John Kammer: Grief, Journaling, and AI | Episode 163

John Kammer: Grief, Journaling, and AI | Episode 163

What drives someone to seek a life without numbing out the pain? This conversation between host Michael Waite and guest John Kammer circles right around that question, using raw grief, alcohol misuse, and AI as unlikely co-stars. John shares how losing three of his closest friends in sudden, separate tragedies pushed him into more than a decade of "substance-fuelled avoidance", mainly alcohol.

He had bought into the idea that time alone heals, saying he tried to "run far enough and fast enough" from his pain. That illusion collapsed after another close friend died and John realised, as he puts it, "the only way out of this stuff is through." Sobriety gave him the clarity to face the grief he’d been dodging.

From there, he began experimenting with journaling, reading *Man’s Search for Meaning*, and eventually creating Guardian AIngels, an AI-powered grief journalling tool. Instead of a one-way diary, it turns grief work into a dialogue: you build a persona of the person you’ve lost, then receive prompts and gentle questions designed with grief-specialist therapists around J. William Worden’s four tasks of mourning.

The episode walks through those tasks – accepting the loss, processing the pain, adjusting to life without the person, and integrating their memory into the future – and contrasts them with Kübler-Ross’s more rigid “stages of grief”. John also speaks candidly about using alcohol to “turn [his] brain off”, why he no longer misses substances, and how sharing stories of loss can be a bridge from technology back to real human connection.

There’s plenty here if you’re sober or sober-curious and wrestling with bereavement: from simple journalling and talking about the person you’ve lost, to how AI might give you language for feelings you’ve never managed to name. It all comes back to one choice: keep running, or turn and face the storm like the buffalo. Which way are you heading right now?