Podbit · Modern Wisdom
By the time surgeons opened Ben Askren's chest, his dead lung tissue had essentially glued itself to his rib cage. The surgeon said it was the worst lung transplant she had ever performed — she had to scrape the old lungs off the inside of his chest cavity before the new ones could go in.
Where this was said
At 9:28 · chapter starts 8:27
The chapter zooms in on June 6th 2025 — the day friends accompanying Ben in Las Vegas, including a doctor and a nurse, determined he would not survive a local hospital and arranged an emergency flight to the CVICU in Milwaukee. To transport him, Ben's body was fully paralysed. On arrival, he was placed on ECMO, with approximately a 40% chance of ever coming off it. Ben was not conscious for any of this — he is reconstructing it from his wife's journal and others' accounts. [1] — Ben Askren "When Ben was flown back to Milwaukee on June 6th last year, doctors had to fully paralyse him for transport. On arrival, they put him on EC…" 01:00 To contextualise how bad it was, he recounts meeting a fellow patient at a routine check-up: a man who had spent 9 months in hospital, received a double lung transplant, immediately had one lung reject, and ended up with two different lungs from two different donors. Ben says he always tries to remember that as grim as his situation was, it could always have been worse — and at the end of the day, he could simply not be here at all.
AI nailed Andrew Huberman's vertigo-vs-low-blood-pressure diagnosis because that pattern has been reported millions of times. But every patient's liver is different and data on liver surgeries is scarce worldwide — making solo robot surgery dangerous. The rule is simple: data abundance means AI can help; data scarcity means keep the human in the loop.
Fei-Fei Li's father had liver surgery performed by a da Vinci robot guided by a surgeon. The result: 10 times less blood loss than a typical procedure. This isn't replacement — it's the gold standard of human-machine collaboration, where the human's judgment and the robot's precision combine.
US drug overdose deaths fell from 110,000 to roughly 70,000 — the biggest CDC-recorded single-year drop ever. Men's rates fell 27% in one year, and the steepest decline of all was among 15–24-year-olds, down 37%. The crisis narrative around young men needs to make room for signs of genuine progress.
Kessler thought his grief expertise would protect him. It didn't. When his son David died unexpectedly, he found himself on the floor — and eventually realized that acceptance alone wasn't enough. That unmet need became the sixth stage: finding meaning.
Grief isn't just death — it's any unwanted change. Kessler lectured at Coca-Cola and General Mills not because they had lots of funerals, but because change management is grief management. People who grieve well live well.
Witnessing someone's grief isn't just emotional support — it's an essential act of healing. Kessler argues grief is a severance and connection heals it. But real witnessing has two steps: seeing the pain AND affirming the person's capacity to recover.
Avoiding grief isn't free — it's exhausting. Kessler's beach ball metaphor nails it: pushing a small balloon down is easy, but holding a massive beach ball underwater takes constant, draining energy. Unattended feelings don't disappear; they just consume you.
Most people try to control their environment to avoid triggers. Kessler flips this entirely: triggers aren't problems to manage around — they're a detailed map to your pain and your healing. Every trigger points directly to what needs attention.
Running from pain doesn't leave it behind — it accelerates the chase. Whatever we run from pursues us, and whatever we face transforms us. Both Kessler and Lewis Howes testify to knowing both roads firsthand.
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