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PODCAST

When We Die Talks

When We Die Talks is a collection of real conversations with real people about death, meaning, and what it’s like to be human.Each week, host Zach Ancell speaks with an anonymous caller. It begins with one question: What do you think happens when we die? From there, the conversation goes wherever it goes. Belief. Doubt. Loss. Relief. Fear. Sometimes even laughter.These aren’t experts or public figures. Just everyday people saying the quiet parts out loud. The result is raw, unpredictable, and deeply

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

63:27

Anonymous #53 — What Would It Take to Accept That...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/10/06

The caller was five or six when they started lying awake at night, scared of death. What frightened them was the idea of not existing at all. That wasn't something a kid could bring up to adults, so they mostly thought about it alone. Around the same time, their mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was the 1980s, and nobody explained much to the kids. When the cancer came back years later, the caller figured she'd get better, because she had before. A few days before their 14th birthday, ...

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47:27

Anonymous #52 — Can You Grieve Without Suffering?

When We Die Talks ·

2026/09/29

Content note: This episode includes open, direct discussion of suicide, including details of the caller finding their son after his death and the caller's own suicidal thoughts in the months that followed. If you are not in a place to listen to this one, that's ok. This week's caller is a psychic medium who spends their days holding space for other people's pain. Ten months before we spoke, they lost their 21-year-old son. For the first five months, they cried every day. Their brain sti...

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54:31

Anonymous #51 — Why Does Talking About Death Sound So...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/09/22

Content note: This conversation talks openly about drug addiction, recovery, overdoses, and near-death experiences. The subjects are heavy, but the call itself is warm, curious, and funny in places. If today isn't the right day for it, that's okay. The first time it happened, the power went out in the bathroom where the caller had collapsed, and their phone dropped into SOS mode. Nothing else in the house lost power. They've been asking what that meant ever since, and the question of energy a...

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59:24

Anonymous #50 — Is It Okay to Have Made Peace With...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/09/15

Content note: This conversation includes discussion around a terminal diagnosis and a period of chronic suicidality. If you aren't in the right space for this today, that's ok. This week's caller is the other half of last week's conversation, the one living inside the diagnosis instead of beside it. They have a former colleague who once opened a tense workplace meeting with three words: I believe everybody. That idea has stuck with them ever since, and it shapes how they think about death now...

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60:56

Anonymous #49 — Is It Okay to Need Them to Stay When...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/09/08

Our caller's framework for what happens after we die starts with basic physics: energy can't be created or destroyed. From there, they work backward. If someone survives a traumatic brain injury and comes out unable to remember who they used to be, wanting different things than they did before, are they still the same person? Our caller thinks so. Just changed. It's the same logic they apply to death itself. Their partner has a terminal illness, and has had it since before the two of them met...

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51:28

Anonymous #48 — Would You Believe a Sign From the...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/09/01

The caller was raised by two atheist parents who explained death the way you'd explain any other natural process: you die, you break down, you go back into the earth. They never fully believed it. Their grandmother offered something else, reincarnation, and the caller spent years circling that belief instead, even as they kept collecting moments that didn't fit cleanly into either story. The strangest one came from their own child, three years old at the time, who had a sudden and vivid memor...

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55:04

Anonymous #47 — When Someone Dies Why Does Everyone...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/08/25

A note before we start: This episode includes discussion of a suicidal crisis and the loss of a pregnancy. If that's more than you can take in today, that's okay, come back to this one when you're ready. The caller keeps their twin daughters' ashes inside a teddy bear on a shelf beside their bed. Most mornings, they say good morning. The girls' names were Scarlet and Violet, named, in part, for Pokémon. Long before that loss, the caller had already been thinking about how to speak to someone ...

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61:16

Anonymous #46 — Can You Hope for an Afterlife That...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/08/18

Content note: This episode includes discussion of suicide, physician-assisted death, psychosis, and serious illness. The caller and their late partner met when they were nineteen. For the better part of a decade they were each other's person, the one you call with good news, bad news, or at 4am when you can't stop thinking about what it will feel like to stop existing. For most of that time, the caller was the one afraid of death. Their partner wasn't. Then their partner, searching for anythi...

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53:31

Anonymous #45 — How Would You Know If a Message From...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/08/04

Our caller was sitting in a college class when a professor, mid-lecture, turned and looked directly at them and asked what it might have been like to be sheltered with your partner under a mantle in Pompeii, watching ash come down. The caller says every hair on their arm stood up. That was the professor's window into something he already suspected about them. Years later, at an artist market, a stranger asked for a reading. The caller doesn't usually charge, and doesn't usually push, but some...

