Four months after my dad passed away I had a dream where he showed up in my daughter’s room looking like how I remember him from when I was 11 years old - much younger, radiant looking, essentially in perfect health.

In the dream I knew he had died so when I saw him he immediately started updating me on what he had been up to and about all the fun things he spent his time doing. He specifically remarked about a lazy river he enjoyed riding around in, where they had food on the side and he could just eat while he floated around. I asked him where he was now, if it was somewhere like heaven or something but he wouldn’t tell me. He simply gave me a hug that felt very real and gave me a smile that assured me he was doing well.

I woke up completely aware of the fact that meeting my dad in a dream felt too real and too normal and so I almost immediately found myself in an internet rabbit hole of “seeing deceased people in a dream”, “afterlife”, and “near death experiences”. And, as you can imagine, there’s A LOT of stories on the internet about all of this stuff - a lot of which are from sources like “trust me bro” or “I promise it happened”, but not a ton of science backing up any of it.

Dr. Kevin Nelson recently published a book called "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience” where he sheds scientific light on some common occurrences associated with near death experiences. Backed by 30 years of research, Dr. Nelson, who is a world-leading researcher on near-death experiences, provides scientific explanations for some common things I think we’ve all heard before:

The tunnel and “seeing the light”

Dr. Nelson attributes seeing a bright light and a tunnel to the fact that when there’s low blood flow to the brain your eyes fail before your brain fails. As a result you begin to lose your outside field of vision and are just left with the center, making it seem like you’re looking down a tunnel. At the same time, as your eyes begin to lose blood flow, all that you’re able to see is light, hence the bright light.

Feeling peace and love

According to Dr. Nelson, when someone is near death their dopamine reward system is activated alongside your REM system causing you to feel euphoric, but also potentially causing you to see things as if you were dreaming while you were still awake.

We obviously don’t know what happens or where you go when you do die but I’d say a little bit of column A (mythical theories) and a little bit of column B (science) never hurt anyone. Believe what you want to believe, of course.

This week's issue is a 5 minute read:

🏢 WeWorking, just not for Adam Neumann

🕹️ A historic video game feat

🏈 Things to bet on this Sunday

WE are so back

OK. I need you to close your eyes and picture this…wait. No. You’re reading this. OK. I need you to just picture this. You build a company, it grows to be this massive behemoth but it kinda-sorta doesn’t really make you or the Japanese investor who gave you $4BILLION any money. Then whole thing starts to crumble and your main investor gives you $1.7BILLION to leave the company. You take the money and go on your merry way.

And then 5 years later you come back wanting to buy the company that is now worth a fraction of what it was when you were PAID to leave.

It turns out former CEO and founder of WeWork, Adam Neumann, has been trying to buy back the company he drove into the ground for a while now. Neumann founded a real estate firm called Flow back in 2022 and used that firm to propose an offer of $1 billion in financing to stabilize WeWork, which has since filed for bankruptcy while struggling with cash flow and the outstanding leases of spaces where no one wants to work anymore.

WeWork hasn’t been giving Neumann the time of day. Neumann’s lawyers commented that their client has been dismayed by WeWork’s lack of willingness to engage when Neumann approached them about being part of the restructuring process of the company.

You don’t say - you drive a company into the ground, get paid out hundreds of millions of dollars while it sinks because it’s losing money, and then you want to come back and “save” it? The only thing Adam Neumann would be good for in coming back to WeWork is providing story inspiration to the writers of WeCrashed for another season…such a good show.

ICYMI: Tetris was beat

Last month the unthinkable and humanly impossible happened - a human being beat Tetris…as opposed to an AI, which already happened a couple years ago. Two years ago an 11 year old boy named Willis Gibson took up playing Tetris, dedicating about 20 hours a week to playing the game - which I’d vouch is a very normal amount of time for a now 13 year old to spend playing a video game. Very quickly Willis became the top ranked Tetris player in US.

And then the unthinkable happened.

When the developers made Tetris, they made it so that when you reach level 29 the speed is so fast that you would ultimately lose fairly quick after reaching the level. What they didn’t expect is for people to develop new techniques to keep up with the speed of the game. Enter: “rolling”.

With this new technique players started going well beyond levels that the game developers, to the point where the colours changed to colours that weren’t even coded in the game.

With the technique in hand and reaching level 157 (the second level the game would crash at - it’s along story, you need to watch this video to get the full logic), Willis officially “crashed” Tetris where the game froze because it effectively couldn’t handle being so beyond what it was coded to do. He is the first official human to do this to the game and the internet couldn’t be happier.

Swiftie prop bets

I’ve never cared for the Super Bowl. But the food at Super Bowl parties, yes. And the prop betting, yes. This year’s prop bets are as wild as they come given Taylor Swift will be in attendance watching her boyfriend play. The following are things you can bet on that involve Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl:

• Will Travis Kelce propose to Taylor Swift?

• Will the MVP mention Taylor Swift in their speech?

• Will Andy Reid (KC Chiefs head coach) mention Taylor Swift in his podium speech?

• Will Taylor Swift wear a Kristin Juszczyk custom design?

• What colour will be Taylor Swift’s lipstick?

• Will Swift be shown on TV before the first touchdown?

The craziest part is Taylor Swift will be performing the night before the Super Bowl in Tokyo. I’m surprised there hasn’t been a prop bet surfaced yet for mention about Taylor flying back just for the game and then having to fly back to the other side of the world to Australia. Given her private jet’s carbon footprint, that would make for a good bet.