Merci tout le monde d'avoir été ici. Je suis désolé pour le contraste sur le slide. J'espère que tout le monde peut voir bien. Vous pensez que c'est évidemment un truc pour la question, parce que nous savons que le Drupal peut faire tout. Donc la session est plus sur le problème, pour parfois essayer de faire quelque chose que le Drupal n'est pas vraiment capable de faire, ou comment on peut essayer de bander le Drupal pour ce qu'on veut faire. Je suis Simon George, j'ai été dans le Drupal depuis 15, 16 ans, non. Je suis un développeur du Drupal, et j'ai travaillé pour Mackina Corpus. Si vous savez le nom, c'est parce que nous sponsorons ces belles éco-caps pour le Drupal Con. Mackina Corpus est une compagnie française. Nous faisons exclusivement un projet d'open source, et nous utilisons 3 softwares, donc le Drupal est principalement pour CMS, mais nous faisons aussi Python, et le Django, et nous faisons beaucoup d'open source web mapping. Ce que j'aimerais savoir, c'est combien de gens dans la salle sont développeurs ou project managers qui ont déjà utilisé le Drupal pour créer un site web. Ok, donc beaucoup de gens dans la salle. Combien de gens dans la salle sont plus de clients, donc les gens planent d'utiliser le Drupal pour notre prochaine site web? Ok, donc 1 personne, merci. Donc, si vous êtes un développeur d'Drupal et qu'est-ce qu'il y a d'autres sessions sur Layout Builder, c'est possible que vous n'aurez rien à apprendre dans cette session. Donc, si vous pensez, ou si vous hésitez entre cette session ou d'autres sessions, je vous encourage d'aller d'autre côté parce que c'est possible que, à la fin de la conversation, vous aurez rien à apprendre. Ok, donc je suis content d'avoir tous les gens dans la salle. Parfait. Donc, le premier des titres est de CMS à Page Builder. Donc, j'aimerais commencer par essayer de définir comment j'ai vu un CMS ou j'ai vu un Page Builder et pourquoi je pense qu'il y a une différence. Et donc, à mon avis, un CMS est quelque chose où vous faites quelque chose et vous utilisez le même contenu partout sur le site web. Donc, c'est principalement construit sur un modèle de contenu et comment vous pouvez l'utiliser partout, alors que, évidemment, Drupal est un bon CMS de ce point de vue. Et ce que je pense ou ce que je vois dans un Page Builder c'est quelque chose où vous customisez chaque bout de contenu et où vous essayez d'avoir plus d'approche de design où vous pensez de votre page pas dans le contexte de tout le site ou du modèle de contenu mais vous essayez de designer chaque page le meilleur. Donc, plus d'approche ou quelque chose comme ça. Et dans ma main, à moins de maintenant, Drupal ne peut pas être le meilleur outil pour ça. Vous pouvez voir dans le keynote qu'on essaye de travailler sur ça et nous espérons que dans le futur Drupal peut être meilleur. Mais maintenant, je dirais que c'est totalement possible qu'il y ait des plus belles outils pour créer des pages ou pour essayer de construire des pages avec un approche de design. Donc, je vais commencer de vous donner un petit peu de contexte. Je currently work for a fairly well known airplane manufacturer. On travaille on a web factory so lots of websites et the thing is that we are migrating from Adobe Experience Manager where the content editor in Airbus were used to create pages and to add some components in the pages and to override almost anything. So, with each page they were designing they could override the title, override the picture and so they they have no reflex in thinking as a content model because every piece of content when they reuse it they can override everything. So, we needed to migrate that in Drupal and the the first team that built the website was not from a Drupal background so they have no idea how we can how we could use Drupal the best et basically they were just appressing the website with the idea that Drupal is just another tool and we will just reproduce what we know but in Drupal and so when I when I started to create the session I had in mind something where I would try to illustrate the story and try to give you some advice for your next project so as you are all developers and are used to work with Drupal it's totally possible d'avoir des advices you know them already but I hope if I can change some of your minds it will all be worth it so the first thing I would like to do is say that you need to hire Drupal specialist because Drupal is a product and I work with a lot of good PHP developers that were not Drupal specialist and it's not something you can learn in one month or something like that you need to have work with Drupal work with the community modules learn how to best utilize what Drupal can do and so I guess you all think that since you all are using Drupal to develop but I feel it's really important to communicate to a client that Drupal is not a generic PHP product and you need to work with people that know Drupal and I think another thing that even in big project is sometimes a little bit forgotten is you need to train your clients so obviously that was not done on that project because I came to the project later but what I tried to do on a very big project so I mean this project has been ongoing for 3 years now is to try to train the clients so that they know Drupal and it's easier than to discuss about Drupal issues because they understand a bit how it works how the content type works what's the view what's the taxonomy and I feel then our discussion are better because at least the client has at least a vague idea of why we are doing