 Well, welcome to the show Bruce. We're so excited to chat with you today about life in the transitions and Johnny and I both thoroughly enjoyed it and we want to first start by talking a little bit about how this book came together because I know it was an immense amount of work on your part with interviews to really define this toolkit. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me. It was great to be with you guys. I've been looking forward to this conversation. This is one of those stories that on the one hand feels like it's been changed by the ending like that this book came out in the middle of the pandemic at this moment when the entire planet is in a life quake. But it didn't really begin that way and so I sort of got interested. Since you asked how it began, I'll tell that story because I got interested in life breaks, what I call now life quakes, because I went through one myself right and I think back on my life now. I think of it as having a kind of traditional linear path I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, I left the south and I went northeast to go to college, and then I left there. And I found I learned more about myself as a southerner by leaving the south and going north and this was I'm older than you guys but this was the age of discount airfare in the 80s and I thought well, you know, I should leave America and find out what it means to be an American so I went to Japan. I landed the day that the space shuttle Challenger exploded actually. And I started writing these letters home on crinkly airmail paper again this would be totally alien to you guys. But they didn't have lines like in the pad would have a line like the cover of the pad had a line and you would stick it under the papers so that the writing didn't go crooked. You know we learned to hand write right there was no internet there was no, none of this stuff happened. And so I wrote these letters home for months and months and months and when I got back home everyone said I loved your letters I was like great. And so we met. And it turned out that my grandmother at Xerox them and passed them around and they sort of went viral and the old fashioned sense of the word not that well I should write a book about this I mean it didn't happen, but I saw my first book 31 years ago this month I was 24 at the time. And I said my 20s traveling around the world and writing this was kind of my thing I would enter a world and write about Japan and England I spent a year as a circus clown as you know and living in Nashville writing about country music when I thought. Okay, I'm a writer now I can't deny this anymore but I don't know anything about the Bible right because in Nashville the songs were kind of about that in one way or the other and so I took Bible by my off my shelf and I put it by my bed where it's not untouched for me and I went to see a friend in Jerusalem and my friend said over there is this controversial neighborhood and over there's the rock where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac. So I thought well, here's an idea, like what if I walk along the route and read the story along the way, no one thought this was a good idea like terrorism and you know they would this was the middle of all those Middle Eastern wars but I did it anyway and I would have written the Bible and it became a thing. And when viral in the modern sense of the word and so this is what I was doing in my 30s I was going back and forth the Middle East writing books making television I got married I had children. That's the linear path I was saying earlier like you do something, and then it hockey sticks right and then it was succeeding and this was going to be my life. And then boom, then I had this life quake and what I've now come to see like a lot of life breaks it was one it was like a pile up it was like a bunch of things happening at once. At first I got cancer at 43 as a new dad. Then that was the last recession, I was one bankrupt my family in real estate that all went under. And then my dad is Parkinson's, and he tries to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. This was just, you know, an awful experiences you might imagine even telling it now is awful. I'm the story guy and I'm the meaning guy and I said to my dad like well I'm going to start sending you a question so every Monday morning for what became yours I would send him a question about his life. Tell me about the toys you played with the house you grew up with how'd you join the Navy how would you meet mom and he like dictates this answer to Siri and every week and it's like the only thing really that he cared about. And I thought well this is really interesting and when I told other people about this everybody had a story that was like this about how they just got walloped by life right there. My wife has a headache goes into the hospital and dies my brother gets diagnosed with stage four this that are the other thing I just lost my legs in an accident my boss has stolen money from me whatever it was. And what everybody was saying was kind of some version of the same thing, the life I'm living is not the life I expected like I'm living life out of order. And it was that idea that there is an order, and then there's not an order, like that was that that was the motivating thing and so I thought I have to do something about this and then what I did. I was going to wrap this up was like went out and started collecting what became hundreds and hundreds of life stories of Americans and all ages, all walks of life all 50 states, trying to answer this question of what do you do when something unexpected happens to you. This idea that we all have that life is linear, and we latch on to this and I think a lot of times it leaves us unable to face the transitions that you eloquently put in the book we all are going to face in our lives. Why do you think there's this misconception around linearity to our lives. This was the key moment, guys in the whole process and the best way for me to describe it was I feel like one day I pulled the book off a shelf. And instead of the book coming off the whole shelf open you know that kind of fantasy that we have almost like a Harry Potter movie or something like wait a minute there's a whole another room behind this apparently Dan Brown has one of these moving bookshelves in his castle and in in in France. What was in the other room, kind of that was news to me and now that we know that the books come out and found this big audience turns out to be news to a lot of people and that is the linear life that we're talking about that's an aberration right so that basically how cultures have a way of looking at the world and how they look at the world defines how we look at our lives. And so that in the ancient world they don't have linear time right and watches and batteries and all those kinds of things electricity, so they think that life is a