Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - "Losers Don't Come to Their College Reunions" -- with Bruce Feiler

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

These days there are lots of conversations about the re-shaping of the workforce as a result of the pandemic. Bruce Feiler is just out with a new book – THE SEARCH: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World – based on years of research on this topic. He is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers. His book WALKING THE BIBLE describes his 10,000-mile journey retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert. The book spent a year and a half on the New York Times bestseller list. His book WHERE GOD WAS BORN describes his trek visiting biblical sites throughout Israel, Iran and Iraq. His book AMERICA’S PROPHET is the story of the influence of Moses on American history A longtime columnist at the New York Times, Bruce now writes the popular newsletter THE NONLINEAR LIFE. Items discussed in this podcast: The Nonlinear Life newsletter -- https://brucefeiler.substack.com/ The Search -- https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-search-bruce-feiler/1142169519

50 million people did, in fact, quit a job in the last year. That number is essentially twice what it was 10 years ago. So this is a long-term change that's going on. And add on top of that the work from anywhere so that a third of Americans are now working part-time at home. Add all those numbers together, basically 100 million Americans will sit down with someone they love today, tonight, this summer, this year, and say, honey, I'm not happy with what I'm doing, and I want to do work that makes me

happy. That is a massive change. These days, there are a lot of conversations, including on this podcast, about the disruption and reshaping of work life and the reshaping of the workforce as a result of the pandemic. Bruce Feiler is just out with a new book, The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World. Based on years of research on this topic, his research actually predates the pandemic as he had seen career trends emerging going back years, but the pandemic, of course, was a natural inflection point. Whenever Bruce is working on a book, I'm always curious. He's the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including Life is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and The Council of Dads.

His book, Walking the Bible, describes his 10,000-mile journey retracing the five books of Moses through the desert. The book spent a year and a half on the New York Times bestseller list. His book, Where God Was Born, describes his trek visiting biblical sites throughout Israel, Iran, and Iraq. It was actually when he was working on this book in Iraq that I first met Bruce in Baghdad. Another one of his books, America's Prophet, is the story of the influence of Moses on American history. He's a longtime columnist at the New York Times, and he now has a popular newsletter called The Non-Linear

Life on Substack. We'll post the link to it in the show notes. In this conversation, I quibble with some of Bruce's takeaways from his years of research that led to this book, but it's a fun conversation. Bruce is a very thoughtful guy. Bruce Feiler and what it means for us and for the economy when people are increasingly building careers in what he calls a post-career world. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast for the first time my longtime friend, Bruce, I don't say old friend. I normally say old friend, but then people get offended because

it implies that they're old. My longtime friend, Bruce Feiler, who's just out with a terrific book, The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World. Bruce, thanks for coming on. Dan, thank you very much for inviting me. In fact, when you said long time, I have to say I went back to the first time we met when I passed through the gates of the palace in Baghdad where on the upper right hand, there was not blood on the column, right? Because we're not trying to have Passover at this moment. But what there in fact was on the upper right hand column, as you walked through the gates of the, you'll probably remember the name, which I don't, one of Saddam's palaces in Baghdad. It was the Republican Guard Palace. It was the Republican Guard Palace.

There was the deck of cards with the faces of the most prominent targets of the U.S. government at the time with unceremonious, I don't know, Sharpie Xs over them on some kind. Good memory. That was the Pentagon and CENTCOM's deck of cards for the most wanted of the Iraqi military and political leadership, pre-Saddam era. That is where we first met. So that was-

And I can date it now. I'm interrupting you, but I'm about to celebrate my 20th wedding anniversary, and it was like six months after we were married. So it was 20 years ago. Wow. Okay. So that, and you were going through Iraq. Now, that was for your second book on the Bible, right?

That was for your first book. That was for where God was born. Right, right. Because Walking the Bible, which was 2001? Yeah, 2001. And then Abraham was after that, and then where God was born. So technically, it was my third, but yes. Right, right. Not to nitpick. Right, so you were working on a series of books, which we're going to talk about in a minute, tracing the footsteps, various characters'

footsteps in the Bible, and part of that was in Baghdad, or Iraq, and you needed help navigating Iraq. Maybe let's start there, and then we'll talk about... Well, you know what? Let's start with Walking the Bible, because that was the beginning of this journey. So can you talk about Walking the Bible? Because I've said this to you, I've said this... I think Walking the Bible was one of the most innovative books I've ever read, but rather than me describe it, can you describe, just briefly, Walking the Bible? Because it led to a series of books on the subject matter that you wrote about. So I grew up in Savannah, Georgia. And to me, in some ways, the story really begins there.

Five generations of Jews in the American South. I grew up in Mikveh Israel Synagogue, which is the third oldest in the country, founded in July of 1733. And my father became its president. My mother was its first president in its 275-year history at the time. And in some ways, sort of everything that I've done professionally, eventually we'll get to the search, which in kind of one of the big ideas in the search is that we all have this story that we've been telling our whole lives. And in my story is I grew up in the South and I love the familyness and the storytellingness and the stickiness, but I grew up Jewish in the South, which meant I was sort of a

part of it, but apart from it. And I grew up Jewish and being Jewish is really important to me. I like the familyness and the storytellingness and the stickiness, but I grew up Jewish, and being Jewish is really important to me. I like the familiness and the storytelling-ness and the stickiness. But I grew up Jewish not even outside of the traditional sort of story of Judaism as it began in the ancient world, but also even apart from American Judaism in the South. So I was a part of it, but apart from it. And my whole life in some ways is about sort of entering a culture, becoming a part of it, and then leaving and explaining it to people who might like to know, you know, what it was about. So in my 20s, my first book was called Learning to Bow. As you know, it was about teaching junior high school in

Japan. After that, I went to Cambridge and got a master's degree and wrote a book called Looking for Class about sort of inside the British aristocracy. I spent a year as a circus clown in the Clyde Beatty Cold Brothers Circus. And again, apart, apart, apart, apart from, apart of, that was always the tension. And so in this sort of journey through life, I moved to Nashville in my early 30s to write a book about country music. And I spent a year traveling with Garth Brooks and Wynonna and a bunch of other people. And I was living across the street from three churches. And I was like, okay, I need to be more conversant with the Bible. I hadn't really read it since I was a kid, which meant I hadn't really read it.

