Crashing

Crashing

Sometimes, marching steadily through the steps of life—we crash right into something entirely unexpected. In one instant, the entire world changes, without even a word of warning. When a crash comes, that collision can destroy everything. But it can wake us up to what we truly need; we must decide what to raze and what to rebuild. How do humans move forward before the smoke is cleared? What happens after the crash?

Transcript for Crashing (Full Episode)

Officer Eddie Maison: [00:00:00] 424, 1029 my number.

Eileen Williams: So what's the protocol if you get called to a crash? Like what's the code for that?

Officer Eddie Maison: 1180, which is major accidents, even a fatality. 1181 is there's an injury, but it's not life threatening, they'll think it's like...

Eileen Williams: I spent a morning riding around Menlo Park on patrol with Officer Eddie Maison. In his work, he sees a lot of crashes.

Officer Eddie Maison: So there's a vehicle going maybe 60, 70 miles an hour. Sees that, has a negotiated...

Eileen Williams: Even though Eddie visits crash scenes all the time--

Officer Eddie Maison: ...so he clips that vehicle, ping pongs into the vehicle that made the right turn...

Eileen Williams: --he says that drinking is rarely involved. So what causes all these accidents?

Officer Eddie Maison: A lot of distracted drivers. A lot of going too fast.

Eileen Williams: I wonder about this. We know we should be focused on the road. We know we shouldn't speed, shouldn't text, but we still do. Why? It's addiction, Eddie tells me. People can't look away from their phones, can't stand to be disconnected.

Officer Eddie Maison: They just become accustomed to it, and they just start accepting their bad habits. And then those bad habits meet somebody that's not paying attention, and a collision happens.

Eileen Williams: No matter where we are, what we're doing, it can be easy to fall into certain habits and routines-- to sail through the day on autopilot. Until suddenly, there's a crash. Sometimes, that's what it takes to shake up our assumptions.

Officer Eddie Maison: This is the State of Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Each episode we take a common human experience, like teaching or belonging or joking, and bring your stories that explore and deepen our understanding of that experience.

Eileen Williams: In this episode, we're bringing you stories about crashing, all kinds of crashing.

In [00:02:00] this show, we're heading toward a life-threatening car crash. But for now, let's go small. Real small. What happens when particles collide? And what can these tiny crashes tell us about the bigger picture?

Michael Peskin works at the National Accelerator Lab here at Stanford.

Michael Peskin: People like to talk about the end of science, you know, that we discover everything there is to know and there's no more. But we're so far away from that.

In the 19th century, people thought that they knew a lot about science. And then it turned out that because of the discovery of x-rays and radioactivity and phenomena like this, you just turned the page and there was just a whole 'nother chapter there that nobody had the slightest inkling about.

In our x-ray laser, you can have a molecule, and you hit it with one of these very fast X-ray beams. The x-rays will go through the atom and they will, um, get scattered off of the individual, let's say, electrons in the electron cloud around the molecule.

And from that, you could reconstruct the structure of the biological molecule.

Why are enzymes built a certain way? Why are our bodies built in a certain shape and for certain functions?

By understanding the structure of things, we get to the answer of "why" questions like that.

For example, in cancer, it's a tremendous advantage to know exactly what the shape of this thing is. You design a drug that fits in some slot in the enzyme and deactivates it. All drug [00:04:00] discovery now is informed by thinking about what the target is.

Eventually, we want to increase the capability of humans to do things that were not otherwise possible. And that only comes because we understand the world so well that we can build tools that, um, you know, overcome our human limitations.

There are a lot of steps between fundamental knowledge and technology.

As someone who works on elementary particles, I'm even further out. I'm interested in whether there are new laws of nature beyond the ones that we have already discovered and characterized. Out there, there are some, and we will find them out.

It all starts from there. I mean, if you discover a new way that forces work, or that matter works in the universe, or that biological machines operate, then you can go forward.

And we do that by, yes, smashing things together.

Eileen Williams: Claudia Heymach interviewed Dr. Peskin for that story. Original music by Rosie LaPuma.

Researchers at the National Accelerator Lab work with x-ray lasers and particle accelerators. Atoms and molecules crash in less than an instant, but how do we measure a slow crash? A crash that's already underway?

Miles Traer: Hi, I am Miles Traer. I am a geologist and geophysicist at Stanford University, and I created the Geology of Game of Thrones Project.

