Jeremy Renner

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1:01I'm glad it happened. One of the greatest things happened to me on that day when I got ran over. The greatest thing happened. Whoa, whoa, whoa, back up. The greatest thing? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm blown away. I'm really blown away to hear you say that. Because I'm proud of, like, where I'm at and where I've become. There are moments that divide a life into before and after. For Jeremy Renner, that moment came on New Year's Day 2023 on a frozen driveway in the mountains above Lake Tahoe. He's known to millions as Marvel superhero Hawkeye, an actor known for doing his own stunts, for his Oscar-nominated role in The Hurt Locker, and now as mayor of Kingstown.

1:44Trust no one unless they tell you to do so. Someone will come after you. But on that winter morning, he wasn't a movie star. He was just Jeremy. Snowed in with his family after a massive storm, trying to clear a way out with the help of his nephew. Renner was operating a 14 ,000-pound snowcat when he slipped off the moving machine and fell beneath its tracks. His body shattered, nearly 40 bones broken in nearly 100 places. His ribcage crushed. His nephew ran to get help from a neighbor. Are there any obvious injuries? Oh my God, yes. And then is there any serious bleeding? Yes. Okay. But the conversation you're about to hear is not just about a celebrity's miraculous survival.

2:36It's about what happens when what really matters becomes clearer. When life is reduced to one breath at a time. It's about before and after. Here is my conversation with Jeremy Renner.

2:59I see you as I walk in the door. You reach out, you give me a bro hug. That's right. And my instinct was to kind of like, is he okay? Oh, really? Like I'm afraid I'm going to hurt him, like he's fragile. I can't be the first person to say that. No, I guess not. I guess maybe if, you know, because we haven't seen each other in a long time, right? Yes, that might go through people's brains, but I'm probably better than before and stronger than before. You look great. Yeah, hanging in there. Not bad, right? I should be more fragile, you know, but I'm a lot of titanium, so I'm stronger. You should be more than that.

3:29I should be dead, yeah, yeah. When you say those words, I should be dead. I mean, people will say stuff like that in a flippant way, but this is real life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty awesome, though. The premise of the impetus behind this podcast is over the years, how many people I have encountered, I've covered stories of everything was going one way, and then it goes the other way. Is that something you contemplate a lot? Yeah, I mean, I think that's sort of the way I live my life. The acute awareness of my gratitude, of my next fucking breath, and my next step. You grew up in Modesto? Yeah.

4:03For your career, you moved on to L.A. Yep, yeah, 31 years in L.A. Yeah, living there for a while. So you weren't always a famous, well-paid actor. No, man. No, I mean, Hurt Locker, I was 38 or so, and the Hurt Locker caught fire. There's too many locks. There's too many. I can't do it. I do. I can't get it off. I'm sorry, okay? You understand? I'm sorry. Tell me if this rings a bell, because I have this vivid memory. You were at the Today Show the morning of the Oscar nominations to be announced. Okay, we're going to go live to Samuel Goldman Theater in Beverly Hills for the nominations. Yeah, live television.

4:38Live television. I was in the studio that day. Yeah. And I remember you guys sitting on the sofa. I remember this. And they cut to L.A. and they made the announcement that you got nominated. They got nominated. Oscar nod. Like on live TV, like, oh, man. The nominees for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role are Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker. Well, I remember, I never heard of this guy, Jeremy. I'd seen the movies. I knew who you were at that point, but I didn't know much about you. Can we talk about your family? Sure. Tell me about what your upbringing was like. It was great. I'm the oldest of seven kids, and close to my family always all my life.

5:14When my parents divorced, I was in, I don't know, third grade or so. And they always live across the street from each other. And they moved around a lot. So I went to a lot of different schools. But my dad was pretty much always living across the street. So I went to dad's for the weekend. Just walk across the street. That's perfect. And stay pretty connected, even though, you know, there's divorce and things can be splintered. There's always really closeness all throughout my life. And the family is, it's kind of everything to me. It's, I grew up in a large family. And there was always, I don't want to say a torch holder.