So I took quite literally my bar mitzvah Bible off my shelf. I put it by my bed and it sat there, you know, collecting dust for two years. And then I went to visit an old friend from Savannah, actually, who had married a rabbi and made aliyah and moved to Jerusalem. And on day one, I'm not sure you and I have ever really talked about this origin story. We went to the promenade overlooking Jerusalem, where I'm sure you've been many times. Yeah, many times. And south, you look toward Bethlehem. And at the time, Hacharchama was this really controversial settlement,

and that was in the news. This would have been the late 1990s. And then you look north, and there was that golden dome. And we can debate whether or not it was an actual settlement, but we won't get into it. But yes, it was controversial. A suburb of Jerusalem. It was a – yeah, it was fine.

It was a controversial place at the time. This is what's always been special about our relationship is that we don't mind going there. And it's sort of an example. You can love each other and sometimes have different politics. And so my friend said, that's where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, which, by the way, you can also debate. But we will leave that offstage.

And I just thought, wow, these are real places you can touch and visit and feel. And this kind of crazy way I had lived my life, which was traveling around and becoming a part of different cultures and then becoming a part from them and telling other people. I thought, what if I travel along the route and read the Bible along the way? In fact, what I said to myself, which I never said publicly for a long time, was what if I joined the Bible as if it were the circus, right? And sort of become a part of it and meet the characters and go to the places. And the essential idea was that I would physically go to the places, right? And I would then read the stories in the places and see what you could learn about the stories by going to them, right?

I used to call it topographical midrash. And that's what I did. And everyone thought this was a crazy idea, right? This is too dangerous. Like, there's conflict. Like, there's nothing to see when you get there. I never asked you this. Did you pitch this idea to the publisher before you went on the journey?

Or did you go on the journey? Okay. And the publisher bought it before you went on the journey? Actually, bought it and the next book pre-sold. Wow. Okay. So they got it. It's a very interesting story, and I shouldn't divert this, but it's your podcast.

And the second I had the idea, like, you know, you've written books, you and I have had many conversations over the years about books. And one of my theories is book titles come on day one or day the last, they never come in the middle. And if you go through all of my book titles, it fits one or the other and walking the Bible came day one. And so the book contract that was signed was for Walking the Bible and an unnamed, unknown at the time, follow-up book. In fact, that contract was a defining moment in my life because it made me realize I could actually sort of do this, so to speak. And an hour before I was going to sign the contract, my agent called and said, they want to add one contingency that you

not call the book Walking the Bible. Oh my God. Because it sounds like a travel guide. And I said, I won't sign the contract. I mean, I literally, like this was more money than I had ever seen in one place. And I was like, then I won't sign the contract. I don't care. And they folded. And I won't sign the contract. I don't care. And they folded. And I signed the contract, yeah. Wow. Okay, and then it was a huge hit, bestseller, and then you – Year and a half, in fact, on the bestseller list, yeah.

Wow, and then you did – I mean, that's really interesting in and of itself because I think you appealed to a whole pretty diverse group of audiences. Yes. I'd say about a third, about a third of it was Jewish, but two-thirds was Christian. And now that I know more about the book business, like it was 50-50 male-female.

That was the other thing that was interesting about it, which is kind of rare. But even among the non-Jewish readership, and probably some of the Jewish readership, a big chunk of them were not necessarily religious. They were... Right. And that was part of the appeal. And I think that that book now, in retrospect, I mean, I can talk forever about this, and I know we have other things you want to talk about. But that book was coming out, that book came out in March of 2001. And by the way,

it was instant. It just happened. There was television, was you know a big huge profile of full page thing in usa today jay leno made a joke on the tonight show i mean like it was just one of those things that went pop and instant and just just sold and sold and sold for a decade um i went back and made a tv series and all these things but it was it was coming at this moment where people were beginning to question, right? Right. Because Da Vinci Code was around that time, and I used to go to all these churches and synagogues, like hundreds and hundreds of them, to talk or go to book clubs or Sunday school groups or whatever. And there would always be a poster in the corner like, come on Thursday night to discuss Da Vinci Code. And what I realized was nobody, none of those churches or synagogues wanted to have that, particularly the churches, conversation, but they were forced to. So it was this moment

when people were breaking away, they still had questions. Also travel was sort of, it was also the pop travel thing. So just a bunch of things converged and it was just the right book at the right moment in time. So then again, in that genre was where god was born and abraham and then at some point you train you transition to a completely different genre which is because my life blew up but that's what happened so let's my life blow up so let's talk about not yeah i think i want you to revisit life blowing up but you your word's not mine. Well, that's what happened, and I think that that's central to the story. So I think of the story that we've been talking about now as a kind of classic linear life that we all fantasize about. Like I figured out – I mean I sold my first book when I was 24, right?

So like – and I figured out what I wanted to do early. I did it for no money. Yeah, you were on a tear career-wise. Yeah. I mean – what I wanted to do early. I did it for no money. Yeah, you were on a tear career-wise. Yeah. I mean, then I had... Listen to what you just said, this massive success with these books about the Bible, television, I mean, everything.

