EP32: The Emperor of All Lead Dads

Interview with Bruce Feiler / Creator of The Council of Dads, thinker on family and friends

HOSTED BY PAUL SULLIVAN

Bruce Feiler is best-selling author, sought-after speaker and contemporary thinker on fatherhood, family and work. He may be best known as the creator of The Council of Dads, an idea and a book he conceived when he was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in his leg. He wanted to recruit other dads to be there for his daughters if he wasn’t, and the council was born. He’s also written The Secrets of Happy Families, which is filled with actionable advice that we can take to make our lives better. Listen to us talk about fathers, family and what he calls a crisis of friendship among men today.

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Transcript

00;00;05;02 - 00;00;24;01
Paul Sullivan
I'm Paul Sullivan, your host on the Company of Dads podcast, where we explore the sweet, sublime, strange and silly aspects of being a dad in a world where men were the primary parents often feel they have to hide, or at least not talk about their roles. One thing I know from personal experience is being a dad is not a traditional role for men.

00;00;24;07 - 00;00;42;05
Paul Sullivan
Whether you work full time, part time, devote all your time to your family. Parenting is so often left up to mothers or paid caregivers. But here at the Company of Dads, our goal is to shake all that off and create a community for fathers or indeed dads, and to welcome other dads who want to learn from those among us today.

00;00;42;10 - 00;01;05;15
Paul Sullivan
My guest is Bruce Feiler, best selling author, sought after speaker and contemporary thinker. Bruce has written a dozen books, including his story of Being a Clown, Like a Real One in a circus, and others about figures less prone to pratfalls like Moses, Abraham, and God. The two that I want to talk about are the Council of Dads and The Secrets of Happy Families.

00;01;05;17 - 00;01;24;18
Paul Sullivan
He conceived the Council of Dads when he was diagnosed with a tumor in his leg, and wanted to recruit some other dads to be there for his daughters if he wasn't. Fortunately, he's still here. And then there's the secret life of happy families, which fortunately, is actionable stuff and not out of reach for most of us. Though it takes a bit of work.

00;01;24;21 - 00;01;33;09
Paul Sullivan
Bruce lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their twin daughters. And we've got a lot to talk about today. Bruce. Welcome to the Company of Dads podcast.

00;01;33;11 - 00;01;46;22
Bruce Feiler
My pleasure. It's, thank you for having me. And congratulations for all of us who care about dads. I'm just cheering you on as you try to figure out a way to bring us together and help us figure out these changing roles that we all find ourselves in.

00;01;46;24 - 00;01;59;02
Paul Sullivan
That was such a sweet thing for you to say. And my first question is going to come across. I don't want to come across as snarky, but I'm fascinated by this. Reading your bio, your face is on a postage stamp in the Grenadines.

00;01;59;05 - 00;02;01;09
Bruce Feiler
My face is on a postage stamp in the Grenadines.

00;02;01;10 - 00;02;12;23
Paul Sullivan
Okay, so then then let me ask you so, so I have confirmed that fact in a New York Times column is going to confirm the piper. So should my next question be why or how?

00;02;12;25 - 00;02;19;26
Bruce Feiler
No. Your next question should be tell me a story of journalistic humiliation involving that postage stamp, because I.

00;02;19;26 - 00;02;21;24
Paul Sullivan
Never would have guessed that. But all right, guys, you.

00;02;21;24 - 00;02;23;07
Bruce Feiler
So please come on.

00;02;23;09 - 00;02;25;11
Paul Sullivan
That's a better. That's what you answer that question. That's much.

00;02;25;12 - 00;02;47;20
Bruce Feiler
Too much. My question. Go ahead. It's much more related to you because you I'm guessing in the course of your distinguished, journalism career, occasionally went to an editor and pitched the story that that editor rejected. Or maybe this didn't happen to you because you were so good, or maybe they didn't even make you pitched your stories. Well, I, you know, a mere, freelance journalist.

00;02;47;22 - 00;03;15;04
Bruce Feiler
When I found out that my face was on a postage stamp on the grenadine and grenadine, and that story in of itself is an interesting story, because how that happened was that there was a clown superfan in the Grenadines, who collected the this stamp, and it was actually four stamps of professional clowns. And as you, as you mentioned, I was a professional clown.

00;03;15;04 - 00;03;26;27
Bruce Feiler
Right? So I learned to juggle when I was a kid. I ran a children's theater when I was in college, and I, in fact, thought about running off to join a circus and to join clown college.

00;03;26;29 - 00;03;28;16
Paul Sullivan
Oh, yeah, I love this.

00;03;28;19 - 00;03;55;19
Bruce Feiler
Which is the greatest marketing, shtick of all time, actually. Okay, the former business writer, you must appreciate this. Is that basically, for the 250 years that there have been circuses, okay, which go back to the late 18th century, clowns were essentially older performers who couldn't perform anymore or, you know, acrobats who got injured or tagalong members of the family, of some performing family.