cycle. Okay, to every season turn turn turn. The Bible sort of introduces the idea of linear time this comes along, you know, with Western civilization so the Middle Ages they think and you know I have these pictures in the book that was so amazing. They think that life is peaks at Middle Age, and then it's downhill like there, and everybody has to follow it men women old young so it's like basic things like new love at 40 or right you know moving at 50 or retiring at 60 and all of those things were not deemed possible. So that's a staircase life, these paradigmatic shapes and essentially when science comes along the birth of science 100 years ago, which brings of course the Industrial Revolution all these things. Suddenly everything is linear. And why is it linear actually for no more profound reason than like forward and because of the conveyor belt and because factories things were done in a linear way. So everybody's so broy their Piaget their development stages for children Freud, psycho, psycho sexual stages. Erickson the eight stages of moral development Erickson says he models his on the conveyor belt, right the five stages of Greek the heroes, grief the heroes journey these for all these linear constructs and this reaches its peak. In, you know, what for you guys will be ancient history but the 1970s gal she he writes this book called passages, which says everyone does the same thing in their 20s, the same thing in their 30s and then everyone has a midlife crisis at 39 and a half. And you can't overestimate how powerful that idea was a book sold 20 million copies. It's sort of suddenly it was low that you had to have a midlife crisis so now let's just again let's just take the proof text of the pandemic. If you're between 39 and 44 you're having a midlife crisis. But if you're 27 you're also having a crisis and if you're 67 or like my children 15 and a half. So the point is that these tumultuous episodes in our life have nothing to do with birthdays that ended in zero have nothing to do with this linear. They happen when some people are born. And if I spend the next 10 minutes asking you questions and so the other way around, I would find out that you know, one of you may have had, you know, maybe one of maybe your parents, one of your parents was divorced that that would be mathematically possible. Maybe someone has a drinking problem maybe someone lost a job and you had to move, like, you know, maybe you lost a parent, right, maybe you lost a job maybe you left a job to then start a podcast. These are events of some voluntary some involuntary that happen. That's why I call it the whenever life crisis because they happen just whenever. And sometimes along with other people we're all going through one together now, but often separate. And the point is, they come more often to the kind of the big idea this book is we're going to have one every 12 to 18 months, one of these disruptors. And most of them we get through, but one in 10 will be will be bigger. Higher on the Richter scale of consequences. That's why I call it a life quake. And that takes many years to get through. And the way you get through it is tools, the steps, the phases of a life transition that becomes the backbone of this book. There's a lot to impact there. So I'm going to just go ahead and start asking. Let's go through the dirty laundry. Well, one of the things that stuck out to me was this, this need or want or desire to see the world to figure out who you were. And that is not something that I see that is prevalent in American culture. So were you a reader that was it was it somewhat sparked you at a young age that forced you out in the world, because you see that in Europe. In Europe, it is encouraged to go to different countries and travel, take time off of school, but not in America. And so I that was first one thing that stuck out to me. But also, it is, it is that idea of traveling, seeing the world, finding out who you are, that is going to put together all of these pieces that become tools about how you deal with life quakes. So what was it at an early age that forced you out to see the world in that manner. So that's such an interesting question and I spent a lot and in a lot of ways I'm not the right person to answer that because it's my life, but since you asked me. I think a couple things happened for me. Number one, I grew up in a very, I'm very place oriented. So I grew up in Savannah, Georgia. I don't know if you've been to Savannah you certainly have seen these made in Savannah. Savannah is a 80% of the buildings, Savannah was was preserved by when when Sherman burned Atlanta and March to the sea. The Savannah is actually fled this is not a story they like to tell, but so therefore Savannah was not burned and the his and then a century later the historic preservation movement began in Savannah so like 80% of the buildings, standing and 1800 still standing today and so it's very steeped it was very isolating. It was very steeped in place and culture and history and I kind of bit of kind of self mythologizing romance of course. But so I'm very place oriented and cut to as I said earlier I grew up in the age of discount airfare were certain where suddenly travel was possible. So since I actually like to learn from place first. So to speak, I, I like the idea of going to places as a way to learn that to be one B2 is I grew up Jewish in the south. Okay, so, you know, I love the South, I love the stickiness, I love the storytelling is the family this, but I grew up Jewish in the south which meant I was sort of a part of it. But apart from it at the same time. I also like being Jewish, right and I like the family this and the stickiness and the storytelling this, but I grew up Jewish in the south which is not only different from the history of Judaism but also from the history of Judaism in America. So I feel a part of it and apart from it. So I think of myself as kind of two things. One is I'm an experientialist. So I like to go places and experience things becoming a part of it, but I'm also an explain a holic, which is actually an Isaac Asimov phrase for himself, long before being whatever the boy what a man's planning has now been a bad thing, but I'm an explain a holic so I like going to a place and then coming back and explaining it so like I'm in Japan I write these letters like that's kind of fundamentally who I am. And then because I like, I like made up words about myself. I have become a life story and and so I think that what what is appealing to me about the life story thing was that I like talking to people right and so what I think about this book is like, in some ways I did the most old fashioned thing imaginable. I went and talked to people like the circle was doing this in the 70s, but I also did it in a new fangled way which is then I did this data analytics. So then I had 1000 hours of interviews and 6000 pages of transcripts. And so with this team