5:44but someone who had, he always went to grandma's or went to grandpa's or then my dad or somebody just always held the thing that united everybody together. And that torch got passed to me. And it's everything to me. And I love the responsibility of loving them all so much. There's times where I don't know everybody's name sometimes. It's like everybody's having babies and stuff. I'm like, oh my God, I can't catch up with everybody. I thought I was the only one. No, I'm glad you knew. No, man, it's brutal. It's like, oh my, you can't, like my sister has like a whole spreadsheet of all the birthdays, the stuff that's going on.

6:15And then see, there's like a newsletter that goes out and these family chats that like, it's like a little village. It's crazy to keep up with. And it's very easy for large families to divide once they get significant others and kids and move across the country or the world. Or, you know, it takes a lot of work to keep a family together. And we worked very hard to do that. So I was been fortunate enough in my success to get a house that can house everybody. Having the house in Lake Tahoe is always having like a great magical Christmas and uniting the family together. There's like 25 people everywhere I roll.

6:48So, you know, I got like those shuttle buses and stuff so we can get around. This particular holiday, Wicked Storm comes to the Sierra. You barely make it in. Yeah. We missed our flight. It was the last flight out before the storm was coming in. It was a three, four-day storm. It was going to dump, you know, anywhere from like 10 to 25 feet of snow, which is a lot of mass of snow. But once we're up there, let's get snowed in. Who cares, right? Getting snowed out is not an option. We need to go get snowed in. That's better. Because then we'll all be together. We got the dogs. I have my little daughter.

7:23So we ended up just driving up and getting up there. And we all made it. We all somehow made it. And it was great. You end up with no power. Yeah. The kids are off the iPads. And, you know, the Wi-Fi is down, playing cars. I mean, the family knows how to have fun. So the limited amount of power that we did have, we had disco balls going. and we're playing pool with headlamps on. We had a lot of fun. Talking about, you know, what happened. You were out there. It was New Year's Day. Yeah. We saw that the roads were closed. Skiing wasn't going to happen. So we're going to make a plan. I was going to take the snowcat and go make some sledding trails on the property since we couldn't go skiing.

7:58For folks who don't understand what a snowcat is, I describe it this way. I say it's kind of like a tank without a gun. Yeah, exactly. It's got a big, giant, 2 ,000-pound blade in the front of it that pushes snow. I've seen them at ski resorts. Exactly. They're the big, they're the big, they're the make the trails and groom the trails at ski resorts. These big metal bladed tanks. And they're, they're, they're amazing machines. I love, they're really nimble and powerful and heavy. This all began with you recognizing that your nephew was in serious danger. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We were clearing a ton of snow, generational sort of storm that we had.

8:32And the incident was, we're clearing all this stuff out of the driveway and cat was sliding and I was standing outside of it, got into gear. It was rolling towards me. My nephew was going to crush him. So within five to seven seconds, he was going to get crushed. So I jumped back on this rolling machine, stupidly, but trying to save my nephew from getting killed. And were you keenly aware of what was about to happen to you? No, no, not at all. Because that happened pretty fast. The machine's moving pretty quick. I mean, it's moving probably 10 miles an hour. So I jump on this over the tracks to try to turn this thing off.

9:08with a, there's a button you can hit and just stop the thing. Otherwise it's going to keep rolling. It's just going to be like the Terminator. Just keep going until something stronger than it stops it. So that's why I tried to jump on it. And then it happened very quickly. And it's, I didn't stop it at all. I mean, so you went under the track. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And 14 ,000 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just a piece of driftwood under this thing. Right. First thing was just hitting my head on the ground and slammed. It would have been nice if it was like I was on snow, you know but i was on ice and asphalt so there's no relief of when you're getting crushed and you're just between steel and stone but then there's a set of six wheels so it kind of undulates that's why there's like kind of getting ran over like six times you know just like oh oh so the first part was a shocking one and that's when i and the everything crushed but then the rest of it was just sort of like okay when's it going to stop and it stops and then then everything flows like oh god it's like your body's screaming i can see my eyeball out and i can see my legs all twisted up and going different directions than they should in case folks missed that you literally were able to see your other eye yeah i could see my my left eye hanging out with my right eye and i got it but i just rolled on the ground and put it on ice to and that was the least of my worries man it was like i had to breathe you know and that was that was that was the struggle yeah i couldn't breathe i'm like your brain's telling you better breathe you're going to die.