00;03;55;19 - 00;04;04;14
Bruce Feiler
Okay. You never needed any official training, but they were gay men who wanted to be closeted. Okay. And if you think back to the.

00;04;04;16 - 00;04;09;23
Paul Sullivan
This is all part of like the over credentialing of America, I love this. Oh that is so good.

00;04;09;23 - 00;04;29;02
Bruce Feiler
Credential is so good I want you I want to steal that from you next time I tell that story. And I haven't told the story in probably 15 years. But anyway, so what happened was, you know, in the 70s, these need all collapsed, right? Gay men no longer needed a closeted space to hide as much. Older performers would get off the road and go work at Walmart.

00;04;29;02 - 00;04;29;26
Bruce Feiler
I mean, lots of things.

00;04;29;29 - 00;04;34;19
Paul Sullivan
Are like the Rolling Stones. They would just keep going. They just won't be as acrobatic or limber anymore.

00;04;34;21 - 00;04;48;19
Bruce Feiler
There we go, though. So basically, Ringling Brothers at that point that had who had three circuses at that point, the blue and the gold needed a supply. And so they started a six week training program.

00;04;48;21 - 00;04;49;23
Paul Sullivan
Oh my goodness.

00;04;49;26 - 00;05;22;28
Bruce Feiler
Which and a feat of brilliance they called Clown College, thereby persuading everybody that you needed to go to college, not, in fact, spend a long weekend where they taught you how to put makeup on and put your shoes on. You, and then go out and fall on your butt and laugh about it. Okay. So, and then what they would do is when, when the, when the circuses would travel to every city in America, they would hold, quote unquote, auditions and invite the local press, so every local weatherman would go out and audition for clown college and they would get free publicity.

00;05;23;00 - 00;05;38;27
Bruce Feiler
For this, for this program. It was absolutely brilliant. So I did not go to clown college. In fact, I went to customary college and I went to graduate school. You know, I went to the Ivy League and I went to graduate school at Cambridge, and then had lived abroad for a long time. And so I want to join the circus.

00;05;39;03 - 00;05;58;16
Bruce Feiler
So I spent a year in, really acclimatizing myself to America as a clown in the Clyde baby called Brothers Circus. 99 cities, 501 circuses every day from March, December, without a day off. And on the back of the book that I wrote about that experience called Under the Big Top, is a picture of me in clown makeup.

00;05;58;16 - 00;06;10;05
Bruce Feiler
And there was some superfan and credit deans who turned that into a postage stamp. And then somebody saw it and like, wrote me through my website. And at the.

00;06;10;05 - 00;06;14;11
Paul Sullivan
Time, I want to I want you to say that they sent you a postcard with that stamp on it. And you were.

00;06;14;11 - 00;06;34;11
Bruce Feiler
Like, no, they did not do that. They sent me. They they notified me, you can actually now Google Ed Bruce by their clown postage stamp. It'll show up. And at the time this brings us to the journalism. And half of the time we've now wasted on this story. I was under contract at gourmet magazine, where I would, like, travel around the world and write food adventure stories, including going to the circus.

00;06;34;14 - 00;06;43;01
Bruce Feiler
But, the arts, kind of Oscars in, Monaco. And I went to Ruth Reichl, late of the New York Times and.

00;06;43;02 - 00;06;51;09
Paul Sullivan
Former former food critic for The New York Times. You know. Well, oh, always in disguise. Not clown disguise, but always in different disguises when you go to dinner. Yeah.

00;06;51;12 - 00;07;06;23
Bruce Feiler
And, she I said to her and I had to pitch stories to her because I had or whatever, three stories a year that I would do for her, five or whatever the number was. And I was like, Ruth, I want to go to the audience and walk down the street and see if anybody slaps the back of my head.

00;07;06;25 - 00;07;11;09
Bruce Feiler
And she slapped me down. She did not give me, she did not give me.

00;07;11;15 - 00;07;13;05
Paul Sullivan
Goodness of goodness.

00;07;13;07 - 00;07;27;29
Bruce Feiler
She did not give me the gig. And then later, she recommended that I, replace her replacement as the restaurant critic in the New York Times, which, by that point, the disguise was out. I'm like, my face is on a postage stamp. This is. How can I be a restaurant critic? Everybody will know what I look like.

00;07;28;02 - 00;07;44;16
Paul Sullivan
Oh my goodness. All right. I want to get to the Council of Dads. And these are the policemen, first of all. I mean, you're best known for writing and thinking about about modern life, but, you know, how did you go from the Old Testament to contemporary Brooklyn? Was it when was it when you got sick, or how did you make that transition in your writing career?

00;07;44;19 - 00;07;58;24
Bruce Feiler
It was it was a combination of things. So my story I grew up in Savannah, Georgia. I left there, I went, to college. I found I learned about myself as a Southerner by moving to the North. This was the 80s. It was the age of discount airfare. I was like, time to learn about myself as America.

