Death & Disco

Death & Disco is the podcast where we explore how truly embracing death can lead to a more meaningful, magical and radically alive life. Host Emily brings together researchers, healers, mystics, scientists and everyday people with extraordinary perspectives on mortality — because the conversations society avoids most are often the ones we need most urgently. We go deep on physical death and grief, the metaphorical deaths of ego and identity, and the profound cost of our collective denial — how running from death keeps us hustling, dividing, and sleepwalking through the one life we have. We sit with the evidence from near-death experiences, psychedelic research, ancient philosophy and neuroscience that facing death doesn't diminish life. It explodes it open. Because no one gets out of here alive. So we might as well enjoy the ride. Death & Disco — dance 'til you die vibes.

Death & Disco is a education podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 0 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Death & Disco, a education show with 0 episodes published.

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  Episode #9

  The Cards That Crack Us Open: Talking About Death Before It Talks to Us with Lisa Pahl

  Sep 9, 202653 minS2

  Emily sits down with Lisa Pahl, CEO and Creator of The Death Deck, for a conversation about what happens when we finally say the thing out loud. Lisa has spent nearly 20 years in hospice and about eight in the ER, and what she witnessed over and over was the same quiet catastrophe: families forced to make impossible decisions on behalf of someone they love, with no idea what that person actually wanted. So in 2018 she partnered with Lori Lo Cicero, the spouse of a former hospice patient, and built a card game. Multiple choice questions. A friendly little skull. Humor as the way in. Because as Lisa puts it, even though we think we don't want to talk about death and dying, we actually do. The conversation goes exactly where you'd hope. Lisa reads a question from the deck live, Emily wrestles with it, and both women end up somewhere honest about what it would mean to know your own expiration date. They talk about the difference between mortality awareness and knowing the actual calendar square, about the battle and warrior language we drape over illness that makes it nearly impossible to ask a dying person what they want, and about the clinicians who should be starting these conversations and often don't. Emily shares the regret that still sits with her: Ian dying in front of her while the conversation stayed stuck in the room like an elephant nobody would name. Lisa shares her own humbling, caring for her mother-in-law in hospice and realizing she could not give anyone the perfect death, because it was never hers to give. They also get practical, which is rare in this genre. How do you bring this up with parents who just turned 70? Complete your own advance directive first, then use it as the doorway. Use a TV show. Use a podcast episode. Use whatever medium the person you love already speaks. Lisa walks through her three decks, The Death Deck for mortality awareness, the EOL Deck for people living with serious illness, and the Dementia Deck for advance planning around the most feared diagnosis in the country. And she names the secondary gain nobody expects from a game about dying: when people talk about real things, they stop performing, and connection shows up. As Lisa says near the end, this felt really good, so go out and talk about real stuff. Key Takeaways ● Peace at the end starts with the conversations we're willing to have right now, not the ones we hope to have later. ● Humor is not disrespect. Lisa built The Death Deck with multiple choice questions and a friendly skull specifically to make the topic approachable, and found that once people start, they rarely want to stop. ● Warrior and fighter language around illness can make it nearly impossible to ask someone what they'd want if the fight doesn't go their way, which is exactly why timing and receptivity matter so much. ● The burden should not fall on the family alone. Lisa argues end-of-life professionals need more courage to directly initiate advance directive and planning conversations with patients. ● Grief support is hard for most people because supporting a griever means acknowledging that we too will die. ● If a goodbye didn't happen the way you needed, it isn't closed forever. Emily talks openly about returning to that moment through healing work and rewriting the story in her heart. Host, Emily Bingham ● Podcast Website: https://iamemilybingham.com/ ● Emily on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamemilybingham/ ● Join the YOLO Year Waitlist: https://iamemilybingham.com/yolo-waitlist ● Emily on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/i-am-emily-bingham/ Connect with Lisa Pahl ● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedeathdeck/ ● Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedeathdeck/ ● TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thedeathdeck ● The Death Deck: https://thedeathdeck.com/ ● The Death Deck on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0aktSuXG If this conversation moved something in you, leave a review and send it to the person you've been avoiding this conversation with. #DeathAndDisco #DeathMedicine #NoOneGetsOutAlive #EmilyBingham #LoveAndGrief #TheDeathDeck #LisaPahl #HospiceCare #AdvanceCarePlanning #DeathPositive #MortalityAwareness #GriefSupport #EndOfLifeConversations #DementiaAwareness Mentioned in this episode: Sign up for Coaching! 1:1 coaching

