The One You Feed - The Search for Meaningful Work with Bruce Feiler

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

With a wealth of experience in collecting life stories, Bruce Feiler has become an expert in identifying personal values in the search for fulfilling and purpose-driven work. As a best-selling author and engaging speaker, he inspires his audiences to dig deep, unearth their own personal stories, and chase their dreams rather than follow someone else’s path. In this episode, Eric and Bruce Discuss the Search for Meaningful Work and… Defining “workquakes” and developing strategies for navigating career transitions How to determine your personal values to pursue more meaningful work  Understanding the power of making unorthodox decisions, fostering individuality and creativity. How to embrace change and extract happiness and meaning from evolving situations Recognizing the impact individual decisions can have on personal growth and empowerment To learn more, click here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The biggest problem in work is not what you don't know about work, it's what you don't know about yourself. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor?

What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Bruce Feiler, the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including Life

is in the Transitions, The Secret of Happy Families, and Council of Dads. His three TED Talks have been viewed more than 4 million times, and Bruce has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Gourmet. Today, Eric and Bruce discuss his new book, The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World. Hi, Bruce. Welcome back to the show. Eric, it's such a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me back. Yeah, I'm really happy to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book called The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World. But before we do that,

we'll start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, what I appreciate about this question and in reflecting on it in advance of this conversation, and I think of course this is the wisdom that you found by asking this over and over again.

And that's one thing that you and I share is this interest in asking people the same question because the answers tend to, you know, surface very interesting patterns. But in reflecting on it, Eric, in advance of this conversation, I realized how much my answer is shaped by what I have been thinking about

and the work I have been doing and that the answer I'm about to give you today is going to be different than the answer I gave you when we spoke a few years back. And my answer is this. I'm fascinated that in the parable as it's written, that you have a grandparent and a grandchild talking. Because as you know, I've spent the last few years collecting and analyzing stories about work. And one of the things that I learned, maybe the central thing that I learned is that we all have these stories that we tell ourselves about work and they are shaped not just by our own experience, by all the people around us, both the people now, our spouses, our children, our bosses,

our lovers, whomever they might be, but also by our ancestors, by our parents and our teachers and perhaps religious figures or coaches that we grew up with and even by our ancestors. And so what strikes me about this today is that our stories are shaped by all of these people and that there's a tension between the stories that we want to tell and the stories that other people want us to tell. And so my answer to this question today, Eric, is that we're not the only ones feeding the wolf. So we might feed the wolf that's about bravery and courage and the values that we want, but other people around us are feeding the wolves that are also nipping at our toes. And while there may not be greed and, you know, being self-serving and some of these negative qualities, they have different wishes for our lives than we have. So the wolves are not zero sum. By feeding one, you don't starve the

other. And in effect, both are being fed at all times by us and by other people. And therefore, are being fed at all times by us and by other people. And therefore, our challenge is to make sure that the wolf that we want to listen to is being fed a little more and that we're listening a little more closely to that wolf than to the other wolf, which is also managing to survive no matter what we do. That's a great way of looking at it and really thinking about the things that we want and we desire and all of that comes from within, but it also comes from without. Bingo. And that can be both our ancestors, parents and all that, but the culture as a whole and all of that. And as you were talking, I had a moment, it's funny how we can be blind on things with

ourselves up to a certain point, because I was thinking about the grandparent, when you said grandparent and grandchild, I thought about it in terms of your book, Work. And I was like, you know, the last thing in the world that would work today would be for a grandparent to try and teach their grandchild today about the nature of work and how to succeed in our time. A grandparent is so far out of touch at this point. And I remember thinking that a little bit with my parents. Like they still think that I'm safer with a corporate job than I am a consulting career, right? And yet I somehow was fool enough to think that perhaps I wasn't out of touch when it would come to my son. And I just had a moment where I was like, well, of course you are

to some degree. Of course you are. I love that. Like, yeah, I've been playing with chat GPT. Yeah, I'm pretty down with it, but of course I am. You know? I love that. I love everything about that. And I love the vulnerability and I love the truth telling here. Right. You know, as you know, I mean, my book opens really with a story of me. I grew up in Savannah, Georgia in a family business. And every Saturday morning, I had to get up and, you know, put my work clothes on. I mean, it wasn't coat and tie, but I had to get dressed up, go to my grandparents' house, which was immediately behind the house where I grew up in. You know, we used to joke it was like out of Faulkner.

And my grandmother would make breakfast and I would drive in my grandfather's Ford. He drove seven miles an hour down Habersham Street in Savannah, Georgia. And I would go and sit behind a desk and in this case, take rent payments from people who lived in the apartments and homes that my family built, like $18, $22, $26. And I'd have to record these in a ledger. And my grandfather in his Oxfords and, you know, 1930s clothes would be sitting there with his hand on my shoulder, like, you know, bragging about my grades and penmanship. And that was the world that I grew up in. And the message was very clear. The most important thing in life is work, right? Not family, not love, not self-expression, not giving back, not service.

It was work, but in a very specific kind of linear industrial hair tonic and kind of masculine way. And I think a lot of what's going on in work today is the fact that that is the story that we've told in this country ever since Benjamin Franklin. And, you know, this is a huge theme of these conversations that I had, the, And, you know, this is a huge theme of these conversations that I had, the, you know, 500 hours of interviews that I collected and the now 15,000 pages that I have of life stories is that we've told one story of success since the very beginning. And it's all about up, right? Rags to riches, up by your bootstraps, higher floor, bigger salary, greater benefits, better view. higher floor, bigger salary, greater benefits, better view. And it turns out that the people who are happiest, who are the most fulfilled, who get the most meaning out of work, they don't climb, they dig. They do this, what I call personal archaeology, which is to excavate

these parables and homilies and wisdom and expectations that they inherited from their parents, that they took in from their surroundings, maybe that they listened to in their religious institutions or learned on the ball field or, you know, the ballet theater, wherever it might be. And the real challenge is to make sure you're not chasing someone else's dream. You're chasing your own dream. But the challenge is learning to identify what is it that brings you meaning, which is why the essence of this book is a set of tools. I call them 21 questions to find work you love that will help you figure out what is

the story you want to tell. Because the story that people of our generation have been telling is the story that we were expected to tell. And invariably, it's different. And almost everyone I know and absolutely everyone I interviewed hit a moment in their life where they realized that they were at crossroads. Do they want to tell someone else's story or do they want to tell their own? Yeah, it's interesting.