that or why we are proposing some solution better than others so and I feel even today we are approaching project by thinking we are the experts and we will build the website even if the client doesn't really need to know what Drupal do and I think it's a mistake you need to train your clients so that they understand a little bit better about Drupal so obviously when the project started we just said yes to everything the business wanted so we try to recreate or they try to recreate how the website worked and so basically they try to create a page builder when you were reusing content so when you were using entity reference or things like that you always had the possibility to override the title override the picture override the description override every field and so there also it's built upon some kind of content model when you look at the database basically there are data that is copied everywhere with every content having at least several occurrences with different title different picture all depending on where it is included in the website so basically the when we when we got the website two years ago there were two content types one I would say usual Drupal content type which was the news so you had very structure content type and something that we are all used to work with and then there was a flexible page so basically a layout builder where you could put every block every component on the website and you could build whatever page you were dreaming of and the client was quite happy with that at first so because they were able to create every pages they wanted but the thing is that as we are on a web factory with a lot of website a lot of different clients and a lot of different needs something happened after a few years and so the message here is as a developer you need to say no to your clients sometimes because they don't have sometimes they have good idea about what they want for their business but they don't know like you do about the web quality or what is expected of a website so you're the the guardian of the web quality you're the guardian you're the user experience for your visitors and you need to impress the client that it's really important to think of a website as a a complete entity you are not designing only pages you are designing pages inside a full website otherwise after 2 years it became a complete anarchy where every page of the website was different and it was almost impossible for every user who was coming to the website to understand what was going on there were a lot of similar components that were reused in different context and so when you were browsing the website you didn't really know what the page was about how it was linked between different sections of the website and also the client was happy about how they were bringing the website basically the visitor were not staying on the website they were not browsing the website and they didn't know how to or base to to use the feature of the website so the website was good for the editor but was not working as a way to to interest visitors as a way to get the client for example to sign for the newsletter or to apply for a job at Airbus or thing like that so basic features that they had in mind were just not working at the time a decision was made and the teams that were managing the project changed completely and they decided to rework everything and they went from a company that were not a Drupal specialist to hire specialist for each part of the website so they hired a Drupal specialist for the backend and everything related to Drupal they hired a consultant for the UX as well so a dedicated company that was doing the UX they hired a good front-end developer which was something that was missing at the start of the project and so it was not a small decision because that meant as a project manager they needed to co-organise a lot of teams a lot of people they needed to ensure that they work well together which is something that is sometimes hard to do when different companies are involved that may eventually be competitors and for this project it was a little bit of a success story and it's something that we are all proud today that even as competitor we managed to work together very well to change the way the website was built so we started the new version of the project so that was 2 years ago after the website has been online for 2 years and we started with a UX audit both for back office and front office the UX consultant was doing the audit for the front office and as a Drupal Dev I was doing I've been doing the audit for the back office so basically what I've been doing is ask content editor to create some content while I was seeing how they use the browser and trying with my Drupal background to think how we could do better and how we could transform their content editing experience by trying to just adapt a little bit the back office we didn't want to rebuild the whole back office because we decided from the start that we would completely rebuild the front office and that was enough of a big project so we tried to just at least make their experience better without investing too much money into the back office and another lesson here is as we knew that the front office redesign would take some time when I said some time I mean something like 2 years, 3 years you need to still deliver value to your customer and so immediately after we came on to the redesign we started to make improvement to the back office so the web editor were seeing that we were doing a good thing to build trust inside