10:30Everything was collapsed in my lung, and the lung was punctured, and I had, like, no way to get air. It's like being sat on by an elephant or something. You just couldn't capture air, and I had struggled to suck in air and then blow it out. And I used words, even profanities, just to confirm I was exhaling air. So then I could, like, try to breathe in air again. It was like this breath. It was just everything. What are your sharpest memories lying there on the frozen driveway? Well, my condition. Yeah. My breath, the lack thereof. There was a time where the incident first happened and then my nephew came to my side, but then he left.

11:06And I remember that feeling of him being gone, being one of the loneliest feelings. You know, that's, if you're going to die, you don't want to die alone. Are you in pain? Are you in serious pain? Oh yeah, it's beyond, it's beyond that. I was lit on fire. I was being, I was melting. I was crushed. So, yeah, it was like struck by lightning and all these visuals of it all, the sounds of everything. And it was just overload. All these sensations were happening and none of them were. And then the sort of cavalry, if you will, would come as my neighbor and her partner and then my nephew. And they were there.

11:40Someone's been run over by a snowcat. Hurry. He's been crushed. Okay. 10 paramedics, ambulance. Everyone's on the way right now, okay? There was help coming and I can hear them on the phone. Where is he bleeding from? I don't know. I can't tell. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Easy, easy, easy, easy. So it went to a place of, as long as my body wasn't getting stabbed by the bones that were punctured through my skin, and my nephew had to hold my arm in a certain position to relieve all the bones off my punctured lung just so I can struggle. Again, I was just focusing on breathing and moaning and groaning and how to position my body.

12:17Is he awake? Barely. Okay. They're coming as fast as they can, okay? when i hear your account man i can't help it i go through this would i be at this point wishing to die did you hit a point i don't know i mean would you ever wish to die i don't know yeah i think i don't know if you have that you know i don't think i had that that choice i mean i didn't wasn't trying to die i didn't want to die and so i was trying to live but i had to breathe first and that's why i just managed and compartmentalized the pain and the injuries like i saw in my eye i'm oh my god, that's fucked up. And I see my legs all twisted, make us messed up.

12:53Those shit hurt. They don't. It's going to hurt later. Let's worry about this breath. Because if I don't breathe, none of this matters. And it took every fiber of my body to focus on inhaling and exhaling. When we come back, the moment when Jeremy says he almost lost it all. What's it like to die?

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14:57As Jeremy Renner lay on the ice in critical condition, broken, His mind went back decades to his mother and a lesson he learned as a boy that would help him survive. I was probably 12. My mom was pregnant with my sister Nikki, and she told me to put my soccer cleats away because I was supposed to go to soccer practice. And I, you know, always did what my mom said, you know. I was a good boy. I listened to my mom. She said, grab a pillow, we're going to the YMCA. I'm like, all right, right. And so she takes me to this thing, and it's like, you know, all the ladies are laying on the ground and pull down a screen and we're watching like this home birth as women in a bathtub and we're learning like the ma's breathing techniques and i learned that technique and what's that to do is to mitigate pains take the the mind away from you know all your contractions and breathe right and control of breath really controls pain yeah i remember my wife yeah it does all these things really quite important and i learned that at a very young age it was very inconvenient when i was 12 or 13 right but realized later on in life It became very important to me from Lamaze to, as a young man and struggling in Hollywood, the nerves.

16:04And I used breath to get over nerves and, like, center myself. And then on the ice, it became very, very—a great survival technique for me. Who knew? Who knew, right? Who knew? Paramedics said your heart rate went down to 18 or 19? Yeah, they had to breathe for me a bit. They had to inject through my chest and did all these things. So I would be okay. But that's when I passed as well. I just ran out of energy. I just got tired, you know? Pretty crazy. What's it like to die? Pretty peaceful. And I go, wonderfully peaceful. It's magnificent. There's no questions because everything's answered. Everything just is.