I'm reflecting on my own work life. And I sort of was pursuing my own life up until I was 24 and a homeless heroin addict, right? And I thought I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be this free spirit. And that crashed and burned. And it just occurred to me that what happened is when that crashed and burned, what stepped in almost immediately was all these default stories. Wow.

The minute that I walked into a professional setting and saw a path ahead of me, that dominant paradigm. Yes. Wow. Get this, get that, go this way, learn more, get a raise, get promoted. That just slid right in and took over for a long time until I was able to ask better questions about what do I really want? And it's just amazing how it was kind of just waiting for me. Well, first of all, again, I just appreciate the way you communicate and your willingness

to be vulnerable and to tell that story. So let me just pause a little and acknowledge this. You and I haven't planned this conversation, but I'll tell you what I hear having, you know, collected life stories now, 400 of them in the last six years is, you know, number one, 400 of them in the last six years is, you know, number one, the idea that we are sold, certainly those of us, you know, 40 plus, which was the dominant idea, which is that there is a linear life, right? Where the biggest transformations in our lives happen on birthdays that end in zero. That is not a reflection of how we actually live, okay? These events did not necessarily happen on round birthdays they happened when they happened maybe in your case when you hit rock bottom as an addict then you got onto a traditional linear path and then you realized you don't have to stay on this path forever and that's completely consistent

so i'll put it in the language of the search that i sort of tried to sort of put some structure to this and the way i would say it is you know there are three lies about work that we are sold. Lie number one, that you have a career, okay? The career was an idea. It never existed in human history. Most people, like, lived where they worked and worked where they lived and they were farmers and they made their candles and they made their food and they raised their animals. Like, that's how it was. The idea of a career was born actually in 1909 by a guy named Frank Parsons who invented

career counseling as a way to accommodate people who left the farms and moved to cities or people who emigrated from abroad and immigrated into this country and found themselves in cities and they needed jobs. So you had a bunch of new jobs in the industrial world and a bunch of new people looking for jobs and so they invented the career. And then 50 years later, they invented an idea to manifest that linear career, which was the resume, something that also never existed essentially before the 1950s, okay? So now what's going on is that that doesn't capture how it is today because the career is built on the idea as you use the language in this conversation, a path or a ladder, okay? That's bunk, okay? The average person goes through what I call a work quake, Okay, a work quake is a moment of reconsideration or reevaluation or change or some inflection point. We go through 20 in the course of our lives. That's one every 2.85 years, every two years and 10 months.

And by the way, Xers go through that more than boomers, millennials more than Xers, Zers more than millennials, women more than men, diverse workers more than non-diverse workers, which means the number is only going higher. So if the average person in general goes through 20, the average millennial goes through 25. Okay. And here I think is the signature piece of data that your story just captured. And that is the majority of all workquakes, 55%, occur outside, begin, initiate. The energy behind them begins outside the workplace. So it's not something is wrong with the company or you get downsized or you don't like your boss or whatever. It's something happens in your personal life or something happens with a loved one, okay? Or you have a change of mind or you have a mental health challenge or you decide to, you know, turn towards sobriety. So in this battle

between life and work that we always talk about balancing, that's just the wrong metaphor because it turns out today people choose life over work and life is a bigger influence on our work. So you can't leave your life out. The people are happy to learn to integrate. And I think your story is a perfect example. Two mindset changes are what produce the big work changes. It's not the other way around. The biggest problem in work is not what you don't know about work. It's what you don't know about yourself. I want to jump ahead to a different point in the book. There's so many great places we could go here, but I want to jump to an idea that you talk about and you talk about that people have jobs, and that one of your other

lies is you have a job, right? And you say, no, you don't. You have a lot of jobs. And we could talk about the different types of jobs. There's the job that we get paid for. There's the job that we wish we could have. There's all these different things, and we'll get into that. But I want to ask a question. This work and life not being a balance, but being blended together and starting to look at things like dealing with personal challenges as a job, dealing with taking care of our parents as a job. What is not a job under that rubric? That's a fascinating question. Let me work my way toward that by sort of setting the frame. Okay. Okay. You just summarized it, but I'll just sharpen the point.

Okay, so there are three lies, right? You have a career. You don't have a career. Some people do. Some people pick something at 21 and do it for 40 years, but for the vast majority of us, that's no longer a relevant and helpful way of looking at it. You have a path. You don't have a path. You can get on the path.

You can get off the path. Especially helpful for women, right? Because it used to be, I'm going to get off the path and spend time raising my children or caring for an aging relative, and I accept that I'll never get back on the path. That was an absurd choice we asked people to make because, especially if someone's about to be an empty nester, you can get back on the path whenever you want. When there's no path, there's no penalty for getting off the path. And the third is that you have a job, right? And so again, this paradigm was never used throughout human history, okay? So the word job wasn't even popularized, didn't even enter the language, frankly, until the early modern era. And then it meant a task,

okay? If we jump ahead, that's how it's used now. But the idea of a job as something that you do during the day for which you get paid, which is sort of what the economists call it, that basically doesn't enter human consciousness or the lexicon again until the industrial era where you sort of had something you did during the day and then went home. But can I ask a question about that real quick? Yeah, sure. So you're sort of saying that this idea of career job entered the lexicon around the time of the industrial revolution. And before that, it didn't really exist. What was someone who was like a blacksmith? There were trades before then throughout human history. Now, not before 10,000 years ago, more or less, but how do those compare? I'm just kind

of curious. Well, okay. So how the word was originally used for a blacksmith, which was, this was a task or a set of skills or ways that you spent your time. That is still in the dictionary today. And that's essentially how we've come to use it today. So the implication with a job was that you went and you did this one thing for which you got paid, and then you went home and did nothing. Or then you went home and you did work for which you were not paid, right? So what this does is it devalues, and this was sort of an idea that post-feminist scholars introduced in the 70s and the 80s, which is it's a job to clean your bathroom.