To use bits of information from the books, from, from the HBO show to create a geological history for the planet on which the story takes place.

And then wherever details weren't explicit, I would fill in the [00:06:00] gaps based on the real life geology of British castles. And so I was able to actually take something that seemed preposterous, and in some ways still is preposterous, and reconstruct over 500 million years of history.

The project became way bigger than I had meant for it to. Um, it was supposed to be one geologic map, and it turned into nine. So I put the project online, and you know, in my mind it was like, it's, it's a passion project. It's a nerd project.

Not much happened in the first day. An editor at io9 put up a, a post about it. A writer for The Nerdist put it up. People started to comment. Boing, Boing and AV Club... whole bunch of other sites started saying, "You've gotta check this out. You have to check this out." People who worked for the TV show started to comment on it. People who created the official map for George RR Martin wrote an article about it. Everyone started coming to the site to the point that-- it, uh, the numbers got up to about 500,000, and then the server overloaded, and everything came crashing to a halt.

Crap. The servers crashed.

There was kind of an awkward pause, I would say, of about maybe 10 minutes or so in between getting that, "Hey, the link is broken," and me getting an email from IT at Stanford saying, "What the hell did you do?" Because they had watched the numbers just get overloaded and watched the server crashed.

People at Stanford were not very happy with me. They didn't particularly like that I had crashed their server accidentally. But they had it back up and running within minutes. It was very, very quick.

Asking a question of, you know, "What is the rock type under King's Landing?" is, is not inherently a [00:08:00] useful answer to have. It just isn't. But what's incredibly useful is the journey by which you discover the answer. Science is creative. Science is imaginative. You have to take advantage of that stuff. So, I think that projects like Geology of Game of Thrones help in terms of understanding the fundamental building blocks that we live on.

The changes that we're making, if you believe the most recent publication that says the Anthropocene starts in the 1940s, that's an instant in geologic time. That's not even the blink of an eye. A blink of an eye takes way too long. Uh, it's so fast, and we've changed things so dramatically.

We are anticipating that crash at some point.

There are huge stressors on the system right now. Climate is really affecting a lot of it. Ocean acidification is driving a lot of it. Land use change is a huge deal. You know, we have a lot of people, and we need to continue to feed them, and we've turned most of the land surface that we can into farmland.

Uh, there are just a lot of changes, and I don't, I don't know that relying on a technological solution is going to get us there.

For the most part, in the United States, water is okay. We have pretty good access to water. We're depleting reservoirs like crazy. We have the Great Lakes, which we're depleting like crazy, and we're polluting a lot of this stuff. But for the most part, we have access to fresh water. That is not the case in most parts of the world. It just isn't. So that's another way we can sort of see the crash coming, but we're trying to figure out what the hell to do about it.

The crashes started in biodiversity for sure. We've, we're seeing a lot of species falling off the planet and disappearing. We've, we've seen that for a while now, and we see that it's mostly driven by human hunting. We crossed, you [00:10:00] know, 400 PPM-- that's not good. You know, we definitely don't want to be in that neighborhood, because the last time we saw that, the planet looked very different than what it looks like right now. Uh, and not one that humans would be all that great in surviving in.

Things look bad. They really do. Um, I will not deny that they look really bad.

You know, reading through the, the history of, of the geology of Game of Thrones, there were a lot of things that we're talking about. This mountain building episode created increased weathering, which draws carbon dioxide out of the air. It's basically a way of undoing global warming, right? You take the carbon dioxide up there, pull it down, things get cooler. But that process, as we understand it, which is very well, takes millions of years.

It's not always a good idea to take science and apply it to fiction because that's not the point of fiction, right? Like the point of fiction is to create a world and, and do something fantastical with it.

It's much more engaging for a lot of people to imagine that these fantasy worlds are real.

I do think that there are absolutely parables in the story that we can read, even if Martin didn't intend them to be there. You know, one of the more famous lines is "winter is coming." It's almost an inverse, apocalyptic climate change, right? Like things aren't getting warmer, they're getting much colder.

There are a lot of different theories about why people don't react as strongly as scientists sometimes wish they did. Science for too long has been presented as absolute. There's a right answer, and there is a wrong answer. Things are easy. And as a result of that, people don't view science as a creative endeavor. [00:12:00] And it is. I think it's one of the most deeply creative vocations on Earth.