Everything was going your way. And I got married, and I had children, and this was the fantasy. In the business terms that you live in, it's the hockey stick, and this was the shaft of the hockey stick until my 40s and my life blew up. So first I got cancer, as you know, as a 43-year-old father of identical twin daughters who were three at the time. Then I had financial troubles because my family owned a bunch of real

estate in Georgia. And then my father, who had Parkinson's, got very depressed and tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. So here I am a storyteller, right? I'm not just a professional storyteller. I think about storytelling. Like a lot of these biblical things were about the role of narrative in building a nation and building identity and building individual sort of character, if you will. And I had a story that I didn't know how to tell and I didn't want to tell. And this sort of all climaxes at my 30th college reunion.

And I drive up, I live in Brooklyn, as you know, and I went up to my, it was my 30th Yale reunion. And I was in the car with a buddy of mine and he was on top of the world he was closing a 400 million dollar real estate deal and he was using my car phone to close that deal and he was very happy and then talked to his colleagues because the previous day one of his partners had a nine-month-old and the nine-month-old went down for a nap and never woke up so he is on top of the world and like

weeping in this two-hour car ride. And I was moderating a panel that afternoon. I had 250 people, very prominent people to either side of me. I had their resumes like all neatly typed. Sorry for banging my wedding ring on the table here. And I ripped up the resumes and I said, you know what? Losers don't come to their 30th college reunion. I don't want to hear your successes. I want to hear what keeps you awake at night and what you're struggling with and what you're not telling anybody, and that night, we had one of those barbecues. There was a barbecue, literally, BQ, and a bar on the other end, and it took me two hours to walk from one side to the other because every person came up and told

me a story, like, I'm being sued for malpractice my boss just stole money from me my wife went into the hospital and died the next day my daughter is cutting herself you know on and on and on and on and i called my wife linda whom you know well and i said no one knows how to tell their life story anymore and i want to do something to help and what i did was i created this thing called the life story project and i have spent basically every day in the six years since almost to the week as we have this conversation, collecting life stories of Americans of all ages, all walks work is sort of adjacent to, an average academic paper in this space will have 8, 10, 12 of these stories. In six years, I've collected 400 of them.

In 50 states? In all 50 states. And were you doing a lot of this during the pandemic? It started before the pandemic. In fact, the first book I wrote about this, Life is in the Transitions, I finished in the- Well, that book came out right in the first phase of the pandemic, In fact, the first book I wrote about this, Life is in the Transitions, I finished- Well, that book came out right in the first phase of the pandemic, I remember. Well, exactly. But what was interesting, so all I knew when I started this project was like,

no one knew how to tell their story. So I would meet somebody, I would seek them out, and I would say, tell me the story of your life. And I had very sort of organized questions, and these conversations would go on two, three hours. And it was in the act of listening over and over, I realized what sort of became kind of the big idea that emerged from that, which is the linear life is dead. So the idea that we're going to have sort of one set of things in our 20s and one set of things in our 30s and then have a midlife crisis. I mean, this is all cockamamie. In fact, it goes back to the ancient world because in the ancient world, they thought of life as a cycle, right?

To every season, turn, turn, turn. There's no linear time. In fact, the Bible in the West introduces the idea of linear time, even the Hebrew Bible in particular, right? You've got the first creation story with named characters and a family, like this introduces it.

But even in the Middle Ages, like they think life is a staircase up to middle age and then a staircase down. And it's not until the birth of science. I mean, no one ever talks about the story that the idea of linear progression enters. And every idea that you and I grew up with, I'm older than you are, but was a linear construct. Piaget, childhood development. Freud, psychosexual stages. Erickson, eight stages of moral development. The five stages of grief. The hero's journey.

These are all linear constructs. And it reaches its peak with Gail Sheehy, who writes passages in 1976, which introduces the idea, which she plagiarized from two... There was actually a lawsuit that she lost, that she stole this idea from Roger Gould at UCLA, and he sued her, and she won, excuse me, and he won, and she had no money because she was a single mom, and she promised him, I'll just give you 10% of the proceeds of this book I'm going to write, which went on to sell 20 million copies.

So we all have this idea that life is linear, and it's all bunk, Just truly just bad science, bad idea, misleading, dangerous, I would say. And in fact, we have nonlinear lives. We can get into it or not get into it, but that's what that book is about. But the concept you introduced was what you called a life quake. Yeah. And just totally coincidentally, your book comes out while the whole world is kind of experiencing a life quake. And just totally coincidentally, your book comes out while the whole world is kind of experiencing a lifequake, like literally. This is exactly the point I was going to say, right?

Which is that I had to, I wonder, so the big idea was that we go through disruptors, three dozen of them, and we go through three to five lifequakes, as I call them, in your lives. The signature piece of data from that book is that a lifequake- Can you just explain what a lifequake is? Yeah, so a lifequake is a moment of disruption. It can be voluntary or it can be involuntary, right? You get a diagnosis, there's a natural disaster, right? You lose your legs, you get laid off.

And 47% of them about are involuntary, but that means a lot of them are voluntary right so right you know you choose to leave you choose to start a company you know i'm the father of identical twin daughters we i mentioned them earlier they're now 18 they're going to graduate from high school as we have this conversation in a few days and go to college in the fall and um thank you um that was joyful that was playing i mean it wasn't planned that they'd be identical daughters like but it was a life and thank you. That was joyful. That was planned. I mean, it wasn't planned that they'd be identical daughters,

but it was a lifequake. It disrupted everything in our lives. But so we go through and they take five years, a lifequake, three to five, four or five years. That's 25 years. That's half of our adult lives we spend in transition.