It's a job to clean up after the kids, right? It's a job to make dinner, except that just happens to be unpaid labor, right? And so this is an idea that's been building, and now I think it just goes a lot further, okay, which gets to the heart of your question. So, in other words, you could be a blacksmith during the day, but then you're a parent at night, right? But now that usage, and I'll get to the core question about what's not a job because I think that's a very interesting question. I'm going to have to reflect on that. But so now the way we use it, the way that I think that we should use it is that we have to acknowledge that in the balance between, you know, life and work. And so, in some ways, life has won, as I said. But one of the things we've done is we've jobified life, okay?

So, job becomes what we do. So anybody who's a parent of a kid in travel soccer knows that their job is to be that parent, right? And maybe they have to bring the snacks on Saturday, right? Or, you know, get the hotel rooms for the boys, right? Serving on the co-op board, okay? Working on your social media. That's a job for a lot of people. Anybody who's a parent who has two working parents, as I did when my kids were young,

knows, okay, your job is bath time and my job is bedtime. This is how people use it today. So we don't have one. So what are the five jobs? The five jobs are main job. And by the way, half of us even have a main job anymore. Two-thirds of us have a care job that's caring for an aging relative or a neighbor or a child. Three-quarters of us have a side job, which we talk about a lot, but there are these two other categories that you mentioned that I've come to name because I kept hearing about them. 86% of us have a hope job, which is something that we're doing that we hope becomes something else, right? Like writing a screenplay or starting a book. I know you're starting a book, right? Or, you know, selling jewelry on Etsy or pickles at the farmer's market or like that's a hope job. But it then turns out there's another job, which is an invisible time

suck that feels like a job, like battling sobriety or discrimination or imposter syndrome or, you know, learning money management skills that you're anxious that you don't have. I call that a ghost job. That's 93% of us. And that takes up to 12 hours a week. So one way of looking at this is, oh my God, everything is work, which is sort of the implication of your question. And like we work too hard, but I don't think that's the right way to look at it. That's not the people I talk to look at. The way the people I talk to look at it is what's non-negotiable is this sort of basic frame that I have. It may be like the primary I talk to look at it is what's non-negotiable is this sort of basic frame that I have. It may be like the primary takeaway here, right? Which is fewer people are searching merely for work anymore. More people are searching for work with meaning, right? We are

transitioning from a means-based economy to a meaning-based economy. The thing that's non-negotiable is the meaning. Now, for some people, that meaning may be money and hallelujah. I'm sending two kids to college. You know, I get it, right? That meaning may be freedom or responsibility or taking care of your family or self-confidence or whatever. And for some people, that's their sense of meaning. But for very few people, is it their sense of meaning all the time? Okay. Maybe when they're younger, it's more adventure and experience or self-expression. Maybe when they're older, it's giving back. So people are oscillating in how they allot the meaning.

And that's really what's going on here. So maybe we have our main job because we need the salary and the benefit to whatever. And maybe we do our side job or a hope job for meaning. And so that's what's non-negotiable. So on the one hand, I get the spirit of this. What's not your job? Recreation. You know, gardening may not be your job. You know, watching Game of Thrones may not be your job. But, you know, you and I were talking before we came on

the air about exercise, right? For some people, that's a release and something when they're off. But for a lot of people, that's a job, you know, like self-care is a ghost job for people, right? You know, managing their weight or, you know, a physical ailment of some kind. So I think that the spirit of your question is, is everything work? I get it. I would push back a little bit and I would say, by raising these things of our lives to jobs, we downplay the weight of meaning we have only to take from our main job. That makes sense.

Yeah. And I think you intuited some of kind of where I was going with that, which is the word job for a lot of us is a pejorative term. Yeah. Right? The Garden of Eden, you know, like the penalty for getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden is work, you know, like job, you know, work. These come from the, you know, Greek and Latin words for torture and misery. So yeah, every story we've ever told, you know, work. These come from the, you know, Greek and Latin words for torture and misery.

So yeah, every story we've ever told, you know, kind of work is a penalty. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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The way we talk to ourselves about things matters. And if I'm heading into waters that aren't aligning with the core ideas you're trying to get here, we can steer back on. But the way we talk to ourselves about things matters. So, for example, you've got two kids you just mentioned who are going off to college, right? There are times that being a parent feels like this amazing, wonderful, deeply meaningful thing. And there are times that it feels like a job. In the pejorative sense of the word, yes. Yeah. What I know for myself though, is the more that I reflected on the former,

the meaning elements of it, the choice elements of it, and the less I thought of it in the latter as a job, the more I felt like it contributed and gave meaning to my life and the less it felt like something I had to do. So in that framework, talk to me a little bit about how we can use this framework of seeing more of these things as jobs, which I think, to your point, the important lesson is that we don't only think about our main job as our job and everything else is secondary. Everything else has to fall in behind that. You're saying that doesn't make sense anymore. I just want to also think about how do we not use that way of thinking to turn all these other things in our lives into something we, quote unquote, have to do because we are making choices about what we do do. I like the word do a lot, actually. It's not a great word, a writerly word or a talkerly word or whatever the word you want to say is.