And so part of why people don't react as strongly to environmental changes we're seeing today, I think it's because we haven't done a good job exciting the imagination to be able to picture, you know, 300 parts per million, 400 parts per million, 800 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What, what is that number? What is that? Does that mean anything to anybody, other than just being a number? Not really.

But to be able to think about it creatively, to be able to think about how many dragons would it take to do that. We keep passing these milestones. The scare tactics work on some people. I think they don't work on most.

Uh, you know, the apocalyptic imagery, right? Calling back to Game of Thrones, the white walkers coming to invade makes for great television. Doesn't really get people to do much, uh, so that that narrative needs to be toned-- maybe not down, but toned differently. Scientific literacy-- at the most reductive answer you can give-- is to increase scientific literacy, that's what you have to do to get people to care.

If you can show somebody or have somebody imagine what 400 PPM, 400 parts per million carbon dioxide looks like and the effect that that can have, people will change.

What we were seeing until recently, um, was, you know, people moving away from coal. That's the big one. You know, in terms of, of climate change, burning coal is remarkably terrible for the, the planet and for humans. And it's actually way worse for [00:14:00] humans than it is for the planet. The planet will be fine.

As a species, we will get through the Anthropocene. In what shape we are when we get through it, I don't know. The, the hope is not to prevent the impact, you know, to prevent the crash. I think the crash is coming. The hope isn't to stop that. I think the hope is to sort of soften that blow. We can sort of draw out the crash as long as possible to give ourselves and everyone else enough time to adapt.

In a lot of ways, you don't have another choice, but to be hopeful. You really don't. Despair is-- it's a paralytic, right? Despair is absolutely a paralytic. "Oh, well, everything's going straight to hell. What can I do about it?" "Nothing." "Alright. This won't do anything then." You can't. You know, hope gets people up in the morning.

Every story-- Game of Thrones included-- is built on hope. Characters die. Things seem to be bad. Oh, but come on. Keep going, keep going. You will get there eventually.

Eileen Williams: Miles Traer is the co-founder of Stanford's Generation Anthropocene Podcast.

In an emergency room, one never knows what can come crashing through the doors. David Radler is a senior resident in the Stanford Emergency Department. He shares one of his early days. And a crash that he wasn't trained to treat.

David Radler: So this is like way back when I was first starting my medical career. I was the last year of medical school and I was at a high volume trauma center, out in the Midwest. And we had a, uh, trauma service that worked with the emergency department, and I was part of the trauma service, but we were down in the ER a lot.

[00:16:00] So it was early spring. It was a really nice day out. It was during the weekend, a pretty calm day.

Nothing really was going on, and around like nine o'clock or 10 o'clock, um, uh-- we all got like a 0, 0, 0, 0, 0. Everyone carries a pager, both the ER and the trauma service. And, uh, there were different levels of trauma. So if you got like, a 0, 0, 0, 0 across your, your pager, um, that would be like a low level trauma. Didn't really matter. Pretty minor trauma. And then if you got a 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, um, that was like a major trauma and that person was probably dying.

Usually on the pages, you'd get just a brief summary, you know, like brought in by ambulance or, or ground transport. Uh, so we were all like, went to the trauma bay, kind of moseyed in there 'cause it was a low level trauma, you know, put on our personal protective gear. And, you know, before like a trauma comes, you're always like joking around, like talking about what you're doing for the weekend.

And um, right when we got in there to, to actually get like our gowns on, we all-- all the pagers went off in the room. It was like 20 pages, all at the same time. It said 2, 2, 2, 2 2. Life flight, ETA zero. That, that means like, someone's coming in by life flight, so you know they're kind of screwed, and they're coming in in zero minutes.

Just as we got that page, like before anyone could react, life flight came just like busting through the doors, and they were bagging the patient, so you knew that they were unconscious and not breathing for themselves.

We all, like, ran to the trauma-- the actual bay where we were gonna do the resuscitation.

I was like kind of the junior guy on the team then. So I was on the patient's right. The, uh, emergency department senior resident was in the airway, and then the trauma surgery service, uh, senior was doing the survey, or the, the actual resuscitation on the patient's left.

As we were moving her from the gurney to the bed, I just remember grabbing her arm. It was like a bag full of, like, marbles. Or like, you know, like, it was just crunchy.

Uh, we moved her over. I started working on getting intravenous access, you know, IVs and lines to try to give her medications. There's a host of different medications we can give in a situation. I started to restart the heart.[00:18:00] 

And the ER resident intubated her. And just after he intubated her, she lost her pulses.