So what is a transition? A transition is the human response to a lifequake, right? So if the way I like to think about it is if the life quake puts us on our heels, the life transition puts us on our toes, right? It's how we respond to it. And I wandered around in 2019, early 2020, that book was supposed to come out in the spring of 2020 saying, we spent half our lives in transition. Why has there not been a major book in transitions in 40 years? We all need to be talking about that. And everyone said, yeah, I think that's very nice. And then the pandemic comes and suddenly the entire planet is in a life transition at the same time for the first time in a century. So we had this conversation. In fact, your amazing, wonderful, generous wife,

Campbell Brown, interviews me, but I'm here remotely in my Brooklyn. You guys were in Colorado. I remember she's sitting in our kitchen interviewing you for a was it Politics and Prose? It was a book launch because it was all remote. I was like, you're doing

an interview? That's like a Bruce. He's in Brooklyn. We're in Colorado. You're interviewing him for a book event that's in Washington, D.C.? I was like, you're doing an interview? That's like a Bruce. He's in Brooklyn. We're in Colorado. You're interviewing him for a book event that's in Washington, D.C.? I was like, what is going on? Now, of course, it seems perfectly normal. But at the moment, because it was just the things we were getting going. And so again, I sort of had the right book at the right time. And I became a bestseller, a TED Talk with 2 million views.

Now I teach this TED course on life transitions. And so that book comes out. And suddenly, I'm sitting in the right place at the right time. And maybe a week later, I was having a drink with my editor. We actually met in person and took off our masks. Like, you know, is that cool? And I say, work is the next domino to fall. This is going to change everything about work.

It's the convergence of the public health crisis, right? The technological, like suddenly you can do work from anywhere, which is not something 95% of us had ever imagined before, right? And the social justice movement and Me Too were happening, right? So all these things were converging and I was like, this is gonna change work.

I wanna go do it again. And that became the impetus for what brings us here today. Okay, so now let's talk about the search. So you say, according to your research, 50 million Americans quit a job in the last year, but a third of them are not necessarily quitting, but they're renegotiating their deals. So to achieve things that one wouldn't think

were the ambition of people in another time, meaning they're looking for... Okay, so can you contextualize both those numbers, both the 50 million Americans and a third of the workforce, or a third of those 50 million, or no, sorry, a third of the workforce that are either quitting jobs or renegotiating the terms of their jobs? Because that's a big number, and it seems to me that could mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. Correct.

So I think, yeah, so let's start with the stakes here of what's going on. I sort of felt this was coming, and now it's upon us, right? Because when I started this, the great resignation, quiet quitting, all these, you know, sort of the big tug of war that's happening now between workers come back to the office. This was all in the future. But it became apparent as i was gathering these interviews so as we have this conversation today there's a number of things that are just true i don't assert it these are independent numbers right so according to gallup 70 of americans are unhappy with what they do okay

according to the muse three quarters of amer Americans will look for new work this year. I don't say 50 million people quit. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which every month reports this number, 50 million people did, in fact, quit a job in the last year. That number is essentially twice what it was 10 years ago. The idea that this all happened in the great resignation is a is a lie and it's a myth and we should put it out of our minds. What's called the quit rate has gone up essentially every single year this century, except for one after the Great Resignation. I mean, excuse me, the Great Recession. So this is a long-term change that's going on. And add on top of that the work from anywhere so that a third of Americans are now working at least part

time at home. And that means, add all those numbers together, that means basically 100 million Americans will sit down with someone they love today, tonight, this summer, this year, and say, honey, I'm not happy with what I'm doing and I want to do work that makes me happy. That is a massive change. Why is that change going on? Well, first of all, what does the change mean? The big idea that emerges in this book, right, is we can get into it, but it turns out that there's what I call

the three lies and the truth about work that we've all been told for a long time. But the big convergence, what is at stake is that fewer people are searching for work fewer people are searching merely for work and more people are searching for work with meaning okay we are transitioning from what i call a means-based economy to a meaning-based economy and this is led by a whole new generation of workers okay younger more female more diverse people who are pushing back on an idea about work that has been around since we're partly preaching here today you and i the garden of eden okay what happened the most influential story of work ever written is Genesis 1,

because what happens in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve get kicked out? What is the punishment? They have to work. That's literally what it says. You now have to work. So since that time, we have said that work is supposed to be miserable, and people are not prepared to sign on to that agreement anymore. And we can talk about why that is, what the consequences are, because it affects every worker and it darn sure affects anybody running or leading an organization as they try to recruit and retain talent. We are in what I call the meaning moment. And this is the biggest change in work in a hundred years, and one

of the fourth biggest changes in the history of work going back to the ancient world. Okay, so Bruce, let me just push back a little bit. Please. So the CEO or the editor-in-chief of a major publication, I won't say his name, but you and I both know him well, personally. I was once in a session, conference kind of event with him, but it wasn't on the record. And I asked him, what's the, and he employs hundreds of journalists. I said, what's the biggest difference between the journalists and the journalism and the career of journalism you see today versus when you were getting started in the business as a young, you know, kind of cub reporter. And he paused and he said, you know, when I got started as a

reporter, which was probably, I'm thinking he's probably about 30, 40 years ago, he says, there's this term that I never knew, that I hear now all the time from people work for me it's called job satisfaction he says he says these these young reporters now they come to me and they're like i'm looking for more job satisfaction he's like what the hell is jobs you take your notepad you take your your your goddamn tape recorder and you your shoe leather and you you go work 15 hours a day, get yourself caffeinated, and you're happy that you have a job, and you're happy that you're making $26,000 a year, and if that's not satisfaction, you got problems.

And he spends half his time now indulging these young people who, if I were to put a slightly different spin on what you're describing, they have this overly idealized view of work. And it's like an experience. It's not work. It's an experience. And I don't feel like it's a— Yeah. Satya Nadella just came out and said, I can't have meetings anymore.