But when I realized that these are the three lines about work, right? You have a career, you have a path, you have a job. I actually set out to write a book without using the words career or path or job. And it's actually challenging. And so I came back to this issue of what it is that we do. Okay. And so if those are the three lines, what is the one truth, right? So then the one truth is that only you can decide what story of work you want to tell, what makes you a success. You know, the sort of next level of this one truth is that the answer is already inside you. And you can't find it by asking somebody else. You can't find it by going to a counselor. I talked to the guy who invented, you know, the cutting edge of modern career counseling,

which is called narrative career construction, the idea that you have to construct the story. And he says, when I meet somebody, I know within five minutes what the answer is, but I don't want to tell them. I want them to discover it inside themselves. So that's what we're doing. And then this is, in a sense, the first book that I know of that's written with the idea of helping you excavate and tell the story that you want to tell. And so I'm perfectly happy not using the word job, okay, and say how is it that

you want to spend your time to get what it is that you want, okay? And then, as you know, the second half of my book is essentially, I call it 21 questions to find work that you love. And the first one, and you heard me flipping the pages perhaps when you were talking, I was looking through the book this morning, writing an excerpt that's going to appear in the Wall Street Journal in the next few weeks as we tape this conversation. And the first question that I asked when I started these interviews was, I'll ask this, Eric, tell me the upsides of work, the values of work that you learned from your parents. While you're thinking, these are a series of questions to understand what are the hidden legacies of work that you're carrying around that we don't spend enough time

talking about. So what were the upsides or values of work you learned from your parents? It's a great question because I would say, and I did say this recently, my father passed recently and we didn't have the best relationship. We were very different people. But upon reflecting what did I learn from my father, one of the things I said I learned from my father was that I got a really good work ethic. But now that you ask me what the upside is, I'm suddenly a little bit more, you know, like this is not what I'm going to say at the funeral, perhaps. But, you know. What's the downside?

Exactly. It's both, right? It's absolutely both. Okay. You're just listening to us in this podcast. I'm raising my arms in the air because this is the point that I wanted to make. I'm cutting you off a little bit because I'm so moved by your answer. And I also lost my father recently. So my heart goes out to you. So I started asking people at the outset of this thing, tell me the upsides you learned about your work or, you know, values you learned from your parents. And basically everybody, we've got a code of codified. So here it is on page 164 of the search. It's two thirds of people said hard work and, you know, without being demeaning to you, I'm like, okay, this is really boring. Everyone's telling me the same answer. It's not, therefore not telling me anything.

And then I started asking, what are the downsides? Of course, you intuited it because you're good at this. And guess what the number one answer was? Overwork. Okay. So the upsides, 67% hard work, 17% love what you do. In other words, I sold my soul to a corporation, right? Or, you know, you better love what you do. And then 16% be true to yourself. Okay.

The downsides, actually more tightly bunched. 31% overwork, 25% the strain on the family, right? They were working so hard they didn't pay attention to me, okay? This is something that we all know or know people who experience. And then another quarter said they were unhappy. They worked all the time, but they were unhappy and they didn't value happiness. So I think that this is what's interesting, okay?

So we all have this ambivalent feeling toward work that we're carrying around within us that we never articulate. That gets to what we were just talking about, which is why job is a loaded pejorative term because we looked at our parents and they were unhappy either because they had a job or often the case of moms because maybe they didn't have a job. So, as you know, what are we trying to accomplish here? We're trying to write a work story. I mean, one of the interesting things to me is that storytelling as a value, it's kind of all over contemporary culture. Like it's gone from like nowhere to like your life is a story. My last book, Life is in the Transitions, is all about. It became a bestseller. A TED Talk with 2 million views. You know, I teach a TED course on managing transitions. I get that it resonates. But for whatever reason, we haven't carried this

into work. Like the idea of a work story is not a phrase, I would say, that's just sort of abreast in the world, right, or popular in the cultures. But if you want to tell a story, which is what we're talking about here, what are the ways to do it? Well, the number one way to do it, the teacher in journalism school, is what I call the Kipling questions because of Rudyard Kipling, who, what, when, where, why, and how, okay? Those are the six questions. The problem in work is that we only ask one question, how, okay? I've just had a work quake. I'm looking for a job. How do I do it? And what do they tell you? Beef up your resume, call your contacts, you know, your close contacts and your distant contacts, you know, go on the internet.

Here's the problem with that. You'll succeed. You'll find a job and in 2.85 years you'll be unhappy again because you're not getting to the thing. How is the last question you ask? The first question should be who. You know, who are your who's? Who are the influential voices in your head? And then the second question is what?

What is your what? Okay? influential voices in your head? And then the second question is what? What is your what? Okay. And then that gets to me one of the best questions in this whole process, which is, who were your role models as a child and what did you admire about them? So I'm going to ask you to do this again. So Eric, other than family, who were your role models as a child? Define child years. I mean, I like early, but I'll take them at any time you mentioned that. All right. Because I was going to say at like age eight, nine, ten, I probably would have said Pete Rose.

Oh, okay. There we go. George Brett. These are baseball players for those of you who are of a certain age. Yeah. One of which was convicted for gambling, but that was not known at the time. We didn't know that about Pete Rose when you were young. He was a Cincinnati Red.

That's right. Charlie Hustle. And then- George Brett was a Kansas City Royal. We're the same age. He was a Cincinnati Red. That's right. Charlie Hustle. And then... George Brett was a Kansas City Royal. We're the same age. I met George Brett once. I went to a... Better than Pete Rose. Hang on. Oh, really? Oh, wow.

Every spring, we would go to Florida, where my grandmother lived for spring break. From where? I don't know where you grew up. Ohio. Yeah, I was going to say, you must be in the Midwest if you're picking Pete Rose and George Brett. Yeah. And down there, you could go to the spring training games. And so I was at a spring training game and I looked over and sitting just like across the row and down the way was George Brett. And I was like crazy about him as a kid. I bet I was eight at the most at this age, but I loved him. I mean, I just thought he was it.

So I went over to him to say like, Mr. Brett, I really admire you. I don't to this day know exactly what he said, but he was basically, my parents will tell you, like he was an asshole to like an eight-year-old kid. So sorry, George, I hope I don't get sued for libel on this. Anyway. You're telling the truth. You can't be sued for libel. don't get sued for libel on this. Anyway. You're telling the truth. You can't be sued for libel. I flipped from Pete Rose and George Brett to at about 15, Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols. So what would you deduce from those two? Well, the question then is, what did you admire about them? What did you admire about Johnny Rotten? I'm looking at your spiky hair and a guitar on either side of you. The electric guitar, that's one wolf and the acoustic guitar, that's another wolf.