16:44And it's all fueled in love. And everything's connected at once. We're all connected as one thing. Were you going on a journey? Well, I don't know. No, it was more of like a flood than it was like a journey. I feel like it was more a flood of love and this overwhelming feeling of, like, gratification, satisfaction. There's no void of anything. Like, you have—like, you're at the finish line of anything. Whatever, like, there's a punctuation. It's more like a dot, dot, dot, a continuation of, if it's a punctuation. You know, we all want to know. I mean, I laid my mother to rest last year. Yeah. And, you know, I remember holding her hand and thinking she was there, and now she's not there.

17:28Yeah, but— And is she okay? Yeah, absolutely. I say absolutely, without a doubt. It's all happening concurrently in my mind. This is just an extension of what our spirit and soul is and how it exists. We're already collectively existing and coexisting together anyway. The real surprise to me is, like, after the passing and, you know, then being revived, But then I was intubated. I was out for a few days. I was, you know, put in a coma. When I woke from that coma, the real surprise was I woke up to see, you know, everyone there at the base of my bed. And then I was intubated and I was a hot mess.

18:08But I wrote down on a piece of paper, I said, I want to write something. I wrote down, holy fuck. I'm so sorry. I love you all. Love you all so much. Meaning so sorry for what I put you through. Yeah, yeah. I kind of fucked up the holiday. I'm like, all these things, you know, that's what I meant by this. I'm responsible for that. I'm also responsible because I've been on that side of the bed before. And that's a terrible place to be when, you know, someone is on their last breath or what it might be. And they're helpless. All these people that love me so deeply can do nothing to help me. And I've done this to them.

18:41I've put this on them. You seem to want to assign blame to yourself. I'm not here to make you feel good one way or the other, but I'm just... Well, that was a real surprise to me. I mean, not the surprise of like in the middle of my trying not to die, where it was like, I got to get back to my family. I really had something to always live for. And I've always felt responsible. And I'm certainly not going to put this under my daughter or dump this under my mom or my sister, right? I'm not going to do this to them. No way. I'm like, I'm not going to lose to this. I'm not going to lose. I'm not going to do that to them.

19:16For my daughter, I had to show her that it's going to get better. Otherwise, she's going to be worried for how long, for the rest of her life. And that was like my main focus. Now, none of these people could do anything for me, but they loved me. So I wasn't alone. All that made the world a fucking difference for me. That is the greatest gift I think anybody can give anybody. Like I was so fortunate, brother, to have a ton of people that love me. So the greatest part of my recovery was not even thinking about my recovery. It's like, how do I relieve this horrible look on their faces? I'm staring at it.

19:49I'm like, how do I get these faces to change into something a little bit more positive and hopeful? And that's by just getting better, moving my arm a little bit more, moving my toe and doing things and cracking jokes. My brain's still there. They're getting relieved of all these fears the more I show them. And that's what I focused on. And I think that is what I attribute most of my recovery journey for that to happen and happen as quickly as it did. You were just a model patient. i heard that somewhere yeah yeah yeah i think you know it i think i was fine when i was out but as soon as i i woke up i think they woke a demon i think that's also part of like my spirit it wasn't being a dick to be a dick but i was breaking out of that hospital i didn't die okay great now let's go get better at home and it's everything's irrational and unreasonable the bowl but who cares yeah before long you're back in los angeles at cedars um yeah yeah it was um it was three months of hell because the organs were yeah it's much more organs and bones and just internal sort of thing so yeah i mean the jaw broke and the eye everything kind of went back in place and some metal pieces kind of fill in the spots that were missing 39 bones is that well 39 bones and you know 100 some odd breaks you know because the jaw broke in three places isn't, it's just a bunch of, you know, whatever.