of people we spend a year coding it, trying to tease out themes and patterns and takeaways. So again, that's really me in a nutshell like a foot in the old in the ancient world or a foot in the old and a foot in the contemporary that really, I think that really captures me pretty well. Yeah, that sets up a lot of nice things I and I wanted to also add, we were talking about how a lot of people we would view life as this linear way and then you had brought up a bunch of points that you felt contributed to why we think in that way and I think one of the things that was missing there was where civilization got to a point where everyone was able to collect wealth. And so, when you're collecting wealth, you just want to keep stacking it right it just keeps getting high so once again, we're looking at something that inevitably just continues to grow. Life isn't like that and because we're we're going to be faced with trauma and loss. That's just a natural part of it. And of course when you're collecting wealth, no one wants to see that go away you want to just keep collecting it so I think that lends itself to a skewed look at life. Well, the one of the quotes in your book that we absolutely love and it's about your default reaction to crisis and when in turmoil, turn to narrative and being a life story. Oh my God read the next line the next line is the next line that's the killer line. Well, let's read it off the full thing that when in turmoil turn the narrative the proper response to a setback is a story. There's your line. There's the money line. Well, as you you see now why I asked that question about leaving and discovering and because that helps build narrative it helps of who you are and all that discovery lends itself to building these tools of being a life story and to understanding how narrative works and also as a writer. So that's why I wanted to set the stage with that. Okay, now I'm going to I get to do the anti there AJ because now I get to do the unpacking. Okay, because I have a lot of things to say about that. First of all, I love I'm loving this conversation. But let me go back to the first thing you said and we'll work our way to the story. Because you brought up this issue of what happens, because a central myth, I would say, of the American dream itself a myth, but a central myth of the American dream has been that every generation is going to do better than it. Sure. Absolutely. Then the prior generation by the way the idea of the American dream is not that old an idea. It's only a century old itself was a product of the of the linear age, which is now passed. And so I do think that there is an interesting dimension here which is that, you know, it is often said that say the millennial generation is going to be the first generation that cannot naturally expect to make more money than its parents generation, which would be presumably in this model. The former generation with the Xers in between. But I, and I, but this is very interesting to me and it's interesting to me a lot because I actually what I'm doing right now, which is that, you know, life isn't the transitions has, you know, come out into the world. And I've actually now agreed to keep going and to set out and collect more stories. And with the news stories I'm going to collect I'm going to focus on people's work lives, and their family lives and kind of how they navigate the major kind of work family hobby creativity decisions in their lives and by the way if anybody listening has interesting work, work life. Send me an email brisfollow.com and let me consider adding you to this project. So I've been reading a lot about this issue of economics and I think that there's other, you know, the way you said it was you left out something. I think even in the thing that you say I left out there's even more that you left out, which I've been thinking about a lot. So let's just put this all on the table, which at the basic relationship between people and work, particularly large corporations and companies has been has melted right. So the idea that you can have a long linear relationship with an organization, a company, a corporation has been obliterated and kind of blown to smithereens in the last generation. And as a result, that was something that was pretty powerful 100 years ago, when the industrial revolution first rose and even in the 1950s. And so but it's gone away now you want to add something to this. Well, AJ and I both grew up in factory households where our dads had bought into that idea, only for us to see as teenagers, that idea that and that just get yeah obliterated and it was all around us. He grew up in Detroit. I grew up in Pittsburgh. And so two of you know two of the muscular shoulders of the American dream. Absolutely. So we were there when it was crashing around us and watching our fathers deal with that very life quick. I alluded to this earlier like what I said if it took 10 minutes in this conversation, we're going to start here and you're not nonlinear event. So a lot of this idea of nonlinearity has to do with when was the when was your first nonlinear event. Okay. So, you know, for me, I would say my first nonlinear event, you know, was in my 40s and for you it was in your teenagers and I think that that is increasingly now we have fire trucks that was that was increasingly. I don't think they're stopping on this block but there's a there's this is like a, you know, serious business. Yeah. Sounds like Brooklyn. Yeah, Brooklyn, you know, this is this is life someone's having a nonlinear event. They're okay. So we'll keep talking. Exers get this idea of nonlinearity more intuitively than do bloomers and millennials more intuitively than Xers. And that's a very powerful change that's going on in the culture. So that I feel like, you know, remember, I was born in 1964. Okay, so that's normally the last year of the baby boom, even though that was 20 years after the war. I feel like people 50 plus are still haunted by the ghost of linearity. So I think that for your generation and sounds like for you individually, you already didn't have that. So you're already more insecure on the one hand more open to change. But you know people react differently some people react to that kind of instability by saying I want a job and I want you know I want to go in the most stable thing. I don't want to go into I don't know medicine or academia or something that's stable because I don't want to happen to me. There's a bunch of stories in my book. That that story of Jamie Levine and about chapter four who, you know, he grew up in in Worcester mass right which is the shoe capital of the world and also kind of a blue color shoulder retail like Detroit and Pittsburgh. His father also lost his job and he's like I'm never going to have this and he rose to become a partner at Goldman Sachs, which you would think would be captain of the universe, and then his daughter is basically