The Adventures of Memento Mori: A Cynic's Guide for Learning to Live by Remembering to Die is podcast exploring the science, mysticism, culture and mystery of death. Satirical and philosophical, the show follows host, D.S. Moss, as he attempts to reconcile his own impermanence and live a more meaningful life. Problem is, life keeps getting in the way.
2.8: Be Happy or Die Trying Are you the happiest version of you you can be? Are negative thoughts and feeling keeping you from this? What if I were to tell you the only thing keeping you from living your true bliss is you! In this episode D.S. Moss gives you the secret of how the practice of Memento Mori will help you achieve happiness beyond your wildest dreams. The happiness you can feel with every single breath you take. The happiness, my friends, that you deserve. Guests include Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle is the Way and Oliver Burkeman author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.
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Are you the happiest version of you you can be? Are negative thoughts and feeling keeping you from this? What if I were to tell you the only thing keeping you from living your true bliss is you! In this episode D.S. Moss gives you the secret of how the practice of Memento Mori will help you achieve happiness beyond your wildest dreams. The happiness you can feel with every single breath you take. The happiness, my friends, that you deserve. Guests include Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle is the Way and Oliver Burkeman author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.
This episode is about Texas, a boy and his dog and the unthinkable and inevitable decision that comes to almost all pet owners. D.S. Moss confronts “How do you know when it’s time to make the decision to say goodbye? to a four-legged family member.?”If you're a person with a pet, know a person with a pet, or just like a sad ‘ol country song - this episode confronts the toughest conversation yet and provides insights for those that must eventually face that same decision.
Ever written an obituary? Yeah, neither had D.S. Moss. In this episode, Moss is asked to write a memorial to his grandfather with the challenge of a limited word count. How do you capture a person’s life in two paragraphs? And, what exactly is the purpose of an obit? Is it a matter of record or a legacy statement? To make it even more awkward, his grandfather is actually still alive and will be proofreading. Worried he’ll fuck it up, Moss enlists a professional NY Times journalist to help write his first obituary.
The adventure into the afterlife continues with Hindu and Vodou. In this episode, D.S. Moss sits down with a former Vedic monk and a bottle of mezcal to discuss the divine consciousness and taking monumental leaps of faith. Then Moss heads down to the city of New Orleans to chat with a Vodou (Voodoo) priestess where he discovers things are rarely as they seem.
While on his imagined death bed, Zen Buddhist Chaplain Trudi Hirsh-Abramson suggests D.S. Moss would make a good chaplain. The problem is - and it’s a big problem - Moss is religionless. In a three part mini-series, Moss sits down with a priest, pastor, priestess, monk, imam and rabbi to explore their religious belief systems, views on the afterlife and if, in fact, he can find a religion of his own.
He begins with Jesus and the Buddha.
After discovering that the fear of death is the worm at the core of the human condition, D.S. Moss stands quivering on the threshold of psychological oblivion. He figures the best way out of this state of anxiety is to actually experience his own passing (obviously). In this episode, Moss crawls into his deathbed and is taken to total body failure with the hope that upon return he’ll have a new perspective on life.
D.S. Moss comes back from the jungle for more adventures in death, yo. Life coach turned death coach, Devin Martin, gets filled in on Moss’ post-psychedelic reflections. This leads Moss to the ultimate question: how to live life with psychological anxiety of knowing you’re going to die? To help answer this question, Moss gets social psychology professor and egghead crush Sheldon Solomon on the horn to discuss if the fear of death truly is the worm at humanity’s core.
The inaugural episode of The Adventures of Memento Mori finds Moss administratively making death preparations. Who keeps the dog, when to pull the plug, what will happen to his body, and who will dj his funeral? Special guest include Everplans.com, Cynthia Beal of Natural Burial Company, and life coach Devin Martin. Listen.
In this episode of The Adventures of Memento Mori, D.S. Moss enlists the help of medium and intuition coach, Psychic Betsy to conduct a seance in hopes of summoning a particular spirit to reconcile a mysterious twenty-year-old question. What he receives instead only pulls him deeper into the quest for enlightenment. Listen.
In the third installment of The Adventures of Memento Mori, D.S. Moss goes on the road in the Immortality Bus with Presidential hopeful Zoltan Istvan of the Transhumanist Party and gets educated on the jaw dropping, mind blowing, and venture capitalist funded movement in the science of living forever. Listen.