So we started CPR, and as we were starting CPR, she started having a blood coming out of her mouth into her endotracheal tube. They checked her pupils as the resuscitation was going on, and noticed that one of her pupils was blown. And that usually means that there's like blood, they're bleeding into the brain somewhere, and that's pushing the brain out.

You know, we worked on her for a while, probably about 30 to 40 minutes. Yeah. Which honestly was probably 30 to 40 minutes too long. She was so badly injured at that point, it was, it was futile. She had died, and there was just no way we were ,gonna bring her back with any meaningful recovery. So we called the resuscitation and decided to-- she's dead.

Usually after like a resuscitation when someone dies, or you know, something bad happens, usually there's like a moment of silence. Either someone calls for it or it just kind of happens. So in that moment of silence, we heard the in the next bay over, them taking care of that initial trauma that they were talking about. The one that was like 0, 0, 0, 0.

And they were in this part in the evaluation where they were like seeing if he had any injuries, and they could hear what was going on. So they probably had him on his side, and they were kinda pushing on his back and he is like, "oh yeah, you know, it kind of hurts there on my back a little bit," you know, then you can hear the doctor saying like, "oh, okay." You know, and the, and the patient goes, "Yeah, I, you know, that's the only thing I hurt. So I was, uh, just trying to lift the car off my wife. Is she here?"

We're in the next bay over, separated by a curtain. Turns out, it was their anniversary. So it was springtime. It was their anniversary, like their 60th anniversary or something. And they were on their way to brunch, and the patient was actually driving a motorcycle and she was on the back. And, uh, they got hit by a drunk driver. She got thrown, and the car went over her, and he was totally fine.

He [00:20:00] didn't get off the motorcycle. He had spent some time trying to lift the car off of her. I just remember the attending physician, you know, this, this like very hardened ER guy who's been around since the beginning of emergency medicine. He's probably seen everything. He, I just remember him just sitting down in a chair and just being like, "Oh my God, like this is bad."

I don't know the contrast of, you know, this patient had died of massive injuries and this other guy was completely fine. Um, except for maybe some back strain.

I think working in the emergency department, you get like a, a front row seat to all the tragedy that happens in your community. I get, I definitely have a better view on what can happen. So you, you have to tell your loved ones that you love them. And you gotta live every day like it's gonna be your last.

Eileen Williams: David Radler is a senior resident in Stanford's Department of Emergency Medicine.

On the road, you never know what's coming. A car can come out of nowhere, can sideswipe you in an instant. But what happens when you're not alone?

Can a friendship survive?

Dehan Glanz: When the debris settled, and after we'd just been hit, and the car was evaporated, and you were slumped over, I was just sitting there completely unscathed.

Dan Klein: I wouldn't wish it on anyone, obviously, to be in the car to go through that. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but in some ways, I'm glad that I didn't experience it alone.

Dehan Glanz: We were so close that in a way it, it almost like, of course we would go through this.

Dan Klein: Yeah.

Dehan Glanz: Of course I would go through this--

Dan Klein: Yeah.

Dehan Glanz: --life-altering event with Dan.

Okay. Yeah. So, uh, my name's Dehan Glanz and I'm from Durham, New Hampshire. But everybody [00:22:00] out here calls me Dano. And that's D-A-N-N-O. Well, I teach a couple classes here at Stanford. I teach, uh, urban Design Studio class, and I teach an Introduction to Urban Design lecture discussion class through the Urban Studies Department, which is the department that I got my major from when I was a student here in, uh, with Dan, Class of 1990.

Dan Klein: I'm Dan Klein, lecturer at the, uh, Department of Theater and Performance Studies. I'm also a lecturer in the Graduate School of Business, and I teach in the d.school. And Danno Glanz is my friend. 

Dehan Glanz: I'm very sure I met Dan on literally the first day of college.

Dan Klein: I've seen photos of myself on that day. I look pretty dorky. Like, I, I had a button down, um, short sleeve shirt, which is-- looked really cheesy. I was sort of wide-eyed, like I wouldn't, I was more likely to sort of smile and defer.

Dehan Glanz: I had this all white suit that I was wearing. I just, 'cause I thought, you know, that would just be so cool. I, I don't know. That was just what my style was like at the time. I-- I don't know what I was thinking. You know, Miami Vice was big back then, so I think I maybe, I was trying to do a Don Johnson thing.

