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Paul Giamatti’s CHINWAG with Stephen Asma

Digging Into The Business of Death

Paul Giamatti’s CHINWAG with Stephen Asma

Treefort Media & Touchy Feely Films

Society & Culture, History, Science

4.92K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

🌺💀🌹 Paul and Stephen are into learning about death. Not just what happens after one departs, not just about ghosts and spirits and the afterlife, but what happens in the days that follow - to the bodies, and to the workers in the trenches of the death industry. Enter journalist and author Hayley Campbell, who after a lifelong fascination with death, sought these answers from the hardworking people who make their living working with the dead. Learn about alkaline hydrolysis (water cremation), cryogenics, the euphemisms for embalming, crime scene clean up, and how women and men process death differently. Join Paul and Stephen as they dig into the different cultural traditions and attitudes around death, and discuss the merits of facing death directly as a means of fearing it less. BONUS: Why Paul prefers female crime-writers to men! Paul Giamatti is an award-winning actor and producer. Stephen Asma is a professor and author specializing in the philosophy of science, religion, and art. Hayley Campbell is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in WIRED, The Guardian, GQ, Empire, Vice, New Statesman, McSweeney’s, and more. Her books include All the Living and the Dead and The Art of Neil Gaiman. She lives in London with her cat, Ned. 🌺💀🌹 ========= Vocab Word of the Week: ALKALINE HYDROLISIS ========= New episodes of CHINWAG drop Wednesdays for free... n(🧊) Make sure to follow us @chinwagpod 👉🏼 YT: https://www.youtube.com/@chinwagpod IG: https://www.instagram.com/chinwagpod/ Tik: https://www.tiktok.com/@chinwagpod Website: http://chinwagpod.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello everybody it's Paul Giamotti speaking. Stephen Asmas I live and breathe.

0:10.0

How are you sir? I'm doing well. Are you familiar with NPR's throughline podcast?

0:15.0

Yeah, it's an excellent podcast and I've been listening to it for a while.

0:18.0

Yeah, you're a listener. Yeah. I love this show. Every week they go back in time to understand the present because you can't

0:25.2

fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been, right?

0:28.4

Very true.

0:29.4

And on every episode of NPR's throughline, the host take a story from the news and go back to where it started.

0:35.0

They seek to answer one important question, how did we get here?

0:38.4

It's interesting stuff.

0:39.6

They have some amazing topics I think our audience will find intriguing.

0:42.6

There was a recent one about the scientist who tried to stop the aging process

0:46.6

because he deemed old age to be a disease that he could cure.

0:50.5

So it gets into all kinds of weird stuff.

0:53.0

Eternal youth, our fear of aging, our fear of death,

0:56.0

that traces his feelings back thousands of years.

0:58.0

It's remarkable discussion.

1:00.0

So very cool stuff.

1:01.0

If you're interested in learning about how the past informs the present,

1:04.7

you'll love the Thru Line podcast from NPR. On NPR's Thru Line, the Past is brought back to life

1:10.8

and listeners get to go inside the stories from then that

1:13.7

shaped the world we live in now. Past is shrouded in mystery, correct Steve?

1:17.8

It is. To understand it you have to get up close and reveal what may have gone

...

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