I have to have experiences. Exactly. That's the change. That's what's going on. Yeah, I mean, because I'm interested in these things, the algorithm on my social media, like every week sends me this clip from Mad Men where the Jon Hamm character is talking to the young woman who works for him. It's like, what do you mean you want to be?

It's the greatest exchange. She says, I want you to say thank you. That's the way it works. There are no credits on commercials. It's your job. I give you money say thank you. That's the way it works. There are no credits on commercials. It's your job. I give you money, you give me ideas. You never say thank you. That's what the money is for.

You're young. You will get your recognition. And honestly, it is absolutely ridiculous to be two years into your career and counting your ideas. Everything to you is an opportunity. And you should be thanking me every morning when you wake up, along with Jesus, for giving you another day. The money is thank you. This goes back... This is why you're framing this with the 50 million people, I think is

the essential frame. She'll walk. She'll walk, and she wouldn't walk before. But Bruce, she may walk because she can walk, and that's what I'm trying to get at. Correct. That's what's going on. Is this the province of, is what you are describing not really 50 million people? Is it really the province of some very privileged, dare I say, entitled people, but it's not really all swaths of the socioeconomic landscape. It's really just a pretty elite section of it. No. No. I mean, first of all, my own study, half the people made less than $100,000, and 60% of millennials tell pollsters a Gallup poll that meaning is more important to them to their parents. nine out of 10 people,

and a study out of Harvard done by Sean Acor, say that they are prepared to give up a quarter of their lifetime earnings for work that is meaningful. That metric after metric, survey after survey, but the answer, the question is why, okay? So now let's get into the why of it all. So the big why is that, and why people kind of let's just say 50-plus are having a hard time like your you know friend or maybe even our

mutual friend the editor understanding this okay lie number one you have a career okay the idea of the career for most of human history there was never an idea of a career okay ninety percent of people live where they worked and worked where they lived and you just that's's what you did. Okay, the idea of the career is invented in the 19th century as people move. There's this big change going on. People move from rural areas to cities and tens of millions more join them from overseas.

I was on a prominent cable television business channel three days ago and I was asked, hey, 4,000 people lost their job last month for ai how are we going to deal with this cataclysm to which my response was how many people lost their job you know in the last two decades to which my response was do you know how many people lost their jobs in the last two decades of the 19th century when electricity and they caught car and you know the plow were invented. A third of the country. So this AI thing is a blip in the radar,

and it will ultimately create more jobs than it's going to cost. So a third of the country relocates from rural areas to cities. Well, it's a blip, but it's also we've seen it before is your point. Yeah, of course we've seen it before. Radio, television, the computer. Printing press. Yeah. Steam engine. Yeah, exactly.

So what's going on? They suddenly arrive in cities, and they don't have anything to do. Plus, there's all these new industries and businesses that had never existed, and they don't have any way to get people. So a guy named Frank Parsons, who's a writer and engineer himself, went through 20 jobs. In 1908, opens the first career counseling center and essentially invents the idea of the career. And what is the idea? The idea is that once in your life, if you're a man, at 21, you're going to pick an occupation and you're going to do it for the next 40 years. And if you deviate from that path, then there is something psychologically wrong with you, is what he says. And every way we've talked about a work since has been, here we go again, this linear idea,

okay, the career track, the career path, okay, the corporate ladder. What is the resume, which is essentially invented in the 1950s? No one ever needed a resume. It's not that old. It was invented in the 50s, a series of successive linear jobs, each one bigger than the last, okay? First of all, that's done in an age when it's only men. So what is that stigmatized? taking time off to spend with your family?

Starting a company and maybe it fails and you want to come back to the workforce Going into public service as you my friend did as we talked about at the beginning of this conversation To run for political office to you know to give back any of these things changing your occupation is deadly People will think you're a job hopper. That was the great insult Okay,. So lie number one is you have a career. Lie number two is you have a path. My data show that we go through 20, here we go again, of what I call work quakes. So what is a work quake? Okay. We have 20 in our lives. That's one every two and a half years. So what's a work quake? Same thing as before. It's a jolt. It's a disruption where you're either forced to or you choose to rethink or reimagine what you do. But here's the thing.

Women go through them more than men. Xers go through them more than boomers. Millennials more than Xers. Zers no doubt will do it more than millennials. Diverse workers more than non-diverse workers. So as the workforce gets, what is it now? Majority young. Majority female.

You know, increasingly diverse. As of 2019, according to the Labor Department, most people hired are black and brown women. So as the diverse, younger, more female workforce becomes the dominant workforce, and now millennials and Gen Z are half the workforce, they're saying, I ain't playing by these old rules. And I told you the signature piece of data from Life is in the transitions is

That we go through You know three to five lifequakes and they take five years. That's half of our adult lives The signature piece of data from the search is that 45% of work quakes begin in the workplace Okay conflict with your boss the company shuts down okay you get fired that means 55 the majority of work plates work quakes begin outside of the workplace something happens with your family your health okay or you just change your mind about what you want to do so what your buddy and everybody else listening to us needs to you know confront is that in the battle between life and work, life is playing a greater and greater role,

and we're not going back. So, again, I want to push a little bit here because what I've seen with, say, with Israeli entrepreneurs. So Israeli entrepreneurs have, among their many motivations, I find always two. One is they want to become fantastically wealthy, like their peers in Silicon Valley or London or Berlin or anywhere in these tech ecosystems. And they feel that building really innovative companies to solve really big global problems is a contribution to the world,

and it's a contribution to the sort of national cause of putting Israel on the map. So in a sense, it's not a choice. These two ideas aren't in conflict. They are getting, to use your terminology, the means and meaning. They're doing both. They're in pursuit of use your terminology, the means and meaning. They're doing both. They're in pursuit of both.

