about was the physical world and

we assumed that when you die, that's the end of it. So I went through college and medical school

with that materialistic mindset. And then shortly after that, I started my psychiatric training

and started encountering people who had claimed that they left their bodies when they were unconscious

and could see things accurately from an out-of-body perspective. And that just made no sense to me.

Couldn't imagine how they could be. I tried to just push out on my mind saying this is

misunderstanding or someone's playing a trick on me. And then several years later, I read a book

...