our client and so they could in return trust us to do a good redesign and so accept to wait a bit for what would be the new Airbus front office I feel Drupal is a really good tool to deliver value early I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule how many in a room ok, so a few so basically this principle is that 80% of the value of the project will take something like 20% of the time the rest of the time will be dedicated to the last 20% and Drupal is a really good tool to build the 80% really fast we have a lot of modules like views that allows you to start really some screen really fast and you can then iterate on the screen and add filter little by little or adjust every bit of content for the client needs but you will be able to produce value really fast and it's something that I feel that way that Drupal is especially adapted to agile project where you need to bring value as fast as possible so what did we do for the quick wins in the back office the first thing we did was change the administration team so we went from Clairo which is already good to Jean just to bring some kind of modern back office content editor so it's really fast to do you just need to enable a team and then we started to do a little improvement to the back office as I talked a bit earlier about the flexible page which was so flexible that every component had tons of options which were really hard for the content editor to grasp and so what we did was the field group module to start organizing and prioritizing some fields on the blocks so that the content editor could see the most important fields to fill and then we tried to hide all the little options only for advanced contributor or some people that were maybe more familiar with Drupal so we tried to give them a back office where creating content was fast then tuning and editing the content took a little bit more of time but at least the most of the content editor would do their job a lot faster than before something that is not not really used on Drupal project I feel is the help text that you can fill on the back office form so for those that do not know below each field you can add an help text and on a lot of projects these help text are just never used and in the context that we were meaning having a lot of different websites a lot of different people working on the website sometimes subcontractor filling the content having help text to clarify what image format we wanted or how the text would be used in the front end clearly helped the web editor to produce their content so that it better switch their needs so it's a small feature that is directly built into Drupal core and I feel it's not enough used nowadays on big project you should really think about how you approach your back office and you should always dedicate time to ensure that you make a better back office for your content editors and last thing we did was to use some different widgets for example for the entity reference or for the taxonomy selections there are lots of dynamic widgets on the community so a jacks loading on the taxonomy javascript trees if you have a lot of terms and that in turn contributed to make really the back office better when people were waiting for the new redesign so about the redesign I've been done by the UX consultants and they tried to focus not only on recreating the components that were used on the website with a better design but what they proposed at the time was having different templates so instead of using a big flexible page that could accommodate every content they proposed to have dedicated templates for example for an event content type a service content type things like that where instead of using every component available on the website you could only choose 5 or 6 of these components but in return that would mean that every page of this content type would be similar to the other and also it appears that it limits a bit the possibilities of the web editors infini the website is a lot better because every page content type is similar and so the visitor really better understand how the website is about or how to use the content and the pages and I feel it's a factor that is the most beneficial for the website as a whole because it ensure web quality and less cognitive burden for the visitor in return as you have a lot less components on the website each content type it's easier for the web editor to choose the one that will do the most impact comparing to what they need so basically here what I'm saying is maybe sometimes you need to limit the option of your content editor just to ensure better quality for your website so here to talk a little bit about page building I admit I was not I didn't think there would be so many dev in these sessions that's why the solution is not that technical but feel free to ask a question at the end and I'll be happy to answer what I can say is when the website started only paragraph and layout builder were considered because at the time the Gutenberg initiative was not I would say mature enough it was mainly a decision between using paragraph which was maybe the historic solution or at least something that was coming from Drupal 7 while layout builder was something more recent maybe with less of an ecosystem at the time but as it was in core we choose to go with layout builder at the time just because I feel that most of the time better to use something that is built into core because that ensures the community will be able to standardize into something I don't think going with paragraph would have