Dan Klein: I think I saw Danno the first time. You know, up on the third floor. He was sitting on the floor. I'm almost a hundred percent sure of this. I kind of remember his hair. Danno was known for cutting his own hair. But he was really friendly, like he was genuinely kind.

Dehan Glanz: From that first day, 1986, we were pretty, pretty inseparable from each other, and we just went out and played beach volleyball, and I dunno, we weren't getting ready for our summer job. Maybe we were all just slackers.

Dan Klein: I remember this moment, you know, it was probably around Halloween, so it was pretty early on. Uh, and there was a party in the courtyard at Wilbur, and I remember Danno and I sort of off to the side, and we decided that we would have a chugging contest, but we were both not super experienced. And so we set this [00:24:00] rule like, "Well, let's do a chugging contest, but you're allowed to stop." And so we would, so I remember just said, "Alright, go!" and then glug, glug, glug, "Okay, breathe, good."

And we, we knew that that was pretty pathetic, and we thought that was funny. But I, I don't know. That was like this sense that, uh, you're kind of allowed to do that with Danno. 

Dehan Glanz: We went on, we lived together, and we were living off-campus. I had bought my first car back in New Hampshire for a thousand dollars, a VW, 1973 VW thing, and I felt like we were adults for the first time, living on our own.

It was a big treat when we went on campus. So I remember this feeling of anticipation. I remember thinking, "Wow, this is gonna be a fun night."

Dan Klein: People told me the story over and over again. On that day, we had been to a party. And so we'd started at Dominique's, and I think we'd gone over to Vince's. I was gonna sleep over that night, but Danno hadn't been drinking.

Dehan Glanz: I gotta be the responsible driver, of course.

Dan Klein: And he said, "I'm, I'm driving home if you want a ride." And I was like, "Yeah, okay. I'll take a ride." I feel like I remember those things, but it may just be that I was told them enough times.

Dehan Glanz: I remember turning onto El Camino, and it was just totally abandoned. It was kind of eerie. There were no cars, and we were in this VW convertible.

I remember it was a beautiful night. It was warm. And I remember glancing up at the rear view mirror and seeing these headlights coming and, and the, the image was really blurry 'cause they were moving so fast. I remember turning towards Dan and saying, "Wow, check out this guy when he goes by. Look how incredibly fast he's going."

And, and that's the last, really, that I remember.

When I finally regained my, my senses, there was just wreckage everywhere. [00:26:00] Um, and then, and I was fine. I was completely untouched. Not a scratch on me. Uh, but then I looked over and Dan was, was slumped over, um, in the-- slumped over in the passenger seat. And then, and that at that point I realized that something really terrible had happened.

When I got out and looked at the car, it was like a bomb had gone off. Like the wheels were, were all at crazy angles. The, you know, whole parts of the, the body were just completely shredded. We had been there. Dan had been sitting right there where the door was all caved in. The ambulance was there within, within a very short time. It's really just a miracle that the ambulance happened to be there so quick. That we happened to be next to Stanford Hospital. Just a series of unlikely, lucky breaks.

I don't remember there being any option for getting into the ambulance with him to go to the emergency room, so I remember just standing by the side of the road. And from, from there on, it all blurs together a little bit.

Dan Klein: When I woke up in the hospital, I don't remember waking up. I don't rem-- I don't, I sort of became aware that something was going on. It's not even like coming out of a dream.

So I stayed in the Stanford Hospital in intensive care for about two and a half weeks. Just agony. I had aseptic meningitis. If I laughed too hard, that would gimme a headache.

Cerebral spinal fluid was contaminated with my own blood. The extreme fevers. I was missing a part of my skull because they had cut it out and put it in a freezer to put it back in later.

Dehan Glanz: My memory is just basically living at the hospital and sleeping in an armchair there, night after night. I didn't really go to classes for the rest of the quarter [00:28:00] because I was just at the hospital all the time. Maybe it was, like, my-- it was my responsibility as the driver to be there and do what I could.

Dan Klein: I remember hallucinating when, when I was having the fevers and seeing, uh, they were giving me a gallium drip. They were gonna do a, uh, do some imaging with radioactive material. And so, I was getting a, an intravenous fluid. And I saw a, a fish swim by in the, in the fluid, in the container. I was trying to justify how this could be, and I was like, "What, what kind of fish is that?"

And they were like, "Okay, you're, yeah, you're hallucinating."