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51:02

Anonymous #44 — What Do You Lose When You Carry Other...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/07/28

Content note: this episode centers on suicide loss, discussed directly. If that's not something you're in a place for today, it's okay to sit this one out. Our caller found their housemate in the home they shared, staged in a way that made sure they'd be the one to find him. He'd also been their romantic partner at one point, and one of their closest friends. The application that got them on this call was written about a month shy of the one-year mark. They used to believe in ghosts, built on...

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51:39

Anonymous #43 — Is Being Forgotten Worse Than Dying?

When We Die Talks ·

2026/07/21

This week's caller calls themself a radical death advocate. Not because they think dying is good, but because they see it as a part of the life cycle we're better off accepting than fighting. They're mostly at peace with the first death, the physical one. It's the second death, the one where your name stops being spoken, that they're still working through. From there the conversation moves through an ofrenda they keep in their home for a close friend they lost suddenly last year, and what it ...

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55:48

Anonymous #42 — Who Takes Care of the Person Who Is...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/07/14

This week's caller was diagnosed as a type one diabetic when they were 22 months old. They've spent their entire life managing something that can genuinely kill them in either direction, and death has been a fact of daily life rather than a distant idea. From there the conversation moves fast and wide. A reference to Coco and what it means to be remembered. The Big Bang and where the energy to start it came from. Consciousness, and why science still can't explain it. Being raised Catholic and...

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57:20

Anonymous #41 — If Life Comes from Death, What if...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/07/07

This caller was born into death. Their mother survived a rare, near-fatal condition as an infant only because a doctor happened to be at the house that day, checking on a dying sister. That's the reason this caller exists at all and it sets the tone for everything that follows. From there, the conversation opens into a full cosmology the caller has been building for years: reflections in a bubble, a lava lamp as a model of consciousness, the Mandelbrot set and what fractals might have to do w...

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55:36

Anonymous #40 — Does It Matter What You Believe About...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/06/30

This caller doesn't come from a place of loss. They come from a place of curiosity, and a theory they've spent years quietly assembling. It starts with reincarnation. But not the straightforward kind. Not a linear return to another body in the next moment. The caller imagines all points in time as equally available. Past, present, future. When you die, you pick a new life from any of them. From there, the conversation moves into the one electron theory: the idea that a single electron might b...

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55:32

Anonymous #39 — Can You Stop Needing to Know What...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/06/23

This episode includes an open and personal conversation about suicide, suicidal ideation, and suicidality, including experiences from childhood. If you're in a tender place with any of these themes, please take care of yourself first. If you need support, Thrive Lifeline is a great resource. This caller has spent most of their life in relationship with death, and they'll tell you that relationship started before they had words for it. A first-generation Filipino American who grew up wit...

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56:08

Anonymous #38 — What Happens to Your Own Life While...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/06/16

This week's caller grew up in a Roman Catholic household where death was treated as simply another part of life. Something to be at peace with rather than afraid of. But the conversation quickly turns to something that's shaped most of their adult life: being the one who shows up. From early childhood spent in chemo waiting rooms to becoming, at 16, the family member who could see what others couldn't (or wouldn't) admit was happening to aging parents and grandparents, this caller has spent y...

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47:49

Anonymous #37 — Can Faith Change What It's Like to Be...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/06/09

This week's caller is a retired physician who spent decades at the bedside of dying patients and now works at a funeral home. They have been present for death on both sides: as the person trying to slow it down, and as the person who shows up after. Somewhere in all of that, faith became the thing that held it all together. This is a conversation about what it looks like to build an entire life around proximity to death and come out the other side more certain, not less. We talk about the dif...

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42:06

Anonymous #36 — Does the Fear of Death Go Away, or Do...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/06/02

This week's caller is 79 years old and has spent the last three years going down every rabbit hole death has to offer. All in service of a book that's about to come out. They have lost a husband and a mother. They have survived breast cancer. And somewhere in all of that, they stopped being afraid of dying and started being afraid of being dead. This is a conversation between two people who have ended up in surprisingly similar places on a topic most people won't touch. We talk about what it ...

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52:00

Anonymous #35 — How Do You Keep Loving People When...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/05/12

This week's caller was diagnosed with a terminal illness at eight years old. They have never not known that death was part of their life. They are an actor, a writer, a reader, a person who rescues snails and keeps a pet millipede and loves sharks because they understand what it feels like to be misunderstood. They are also someone who has spent their entire life figuring out how to live fully inside a body that makes that complicated. This is a conversation about what it looks like to choose...

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48:40

Anonymous #34 — Can The Losses That Broke You As A...

When We Die Talks ·

2026/05/05

This week's caller is a pediatric nurse who has been around death long enough to stop fearing it and start getting curious about it. They lost their father to suicide as a teenager. A few months later, they were the one doing CPR on their childhood best friend after an accidental fentanyl overdose. They were sixteen. They didn't become a nurse because of those losses exactly, but those losses made them someone who couldn't look away. This is a conversation about what it looks like when death ...

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90 results

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