What's Worth Living For? | Dr. Atul Gawande

Hey everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I am your host, Dan Harris. As a Buddhist, I am simultaneously galvanized by and terrified by uh the unavoidable fact of death. Galvanized uh because being aware of your mortality can make life more vivid and vibrant in the present moment, and terrified because like who's not afraid of dying.

Today, though, I'm talking to a very famous doctor who argues that we can make this process, which again is coming for all of us, much more humane. Dr. Atul Gawande is a renowned surgeon, a Harvard professor, a writer for The New Yorker, and the best-selling author of many, many books, including uh the one we're going to focus on today, which is called Being Mortal. Now you might be thinking, didn't Being Mortal come out in 2014? Uh yes, it did.

But that was before I had a podcast, and I've been meaning to have Dr. Gwande on the show for a long time. And then I found an excuse because just a few months ago, the New York Times listed Being Mortal as one of the top five books that will lift you up in hard times. Which reminded me that I wanted to have uh Dr. Gwande on.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (61 minutes, 9,560 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.