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  Episode #8

  Money and Mortality: Mastering the Six Money Games with Jess McKinley Uyeno

  Aug 26, 20261h 6mS2

  Money might be the only subject more taboo than death, and Emily Bingham brings both to the same table this week with Jess McKinley Uyeno, a mentor to women who went from being a broke single mom to buying mansions and working 10-hour work weeks. Jess teaches women how to master their money in a playful yet financially literate way through what she calls the six money games. She and Emily met on a two-hour bus ride in Puerto Rico, and the connection was immediate: a shared, visceral gratitude for existence that Jess traces directly back to contemplating her own mortality. This conversation lives in duality. Life is only sweet because of the promise of death. Money both totally matters and totally doesn't. Jess walks through the metaphysical death that reshaped her, the dissolution of her marriage and the future she thought was guaranteed, and how facing that loss forced her to confront a financial life she had quietly handed over to someone else. Out of that isolation came an obsession with financial literacy, an unwillingness to identify as a broke single mom, and the radical practice of believing in a future with zero evidence it was possible. Together Emily and Jess unpack the subtraction effect, the difference between needs and wants, the six money games (earning, spending, saving, investing, net worth, and giving), and why selling is serving. They get honest about scarcity, plan A versus plan Z, and the deathbed question that cuts through it all: what is a life well lived. It is fierce, funny, financially literate, and unafraid to say the quiet part out loud, that money matters, and that remembering you are not promised tomorrow is the fastest way to live like it. Key Takeaways ● The opposite of a universal truth is also true: money both matters and doesn't matter, and you get to hold both at once instead of toggling between them. ● Contemplating your mortality is the easiest, fastest path to presence and gratitude, no loss required to start the work. ● There are more money games than earning. Master all six: earning, spending, saving, investing, net worth, and giving. ● Refuse to identify with where you are financially. You cannot out-action an identity you believe is who you are right now. ● Believing in a future with zero evidence is the most underrated skill there is, and community makes it contagious. ● Distinguish real needs from wants, never take on debt you have no plan to eliminate, and put your full energy into plan A before you reach for plan Z. Connect Host, Emily Bingham ● Podcast Website: https://iamemilybingham.com/ ● Emily on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamemilybingham/ ● Join the YOLO Year Waitlist: https://iamemilybingham.com/yolo-waitlist ● Emily on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/i-am-emily-bingham/ Guest: Jess McKinley Uyeno, Mentor ● Website: https://www.sincerelyfutureyou.com/ ● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessmckinleyuyeno/ ● LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manningjessica/ ● Podcast: Fun Money Podcast: https://www.sincerelyfutureyou.com/podcast #DeathAndDisco #DeathMedicine #NoOneGetsOutAlive #EmilyBingham #LoveAndGrief #Money #Mortality #FinancialLiteracy #SixMoneyGames #YOLO #Abundance #WomenAndMoney Mentioned in this episode: Sign up for Coaching! 1:1 coaching

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  Episode #7

  Death, Love, and the Return to Community: Why We Grieve Better Together with Lauren Carroll