The electric guitar, that's one wolf, and the acoustic guitar, that's another wolf. I think Johnny Rotten, I just admired his willingness to look below the values that our society gave us and look to your own values and to look for a deeper story of meaning. So there we go. So what did you learn from your parents is what I call a who question. It falls under the who is your who category because we can't pick our parents, right? It's just how do we interpret the influence that they had on us, positive and negative. Who is your role models is actually a what question because it's not who the role model is, it's what did you admire about them, okay? So I just asked you what did you admire about them and you said the willingness to look below or around or above, my question below,

but look outside the story that society imposes on us and be willing to be a bit rebellious and follow the story that you want to tell. That of course echoes exactly the story that you shared earlier about the nonlinear life that you followed. And so what are we talking about here? We're talking about you're in a work quake. 80 million what are we talking about here? We're talking about you're in a workquake. 80 million Americans are in a workquake right now. You or someone you know or someone you lived with or someone that you love is in a crisis about work right now. 70% of Americans are unhappy with what they're doing. Three quarters of Americans are saying they will look for a new job in the next year. This is research that came out

within the last week, okay? A million Americans quit a job every week. That's 50 million people a year. That's a third of the workforce. Two-thirds of the workforce is now battling with their employer about working remotely or working from home. So we are at a moment that's unprecedented when everybody is saying, I want to write my own story. And so what I'm offering here is a set of questions to ask. I got 21 of these, but the first we went through here is what ghosts are we carrying around from our parents? And the second is, if you want to know what you should be doing right now, ask yourself what your role models were doing when you were younger, because the values that you admired them, in effect, that's the first choice you made about work. These are the first people that you chose to associate yourself with as opposed to your parents whom you had to associate yourself with.

So all of these questions are designed to get at the story that you have been telling all along. Now you know why I can't tell you what to do. I can help you figure out if we just jump to another one of the questions. So I ask people in these conversations, what I'm doing is I'm picking a workquake we just jump to another one of the questions. So I ask people in these conversations, what I'm doing is I'm picking a workquake, a super workquake, I call it one of the biggest to find it. In your case, it would have been maybe when you were younger, but more likely I would have, if I was collecting your life story right now, I would have taken the moment that you got off the career track, right? And I would dig down into that. And one of the

questions that I would ask you is, did you get advice from someone at that time? In fact, I can ask you that way. Did you get advice from someone? And if so, who was it and what did they say? I'm sure I did get advice. I'm a memory challenged person. I'm sure I got advice from a variety of people. And if I had to sum it up, I think that probably what I pulled out of that at the very least was, and this was my transition from my sort of software career into doing the podcast full time. Yep. And it was, if you don't try this, you'll always wonder. Yes. And I think I'd been getting advice along the way for years about it.

And, you know, I think another piece of advice that felt really relevant to me was there's a way to do this without taking an exorbitant amount of risk. Right. to do this without taking an exorbitant amount of risk, right? And that was basically my creating the podcast over years while I had another job was in order to get to a point where I didn't find myself into the binary of do what you love or go broke, right? And so there was actually a different way to get there. One of the people I know that helped me was a guy named Jonathan Fields from Good Life Project. I'm actually taping an interview with Jonathan coming up and I will share that with him.

And this echoes exactly what I heard over and over again, Eric. Okay. And that, first of all, getting advice from someone is valuable. There's a whole chapter in Life is in the Transitions, as you may remember, that's one of the tools is share your story with others because you can get advice. But when I dug down into what was the advice and what people found most helpful, the vast majority of people, I just looked for the number. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but it's like three quarters of people said that the best advice that they got reconfirmed advice they were already giving to themselves. Funny. Yeah. Okay. So what we want from these people is not a kick in the butt or a slap in the face, okay, it's a pat on the back. And this is the theme that comes up over and over again. Trust yourself. Listen to what your inner voice is telling you.

The inner voice knows because the inner voice is much less shaped by all of these external pressures, okay? Those other people who are feeding the other wolves, okay, all around us. It's accessing that inner voice. Now, there are practical things, and my book has a whole chapter on how, and one of them is, you know, things that came up over and over again are give yourself a buffer time, okay, I'll try this for 18 months, and if it doesn't work, right, or maybe you keep your main job for salary and benefits, and you start this side job or hope job in the evenings or the weekends to get it going. Or then maybe, in your case, you leave the main job for the side job or the hope job, and then it's going to work, but it's going to take a while. And so maybe the bulk of your

time now goes to the meaning job, okay, which is the podcast, but it's not fully paying the bills yet. So you have to do take a few side jobs, you know, to pay for it here. Now you begin to see the value in the multiple jobs is that you can allot meaning to this and money to that and time to this and the hours of the day. Now that it doesn't matter that you're working, you know, what do people do all day? It doesn't matter that you're, you know, doing one job from nine to five and then going home and having personal time. That's just not the frame that's helpful today because it doesn't characterize all the choices that we have the opportunity to make today. I think that is so spot on and so absolutely true in my experience because I had this career in the software business that started out being very meaningful to me because I was

just actually picking myself up from nowhere. Yeah. You were paying your bills. You were responsible. You were contributing to society. You're now getting meaning that, you know, you're not a loser. You're not an addict, right? You're not a disappointment. You know, you're getting external validation. Like all these things have great value. That's the meaning that you needed at that time. Precisely. And then as that went on, it wasn't that I didn't like that work because I always liked it. I always found it interesting. I always found it challenging. I always found the people interesting. I found it intellectually demanding,

but it began to have less and less meaning. And so at one juncture, I decided I was going to start a solar energy company to get more meaning. And I kept the consulting work and I worked on the solar energy thing and solar energy company failed after about five years. And then I started up the podcast. But the thing I think about all that, that I'm saying is that at the time, you know, these two instances are 10 and 15 years ago, right? There was not a lot of discussion about what you're saying, the different ways to patch it together. I kept feeling like I was presented with these binaries. Either work your full-time job and give yourself to it and abandon these silly dreams, or you got to quit and go for it, man.