Correct. So that could also be going on here. And you're looking at it saying, aha, they want meaning. Because I do find when I talk to these entrepreneurs, the meaning part is really, really important to them. They want to do big things for their country and for the world. Yes. But they're not divorced from also material gains and the ambition to accumulate them. Right. And so I think that, so here's my response to that.

So we've talked about lie number one. We've talked about lie number two. I'll briefly talk about lie number three, which is that you have a job. Because it turns out you don't just have a job. We all have up to five jobs. There's a main job, which frankly only half of us even have by some metrics, a main job, a care job, like caring for children or aging relatives, which both you and I have been doing in real time in recent years. Okay. A side job, three quarters of us have that. We hear about that all the time, but then 89% of us have what I have termed a hope job, which is something that we're doing that we hope becomes something else, like writing a screenplay, writing a book about Israeli entrepreneurs, selling pickles at the farmer's market, or starting a company.

In fact, often these hope jobs, or running a podcast, are things that we pay out of pocket for. And so what's going on is that what's non-negotiable now, Dan, is the meaning. The question is where you're going to get it from. If you can get it from your main job, if starting a company can give you means and meaning, which we can dig into in a second, that's great. But a lot of people, it can't. So maybe their main job gives them salary and benefits, but their side job or their hope job gives them the meaning that they're looking for. I'm thinking of a guy named Sang Kim, first-generation Korean-American, comes to Queens, shares a bedroom and a bathroom with multiple sisters. He's a first-generation immigrant, like a lot of people that we know, and a lot of pressure.

He becomes a lawyer at Goldman Sachs. But what was his toothache, as I call it, the thing that always nagged at him? Making that bedroom and making that bathroom nicer. So he starts helping buddies remodel their bathrooms, and he opens an interior design company. That's, first of all, his hope job. Then it becomes his side job, and eventually he wants to do it so he jumps and he starts a interior design firm but he can't yet fully make the money so he liked has the side job doing some legal

clients to make it work that is a kind of a perfect example of how we use this fluidity today to get the meaning because we want the meaning because if we don't get it from our main job, we're going to do something else to give us the meaning. And the big difference as we get into, so those are the three lines. What's the one truth? The one truth is that only you can write your own story.

Only you can decide what makes you happy. And that gets to the question of your entrepreneurs, which is it used to be there's only one metric of success, which is the money. And now there's other metrics. And so money can be meaning as much as anything else, but there's other things that also can provide meaning, and we have to revisit that calculus and that equation 20 different times in our lives.

You write about the, not the end of, but people focusing less on climbing and more on digging. Yeah. Here maybe we'll excuse you since you're not actually a native-born American. Yes, I am. Yes, I am. We moved to Canada when I was young.

I was born in Utica, New York. Then we moved to Canada for my dad's work because he lost the job because the mayor of Utica lost his re-election campaign. And we moved to Canada. My dad took a job. And then I moved back later. So I had Canadian residency, but never citizenship. That will significantly help your run for the presidency. Exactly. But I also got to experience taxation without representation for the first time. Anyways, go ahead. I learned this about you today. I'm grateful for that tidbit. The circus played Utica, so I've been in Utica. The story we've been telling is all about climbing.

Going back to Ben Franklin, really, in his autobiography. Up by your bootstraps, rags to riches, higher floor, bigger office, more salary, greater benefits. Better view. Yeah, the whole thing. The number one thing I learned in hundreds of hours, I've done 1,500 hours of these conversations, 10,000 pages of transcripts, the number one thing I learned about work is the people who are happiest and most fulfilled get the most meaning from what they do.

They don't climb. They dig. And most fulfilled get the most meaning from what they do. They don't climb they dig they do what I call a Meaning audit right they perform personal archaeology now You're getting this you know the person who's been to you know as many archaeological sites around the world is almost of anybody that I know and They go on this sort of treasure hunt of their life and they identify What is the thing that they inherited it from their parents about work? And they you know, what of treasure hunt of their life and they identify what is the thing that they inherited from their parents about work.

And what are their earliest role models? What are their two things? Where are they now? What is important to them at any given moment? And that's why sort of the bulk of the search is what I call 21 questions to find work you love. It's a process to put yourself through to do this meaning audit to define what it is

that meaning means to you. So let's just take one of these questions, Dan, because I think it will make a lot of this, make a lot more sense. The first question. So I interview people, I talk to people like you do. First question I asked everybody was, what's the upside of prominent values

or upsides about work you learned from your parents? Let me ask you, what were the prominent upsides about work you learned from your parents? Let me ask you. What were the prominent upsides or values you learned from your parents? Oh, my gosh. My – from – I mean, just like lessons for professional life or lessons for life? About work. What's the value of prominent upsides or the number one value of work you learned from your parents? Well, my father and my mother both had Jewish community-related jobs. So my father worked in—they both had lives that were—

they both had jobs that were anchored in the Jewish community. And the two greatest values that they each derived was a sense that they were, A, doing something to strengthen the Jewish community wherever they lived, and that they got to work in jobs that had respect for the Jewish calendar. So they were very observant Jews, and they never felt any sort of eye roll, annoyance, or stigma around the fact that their observance meant that they had to leave early on Fridays, that they missed every, they weren't at work for every single holiday, not just Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but Shavuot and Sukkot,

and go down the list. So being a part of the community was important to them in a professional sense, not just a philanthropic sense, and that their job respected their life, their family life, their religious life. So what were the prominent downsides or shadows of work you learned from your parents? Hmm. By the way, I'm supposed to be interviewing you. I'm showing you the power of this process. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, I would say they, well, first of all, they were both in jobs that had a real ceiling on their earning potential. These were not jobs that were going to, I mean, I guess they sort of made them financially secure, but not comfortable. So when I asked this question, we crunched the numbers. That's what we do around here. It turns out that two-thirds of people say that the prominent value of work they learned from their parents was the value of hard work. And I kept asking these questions. I'm like, I'm missing something.