born without a kidney. And, you know, his life comes crumbling down in his marriage and everything has to be rebuilt and reimagined, but he was determined not to have the financial insecurity that he saw his dad suffered through so think that that is an important thing. That I think then gets us toward the second part of your question, which is, how do we construct our identity, given these nonlinear events. Okay, and come so what I want to say is that your impulse to tell in this conversation. This happened to me when I was a teenager and this happens to AJ when I'm a teenager. That imp. What that is a way into is to understand that we all have this story. It's kind of going along at all times in the back of our heads, the story of where we came from and where we're going and what's important to us. Right. If if that fire truck that just passed us here was going downstairs in my house or I had to then get a call and rushing go see someone in the hospital that I love. You're going to be telling a story about that person like who are they, how do they mean to this. What do they mean to you. Okay, I was just watching this meme on the internet of Mr Rogers when he won a lifetime. He gave me awards saying spend 10 seconds thinking about the most someone who sacrificed in order to get you where you are. It's not hard for anybody listening to us to take a second and conjure up somebody a teacher a parent a counselor or coach, a religious leader, you know, a neighbor who affected them. That is the story of who you are. I know now that that story is not just part of you that story is you in a fundamental way. A life is the story that you tell yourself. And what we're talking about in this conversation is what happens when that story gets disrupted or interrupted or blown up in some way. And that is a breach. Okay, you know, story fundamentally has to have a breach in the normal. Otherwise, there's no reason to tell the story. Everybody goes off every day and lives their life. And let's just say you have a loved one or partner a friend, a parent or, you know, a spouse, you come at the end of the day you don't narrate all eight hours of what happens in the intervening time since you saw them you pick the highlights and the highlights are usually when when something abnormal happens, something good may have happened something bad may have happened you may have gotten you know, you may have won the lottery you may have had a tire, you're going to talk about the breach is in the normal and what the story does is it helps repair the breach. And so it turns out, though I wasn't aware of it at the time that turns out to be a kind of a big backbone of contemporary psychology. And what this book about it, the book is about in a fundamental way is where the tools that allows each of us to repair a breach in our narrative. Because guess what the breaches or as I like to call them the wolves and their fairy tales, the breaches, the wolves, the ogres, the downsizing the tornadoes the pandemics, they're coming at us at a much faster pace. They did. When you're when your parents just lost their jobs, or, you know, I was growing up, even two decades before that. Yeah, that that was really my next question, especially thinking about the research for the next book is, are you seeing an acceleration in the frequency of these transitions for future generations. So, you know, when I think about my grandparents, I think about them really, you know, surviving the depression and then and retiring at the company that they really started with. And then I think about my father's experience and bouncing between jobs because the factories did close and they weren't making Stroh's beer in the US any longer and all these things. And now when I'm spending time with my fiance's sister, who's a generation younger than me, and I'm seeing all of the transition that she's going through and the disruption that she's facing. And I can't help but think it seems to me like the number of transitions we're going through as a society is increasing in our lifetime. And it's certainly not what we were taught by our grandparents, our parents pass a little bit down, but it certainly feels like the disruption is become more of a norm than ever before. Yes. Next question. No, I think that that's, that's exactly right. So that why is this. Okay. Yeah, that was my next question. I have a guess. Well, let's just start with the why and then we'll deal with the how, right. So the why, if you go back 100 years ago. Okay, we're having this conversation, obviously not by zoom and all that things but we're having this conversation 100 years ago, but, but go back, go back at that time. Most people had to live with their parents wanted them to live, like believe what their parents wanted them to believe, do what their parents wanted them to do. You know, maybe even marry who their parents wanted them to marry, like most of our sources of meaning and identity. And everything else were given to us. You know, and if that was true for men, which it was, it was even more true for women and it was even more true for the children that those men and those women raised. Okay. Now, none of that is true. We can live where we want to live. We can believe what we want to believe. We can do what we wanted to do. You know, we can change our minds we can change our religions we can change our, even in the last 10 years we can change our bodies we can change our sexual identity. We can change our sexual orientation, or we can right size it if you prefer that kind of language, we can change all of these things. And that is a blessing in many, many ways but it's also a burden and almost everywhere. Okay, because we constantly, it's nothing is fixed. We are constantly in a state of, do I want to be with this person because I can loudly I mean you just mentioned I think you mentioned a fiance, well, you know, you're not even married but you can leave that person right, you know, maybe you don't want to have, maybe you want to have a more fluid sexual identity maybe you want to change your jobs or maybe you want to keep your job and then have a side hustle on the side where you do something else or maybe you have a hope job where you are, you know, writing a novel or you're in LA a screenplay on the side because that's your, your fantasy you at any given moment are you a believer or not a believer if you're a believer do you want to go to a religion institution if you if it's one religious institution do you want to change that institution. How often do you want to go. That is a huge, huge, huge. It's not a tsunami of change because it's coming at you from all directions. And even if you're somebody for whom something is stable. Like maybe you've been in a stable relationship or maybe you've been in a stable job, or maybe you've been in a state stable sexual identity, or maybe your cisgender and not in the position of transitioning your