You got to like be all in. Yeah, that's a false choice. Right? And it was a false choice. But for a long time, that was the false choice that was at least in the entrepreneurial narrative I was seeing, you know, and I think that's changed so much, but I kind of had to figure that out on my own. And I love what you're saying is that that's becoming more and more the norm these days is that people are starting to understand I can cobble these various different things together into sort of my own mosaic of meaning.

I appreciate this. You know, this is exactly what emerged from these conversations, Eric. Person after person had a similar story. And oddly, what they all have in common is that at one point or another, somebody makes a decision that disappoints somebody else. It disappoints a colleague. It disappoints a boss. It disappoints a spouse.

It disappoints a child. It disappoints a parent. You know, a spouse. It disappoints a child. It disappoints a parent. And it's funny because for about five minutes, this book is now called The Search, as you have been kind to say. But at one point, I was thinking about calling it How Not to Have a Career because, in fact, the key skill today is not how to have a career. It's how not to have a career and give yourself permission. You said for a while you had a career. Well, what you mean by that is for a period of time, maybe it was 15, 20 years, you did something that was a conventional career path, but then eventually it changed. And of course, initially you also didn't have that. That's what goes on.

So it's why my book ends. I mean, it's interesting. I just opened it up to look at this again as we're talking, because this is one of the first interviews I've done. I read the audio last week and I was talking to a woman named Leah Smart, actually, who works at LinkedIn. And she grew up in a middle-class-backed family in California and ended up in a conventional career at LinkedIn. But she was frustrated. She left for a startup, she came back, and then she made an internal switch. Like in some of these workquakes,

the change may not be leaving your job, it may be staying, you know, in the company, but doing something different. And she said to me, I'm one of the one and onlys. And I realized everybody that I was talking to and everybody I know is a one and only. And that's the thing. We need a way of talking about work that doesn't generalize it, but individualizes it and empowers us to believe that we can tell an individual story that's different, that's similar to other stories for a time or always, but different at other times and other alwayses, and that we're all one and only. And that at one time or another, we're going to make a choice that some people think is the wrong choice because it doesn't adhere to the existing structure, but it's still the right choice for us.

And I think I wrote a line in my book, and that's what I was going to look for. And I'm not sure I can find it in the quick moment that we have, but basically every search for meaningful work seems to contain at least one uncustomary twist. The tragedy in these stories is that our unconventional decisions often cause pain to someone in our lives, a loved one, a colleague, a boss. The glory in these stories is that our unconventional decisions often cause pain to someone in our lives, a loved one, a colleague, a boss. The glory in these stories is that our unnormal choices are becoming so common that they're fast becoming the norm. That's what it is. The abnorm is now the norm. And that's the great moment that we're in. So the question to ask yourself is not, am I adhering to

what other people want? It's, am I adhering to what other people want? It's, am I adhering to what I want? And the only way to do that is to identify what you want. And that, I think, is what's missing in this conversation, is a set of tools, and in this case, a set of questions to ask yourself so that you can figure out who is it that you are, what's the story that you want to be telling, so you can, right now, today, start going and telling it? I've started sending a couple of text messages after each podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free and

listeners have told me that these texts really help to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important. When you get a text from me during your day-to-day life, it's one more thing that helps you further bridge that gap between what you know and what you do. Positive messages when you need them. From me to you. So if you'd like to hear from me a few times a week via text, go to OneYouFeed.net slash text and sign up for free. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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I want to go a little deeper on this idea of workquake, because you said that the average of us will have, what, 20, 24? Well, the average person will have 20 workquakes in the course of their lives. That's every 2.85 years. But as we discussed, the numbers are higher among women and younger workers and diverse workers. So like a young female person of color in her 20s, she on average will have 25. So the number is growing over time, okay? And I think that it's one of the things I learned

in working on transitions is that this number is growing. It means younger people are actually more comfortable with leaving and making transitions. And there's often tension. We've talked a few times in this conversation about being parents of adulting children. And there's often tension between those of us 50 plus and those of us 50 minus. Like the 50 plus among us are saying, wait a minute, wait, wait, like you're having a baby without getting married? Like you're leaving one job

without knowing what you're going to do. You're moving to a new place and you have no idea what you're going to do when you're going to get there. Like that's a comfortable thing for people, you know, under 35. And it often makes their parents really uncomfortable. Yeah. I was going to say the other thing that makes for more work quakes, you know, if you're younger, if you're diverse, drug addicts have more. Thank you for bringing your personal experience to the table. I will say this, by the way, just Eric, I've done 400 life stories in six years. A quarter of them involve addiction. Either the person is addicted or a parent was addicted or a partner or a child. Like this is something that is under discussed. So bravo to you for being open

about it and normalizing that this is something that the shame associated with it is make something that's difficult even harder. By the way, that is the definition of a ghost job, which is a shame, a difficulty that you bear quietly without sharing it with others. It haunts you and you don't tell other people about it. That's the definition of a ghost job. So I want to go deeper into ghost jobs, but I want to ask another question about workquakes. So we've talked about that they're happening more frequently. We've talked about who they happen to more frequently. What specifically is a workquake?

So obviously, maybe changing jobs. Is that a workquake? Let me take a step back. Yeah. Why this term workquake, which is a term that they use here. And to answer that, we've got to go half a step back to when I started this project, the Life Story Project of gathering these stories, I kept encountering these moments of disruption in our lives. And the problem that I had with the way they're most often talked about, right, crisis, you know, challenge, you know, even curveball,

all of the terms used for these moments of inflection or change in our lives were negative. But that doesn't actually fully capture what it's like to go through one of these changes. We've been talking off and on here that I'm the parent of identical twin daughters. As we speak, they just turned 18. I'm going to be an empty nester. That's a lifequake. And that may also be a workquake, right? When they were born, trust me, it was joyful. It was happy, but it was a lifequake, right? Everything got turned upside down. So I ended up with this term lifequake specifically because it's value neutral.