Episode 4 takes Moss on an adventure into the mind where portals (may or may not) open to past lives. After being told by a palm reader that he'll never find true love in this lifetime because of karmic debt, Moss enlists the help of hypnotist and regression therapist , Daniel Ryan to regress him way back back back to search for answers. No matter what you believe his regression is certainly a trip. Listen
In the fifth episode of The Adventures of Memento Mori, D.S. Moss sits for coffee with photojournalist and documentarian Micah Garen, co-author of American Hostage, who recounts his kidnapping in Iraq and his struggle to survive - All leading to how this traumatic experience has changed the way he lives his life today. It's good stuff. Listen.
In this two part series, D.S. Moss travels out west to San Francisco for an interview with Thoughts in Passing artist Claudia Biçen. Convinced that the dying would have the answer to how we should be living, Claudia spent two years interviewing 9 people on their deathbed about their lives while drawing a life-size portrait of each of them. In part 1 we hear the interviews of five subjects along with the artist's motivation for the project.
In part 2, we hear the interviews of the remaining four subjects along with the artist's insights. In this two part episode, D.S. Moss travels out west to San Francisco for an interview with Thoughts in Passing artist Claudia Biçen. Convinced that the dying would have the answer to how we should be living, Claudia spent two years interviewing 9 people on their deathbed about their lives while drawing a life-size portrait of each of them.
As D.S. seeks to distance himself from his digital doppelgänger—a porn star who chose “Devin Moss” as his nom de plume—he is led down the digital rabbit hole of what happens to our internet identities after we die. D.S. talks to experts about curating a thriving social media presence from beyond the grave, managing his digital assets, valuing his digital estate, and securing his online presence. Begging the question, what sort of digital legacy do you want to leave behind? Listen
Take a break from the present and travel into the past and future with D.S. Moss as he explores what caused the earth’s previous 5 mass extinctions and what will cause the next. Join us for part one of our two-part episode as we go from the age of dinosaurs to Moss’s 1980’s Idaho childhood covering cataclysmic events like super volcanoes, “Death Plunge” asteroids, alien attack, and the wrath of God.
Finally! Something clicked. It took everyone on the planet dying - the end of the human race - for D.S. Moss to emotionally comprehend his own death and feel the preciousness of life. The feeling, however, isn't all good. Now he's forced to reconcile being part of a species that would create nuclear warheads, biowarfare, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and emit more CO2 than any of the previous mass extinctions. Well, he asked for it.
What? Death being positive? How can that be? Still hungover from Mass Extinction, D.S. Moss goes in search of some positivity and discovers the movement that’s sweeping the nation; Death Positivity. The quest takes him to a death-centric open mic, tea time at the Morbid Anatomy Museum, the home of a progressive funeral director and an intellectual baptism into The Order of the Good Death. ♥‿♥ Listen.
D.S. Moss unplugs from the steady stream of media fuzz to go on a spirit journey in the Peruvian jungle. However, after two weeks of peace, quite and psychedelics, he feels compelled to go home and feed his dog. Once reconnected into the fuzz, he’s caught off guard by the unrelenting reports and images of death in the news. Has the world become more violent? What effect does seeing death in news have on our behavior? And, is it his responsibility as a global citizen to bear witness to images of death across the world even if its at the expense of his own happiness?
In part one of the podcast finale, D.S. Moss physically & mentally prepares for his psychedelic ego death trip. Psychologist and psychedelic guru Dr. Neal Goldsmith joins the show to discuss how death influences the psychedelic experience. Devin Martin, life (and death) coach extraordinaire returns and cracks open the D.S. Moss shell to expose the gooey marshmallow center where his heart used to be and crafts the 7 ayahuasca ceremony intentions that will (hopefully) reprogram Moss’s less than healthy approach to LOVE and SUCCESS. It's like a blissful car crash.
Part two of the podcast finale joins D.S. Moss in the jungles of Peru at the Temple of the Way of Light where he attempts to kill his ego through a series of seven ayahuasca ceremonies. Life Coach turned Death coach, Devin Martin, returns to guide Moss in his intensions for what turns out to be the finale of finales. If you’re even slightly curious as to how a psychedelic experience sounds, click…Listen
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The three-part series into religions and their beliefs in the afterlife comes to a close with the Abrahamic traditions. The conversation begins with NYU’s Islamic Chaplain where Moss revisits the draw to change his life and become a chaplain. Still faithless, he talks with a mystic Rabbi who literally wrote the book on the Jewish beliefs in the afterlife. In this surprise ending, Moss takes the biggest leap of faith yet.