gender. If you're stable in one thing, or two things you're going to be unstable in one thing or two things. Okay, and then that's just the things that you can control. That has nothing to do with what happens when there's a pandemic, or what happens when there's political upheaval. Okay, or I mean a perfect example of this back to my 2020 being a proof text for life is in the transitions is in the context of my book. The pandemic is a global, excuse me is a collective involuntary lifequake. Okay, and if you remember my book, which was obviously done before the pandemic. That was the smallest category was collective and voluntary lifequake you know this. And there's like what I call a throwaway line and my book was like oh if I done this 100 years ago, 100 years ago with two World Wars and we would have all been going through collective experiences there's actually something kind of charmingly old fashioned amidst the horror and misery and loss and pain and instability the pandemic that we're all going through it together. There's that's actually something in a way to mark and to know, but that's a collective involuntary lifequake. And when you go back and look at 2020. What is the thing that happens 60 days after the onset of the pandemic. The answer the protest movement. And what is that that is a collective voluntary lifequake. And in the language of my book that's a pile up and you cannot disconnect them in my view, because what happens when you get one lifequake is that your, your, your immune system is weakened. And so then along comes I mean the George Ford thing as horrible as it was was unfortunately not rare. And therefore, you know, there have been many regularly these kinds of things had been happening even earlier that year they had been happening. Why this one, because our immune system was weaker we were cooped up. And because the pandemic was disproportionately affecting black and brown people, and because of systemic racism many of those people were outside the health care system, and therefore, you know, we're taking a simple pill to deal with hypertension and that killed them in higher numbers. So finally people just like I had enough and then they boom, they go on to the streets and of course that that has a political backlash to it. So my point is, there's all the things that we can voluntarily change, and then there's all the things that we can involuntarily change, and they're all happening. And there's just simply no doubt that the pace of change is much faster than it was in the past. I can't help but think about the economic pressure that has shifted from the investment in, to exactly your point, the here and the now, the American worker, where they were born and raised where they went to school, we're going to invest there we're going to build the factories there we're going to create jobs there to a globalization now, where it's profit over people. When my grandfather was joining the factory, they paid for him to go to school because they wanted him to stay there as a worker highly educated to be productive to produce the widgets that went into the cars etc. And now what we've seen with globalization is there's even more instability in these neighborhoods where you could find that dependable education that dependable job, live the American dream quote unquote stay there your entire life raise a family it's close to your family. That's been disrupted with us chasing profits and looking for the simplest way to grow shareholder value and not necessarily investing in the people side of the equation. And do you see that swinging back in your research for this next book what what do you see going on with obviously this increase in transitions and the upheaval that we're experiencing on the other side as people are left behind by these involuntary transitions. Well, there was one dimension that I didn't say earlier when I was talking about this life shape question, because essentially I was making a formula. And I was saying that how we look at the world affects how we look at our life. So, you know, cyclical human life cyclical. Okay, you know, sort of early modern era. There's more urbanism there's some, there's a staircase because you know, they wouldn't have had a staircase and, you know, the, in Mesopotamia because there weren't that many staircases right so they have a staircase economy. There's a staircase, and then the site, you know the industrial revolution we start to see the world as as being defined by the factory, and the conveyor belt and the. The world I'm looking for with the everybody working in the line. You know, a sort of a factory model where one person does something that creates a linear line where we are now what I didn't get to is that we understand that the world. We understand with chaos theory and with network theory. We understand that the world is more webbed and the internet globalization globalization all these things you're talking about are connected. The defining introduction of the idea of chaos was a paper that was written by a professor in Boston which basically says that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Latin America, that there's a tornado that happens in in North America. And that was that's famously of course called the butterfly effect. So that point is exactly the point that you're just making a butterfly flaps its wings in in in China, and somebody in Paris wants a different kind of shoe, and therefore the person making a butterfly flap in whatever was term asked to beat this analogy to death is out of a job. And so that we are so much more intimately connected, and you're absolutely right that in the 1970s, when the sort of cult of shareholder value cuts that universities that corporations no longer felt any obligation to their, or they felt less of an obligation to their team members, then they do to to their shareholders, and that that's created down sizing right sizing, you know, all these, all these kinds of things. What's interesting is that we're in a moment right now, where that's being blown up by the pandemic because work from home is I think going to create a huge amount of change. And if for no other reason that men, more men are working from home more men are interested in flex time, and the kind of core issue which is the, which is the moms have been disproportionately, but women and moms have been disproportionately burdened by inflexibility in the corporation guess what now dads are dealing with it because they're home too. So I actually think that there's a huge change that's going on because you have more women in the workplace. You have more stakeholders of women now working outside the home, but you also have more dads in the parenting space. And as a result the membranes that used to divide work from family are becoming more porous. And frankly, the pandemic has just blown those two smithereens so I think that there is going to be a moment of