21:12And the rib cage, I, I, I, by reading your account, I became more appreciative of what the rib cage does. Yeah, well, that's safe. Well, then, you know, that prevented that spinal injury. Like my brain, you know, there was a little swelling there, but like nothing got damaged. Like you think there's going to be some sort of brain damage, right? You think. Or you think if you break 16 ribs, there might be some spinal damage. There's none. None. Your recovery happens really fast. Right? I've been pretty fortunate. You said that almost a little surprised. Well, yeah. you wouldn't think I realized you know when I do like a sort of body inventory through it all even like when I shower like this morning I still do a body inventory and checking how everything's kind of operating and working but like I realized like you know any marks I have and I'm kind of proud of the marks but all from the surgeries nothing is from the actual crushing of this steel tracks over my body dude you still got crushed I know dude it was brutal whenever I read that word I'm like you got crushed yeah yeah Oh, my Lord.

22:10Yeah, look, somehow, someway, it was not heavy enough to just turn me into meat, you know. And thank God, man. Let's do where I want to stop you because I'm fascinated by the thought that we wake up every morning and we start making decisions. I'm going to brush my teeth. Oh, no, I'm going to go have breakfast and brush my teeth on little things. And then something horrible like what you experienced happens on the other end. Do you think about that, those minor decisions that could have affected your fate on that day? Oh, you know, I don't think so, because I guess, you know, in retrospect, in hindsight, kind of look back, and there were a lot of things that made it difficult just to get to the location, right?

22:51We lost the keys to the car, couldn't get on the plane, they just closed the doors when we got there. Like all these sort of like warnings almost. But I'm like, why? It would have been terrible if that was a warning. One of the greatest things happened to me on that morning, and that day, when I got ran over. The greatest thing happened. Whoa, whoa, whoa, back up. The greatest thing? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can see that now in retrospect, but I'm glad nothing prevented me from getting there and doing it. I don't regret trying to save my nephew. I'm going to do it again tonight. So I don't think there's anything, signs that I should have paid attention to or decisions I would have made that I would have wanted to change.

23:29I'm glad it happened. And I wouldn't want to do it again. but i'm glad it happened and i'm blown away but i'm really blown away because i'm proud of like where i'm at and where i've become you know if like look if i'm like if even if i had an eye patch and a wooden leg and i'm half a pirate right on i was i was really committed to being a pirate i thought i was gonna lose my eye i was gonna lose my leg i'm like great but don't give me a good one i just want an old wooden one and i'm gonna get a boat and i'm gonna live a pirate life That was my solution to that trauma. No joke. That was when I was with the doctors.

24:05I'm like, I'm going to be the best pirate ever. It's going to be awesome. I'm going to live on the open seas. It's going to be awesome. Next, how Jeremy bounced back. Do you feel like you have two lives that you're on to the second?

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26:15Jeremy Renner's brush with death didn't just change his body. It changed the way he thinks about how he lives. To put a button on the question of death, are you able to process it now differently than most of us? I think I process life, or at least my life in this body that I always have to care for, like an old car. You know, it takes a little while to... Wait till you get my age, pal. Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, it's no different than aging too, right? And it's like you just get injured just getting out of bed nowadays, right? It's like, oh, Jesus, what happened? I don't really focus on the death because to me there was no death.

26:55I don't really believe in death. Did my body die? Sure. But that doesn't mean anything. So you didn't hit a lights-out moment then? You don't think that it's fade to black? No. No. Never was there a disconnect. A lot of people would say there are religious answers for all this. Yeah. I mean, look, I studied. My dad would study theology, and we studied all religions growing up. And I think they're all fascinating. They're all interesting. They all work towards the same end goal. They just go about it in different ways. I don't have anything against organized religions at all. It's just not my pathway in relations to my spirit and our connectivity and what happens when we die.

27:39But I'm a man that does believe in our spirit. And our spirit is all of us all at once. And love is all one thing all at once, always. And it's a beautiful space. And it's always happening now. And our death is just a great relief of the burdens of the human experience. Have you changed your career path? Sure. I think it shifts. You know, I think our priorities shift. It's the same thing when you're a parent. You become a parent. And my life switched when I became a dad. But priorities shift. and same from post, you know, near-death experience. So I spent a lot more time on my own health and my own self than I ever have before.