been an error but it was just a choice at the time to use layout builder again what I would encourage you is to rely on the community so I feel if you are doing your website using almost only Drupal core and doing everything by hand you miss a lot of what the community has to offer because if you have followed the session yesterday, a lot of community is currently standardizing on layout builder and creating a lot of additional community modules that can really enhance the solution and so really I think what makes Drupal great is to have such a big community that is always creating new features and new modules that you can add to your website that's what we did in the redesign so basically we went from only using layout builder to use layout builder with a lot of additional modules so I won't list them entirely here but mainly layout builder restriction, layout builder lock but basically if you want to see what we did or to reproduce what we did there is a core issue currently regarding the layout builder improvement and everything that we did is in the issues that are on this issue so basically I was quite happy to see or happy, I don't know if it's the right word but at least it showed me that the whole community has more or less the same needs that we had in Airbus and the whole community is trying to address so the current UX issues on layout builder but the restriction as well that can be an issue for content editor because sometimes you need to limit their creativity I don't know if it's a specificity of our team but if we give them options they will use them to the fullest of their potential and try to really destroy the website so limiting their creativity was in fact the way to ensure the quality of the website in the end so I really encourage you to see this issue because it makes me really happy for the future of what layout builder will bring to the community Relying upon the community is for me not enough and I think what another thing that made Drupal great is that a lot of people in the community are actually contributing and so I would encourage you as well on your project to not only use the module but be part of the community you are obviously since you are here today it's a great issue when you find bugs sometimes a thing that is mainly underestimated is that project manager can contribute a lot to Drupal because module maintainer don't have much time and so just closing issue by saying this is a duplicate of this one or this one is more major than this one or things like that can really help module maintainer and so module just triaging some of the issue makes the developer able to release something, a new version early or things like that so everybody can contribute something to the community so I would really encourage you to do that I will try not to evangelize too much but basically as the community and especially when using Drupal you can go faster and further use that but the session was about can Drupal do patch builder as well as CMS and I feel that yes we can there are today lots of modules to do that but the thing is I really don't think you should it's not the main function of Drupal Drupal is a CMS before everything else so you can do patch builder but thinking of Drupal as a patch builder and trying to create every page of your website with a patch builder is to me currently still much of a burden you will need to do a lot of custom code you will need to adjust a lot of things and it may not create in the end the developer experience you want in your team so yes it's possible but it's not easy it may be in the future but right now it's still not ready to do that and I hope you have a lot of questions I don't see any Q&A on the live but if you have any question there is a mic in the middle of the room that you can take it can be more dev related than what I've talked about if you have a really precise question about how we build a solution I will do my best to answer it I don't have any question I think the food will be ready soon so yeah it should be on hello ok so how many editors because we often like when we use the layout builder and go from the sign to finish website one of the quest like there's a tendency to always add extra options and no so the first version of the website had something like 20 components but even on these 20 components I feel something like 5 of them almost were the same just with a different frontend rendering so they were only basically teaser to another content but with a different layout or something like that and what we tried to do on the redesign was create only one component when we wanted to have a specific goal in mind so for example advertise another page or something like that we created only one component but by building upon the UI patterns module we tried to create variants so frontend variants of the same components so we had a lot less functional components but with different frontend rendering that allows almost the same flexibility but with a very simpler data model and with a very simple contribution so basically we tried to keep the feature but really have a cleaner UI and better content editing 20 components to nowadays we are more something like between 10 and 12 yeah but only so not functional options but only design options before we had as well functional options or things like that so but you know the clients we will probably have something like 20 components in a year or so the website will never be done but yeah yes so you said that you used to have a different CMS before and they want to