reimagining I think that the a positive, but there's a positive frame to this. Like all things there's pros and cons to this story. And the pro so I'm not totally kind of just downer here is that there is more opportunity to write your own work family life story than there ever was before. Okay, because if the core relationship that we've been talking about off and on here, the corporation is going to provide for you you just have to sacrifice yourself to the corporation. Well, guess what the corporation no longer feels beholden to you. So you don't have to feel beholden to it. And as a result, it allows people to ask a lot of questions that have to do with what do I do in these in the nodes of the network. What do I do in these moments of instability, the lifequakes, you know, the workquakes if you will, what do I do in these moments. Do I want to stay where I am. Do I want to leave and do something else. Do I want to start a side hustle. Do I want to start a podcast. No, or make a move me in my backyard that there are other ways to do it and that increasingly that is done in consultation with the others in your family. So what does my partner want to do. Okay, well maybe my partner needs to go back to school. Okay, so my partner needs to go back to school. So therefore I need to spend more time focusing on income right now. And then, okay, my partner will be out and that and then my partner will have a job and then maybe I can focus more on myself. So we need, you know, I've been trying to experiment with what to call this in my mind my favorite phrase this week is kind of is sort of like, you know, a whole life career So I think that we're going to get to a kind of a whole, there's the whole 30 diet we're going to need like a whole 360 view of our work lives that will take a take into consideration our primary work or secondary work, our creative thing on the side our spousal work, what's happening with the children, and the advantages, whereas in the past if you step off the conveyor belt you can never get back on. Now you can step off and on and off and on and off and on. So therefore every decision need not be a life, a lifetime decision. It could be a the next three or four year decision. But it is something that you, you have to mentally, emotionally and physically set yourself up for, because learning new skills, having a growth mindset, having perseverance and and to be resilient. And certain things don't work out or you're and you're, you're constantly in the red and what I mean by that of, of being frustrated of learning new things are always at the level of incompetence because you're you're growing you're learning, you're putting yourself in the new areas that you, you haven't been before. And that's for a lot of people, it's utterly terrifying. For a lot of people, it's, it's, you can even make yourself comfortable in, in that realm. And we're, we're seeing that transition play out. And I think that's why we see so many people with anxiety through the roof, who are scared, who are looking for certainty and safety, wherever they can find it, because they're not finding it in their own lives. And I think that's where And the way we were raised and taught to find out security. And I think what, what stood out to me in the book is just how important agency is in this survival toolkit. And you have to take control of that narrative to rewrite it. And I feel many of us when we find ourselves, especially in a life click, it is easy to not work on the narrative to put the blame elsewhere to feel and fall into the victim mindset. But the book pretty clearly articulates that those who survive and thrive through these transitions and we all will ultimately, it starts with a level of agency internally to say, you know what, I'm going to rewrite this narrative. I'm going to take control in this situation where I feel like life may be out of control. Let me do two things here and responding to those two comments. Let me, let me be abstract. And we'll do some big think to Johnny's question. And then we're going to get to the practical into your question. Hey, Johnny, what I want to say to you is you said earlier that, you know, your generation or generations today or people today have to accept that they're not that they're not inevitably going to create more wealth or be more well off or do better than their or your parents generation. So what we said it was a possibility. What, I'm sorry, what, what's your clarification? I believe I, it was a, it was a possibility, right? Yeah, so it's not guaranteed, right? Yeah. I guarantee people will not. But yes, it is no longer a guaranteed thing that will just naturally happen if you play by the rules and do the right thing and, you know, and do your homework and, and, you know, brush your teeth. And, you know, I thank you note when something nice happens to you. Yes, it's not going to just naturally inevitably happen from all the things that I tell my children to do on a daily basis. That's, that was that thing I was taking off in my head. Do your homework, brush your teeth. I don't really care about teeth. Her wife, their mom cares about teeth. I care more about the thank you note than then she cares about the teeth. You got to diversify as a parent. The, but there's what you're saying is that linearity has turned its back on you. So the question is, are you going to be the sperm lover that's going to be, you know, kind of yearning, pining for the, for the linearity that is already, you know, abandoned you. And you need to turn this back on you and you need to turn this back, you're back on it. Okay, so that's, that's, that's part of what I'm saying is that we are still haunted by the ghost of linearity, but linearity is not how the world works. And so we have to kind of grow up and realize that we're looking for something that's not there. And we grew up in other areas of our life. And this is just not an area of life that we spend a lot of time talking about, which is what is the shape of your life, right. What is, what can you expect out of life. It was an interesting moment when we were coding this, and in which I had all these millennial coders. And we were, we were dealing with this piece of data in front of us, which is that 53% of people's life quakes were involuntary. Okay, so an involuntary life quake is a downsizing your spouse cheats on you, you get a diagnosis, your house burns down. Okay, 53%. That means 47% were voluntary. So voluntary is you leave an organization to start a new enterprise, you cheat on your spouse, you change your religion, whatever it might be. Okay. And so I looked at this and I was like, dang, like 47% of life quakes are voluntary, like, you know, like fucking a man like we're getting it, we are embracing the full opportunity of the nonlinear life, we are seeing something about our life we don't like. Instead of just whining into our beer, we're actually agentically AJ, we're