28:22I was always like 10th on the totem pool of important things, like my health and stuff and taking care of myself. I was so low. Now it's like number one. Before anything else, before my daughter, before anything else, take care of me first. And then the career is, you know, somewhere, fifth or, you know, somewhere around there, but it's not quite, you know, I was married to my career prior. That was like number one priority. And just, it's all the same things there of my life. It's just, I just reorganize what has the most value. You're really engaged helping kids with your foundation. Yeah, that's really helped me, you know, on my hospital bed in my house is where I sort of came up with, as my sister was, you know, talking about retirement.

29:00She works for DCFS, Child Protective Services, and so does her husband. And she's been doing that for like 25 years or something. And I said, we should just do something, you know, just start a foundation so I can work with my sister as she retires and we can do this, something quite beautiful and effective. And to me, working with kids and, you know, being, you know, this is where Hawkeye becomes a really cool kind of superpower to kids, you know, and having access to kids and real reach to them. So that became very, very important to me to be very actionable in doing it since the incident is really purposeful for me to do.

29:31And I love all of it. I was kind of thinking when I was coming over here that for a lot of your fans, this seems like a script from a part you would play. Yeah, yeah, kind of. You ever think about that? Yeah, no, I do. I have. It's like, this is an intense movie, you know, how this whole transpired. But I guess it's just how things kind of go in my life. Still doing your own stunts? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but being selective in which ones I choose to do, you know, my brain thinks I can do anything, right? My brain doesn't think I'm 55 or been killed, right? It doesn't know any of this stuff. It thinks it's eight years old and is invincible.

30:12My body says, F off. No, we're not going to do this. This is not happening. Do people approach you now with an aura of sympathy now? Is it like, oh, hey, to Jeremy. There was a lot more of it when it was happening. You know, when I was, you know, peeking out into public more a few months after the incident, you know, I still had a TV show I was putting out. I was, all these things I was trying to get back to live for and not just live for recovery. So there was a lot more sensitivity and people were, you know, whether it was a circus sideshow or whatever the heck it was. There's a lot of people just cheering on just for the humanity part of things.

30:51No one was asking for a selfie anymore. They're just like, I'm glad you're with us. And people have a different sort of connection to me than just some movie I was in. Do you feel like by sharing your story, you are changing lives? I don't do it to change lives, but yeah. People tell me. Yeah, sitting here with you right now, I feel like I'm being inspired. Right. But I can't operate from that, but sometimes it is. Sometimes it can be, and that's a great reward of it, right? That's the great ripple effect of this thing. The greatest lesson for me is getting out of my own way. and it's allowed me to be really connected to so many people in life.

31:28How were you with fans before this? Hey, Jeremy! I'm fine. I was always fine in public, but that's why I remained pretty private. That's why I didn't leave my house very often. Because when I left my house, I was sort of public property, or so it felt. So I just stayed home a lot, and so I felt like I can be free to think and feel and do whatever. You're the guy that would retreat to the back of the house when company came over? That too, yeah. Because I always hosted and had a bunch of people over. And my family's huge. And sometimes I just didn't want all that energy. I'm quite a sensitive, empathetic person.

32:02And I'm an actor. And my body's an instrument. So I'm pretty sensitive to things. And I'm affected by it. I can't watch the news. You know, it really affects me. It really hurts me a lot. Because news is pretty bad. As you know. I do. I know too well. But you always do good stories. Or sometimes, anyway. Yeah. Does your celebrity change the experience, make it easier, or is it a make an easier lesson to pass on? Usually, I think there's a being a celebrity is unfortunate. Normally, this is a private experience. Anybody else, you know, that would have happened on their driveway. And then, you know, just go do your thing and recover.

32:41And there you go. This has become now such like a headline for so long. So that I felt obligated to, as a private man, share a private experience. and I realized what a shame it would have been if I kept it private because I see and I keep hearing about the ripple effect of this and other people that go through struggles and it could be many different struggles just from depression to physical injuries to just aging or anything and everything or what death might be like and I get to kind of ride that with people. Do you feel like you have two lives that you're on to the second? No no I just have a better version of my existence here.