Drupal but are they using Drupal like with structured content or is it only page building that they do so currently the structure content is mainly for the news or press release or something really editorial almost every content that is not a fully editorial content is a page building I'm not really happy about that and for each new content we try to ensure or we try to push for a more structured approach for example we recently build the event content type and we try to push for a lot of structured approach but on almost every piece of content there is at least a flexible part so the beginning of the content type there is structured content and there is a little layout builder at the end to accommodate for more options for the page right and you said that Drupal shouldn't be used this way but that's what many people want yeah how do you feel about that I mean it's not that Drupal shouldn't be used this way but when you use Drupal this way you lose the structured part and you lose the reusability you can reuse blocks or sections inside the layout builder but you lose the entity reference, you lose the views you lose what's in my mind makes Drupal more powerful or easier to use than some other product and sometimes when I see people using only the layout builder part I'm wondering if they shouldn't have choose another product to do that so I'm wondering in that case for the version of the website I'm really wondering why they chose Drupal yeah that was my other question ok so I know why they chose Drupal so and I feel it's because Aquaya has a really great commercial so for big client I think it's the main reason but I don't think the client realized the trade off or why they were choosing Drupal from other questions bon appétit


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


So guys Today, I actually forgot my vlogging camera. I left in my boat bag, but start off where I practice right now I'm gonna just do some fishing today. Hopefully show some tips as well and just do some cool stuff You know, I didn't vlog before this I was just like I'm gonna come out here, but I apologize I know I'm filming with this crappy gopher quality right now. I said like blogging Vlogging wise, but let's see what I got tied on. So guys I have one of these big three-quarter rail traps Got right regular standard up rabble trap. Those are up fifth and sexy Shad KVD ones Got a football jig green pumpkin with some brown in it and also a weightless jumbug worm All right guys, so I'm gonna start off with a jig right now Star there's a jig. I got a football head of jigs half ounce hanging my meat. I Am hanging my meat. You see it. It's about to go down ball Do it. Yeah wobble wobble here. I'm getting out of here. I'll send you a picture in a minute. Oh, I came off God that fish guys literally all I thought did I knew he was tiny He's probably about eight to ten inches No, that's not that it's not as big as I thought he ate the big the big rattle trap Here guys first fish I'm not moving in. I'll go there you guys first fish. Look at that. That's a really pretty fish Right there There you go. I got his first fish. He's a thick one. Look at that. He's honestly really beefy. Look It's not bad.  He's healthy.  Oh, sorry Let me see it. Oh, yeah There you go, I hope this camera is working. I'm really scared about it. Oh No, you're lying. No, you're lying. You're lying. Oh My god, you made it to the vlog. Yeah. Oh my god. I listen. I hope my camera is working so bad right now You have no idea. I'll cry. I'll cry. We'll cry together Yeah, we'll cry together. Oh my god. Are we gonna do this?  I have such a steady hand right now So guys, we're actually at best for right now Galfa Lee can actually long you go into smoothie King. You can get a burger. Now we're here at best bro Do you really know how to tie flies? Oh my god, I mean like not well But do it. All right, so what's going on right here?  You hold it That's what your time I'm gonna get me All right, so since I've been using rattle traps a lot That one right there. It's red-eye shad So three quarter ounce 60 Shag killer. I really need another one of these for this is the big one and it's like 25 bucks And I really don't feel like buying there now Those are amazing. They're by the way, like that's like the best cutters out there Are you on like a poppin one or you want like a standard front? And do that I Don't think I was there with a popper. Oh my god. Do you want a popper? Are you able to do this right now? No, dude, yeah, I'm digging it black. I like black Blackest night A popper, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah for the ponds. Yeah, there's a lot of that grass and that's good for the grass How many are in there? 