  Aug 12, 20261 hourS2

  Emily Bingham sits down with Lauren Carroll, a death educator, former funeral director, and co-founder of La Mort and the Death Wives, whose work weaves community and family back into the death space. What begins as one woman's terror of cemeteries becomes a lifelong devotion after a single, shattering assignment: at 21, working a typewriter in the back corner of a funeral home, Lauren was sent to collect a stillborn baby from a hospital. Shaking, nauseous, certain she could not do it, she instead felt an overwhelming wave of calm and love pour out of the child she cradled. In that moment her fear of death dissolved into a truth she has carried ever since: it's just love. This continuation of love. From that origin story, Emily and Lauren move into the heart of the conversation. They talk about why grief so often buries the love underneath it, why our culture's refusal to sit with the dead leaves us with what Lauren calls lingering, ghosty grief, and why community, not avoidance, is the thing that actually heals. Lauren makes the case that loneliness is an unspoken epidemic, that unprocessed grief curdles into the violence and division we see everywhere, and that our ancestors already knew how to tend their own dead, make bread for neighbors, and mark death with ritual. Along the way she introduces legacy work and the Jewish tradition of the ethical will, reframing the deathbed fear that our lives didn't matter. In the second half, Lauren shares her own diagnosis with a rare terminal disease and the ceremonial psilocybin journey that changed her, crying for six hours and emerging, as those around her put it, a different person. She and Emily explore psilocybin as a way to lower the defenses around dying, the deep prep and integration the medicine requires, and mushrooms as decomposers and ancestral communicators. They close with the ecological cost of our death practices, the greener options of water cremation and human composting, and a shared conviction that giving our bodies back to the earth is the last, most beautiful gift we have to offer. Key Takeaways ● Fear of death often masks love. Lauren's transformation came the moment she felt the love a stillborn baby carried, realizing death is a continuation of love, not its end. ● Grief is not low vibration to be avoided. Your body is built to grieve, and surrendering into it, even sobbing for hours, is what actually brings relief and integration. ● We are meant to grieve in community. Direct cremation and avoidance rob us of the funerals, vigils, and rituals that let people reconnect and heal loneliness. ● Small rituals matter. A blessing over the body, a gong or candle at the threshold, an ethical will passing down your beliefs, these bookmarks help the heart and mind catch up with each other. ● Psilocybin can lower the defenses around dying. Done with intention, prep, and integration (never heroic doses), it opens the heart and helps end-of-life workers process their own grief before holding space for others. ● Our death practices can heal or harm the planet. Fire cremation and conventional burial damage the earth, while water cremation and human composting let the body return as fertilizer and continued life. Resources Mentioned ● Terror management theory / Sheldon Solomon (previous Death and Disco guest) ● The Death Cafe ● The ethical will (Jewish legacy tradition) ● A blessing by Starhawk for tending the body after death ● Sage Warrior (book referenced in Lauren's classes) ● Hope Edelman on how the facts stay the same but the story changes ● The Mushroom and the Cross and The Secret Religion (on mushrooms and the origins of religion) Connect Host, Emily Bingham ● Podcast Website: https://iamemilybingham.com/ ● Emily on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamemilybingham/ ● Join the YOLO Year Waitlist: https://iamemilybingham.com/yolo-waitlist ● Emily on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/i-am-emily-bingham/ Guest, Lauren Carroll (La Mort and the Death Wives) ● Website: https://lamort.org ● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deathwives/ , https://www.instagram.com/lamortcollective/ ● Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lauren.harrisoncarroll/ ● LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-carroll-deathwives/ #DeathAndDisco #DeathMedicine #NoOneGetsOutAlive #EmilyBingham #LoveAndGrief Mentioned in this episode: Sign up for Coaching! 1:1 coaching

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  Episode #6

  Widow in the City: Grief, Desire, and the Sensual Reawakening of Midlife with Amy Gabrielle

  Jul 22, 202652 minS2

  This week Emily welcomes her OG client and widow sister, Amy Gabrielle, an author, writer, and digital creator who has spent the last four years turning the wreckage of loss into a body of work that refuses to be sanitized. The two met shortly after Amy's husband, Steven, died in 2021, when Amy joined Emily's very first widow's retreat. Now, at the release of her memoir Widow in the City: A Memoir of Heartbreaks and Hookups, Amy returns to trace the whole arc: caretaking Steven through three years of terminal cancer, parenting her neurodivergent son alone, and stumbling into an unexpected sensual awakening that cracked her wide open. What follows is a hot, honest, and deeply human conversation about what grief actually does to a body and an identity. Amy talks about the year she gave herself permission to "be crazy," the $1,000 winter coat, the iPhone and tripod she used to photograph herself in lingerie, the double life she led behind a picture-perfect Columbia University finance job. She and Emily name the question that haunts so many widows: do I even exist anymore when the one person who truly saw me is gone? From dating apps and calculated risks to a situationship that ended in a grief tsunami, Amy found her way to the page, launching her Substack, Absolute Pleasure, and writing publications including The Memoirist and Slackjaw. In the second half, Amy, an advocate for authentic self-expression in midlife women, gets fierce about feminism, bodily autonomy, reframing sex work as work deserving of protection, and the difference between consent and trafficking. She makes the case for critical thinking over lazy judgment, for staying civil across disagreement, and for a definition of a life well lived that has nothing to do with doing it all and everything to do with being true to who you are. It is sacred and it is disco, and it is a permission slip for anyone moving through loss. Key Takeaways ● There is no right or wrong way to grieve. As Amy puts it, "grief shows up in different ways for different people," and the distance from a loss does not make it hurt less, it just makes it easier to hold. ● Loss can halve your capacity while doubling your workload, so self-compassion, not self-judgment, is the work. ● Creativity is grief medicine. Whether it is art, music, writing, or building a new life, creating something is how you move forward when you cannot see a foot in front of you. ● Being seen in your grief, even in ways that titillate or unsettle, is one of the most healing exercises there is, and it gives others permission to be seen in theirs. ● Sensuality and desire do not have to disappear in midlife or in partnership. You can reignite that part of yourself instead of vanishing into "mommy and daddy." ● A life well lived is not doing everything you ever wanted. It is being okay letting some things go and staying true to yourself in the present, the only time we actually have. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 04:00 Losing Steven: Diagnosis, COVID, and Widowhood 06:00 The Year to Go Crazy: Dating Apps and Desire 09:35 The iPhone, the Tripod, and Becoming an Artist 17:30 Creativity as Grief Medicine 24:00 The Situationship, the Grief Tsunami, and Finding Writing 32:12 Feminism, Bodily Autonomy, and Reframing Sex Work 40:00 What the Book Wants You to Take Away 46:56 A Life Well Lived: Truth Over FOMO Connect ● Podcast Website: https://iamemilybingham.com/ ● Emily on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamemilybingham/ ● Join the YOLO Year Waitlist: https://iamemilybingham.com/yolo-waitlist ● Emily on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/i-am-emily-bingham/ ● Amy Gabrielle on Substack: https://substack.com/@amygabrielle ● Amy Gabrielle on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amygabriellenyc/ ● Amy Gabrielle on LinkedIn: [LinkedIn TK] #DeathAndDisco #DeathMedicine #NoOneGetsOutAlive #EmilyBingham #LoveAndGrief #WidowInTheCity #AmyGabrielle #GriefAndDesire #MidlifeReawakening #Widowhood