going off and doing something about this. The kids on my team, I call them kids, but you know the 20 somethings on my team were like, whoa, 53% are involuntary, like I can't control my life. Yeah, you can't control your life. You can therefore, if there's something you control, like one of my life models is control what you can control because there's a lot of things that you can't control. Okay, so that gets to. That's my big thing. But now let's just get to the practical because we've been very kind of high minded here. And let me talk about what do you do when you're in this moment because everybody listening to us is in this moment in one way or the other. There's been this. Okay, the first thing that we talked about the first answer I gave is how this book has been this project that I worked on for half a decade has some way been shaped by arriving in the middle of the pandemic. Okay. And so, nothing has been, I'm not disproven by this, if anything, every all the ideas on how to navigate a life transition to me have been reinforced by this, even such a simple thing like creativity people use creativity. Right. What's the first thing everybody did when we got into the pandemic. They started to bake. Right. Remember that was like the number one cliche, like we're going to sourdough our way through this, like I may have been the only person in America was not shocked by this because what that is is a little act of creativity, a little act of imagining a rather than sending around or being scared or whining or being in a fetal position under the blanket. I'm going to do something today I'm going to imagine that I can put my hands in some flour and starter in and baking some salt and butter or whatever it is and then there's going to be something to eat at the end of the day and that little act of being able to imagine rebuilding. So, a meal, a loaf of bread, a cupcake is what allows me to imagine that I'm going to be able to get through this and it's these little acts of creativity that help us recreate ourselves. But some ideas have become stronger and there's an idea in my book that I liked but that has become a kind of a big, a big flashing kind of I don't know green light in the middle of the pandemic and that idea is that the life quake can be voluntary or involuntary, but the life transition must be voluntary. You have to choose to lean in and go through the steps. Okay, and so now there tend to be two types of people when they get hit by a life quake. Some people make a 217 item to do list and are like I'm going to do it this weekend and I'm going to be the gold medal and I'm going to be the greatest person who ever, you know, got over, you know, being fired or whatever it might be. And other people, which is kind of more people but other people are my favorite lines is there's two types of people in the world people who divide the world and two types of people and people who don't. Anyway, so the other type of people are people who are like I'm in quicksand. I'm in a fetal position. I'm never going to get through this. Okay, I'm here to say kind of like both of you are wrong. Right. Because if you look at enough of these, there are certain patterns so life transitions have three phases. Okay, you know, there's the long goodbye where you are kind of saying goodbye and morning, the you that's not coming back. There's the messy middle where you're shedding habits and back to creativity creating new ones. And there are these new beginnings. You know this of course because it's the back point of my book but I'm bringing that up to say, even learning that is an incredibly reassuring. Because everybody turns out to be good at one phase and bad at another. So that list maker the 217 item to do list. And if I had to guess probably one of you falls into that category. That person is. Okay, Johnny is taking himself out of consideration. I don't know about you, AJ, but that person's good at the messy middle, because they're going to do you're going out this is what I'm going to shed and this is what I'm going to create I'm going to get through it. That person is probably less good at confronting the emotion because that person is probably in denial that this is an emotional experience and they're feeling fear or sadness or shame which are the top emotions people feel. And that person in a fetal position is probably good at dealing with the emotion they're probably good at the long goodbye, because they are feeling the weight of the emotional exercise heavy lifting that's going to have to be done to say goodbye to the past. And then when they get to the messy middle, you know, it's going to be different for them so the point is everybody and I'm all fine for that I mean the one of the things that makes me grumpy about the way people used to talk about life transitions. You know, as you know there hasn't really been a major book on this in 40 years is it was like you have to go through these steps in order. First you have to say goodbye and then you have to be in between and then you're up. That's just bullshit that's just not how people live. And because you say goodbye and then you go to the new beginning then you forgot something and you know there's something in the old room you got to go back there and you know or again this is not your generation but if you are if you are divorced and you're raising children, even if you're remarried you're still parenting with the old, you know, the old partner that these things are done and then everybody does them in an idiosyncratic fingerprint their own fingerprint kind of way. But, but my point is, so whatever you're dealing with now, whatever kept you awake last night, whatever you got up this morning and made a cup of coffee and stared out the window, or in your case Johnny, you know, got a guitar and just strummed and played whatever it is that you're worrying about pick one of the things and say that's the transition I'm going to go through because you can't go through seven at once. So pick one pick a phase or good at start there. Let's build some confidence and kind of my main message here is that life gets you stuck and a transition is what gets you unstuck. And there are tools there are phases or things you can do to make it go more effectively. And I think that example of the baking we all resonated with because there is an end. The bread comes out of the oven. We know that there's a payoff at the end and we have it timed out and for many of us when the pandemic hit. And it felt like this is just dragging on and we have no idea when it's going to end. And that uncertainty led us to acts of certainty even in our creativity taking up baking learning. And the book highlights that there is certainty in all of these phases. We just may not see it in the moment. So you are going to go through these phases and that goodbye is going to end and the messy middle is going to start and it's also going to end and you will make your way through. And I think that's a pretty powerful reminder that no matter how uncertain and of course with the multiple transitions hitting at once in these life quakes that every one of those phases ends in that transition. It's not for the rest of your life and it may feel like it's unending while you're in it. But the lessons through the book are yeah these transitions lead to growth. 