16 for five bucks That's pretty good for how big they are The big one. Yeah, I don't usually use the big I usually just use like this okay there That was that's what I use I mean, this is all there's a word to I mean See fishing out Lake mayor and like Mary yeah, yeah, it does it's over. It's so over It's not even it's like bodies in Lake mayor. The thing is There's like 15 of us. Yeah, there's 15. Yeah, it's that one stretch like I caught one. I caught one At least those gizzards had in Lake mayor though, dude, those things are huge. All right, shout out to those guys This is guys are super cool people. They're actually a men army or one of them is an army the other one's been the army the one the UPS Seriously, we're gonna get fish and we plan something you say he's off Saturdays and Sundays We're gonna get fishing here very very very very soon. Just stay tuned. He's usually goes and wax him But I'm only getting one thing right now. I'm gonna try and spend too much money. I've been catching long time So you get this see where we go next I've never seen anyone give me this much chicken in my life and we had this last time I only know what I'm eating again because I had the It's a bathroom for days So guys, I'm over here editing all these vlogs. I like I filmed I'm back home now, but all these laws I like filmed it. I'm like I realize the past three vlogs that I filmed Did not even like have any to him like I just like passed out or like I edited and then just forget There's didn't finish off the videos to this one. I didn't finish off. So I'm gonna say here I'm gonna read a few comments you guys don't answer like maybe like three comments like just something like that But if you guys are like watching my videos and stuff I want it like please support me hit the like button and definitely leave the comics I want to start like reading like there hasn't been enough comments for me to just start reading them out and just answering So start leaving comments guys like all my videos start asking questions start leaving comments about the vlogs I'll answer them on video like this or I'll kind of just read them out and stuff like I give you a shout out But seriously leave a comment below. Um, I like reading them, you know supports me But here I'm gonna read a few and then we're just gonna close off this video. So guys, I'm on the video whereas like the LTV challenge like 45th challenge and Brandon said Do y'all ever catch any decent fish? Well for that pond there really wasn't there's not too many like really like size fish in there to be completely honest You know, we're just going out there filming some cool stuff getting some cool footage for you guys Maybe I'll do some technique videos on that leak. There's really not, you know, many good fish in that leak I'm just being completely honest with you, you know that first time I went out with Chance Caught that really good fish for other than that there hasn't been really any too big fish in there I'll have to find some more place of the fish guys. I just moved the survey and I'm trying to find place of the fish, you know And I'm experimenting, you know, of course I want to catch a lost ball fish and I'm trying to find some good areas to catch and Hopefully found some good fish in these ponds. That's pretty funny He said lick the next fish you catch you do it for the vlog bro. Oh, oh Honestly, I mean, that's just something like we kind of start saying do it for the vlog Just, you know, just messed around. You know what?  I'm Daniel. I might challenge you bro I might I might just do it. So ultimate fishing addict commented. Why are you not using your boat? Well? So it's confusing that pond or lake that we're fishing like with Chance like Daniel and I and all that when the way you put your boat in that lake is Sketchy next time I got there. I legit film it. It's like there's not a ramp It's just like you dive and like rock this cliff So his trailers are really small my trailer is really big I mean his boat goes in it comes about this much for water comes in. It's just really sketchy I'm not gonna put my boat in that it's just not gonna happen I don't want to damage anything and chances fits fine and his boat's perfect for that place So that's that's the main reason especially for that place. I'm sort of using the boat a lot more I'm at some other ponds and stuff like that, but not this pond That's just not gonna happen and this kid right here this man I've been wanting to give this guy a shout out for a while this man right here has commented on literally every video I posted For the past like ever like this guy right here shout out to you man. You I love you so much man.  Thank you so much and shout out to you. Thank you for coming on almost every one of my videos Like that motivates me. You're the man. You've been coming on stuff.  Thank you so much But guys that's gonna conclude this that's right a few comments off my guys I hope you guys enjoyed this video, you know, I went fishing with the bass per shop So I think this is the style of videos that you guys are on the fade towards of course I'm gonna do some random blogs. I'm gonna do some fishing. I'm gonna do some tutorials I'm gonna do a bunch of everything guys But I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did please leave a thumbs up and be sure to leave a comment below Like I said, I'm gonna read some comments on some of the newer vlogs So thank you guys so much for watching. I'll catch you guys at the next vlog


y cyfnod postgres yw'r diwylliant. Yn ni'n gweithio'r cyffredinol, mae'n gweithio'r dynnu ar y dynnu unig, ac mae'n ffwrdd gan y ddechrau. Ond mae'n gweithio'r cyffredinol. Mae'n gweithio'r cyffredinol i'r ddechrau'r ddechrau. A dyna'r gweithio'r ddau. Yr hyffredinol yw'r cyffredinol ar gyfer y Gweld Cwyddiad, gyda'r cyffredinol yn Gwyd. Ond mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r cyffredinol in a self-service fashion. The reason she wants to do this is to extend the power of her cloud-native applications by accessing pre-existing databases containing the years of data in those databases. Now meet Rick. Rick is from Operations and he needs to be able to create services. So he says, hi, I'm Rick. I need to create a number of services for our developers on cloud foundry. But I must exercise appropriate controls in place for an audit, compliance and good practice. Now