Yeah, so I was running my own business, was interested in all of these meditation things and I was just like, “Hey, I’m not doing this. That’s my favorite thing, “Don’t forget you’re going to die” is my favorite thing every day. I just want to say, I just got a thing from WeCroak. The stuff downstairs at Vox Media that they give to the millennials. I’ve been an entrepreneur for about six years and I have a PR business that I still have that mostly does work in natural foods. Like, right central trunk current of absolutely how you’d do mindfulness. This is absolutely important.”Īnd I even read, you know, some old texts that stated that, of the 40 different kinds of meditation, there are only two that are always beneficial: the cultivation of kindness and the recollection of death. You know, “my body will be like that decomposing body one day.”Īnd there’s also stories of, you know, the Buddha using his actual death as a teaching moment to say, “Hey, look at me, you know, this will happen to you too. Everything from meditating in charnel grounds, which are places where bodies decompose, to get a sense of why you repeat mantras. Going way back thousands of years, this practice of different ways of recalling your mortality and death have been part of mindfulness and meditation techniques taught in many different ways for a long time. Yeah, well, it started really because I’m a meditator and have been for a little while and death recollection meditations are just part of what meditation has been supposed to be about. So talk a little bit about your background and how you got to create this. Now, obviously getting older and things like that. They’re in a much more grave, so to speak, point of view lately. I want to sort of get a sense of the entire business, because there’s been a lot of interesting mortality stuff going around Silicon Valley these days. I talk about it all the time and I posted, the quotes are fantastic. Every day the app sends you five invitations to stop and think about death. Today in the red chair is Hansa Bergwall, the founder of WeCroak, which is my favorite app that I absolutely love and I talk about all the time and I post pictures of it. You may know me as a mightily morbid media mogul, but in my spare time I talk tech and you’re listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Kara Swisher: Hi, I’m Kara Swisher, editor-at-large of Recode. You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast.īelow, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with Hansa. On the new podcast, he also talked about the “deluded” ways Silicon Valley is trying to hack death and why tech moguls who encourage employees to meditate may be tricking them into working longer hours. Because we take the responsibility of reminding people of their mortality, which is a vulnerable thing, seriously.” But we’re not gonna make a button encouraging you to do that. If you feel safe there, great, take it there. “We know what social media is: It’s addictive,” he said. They designed WeCroak to have no advertising or hooks to social media, lest they cheapen the experience or compromise their own values. The app, which uses a picture of a poison dart frog as its logo, is based on a Bhutanese folk saying: “To be a truly happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.” It pushes quotes about death, loss, and acceptance to users at five randomly selected times every day, between 7:00 am and 10:00 pm.īergwall said he and his cofounder, Ian Thomas, are proud that their 30,000 monthly users spend less than two minutes in the app daily. I don’t have time for this.’ And move on.” And when we remember our mortality, we can take a deep breath and just go, ‘Oh, I don’t have to think about this. “We tend to get caught up in an angry voice or in minutiae or in stress or in tons of things that ultimately aren’t that important to us. “One of the things that makes us most unhappy is we tend to get caught up in things that don’t matter,” Bergwall said. On the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, WeCroak co-founder Hansa Bergwall joined Kara in studio to talk about his app, which reminds you about death five times a day.
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