Then I started asking, what are the prominent downsides? Here's where it got interesting. So two-thirds of people say that the prominent value they learned was the value of hard work. The number one downside, overwork, followed by strain on the family, followed by happiness. Like my parents worked all the time. It kept them away from the family. They were unhappy, and it drove them into the ground. So we are one question into what I call the 21 questions here, and already you're beginning to see that we are all shaped by these invisible ideas, values.

I've come to call it, I mean, this conversation sort of will make more sense than many conversations I have. I call it your internal scripture about work, this mix of like stories and parables and homilies and life lessons, right, that we have. We are given a script. The script is climb, you know, each job must be higher and bigger, but we have this scripture, you know, and if there's like one thing you should do is

ignore the script you were given, stop chasing someone else's dream, listen to your own scripture and identify it. And that's the only way to be mean now i happen to know what you do now and i happen to know that you are balancing these things okay that you are balancing and now we hear it something that will give you some financial upside because means money providing from your family is important to you even though you're in a two breadwinning, you know, family. But also you're not prepared to sacrifice the values, the meaning, the family, the building, the community, the having your voice, whatever it might be. That is in you, has been in you since you before you could verbalize it. And if you, but the thing is your life is built

around trying to make it come true. For most people, it's not. I mean, I talked to this one, Mary Robinson. She lost her father when she was 11. She was told, don't mourn, you know, stiff upper lip it. She couldn't cope. Drinking, sex, like lost all of her friends, became literally, she wanted to flee so much, she became a, you know, a stewardess is what it was called at the time. And she came back, she worked for Prudential, ultimately giving away money. And she goes to church one day and she hears a preacher, she goes home to her childhood bedroom, has a fight with her mother, lies down in her childhood bed and said, I've been running from this this i call it your toothache from this hans christian anderson

fairy tale my whole life she walks away from a fortune 500 company to work for and then start an organization that helps families and children grieve the loss of a loved one so she has spent 40 years running away from her story until she digs, finds out the story she wants to be telling, and then realigns her life. And now she's happier than she's ever been. I lost my father when I was young. And the financial piece of having the pressure on my mother, I mean, it brought that into sharp relief. A life quake. and then the financial, obviously a lot wrapped up in that,

but the pressure, the financial pressure. Which, by the way, I mean, to bring another one of the questions, you start with the past, because this is storytelling, your work story, past, present. A simple question, like, I'm in a moment in my life when?

You ask yourself this next time you're in a work quake. Or ask it now. I'm in a moment in my life when? I'm in a moment in my life when I want to make money because I want to pay off my student loans, or in my case, about to send two daughters to college, right? I'm in a moment when I have young children, or my mother's going through chemo, and I don't want to miss the appointment. So I'm not going to have a job that's going to make me travel two weeks a month. Or I'm in a moment when I've been doing the same thing, maybe a lot of people listen to us, for a very long time, and I want to give back, or I want to fight climate change, or I want to go to Iraq and serve our country, or I want to run for political

office, or I want to make my community, my religious or my neighborhood community better. You would not have made, I don't care what was on you would not have made certain decisions in your life when your boys were really young and being a father was important to you in part because you know no doubt because you lost your father but just because it's how you're built you would have turned down anything not to be in a job that required you to travel three weeks a month you wouldn't have done it so the point is not that means is never important it's that it's not always important,

and it's not the only thing that's important. It changes and morphs and evolves over time. Your story is oscillating. It's not linear. It's not always climbing. It's bobbing and weaving and doing whatever other shape you want it to do. Okay. Bruce, I want to—that was intense, and I want to end on a less intense note, okay? Now, I told you we run the risk on this podcast of talking about football, but I'm actually going to switch gears because I want to talk for a minute about basketball. All right? Now, you and I talk about— Oh, basketball. No, but don't worry. There's a reason. You and I talk about sports.

We usually talk about football. You give me tsurus about the Jets. The reality is I'm feeling like I'll be Shepping Nachas this fall for the Jets. But we don't have to get into that debate. We've had that debate. I want to tell you, two episodes ago, I had Tyler Cowen on this podcast, who's a basketball obsessive, and he wrote a whole book about talent, and he wrote a whole book about how to recruit talent and pick, you know, identify talent. And in the sports world, he thinks LeBron James is like emblematic of everything one wants in talent because of his interdisciplinary skills, and he's the ultimate learner,

and he's constantly learning throughout the course of his career, and how he makes the people— Super meaning-focused also. And he makes the people around him better, and he figures out how to make them better, and he's—anyways, he went through a whole spiel about LeBron, and I put it to him, LeBron or MJ, you know, who's the greatest of all time? And he says, LeBron, no question. And he went through all the reasons why MJ was great, but LeBron is better. Now, one thing we did not get into in that conversation is one of—I tend to agree with him, by the way, and I don't want people's heads to explode. I tend to agree with Tyler that LeBron history will judge him for a variety

of reasons as the greatest of all time, even though I think he's a complicated guy. But one thing that Tyler did not talk about is LeBron changed the role of players in the NBA in terms of

not just being employees. He was with the Cavs when he in the NBA in terms of not just being employees. He was with the Cavs when he joined the NBA, and then he said, you know what, I see a superstar team, a champion team with the Heat. I can create, we can win a title at the Heat, and I see Dwayne Wade there. I'm going to put together a quote-unquote dream team over at the Heat. He did that. They win a couple titles. Then he's like, oh, wow, I can go back to Cleveland, my hometown,

and I can go play for sort of his hometown, near his hometown. I can go back to the Cavaliers. No one thought he would ever come back to the Cavaliers. He comes back to the Cavaliers. He sees all these assets there. He gets Kevin Love. He gets Kyrie Irving. Boom, wins another title there.