It can encompass voluntary and involuntary changes, a personal and collective. So a personal lifequake would be an illness. You lose a job. You have a car accident. Your house burns down. But a collective lifequake, it would be a natural disaster or a recession or a war. And it's interesting. In that book, you may recall that the voluntary-involuntary was almost a 50-50 split.

But the personal collective, it was many more personal, but that predated the pandemic, which was the first collective involuntary life quake that we've had in 100 years, okay? So, I was originally like upset with this designation, but it turned out, I think, to be quite helpful when we went through the pandemic. Okay, so I bring that up because when I used the term work quake, I was interested in the same thing, is that some are involuntary and for lack of a better word to be reductive, unhappy. Like your startup fails, right? Or you've been laid off, okay? Or you lose your legs in a biking accident and you can't do your job at the Costco warehouse, like someone that I talked to. So some of them are involuntary, negative, in air quotes, or unhappy. But some of them are not. Some of them are involuntary, you know, negative, in air quotes, or unhappy.

But some of them are not. Some of them are voluntary. Like you decide to go back and get a second degree, right? Or you get married and your spouse, you know, has a job in a different place, right? Or, you know, you want to start something new. Or you say, I no longer want to value money above everything. I want to give back. You know, you have to spend less time at work because you need to care for an aging parent. So the essence of the term workquake is that it's value neutral.

And the essence of it at its core is that it's a moment of change in your work. Okay. And so it's a moment of change, redirection, reevaluation. And as I said, you know, to kind of deepen the point that we were making when we first started talking about this, the headline here is that most of them begin outside of work. If you have a whole shelf of books here to my right on like the history of work, and in 98% of them, it talks about work for work's sake entirely through economic terms, right? So this construct that I use over and over again in the search is that what is work, okay? If you look up in the dictionary, it says work is, you know, labor performed for money. We've already debunked that because starting a podcast, selling pickles at the farmer's market, like this is not writing three novels. I met someone

recently who was on his third novel. He hasn't made a dime. It's work, but he ain't doing it for money. So we've already discussed broadening that. But the way to think about work is that work is a formula. Work equals numbers plus words, okay? And we spend two-thirds of our time talking about the numbers, okay? That's hours, that's salary, that's benefits, that's profits, that's loss, that's efficiency. You know, that's what the economists do. But when I ask people, what's the first word that comes to your mind? I'll ask people this again. What's the first word that comes to your mind when I say work? A third of the answers are

what you do, right? Manager, architect, carpenter, union, school for a school teacher. Two-thirds of the words that people do are what they think about their work. Happiness, meaning, purpose, service, They think about their work, happiness, meaning, purpose, service, you know, family, whatever it might be. So we need less math and more literature when it comes to talking about work. And so I think that's the thing about these work weeks is for a lot of them, for the majority of them, they are moments of reorientation that allow us to say there's a change in my story. And, you know, it's like the old line in The Breakup. It's not you, it's me. That's what it is for most people. It's not the job that they're unhappy with.

It's that they're themselves. What they wanted out of the work is what's changing. Earlier, you were discussing the number of people who want a new job, who are going to get a new job, the number of people who are quitting it, huge numbers. I don't remember the exact statistics, but they're staggering. 70% of people unhappy, three quarters of people are looking for a new job. A million people a week quit a job. So 70% of the people that are unhappy.

Yes. Based on what you just said would be that a lot of that unhappiness might be coming from their personal life, making what they do no longer relevant. Would you say that's a lot of it? Because a lot of it is people have jobs that kind of suck, right? I mean, or is that an old way of thinking about it? Well, I think a lot of people do have jobs that they suck. The question is, how did you end up in a job that sucks? And how do you get a job that doesn't suck? I mean, that's sort of, you know, the essence of what we're talking about here in a lot of ways. Here's how I think about it. I think about it is a lot of the people are unhappy with the job they're doing and the career that they have,

and they think the problem is them. But the problem actually is the idea of the job and the idea of the career, right? My frame for this is that we are haunted by the unfed wolf, right? That we think that that wolf is not threatening because we're not feeding it, but we're forgetting the fact that lots of other people around us are feeding that wolf, okay? So that's the parable way. To go into the language that I live under now, we have linear expectations and nonlinear lives. So we are constantly comparing ourselves to a standard that no longer exists because we inherited those standards, because we were force-fed those standards, because we chose those standards at a different time in our life. Those standards were written essentially for a different era of work when the only people

working were basically straight white men. And as the workforce has become more diverse, we have diversified the standards of success. So we are using only one metric of achievement, okay, which is money or salary or status or whatever. And the truth is we need to broaden those metrics of achievement and we need to have multiple kinds of heroes. My book opens, the search opens, by looking, analyzing all the stories told in the top five success books of the last century. That's How to Win Friends and Influence People, right? 20 million copies, right? What Colors Your Parachute, a bestseller for 50 years. Okay?

That's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The stories in those books are 93% straight white men, only 7% women, and the minority number is 0.009%. We've been telling one type of story with one type of hero and only one metric of achievement. And those people may still exist. That's you. Hallelujah. But for many more people, they want a different kind of story with a different metric of achievement for different times in their lives and different work that gives them the meaning they want, no matter how often they change that meaning. Yeah, that's great. I love Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And it is extraordinarily a straight white man's perspective. Although I always think it's not really a business book so much as it's a, anyway, we don't need to go down that rabbit hole because we've got a lot to cover in a few more minutes here. Can people get stuck in a work quake? And what I mean by that is I'm dissatisfied with work. We all know people

who have been dissatisfied. They have said they hate their job for five years, a decade. You know, so it sounds like they're in a work quake, but that work quake is not resolving. Here's where the two books, they're twins. Maybe because I'm a parent of multiples, I think in terms of twins, right? The idea of life is in the transitions, they involve three phases, right? You'll remember that from our last conversation, right? The long goodbye, where you're saying goodbye to the old expectations and the old life, and that involves often mourning and sadness. And then there's the new beginning, the turn toward renewal, which many of these include. But in between is the messy middle, you know,