33:19It's kind of like a new and improved version. And more, not so much physical, but it's the mental clarity, the purposefulness of life with great intention. I learn every day on this and this new body, this new way to live and new way to think. And I learn from everybody else around me. And I take it all in. It's really quite beautiful. I think it would be the greatest thing for everyone to be able to do if you knew you can come out of it. Really? Getting run over? Yeah, or just dying, being tested to your limits, in a way. You realize how minuscule many of your problems are. It's great with perspectives.

33:57You realize how ridiculous we are here on Earth and our problems. There's all these things that are kind of real big issues for us down here. A parking ticket, you're worried about a boyfriend, all these things. All that doesn't matter. All that goes away because we're relieved of these earthly duties and limitations. So as a family, are you in some, not just you, but the entire family in a different or a better place? That's why I'm so glad I came out of this thing. It's because we come out of this thing stronger. Like my mom and my sister weren't speaking. They had some argument and it lasted longer than it should have.

34:35When my sister, she's calling my mom to say that I'm in the hospital and I'm life support. She wasn't sure if her mom was going to answer the phone. Obviously she did. but all that all the stuff that you know it was just it was like shedding all this the ridiculousness of life that the things that didn't matter and really simplified i think everyone in my life actually they're even my friends that just came to visit the hospital and things there was a wonderful perspective like our all of all of the intimacy levels and the depths of love that i have for all my friends as well grew without having to say a word an event like what transpired magnified all the beauty and the beautiful parts of my friendships and my relationships with everyone.

35:20Everything got better. And whether it's, you know, we all got to say, hey, let's take a pause and realize how much we love each other. Let's take this and like, we got out of this one. We're not at a funeral. But hey, let me tell you how much I love you. And come on, man. Yeah. There's nothing more beautiful than hearing the real truths of real people that you really care about. It's just such a huge part of my life now. If it draws out really interesting conversations, then great, because I get to do this for the rest of my life. There's a real meaningfulness to life now. It had meaning before, but it's diluted by all these other things I gave value to, and I call it white noise.

36:01And we all have it. We all give value to stuff that's really not that valuable. Like when we have stress and worries and problems, they're all valid. But when you zoom out a bit, you look up in the sky and you see all these potential suns out there, you know, just zoom out a little bit. You can see that your problems really aren't that big of a deal when you kind of scope in a lot more things. It feels like if there's a little less of like the surface joy and then like the glitter of life, like that's kind of gone, which seems bad. But with it comes like this knowingness of like the depth of love, like the perpetuity, the forever love, you know, because that's all we are anyway.

36:41Down to our atoms, we're just connected by love, you know. I'm learning that me sharing and me giving and me caring, I feel ashamed I didn't do it before. and if it took my near death to make me realize or awaken awareness for other people and then this event it's the greatest blessing and so I'm glad I'm here I'm glad I'm here and I'm but I'm not going to waste my breath or my step or my time on things that aren't quite valuable and don't serve great purpose in acts of service. Well, I'm glad you're here too. Yeah, me too, man. It's been a pleasure. You're okay. I'm going to do your firm handshake.

37:30Doing great. You can squeeze hard.

37:35Since the accident, Jeremy has continued to build his foundation, Renervation, which supports foster youth and other children in need.

37:47And next time, Adrienne Haslett, a professional ballroom dancer who was standing near the finish line during the Boston Marathon bombing when, in an instant, the life she knew was gone. I had my back to the finish line and I heard a giant, enormous boom and blast. Most of my foot was gone. Were you aware of how messed up you were? Yeah, I was. I didn't think I was going to live. And for the first time, Adrienne is revealing a long-held secret about what helped her survive that day. As we prepare to do this, I'll let you tell the story, but you sent an email. I did. And there was something else you wanted to talk about.

38:31Yeah. That's next time.

38:39Before and After is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Dan Slepian and Liz Brown-Kuriloff are the producers. Annalise Peterson is the associate producer. Brian Drew, Billy Ray, and Rich Platt are editors. Original music by John Estes. Jessica Fenton is head of audio production. Alexa Danner is head of audio. Paul Ryan is the executive producer. And Liz Cole is senior executive producer.

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