Then he says, okay, and now I'm going to go create a team in L.A., and he gets Anthony Davis. And it's suddenly like the players are in charge. He's like a coach and a GM and a star player all in one. And I was thinking, I mean, he is, talk about an innovator, but he kind of gripped the situation and said, I have the influence to be more in charge than players have been, and I'm going to create these situations, and I'm going to create these opportunities for me. Now, you could say, oh, only LeBron could do that.

He's a superstar. But that's not true. You actually see this more and more. I'm not saying every player in the NBA can do this, but you're seeing more and more elite players say, I'm going to grip this. Does that fit with your – I mean, is that sort of the high – it's a high-end, first-class example. But it is a version of what you're talking about. I mean, I don't know if that's about meaning, although I guess meaning could come from gripping the situation. It's interesting if you want to look at the Michael Jordan versus LeBron James question.

The way it's usually framed, and in fact, the way you framed it may be the way you framed it with Tyler Cowen, who is the better basketball player? That quickly becomes sort of where you went with it is who's the better leader who makes everyone better around them. Well, the debate normally is about stats, right? Jordan won six titles. LeBron's only won four. Right. But then you say, but then LeBron is the highest scoring record.

But I'm saying it's not about stats. And Tyler was saying it's not about stats. I'm going to go one step further because I'm saying, you know, first of all, you know, Jordan and the conflict, you know, with Scottie Pippen, you could say that's a talent conflict. You talked about the move from Cleveland to Miami. That was, remember, there were three people walked out on that stage, not one, that were taking their talents. And that was one of the things that changed the game. But I would go one step further, and I think you then have to use the metric beyond stats which is the meaning impact and i think if you were to compare say either one of them with you know arguably say the greatest athlete of the 20th century

muhammad ali you would have to say that lebron james reminds you more of muhammad ali in terms of his impact and his voice outside of the game right so that there are now uh you know voting booths in every n stadium, right? And conversations that are going on. And that's the change. Any change in the history of work has always come in the relationship between workers and employers, employees from the employees. Going back to seven days a week then became six days a week then became the weekend. You're going to go back to Major League Baseball, which was where the first union began, which was essentially the players organizing against. You can, in fact, make a

football analogy in college football with the transfer portal, like taking the power away. I grew up in Georgia. It's not the Falcons. It's the Bulldogs, right? That's the, you know, so that- Yeah, Falcons are like the minor league team. Yeah, exactly, right? And so what's going on now? We're finally toppling the hated Alabama and we have two national championships in a row

and then now here comes the transfer portal and it's like gonna weaken the power of the dynasty. So take it to anybody going to weaken the power of the dynasty. So take it to anybody listening to us today. Go Facebook, Amazon, Google. In the last five days, Google makes this big announcement. You're going to come back to work, but only, and it's going to, if you don't show up for work, it's going to show up on your employee review, but only three days a week right Facebook meta come back to the but only three days a week right nobody's choosing to do that it's because we are freed from the script we are freed from the career we are freed from the upper

trajectory the lead story as we take this conversation for all of this week in the Wall Street Journal by the way the Wall Street Journal which up you know literally seven days ago as we had this conversation for all of this week in the Wall Street Journal. By the way, the Wall Street Journal, which literally seven days ago as we had this conversation, put 2,500 words from the search on the cover of its weekend section. And I will tell you that what came from the amazing editor who made that thing work was you can't put this in the Wall Street Journal. You can't say meaning is more important than means. Wall Street is sitting right there in the title. And I'm like, wait, 50 50 plus men grumble about this but if you look at the women and diverse workers and younger work you say most of our readers are 50 plus men

and they put it there and it went to the top of the most email and I have heard from people around the world you've captured what's going on so the most email all week was this insurance guy running this insurance company says you can go remote people sell their houses they sell their cars they move away and, never mind. And they're like, screw you. I'm not going to come back anymore. This is a real thing. We are in the meeting moment. And for companies, it means you need an agenda. You need your own audit. You need to provide this for your workers and for employees. The call here is whenever you're in a work quake, because you are someone you know is in one now, don't follow the script. Go inside.

Follow the scripture. Decide what brings you meaning right now and chase that. That's the great opportunity. And to our friend, who I'll tell you when we're done recording, who was running that publication, it's not to roll your eyes when he hears the words job satisfaction. Well-being, flexibility, satisfaction, inclusion, everyone defines it differently, you better find out how they decide it. We don't need to be Adam and Eve. And work does not need to mean suffering anymore, it just doesn't. So Bruce, we started this conversation with Abraham and Moses and the Bible,

and we end the conversation with LeBron James, which I think he would find very fitting. Maybe the order. Maybe it should have started with LeBron, and then those guys may have come second or third. But we really did cover a lot of territory. A little bit of Saddam Hussein. Right. I forgot about Saddam. Right. The Republican Guard palace. How could I forget?

Right. You're the best. All right. Thanks for doing this, Bruce. We will post the search in the show notes. We will encourage our readers to buy it at Barnes & Noble, but they can actually buy it wherever they want, independent bookstore or wherever. And thanks for doing this. My pleasure. That's our show for today. To keep up with Bruce Feiler, you can find him on Twitter at

at Bruce Feiler, B-R-U-C-E-F-E-I-L-E-R. And you can also subscribe to his newsletter called The Nonlinear Life on Substack. We'll post that link to that in the show notes. And of course, you can find his new book, The Search, as well as all of his books. He's got close to 20 of them at your favorite independent bookstore or barnesandnoble.com or, well, you know. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.