his pain is that he has to keep repeating the same tasks over and over again. The developers coming to him, he's asking them what they need it for, asking them to go through the procedures in order to grant them permissions. So what he wants to do is build on trusted assets and he wants to enable developers to be able to work with pre-existing data. But he wants to do it in a compliant way so that the services are consistent, they're secure and they're curated, and most of all controlled. So this is the scenario that we want to avoid. So Maureen's saying, can I have access to the database? And he says, yes, but once you've followed the approval process. So I'd like to propose our solution, the cloud soft service broker manager. And what we've identified here is three use cases. Those database services that I've just spoken about. But more widely being able to deploy other database type services into a cloud location of your choice, whether it's public cloud, private cloud, on VMs, or bare metal. And what this does is it makes it quicker and simpler to create new service... Sorry, it's quicker and simpler than creating new service brokers. And it's also quicker and simpler than managing multiple brokers. So we provide a permission-based access to pre-existing services as managed services. So no longer using user-provided services. This securely connects trusted enterprise databases and software. And it controls the provisioning and access in line with the company best practices. So no longer are you having to ask for the credentials of a database to be given to the developer for them to create a user-provided service. Instead, we now have an audit trail and we can make sure that everything is exactly the way that we would like it to be within our company. Alongside this, we have a very intuitive and simple form because creating user-provided services is this simple, so it should be for creating access to existing services. So what this does is it adds a new service definition to the Cloudsoft service broker. Each instance creates a new read-only user on that database. So you can imagine here that within your regulatory system the means of providing a new user is very difficult, especially if that user might cause damage within the system. So we focused on a read-only user at this point. And then I spoke about being able to deploy all services that Cloudsoft AMP can deploy. And again, we do this through a simple form-based interface where we can specify the blueprint for the service that we're going to create. Again, this adds service definitions to the Cloudsoft service broker. But instead of this time being a database that is where we're configuring the plan, the service based on what the user's going to be, this time we can specify the configuration details of a VM that we're provisioning. So be that the amount of RAM that the VM gets, the operating system, or even if you're using a clustered service how many nodes are in that cluster. And so once that blueprint is sent to AMP it can then deploy it across multiple clouds. So whether that's public cloud like AWS or a local or private or dedicated cloud such as OpenStack whether it's onto virtual machines or directly onto physical hardware. And you can get this available for open source cloud foundry, for ATOS cloud foundry. It's also in the pivotal network and we have in progress for some of the others too. And so now I'm going to show you a quick demo. It's a recording so I'm not I'm not so confident to do a live demo. It worked. So I'll walk you through the use of this. So this view is for your operator, for Rick. And the developer doesn't get to see this view. This is purely for the manager. And so I'll start the video. So first we're going to look at databases. And we see that there are none available so we want to add a database. So at this point Rick, the database administrator he chooses that he wants to provide access to a Postgres database. So then he enters in the credentials of that database. So at this point the user he's providing is an admin user who is able to create other users. And so then he chooses the database he wants to connect to and provides a service name that will appear in the Cloud Foundry marketplace. He tests the connection to make sure the credentials are correct. And at this point he saves it. Now what's happening here is that the blueprint is created and sent across to AMP and then update service broker is called. At this point we also need to provide access to the relevant orgs that's going to be available for convenience we select available to all orgs here. But because we're managing where our services are going to be deployed and which users have them we can choose the individual orgs. So now this is Maureen's view. She's doing CF marketplace and she can see that the customer's database is available for her. And when she does create service it's at this point that the new user is created on the database. So this says create service, be our customers, standard customers if you can't read that. Her app had no data in it so now she needs to bind the service. So she's doing CF bind service to spring customers to the customer's database. Before this takes effect she restages the app so that the new environment variables are populated. This bind is sped up. It's actually much lower. And so when she comes back to her application she should find that when she refreshes the customers details are now available. But we said this was a read-only user. So let's test that. We expect this customer not to