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  Episode #5

  Alchemy, Ego Death, and the Sacred Art of Transformation with Dr. Eric Russell

  Jul 8, 202659 minS2

  This week on Death and Disco, Emily sits down with Dr. Eric Russell, a psychologist, plant medicine educator, and integration coach who helps purpose-driven leaders and seekers reconnect to themselves through intentional work with psilocybin and microdosing. The two met on a winter solstice pilgrimage through Egypt, and that shared soul-land becomes the throughline of a conversation about the deaths we survive while still breathing. Together they dive into alchemy, not the medieval-castle kind, but the ancient Egyptian art of transformation that turns the lead of our pain into the gold of our purpose. Eric walks through the seven stages of the alchemical process, from calcination (the moment life gets turned upside down) through dissolution, separation, conjunction, fermentation, distillation, and finally coagulation, mapping each one onto the shadow work, ego death, and rebirth we move through in real life. He shares his own catalyst, getting fired from a big-tech career, and how psilocybin became the medicine that helped him uncover the survival programming underneath his perfectionism. Emily brings her own alchemy: the death of her identity as a wife, the ego death that followed career success that no longer felt alive, and the fierce work of asking the ego to take a seat so the higher self can drive the bus. The conversation stretches from the deeply personal to the collective, touching terror management, narcissism, and the survival wiring that keeps humanity stuck in competition instead of communion. Eric closes with the wisdom of Isis and Osiris as a template for alchemical love, and a deathbed reflection that lands on the one truth underneath all of it: life is about how we love one another. Sacred meets disco. Shadow meets light. And, as Eric puts it, in order to heal, you have to feel. Join Eric's Alchemical Love Retreat Egypt! ● Use code EMILY1000 for $1000 off before end of July: https://drericrussell.com/egypt-retreat Key Takeaways ● Alchemy is the ancient Egyptian art of transformation, and spiritual alchemy turns emotional pain into purpose through the same multi-stage process that turns lead into gold. ● The seven stages (calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction, fermentation, distillation, coagulation) each mirror a real inner death and rebirth on the path to wholeness. ● Most people stall at stage one, slipping into victim mode or numbing out, and never find the courage to move through the full process of change. ● Ego death is not about killing the ego but relinquishing its grip, asking the part that has been driving the bus to take a seat so the higher self can lead. ● Psilocybin and microdosing can act as their own catalyst, peeling back layers of survival programming to reveal innate self-worth that needs no external validation. ● True transformation requires feeling the full spectrum of human emotion, grief, anger, fear, and all, rather than spiritually bypassing them. Connect ● Podcast Website: https://iamemilybingham.com/ ● Emily on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamemilybingham/ ● Join the YOLO Year Waitlist: https://iamemilybingham.com/yolo-waitlist ● Dr. Eric Russell: https://drericrussell.com/ ● Eric on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drericrussell/ #DeathAndDisco #DeathMedicine #NoOneGetsOutAlive #EmilyBingham #LoveAndGrief #Alchemy #EgoDeath #PlantMedicine #Psilocybin #ShadowWork #Transformation Mentioned in this episode: Sign up for Coaching! 1:1 coaching

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