90% of the people that I spoke to said that the transition came to an end. To me before the before the pandemic this was the signature piece of data of this project which is that I asked 225 people how long did it take. And the number one that the most common answer and the average answer was five years. Okay, that you know, on the one hand I have kind of been downplaying it in the pandemic because everyone feels like they're in a transition and you don't exactly want to be the person that says congratulations you'll get through but it'll take you five years. But you know, having said that. If you actually step back and look at this. You're going to have three to five of these in a lifetime they're going to take four or five six years. That's 25 years that's half of our adult lives, we're spending in transition. And so that's why this book is called life is in the transitions, as a William James phrase as you know from a century ago, because if we just look at these times as periods that we have to grit or grind or gravel or grunt our way through. We are missing half of our lives. Okay, and you can look at the great stories from scripture. Abraham leaving his father's house the Israelites going into the desert Jesus going out to the, you know, going into the desert Paul on the road to Damascus the Buddha going out, you know, Mohammed going out and back and forth between Mecca and Medina. We all have these periods if you look at the great myths Odysseus Orpheus, Jason Hercules, these all have these periods the same novels. There's a reason these stories are still told. Thousands of years later and it's the same thing with the fairy tales. Okay, we all want to be let's go back to the fairy tale thing because because that was what we were talking about earlier with the storytelling is it's so important to me. We wanted to be the hero. We want the happy ending, but we don't want the wolf. We don't want to go through the woods. Okay, and but we know the wolf is going to appear and it could be an ogre it could be a dragon as I said earlier could be a tornado or pandemic, a downsizing, and you can't banish the wolf because if you banish the wolf. And if there's one thing I learned is that we all want to be and need to be the hero of our own story. That's what this is about. When you end up in the woods. You're the hero. I remember reading us I remember reading a wrinkle in time to my 10 year olds. And I don't know if you remember the part of this that's important to me which is that the father of the dad on the dad reading this okay, the dad is disappears, the dad is, you know, multiple, whatever planets or realms away, and the girl, Meg goes after you know bouncing from place to place, and then she finally gets to the dad. And I, and I remember this like I had never I never this book as a kid one of the pleasures of having daughters was I got to read the cannon girl lit that I had never read like frozen book them like the closest things are perfect book I've ever read. Anyway, I don't even know what's going to happen in the story and I remember closing the book, whatever was half an hour past bedtime, and saying, what's going to happen now. Girls, what is going to happen now in the story. Who's going to save the day. And of course, what are they going to say, because they're 10 year old girls. They're 15 and I'll say the same word like the dad's going to save the day. No, the dad is not going to save the day. She's going to save the day. That's why we're reading this book 50 years later. The only reason I don't even know what's going to happen. But I know that she is going to have to do it. She wants the dad to save her, but she's going to have to do it. That's your agency. Okay, you're going to have to rewrite the story. You're going to have to be the hero of your own story. I love that. And it's such a great way to finish this wonderful chat. I know that many of us going through this involuntary transition that has created a life quake in all of our lives need to be reminded of that exact thing that we will get through it. And part of that narrative is you taking the agency and crafting it in a meaningful way for yourself personally to get through it. And it's going to be different for every one of us, but the themes in the book and the fact that data was involved. It's not just one or two stories, but looking across 50 states and with all these interviews, the patterns are the same. And if we can master the patterns, we can get through a life in transition. We can't get through this together. And so my promise to you is whatever you're going through, you come on this journey with me and meet these people, you're going to get hope for sure. But you're going to get actually practical things you can do tonight or next week the week after to make whatever transition you're in go a little bit better and a lot more effectively. We can be back the wolves together, everybody. Well, we love ending our episode with a challenge for the audience, something practical that they can do in the next week to make a difference to make a change or improvement. And I know the book has multiple opportunities for that. Is there one challenge that stands out for you for our audience that would be beneficial as they experience this transition? Well, I'll double down. I'll go with two one backward looking and one forward. So number one would be to ask yourself, what's the biggest emotion you're struggling with right now. Think about it, articulate it, tell somebody about it, write it down if that's helpful to you, but accept that this is an emotional experience and don't try to hide from that. If you're talking about it, then think of something so that's sort of like part of the long goodbye, but then part of the messy middle and part of creating a new you is to pick something. Maybe maybe the challenge I'll be specific about it. Pick something that you used to love doing. Maybe it's playing music, maybe it's tap dancing, okay, you know, maybe it's baking, maybe it's singing, maybe it's whatever it is, something that you, some part of your personality that you stuck away in the back of the closet. Push away the dirty laundry, pull up the old shoes, you know, open the cardboard box and whatever is in that cardboard box, play with that for a while. Whatever you're going to make that comes out of that box is going to help you make yourself a new. Thank you so much for joining us, Bruce. Fantastic conversation and a wonderful book. My pleasure. See you guys down the road. Thank you.