I think I probably started to get anxious to get out of the hospital. Once I was out of real danger, people just couldn't come visit nearly as much, and so it stopped being kind of as fun to be there and receive people.

Dehan Glanz: Dan had always been my roommate, and then he was gone. And so I remember finishing up the year. There were two beds right next to each other in that room, and then it was just, it was just me in there, and I remember thinking how weird that was.

Dan Klein: At some point, I was really missing college. That was when I first started to think, I should go back to Stanford, like part-time. Uh, so that's what I did in the spring. I came back to Stanford and lived with Danno, and the, and the other guys in our off-campus house and just tried to meet my daily schedule.

Dehan Glanz: I remember at the time thinking, okay, we're not quite back to normal.

Dan Klein: There was tension for me around like, what are my capacities? What can I still do, and what's missing? And they were also linked to the fact that there was a drunk driver who was responsible for that. I thought a lot about how that's not fair. I'm not allowed to drink, I'm not allowed to drive, and I may be less smart than I was before. And uh, and that's his responsibility entirely.

Dehan Glanz: The guy was put on trial for felony drunk driving. He didn't have a license. He was speeding.

Dan Klein: Dan and I both [00:30:00] took the stand during the case.

Judge: All rise.

Dehan Glanz: I didn't have any lawyer or anything. I just went in there, and it had never occurred to me that the drunk driver's lawyer would-- I mean, looking back, of course, this is what he would do-- but he was basically trying to shift the blame over to me.

Dan Klein: The case kept getting strung out, which, which ended up working against the drunk driver because he drove drunk again. And honestly when he did it again, that was really hard for me to, like, I'm trying to put together, who is this guy? And he must not have been that remorseful if he would go do it again. Like it must not have had much of an impact.

And then we got to the last moment, and the judge said he's guilty. And he did it again. And he's sentenced to two years in state prison. And, uh-- and there was this moment, like we'd been pushing and pushing and pushing for this, and finally we got to the end, and I realized, like, that's not a victory. Like I didn't-- the guy just went to prison.

The moment after we read it, we read the settlement onto the court record, he turned to me. Like we hadn't talked to each other. We hadn't spoken for the entire time, ever. Even while we were negotiating, sometimes he and I would be sitting right outside the room where our lawyers were talking, across from each other in the hallway, without making eye contact, and we never said a word.

And then as soon as it got ready, and he, he turned to me, he said, "Can I, can I talk to you for a second?" And I said, "yeah." He said, "I'm, I'm so sorry. I just, my mother told me to never hurt anyone. And I, I, I can't believe that I did this to you. And I just wanna tell you, I am so sorry." And we hugged, and I said, "I forgive you."

I think that was huge for [00:32:00] me, like that helped me heal from it, to not be carrying this grudge. To not think, oh, I'm less now because of this person's fault. I'm more now, and, and I don't blame him.

My mom wrote, wrote it all down for her articles, and they made a TV movie about it.

Meredith Baxter Birney plays my mom.

Dehan Glanz: It's a mother's fight for justice.

TV character: Mom. Are they taking him to jail right now?

Dehan Glanz: You could probably rent it on Netflix, I guess if you really want it. There's a Spanish language version of it as well.

We had a big premiere, I guess, where we, we put it in, and all the friends gathered 'round.

Dan Klein: I thought, this will be really funny. This will be like getting a bunch of friends together and watching some funny, like, "Ah, look at the, what they changed that to."

Dehan Glanz: Right.

Dan Klein: And uh-- and it just wasn't funny. And in fact, it wasn't-- but it wasn't that it was, like, super dark or anything. It just hit this emotional tone that was pretty right on, and, and kind of hard to, um, look past.

Like one of the first things that happens in the movie is there's the phone call, and my mom wakes up in the middle of the night and they have to, they have to just pack and go to the airport to fly up to Stanford. And she forgets, like, forgets about my little brother. And that's like, yeah, we're not making jokes about that, and we're sitting there with him.

Dehan Glanz: I mean, can you imagine getting that call?

Dan Klein: No. I can't imagine it. Um, I like, I actively [00:34:00] try to push it out of my mind that the idea of that.

Dehan Glanz: But there's a character that plays me in the movie, so that character's name is, was Benno, not Danno. Like my character was not a very sympathetic character. My character was really shallow, and everyone would be hanging out at the house and hearing Dan tell his stories, and then my character would say, "Hey, let's go out to some parties" or something.

