Peter Saul.docx

Peter Saul:Lets talk about dying00:11 Look, I had second thoughts, really, about whether I could talk about this to such a vital and alive audience as you guys. Then I remembered the quote from Gloria Steinem, which goes, The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. So –00:31 So with that in mind, Im going to set about trying to do those things here, and talk about dying in the 21st century. Now the first thing that will piss you off, undoubtedly, is that all of us are, in fact, going to die in the 21st century. There will be no exceptions to that. There are, apparently, about one in eight of you who think youre immortal, on surveys, but -- (Laughter) Unfortunately, that isnt going to happen. 00:57 While I give this talk, in the next 10 minutes, a hundred million of my cells will die, and over the course of today, 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back, so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in the piece. 01:11 Anyway, the second thing I want to say about dying in the 21st century, apart from its going to happen to everybody, is its shaping up to be a bit of a train wreck for most of us, unless we do something to try and reclaim this process from the rather inexorable trajectory that its currently on. 01:27 So there you go. Thats the truth. No doubt that will piss you off, and now lets see whether we can set you free. I dont promise anything. Now, as you heard in the intro, I work in intensive care, and I think Ive kind of lived through the heyday of intensive care. Its been a ride, man. This has been fantastic. We have machines that go ping. Theres many of them up there. And we have some wizard technology which I think has worked really well, and over the course of the time Ive worked in intensive care, the death rate for males in Australia has halved, and intensive care has had something to do with that. Certainly, a lot of the technologies that we use have got something to do with that. 02:01 So we have had tre