and the average length of a lifequake is five years. That means the messy middle is often very long. And so, yes, it definitely involves two steps forward and one step back. And the same applies, you know, in many cases to some workquakes, right? Which is that they can become prolonged. I mean, the essence of my life's work at this point, we have been doing this for six years now, is we spend half of our lives in a life transition. And as we've just said, we spend two-thirds of our lives in a workquake. So my goal is to give people the tools to navigate them more effectively. Because you're going to go through them, you're going to have good days and bad days, you're going to feel stuck because you're going to go through them. You're going to have good days and bad days. You're going to feel stuck

and you're going to feel frustrated. But part of it is to make you feel better. Like maybe you are voluntarily having a main job that may not bring you as much meaning because you have two kids going to college or because you want to buy a new home, but because your spouse needs

to go back to graduate school and get a degree, right? Or because you're just in a period and you don't want to leave this job in a lurch. The good news there is even if you have to make the choice that makes you less happy now, you don't have to make it forever. You can feel better to know that everything is a phase and you're going to have another chance two and a half years from now to change that. And that will make you feel a lot better. Maybe if you do that, maybe you take a side job or maybe you start that podcast at night or you start making jewelry to sell on Etsy, right? Or maybe now is the time that you want to

start your screenplay. Do this other work that will bring you meaning. And by the way, by every metric, if it's different from your main job, it will actually make you better at your main job because you won't resent it as much. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point about that is that as I was trying to get out of my main job, I found it really important to learn to love my main job more. It was sort of this ironic sort of thing where I actually felt like, you know what, I've got to invest in this even though I plan to leave because if I don't, I resent it. And that resentment drags me down, which gives me less energy for the rest of my life. Bingo. And a lot of it is identifying what is the value in it? How is it contributing to your 360 degrees of meaning that you're trying to take? And here it's clearly serving a purpose, okay? It's providing stability.

It got you out of a bigger work quake early in your life, right? It's giving you the ability to sock some money away so that when you do step away, you don't have to be living hand to mouth. So understanding that it's serving a purpose and that it's not forever can actually reduce your resentment toward it. And then it just is a matter of when is your when, right? So then you get, that's another one of my six questions, right? The when is your when is then all about, okay, when is the right time to jump and when is the right time to stay? Near the end of the book, you've got another line. You say, if there's a universal message in these stories, it's that there is no universal story anymore. With no single job that will make you happy, you are free to accept whatever job you want. With no single path that will lead to

your dreams, you're free to follow whatever dream you wish. There's a couple more lines in there. And then you say, the lesson of the work story project is there is power in the unright choice. And I love that because I think there's two ways we could take that to mean. One, we could say, it's okay to make a choice that isn't right by somebody else's standards. It's okay to make a mistake. And I think this is what you're aiming at is there isn't a right choice. There are right choices because all of a sudden, once the path is gone, the path, it becomes paths. side. I'm going to do my best digging to kind of find out, you know, what feels right and what feels relevant. And there isn't like only one answer. Your kids are going off to school. I used to talk with my son about this. I was like, you know, we can't look for the right school because that doesn't exist, right? There's just a variety of schools that would be a good fit for you that

are all going to have different trade-offs and pros and cons. We just want to make the best decision that we can knowing that it's reversible. It's changeable, right? You may reverse it or you may move in a different direction, right? But I think that, you know, it's funny because we're having this conversation in this moment of transition, you know, that we've all been in for months now in the British monarchy, right? And so what was the old line?

You know, the king is dead, long live the king. And I think I bring that up because, you know, I'm not sure if this line survived in the search, but it's a line that informs it, which is, you know, the American dream is dead, long live the American dreams. Right? There is not one story to tell. There are unlimited number of stories to tell. And the challenge, I think, you know, having now been in this space, I've been doing this for six years, collecting these stories. This is my second book, you know, in this space, I've been doing this for six years, collecting these stories. This is my second book in this general space. The first one, Life is in the Transitions, is generally about all of these lifequakes,

and this is specifically about work. And the sort of essence of what I've learned is that there's a blessing that we can write whatever story we want to write, but it's also a curse, right? Because we get writer's block trying to write the story of our lives. But if there's one thing I learned is that you want to make sure you're the hero of your own story. And there's only one way, you know, in the fairy tales, you got to get through the woods, you know, you got to encounter the wolf, right? You got to have the scary music, you know, in the clouds and that moment. And we would like to banish the hero, but you can't banish the hero. You can't

banish the wolf. You can't banish because if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero, but you can't banish the hero. You can't banish the wolf. You can't banish because if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. And it is essential that we figure out who the hero is. What is the superpower of the hero? What is it that makes your story special? That is the challenge. But there's a reason that we tell fairy tales at night because they help turn our nightmares into dreams.

And so my message to you and to anybody listening to us is you're not alone. Tens of millions of us are feeling stuck and confused and in pain and unsure. Okay. Three quarters of us, we talked about this earlier, want to find a new work. If you come on this journey with me, if you meet these people, I think of this book as the largest collection of informational interviews ever did. I think of this book as the largest collection of informational interviews ever did. You know, it's going to help you understand the options before you and ultimately understand the choices that you want to make. You can get the work you want. You can find the happiness you crave. You can find the meaning you deserve. Well, I think we have come to the end of our time while

I have about 15 more questions, but I guess that's a sign of a good book, or at least I usually think it's a sign of a good book when I'm like, there's too much here to cover, and you're always such a pleasure to talk to, Bruce. So thank you so much. Again, the book is called The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World. We'll have links to you, the book, all that stuff in our show notes, and such a pleasure to see you again. My pleasure, Eric. What a delightful conversation, and we'll get through this, everyone. You'll find what you're looking for. I look forward to our next conversation. Thank you very much. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio

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