And then everyone would be like, "How could you go to a party at a time like this? When we're, you know, we're trying to visit with Dan."

Benno, TV character: Listen, what I'm saying is that there's all kinds of suffering in the world, man. You weren't the only one hurt when that guy smashed into us. 

Dehan Glanz: So I, I really hope that's not how people saw me at the time. Um, but I remember my friend saying, "No, that wasn't-- you know, you weren't like that." But maybe they were just being nice, I don't know.

I remember being worried that I'd betrayed Dan, like I had just made a bad decision, and, and I would never get to be friends with him the way that I had been. And that was a really crushing, uh, that was a really crushing worry for me.

I spent a lot of time thinking, "Oh, why didn't I just, you know, stay home? Why did I, why did I take the car that day? Why did I get that kind of car?"

Dan Klein: I remember feeling a little bit worried about him, knowing that we had really different experiences of the accident itself.

Dehan Glanz: So then we graduated. And Dan, because he'd missed so much school, he stayed an extra year while I was getting my master's at UCLA and I was living with another guy from our draw group.

And I remember we were in our house in Venice, California, where we lived on the beach, and, and I got a call from Dan.

And I remember being kind of surprised because I had fallen outta touch a little bit with Dan, and I had thought at the time, "Well, okay, this is just the new-- you know, I don't, I just don't get that friendship anymore."

Dan Klein: Maybe I called Danno and said, or maybe I found out he was moving to the city and, and he was looking for a roommate. I [00:36:00] don't remember.

Dehan Glanz: I remember him saying, "I was wondering if you'd like to live together when you get out of UCLA."

And for me, um, I, I, I, I remember that moment so vividly because I-- because it, it meant that, it meant that, to me at least, it meant that Dan wasn't mad at me. He wasn't holding me... he didn't hold me responsible. In one three minute call, it just wiped out years of worry and concerns that I'd, you know, that I'd lost this, this friendship.

Dan Klein: I, I'm pretty touched by that. Like the idea of moving in with you was huge. Like, it made all sorts of sense, and it was like, right on. Alright. I can do this. Now I can do this right.

Dehan Glanz: And then we went on, we lived together and, and then, uh, Dan got married. And then had a, um, and I was in the wedding. And then he had a kid, um, godfather of his kid.

When I, when I think about it, it really feels like a very full life that we've had.

Prior to the accident, my life was just sort of a breeze, and I just sort of floated through it. Since then, I, I've thought a lot more about life, and what could, what could happen, and being prepared for things to not go my way.

All stories don't necessarily have a happy ending. They can have terrible endings, and for some miraculous reason, everything broke our way that day and that month and that year.

What did I do in another life to deserve that string of good luck?

Dan Klein: I see myself as very lucky. I've always seen myself as lucky. When I was little, it was just sort of random, like, oh, how-- how lucky, I rolled the dice, or whatever. Like I see myself as generally more lucky than other people. But with the accident, I've come to realize that I'm way luckier than I thought. And that lucky is sort of a choice.[00:38:00] 

Like, you can just choose to be lucky. You can take whatever happens and look at the lucky effects of it. And that's better. Like it's more fun, and you get more outta life.

I feel like that's just a great approach to life-- to, to just assume that there's something lucky about every, about every unlucky thing that happens.

I wouldn't wish it on anyone, obviously, to be in the car, to go through that. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But in some ways, I'm glad that I didn't experience it alone.

Dehan Glanz: We were so close that in a way it, it almost-- like, of course I would go through this--

Dan Klein: Yeah.

Dehan Glanz: --life-altering event with Dan.

Dan Klein: Yeah. Yeah.

To have gone through it, like it's a thing that we both experienced. And, uh, I feel lucky that it was, that it was you.

Eileen Williams: Dan Klein and Dehan Glanz both graduated and now teach at Stanford University. Thanks to Megan Calfas and Alex Cheng for bringing us that story.

Sometimes a crash is exactly what we need to realize where we are and where we want to go. When the sirens die down and the dust settles, we have to look around and evaluate our lives. After an impact, we gain a new kind of clarity.

A life without crashing might be safe, but it would also be boring. In a weird way, every crash is the question: What's important to me? Who will be there when things go wrong? Where do you go from here?[00:40:00] 

You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Eileen Williams.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. The Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Stanford Arts, Bruce Braden, and everyone at the Stanford Storytelling Project. For full credits, including music used in this episode, plus archives of every episode of State of the Human, visit our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.