be added. So if you can't read that it says should fail with read-only. The customer is 0-0-0 and it's a test. After adding this customer that went too fast. What happened there? Play that again for you. So the customer was not added because it was a read-only connection. And back to Rick's view he can see that the database has been created or rather the user has been created as a new service. And he can have a little look into that. He can see behind the scenes what actually happened that a new user was indeed created. And so he can see what the... I'll move my pointer there. He can see that the new user has been created and the password that was used for that. And he can see the JDBC URL that the application would use to connect to that. So that's database services. I mentioned... I mentioned our other use case. These are other services that AMP can provision across multiple clouds. So we have a few in the catalogue already. Some different services. Rabbit, Mongo, Redis, Postgres and the customers that we've just added. Now when we want to create a new service again we click plus. We fill in the metadata that's required for a catalogue item. Here we're going to create a post... sorry, a couch-based service. So we give it the service name and a description and a URL for the icon. Then we can choose from the catalogue of services that AMP is able to provision. And that provides us with a base entity from which we can make plans. So to make a small plan we give it a name and description but then we provide some configuration YAML. And that configuration YAML in this case is configuring the provisioning properties of the virtual machines used to... to provision this. And we're going to set the minimum amount of RAM used. Excuse me, I don't know what's... Sorry about that. So as I said, we're setting the minimum amount of RAM because it's a small plan we're just going to give the VM one gigabyte. We add that plan and then for good measure we make a second plan called medium and we're going to provision it with three gigs of RAM. Once we're satisfied with the plans that we're defining we click save and this blueprint is added to AMP's catalogue and brought in through the service broker into Cloud Foundry. We can now check that the service is there. There's a couch base ready to be used once we've enabled it for the particular orgs that we care about. Again, for convenience just to all. So now when Maureen checks her marketplace she can see that couch base is there and she can create that service. Rick can now check that the service is available. He sees that it's in a starting state. A few moments later once the create has succeeded he has the ability to look inside that service and see key metrics affecting that service such as the number of HTTP requests per second or any other pertinent information. Lastly, because we're a service broker manager we don't just manage the Cloudsoft service broker's access requirements. We can select a different broker and choose the access requirements for the services available for that. That's the end of the demo. So, as I said, these are available for open source Cloud Foundry and some other Cloud Foundry providers. If you would like to get it and try it out you can download it from cloudsoft.io. Get CSB. Thank you. Any questions? Yes. I'll speak later. When the application binds to the service using the first example what's actually in the environment and what's exploited in the space of the app? Does the code have been written in a specific way to leverage the connection that's provided or does it just get access as it would normally? So it works in the same way that it would normally but the credentials that are passed back on-bind are not those of the admin database but of the new read-only user that it created. Yes. Yes, absolutely. We're also live streaming this talk and we'll make it available, definitely. Yes. It can create user accounts on existing databases or it can create new databases on virtual machines. I should say we can also deploy to locations that are container-based as well like Docker or Kubernetes in the works at the moment. Well, we have... we have a partnership with Atos. We also have it in the pivotal network as a tile if you are using that brand. Yes. How does it work in France because the people can get to from predicts to the enterprise and the workload? Okay. That's not something that's integrated into it at the moment but if there is a route to that host then it's just making a JDBC call out to it to connect to it. Cool. Thank you very much.


Today we're conducting a section live fire exercise to certify our gunners and our section leaders so that way we can build up to platoon level and then company live fire exercise as a part of Atlantic Resolve 2015. This plays a part in the Oolong Fury, it's just really the first step of a two week long exercise we're going to be doing with our counterparts here. So this is only the beginning as we build up our SOPs and our rehearsals so that way we can work together in a better manner. The training went great I think we we definitely hit the intent of getting these new crews together so we can build cohesion and increase our readiness. Two meters, two enemy dismounts. For us rehearsing our systems right now certifies our leaders so that way in the event of a real-world crisis we would be able to act together immediately. We already know each other's systems we already know how to communicate together so it wouldn't need any more rehearsals we already know that we're ready to go.