00;07;58;24 - 00;08;18;12
Bruce Feiler
So I went to Japan. And I started writing letters. Home of the. You're not going to believe what happened to me variety. And when I got back to Georgia, everyone said, I loved your letters. And I was like, great, have we met? And it turned out that my grandmother had xeroxed them and passed them around, and they went sort of viral in a 1980s sense of the word.

00;08;18;12 - 00;08;38;03
Bruce Feiler
And I thought, wow, I should write about this. And so I sold my first book at 24. I've never held a job since. And that was those years of traveling. That was the circus. That was Japan, that was England. Then there was this decade, as you alluded to, of, writing and making television about the Bible. And I also got married, had children.

00;08;38;03 - 00;09;01;24
Bruce Feiler
So it was a confluence of two things. Number one, here I was in a different lifestyle, balancing because I also married a traveler. My wife, Linda, started and runs an organization called endeavor that supports high impact entrepreneurs in 40 countries now around the world. So we had this. We always wanted a a parent on the children and we were this is what you do all day, every day.

00;09;01;24 - 00;09;20;12
Bruce Feiler
We were balancing how to have a parent, but also be an individual, have a have a parent on the children and be an individual. And then the cancer came up and it was in it was in 2008. The girls were three. It was a kind of a fluke thing. A blood test produced an elevated ALK number, which is a number no one ever even looks at.

00;09;20;15 - 00;09;41;28
Bruce Feiler
Yeah. And I, I had a doctor who said, this is weird. And she gave me one test after another. And then I got a call from a doctor, walking in the Upper East Side, between appointments. And she said, the tumor in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor. Now, you're a writer. I'm a writer.

00;09;42;03 - 00;09;43;17
Bruce Feiler
That is a double negative, like.

00;09;43;20 - 00;09;45;09
Paul Sullivan
Yeah, writer.

00;09;45;11 - 00;09;51;27
Bruce Feiler
And it took me a second to convert that double negative into that worst negative. Right. Which is, which is I have.

00;09;51;29 - 00;09;53;29
Paul Sullivan
So that's not not good. Is that what that means?

00;09;54;01 - 00;10;13;15
Bruce Feiler
Exactly. Right. This is a not not good. Not all about that actually. Right. Frankly. But, that produced a whole series of events. We can talk about whatever dimension of those you want. Yeah. But it meant that for two years, for a year, I was in bed. For two years, I was on crutches.

00;10;13;15 - 00;10;31;29
Bruce Feiler
And for a year after that, I was on a cane and I couldn't travel. And so I had this kind of, intense, you know, travel, adventure, curiosity, you know, sort of Indiana Jones meets your local rabbi or preacher or priest or whatever it is. And so I said, well, I can't apply it to the rest of the world.

00;10;32;05 - 00;10;43;16
Bruce Feiler
Here's an idea. I'll apply it to my home. And nobody particularly welcomed that. But that's what happened. So I was like, okay, I'm going to I'm going to like, do like your daughters breakfast table, right?

00;10;43;16 - 00;10;51;26
Paul Sullivan
Your daughters were young enough. So they thought it was probably a charming idea and they couldn't really protest as opposed to now, he said, there's 17, there's there's no way this thing flies now.

00;10;51;29 - 00;11;01;10
Bruce Feiler
It does not, it does not apply now. Although in the best moments, actually, they they are the worst mom. And they term that archeology to me.

00;11;01;13 - 00;11;19;10
Paul Sullivan
I remember when so I have to so I, I'm actually so we joke about that here. So I'm actually part of a council dad. For family where the father died of cancer, when the girls were then four and seven, and they're now, that's 12 years ago. And, you know, the girls are great. They're wonderful girls.

00;11;19;10 - 00;11;39;13
Paul Sullivan
But, you know, I was the writer, dad. So whenever that question did come to me and I do my best. But, you know, to be honest, I'm not sure I. I was super successful. You know, I would always help whenever they would ask, but I would, you know, I had kids go, but tell me about the council and how you, you know, came up with the idea and what you were such a novel idea back then.

00;11;39;13 - 00;11;45;04
Paul Sullivan
But what were you hoping to, you know, achieve?

00;11;45;06 - 00;12;07;02
Bruce Feiler
So I love that story. And I and I salute your service. And I, acknowledge and empathize with, vulnerability and the confusion and, like, you know, what is the role and what should I be doing? Have I done a good job if I'm not going to do a good job? Because I think of that trio and let's get into both of those just to just to kind of dispense with the narrative.

00;12;07;02 - 00;12;29;15
Bruce Feiler
I was diagnosed with a on a Tuesday. I had an osteogenesis sarcoma in my left femur. I broke my broke that femur when I was five, in a biking accident, and 38 years later, I had cancer. Five and, there's 800 people a year who get an osteosarcoma, 85% are under 21. So there's only 100 people a year who get this disease.

00;12;29;15 - 00;12;50;27
Bruce Feiler
I was one of 100, for that year, 20 years ago, they would have cut off my leg and hoped. And there was a 15% survival rate. But they did determine that one cocktail was effective, on young people. And they give that to older people. But it's designed for younger people who can bounce back and be more resilient than a 43 year old man could.

00;12;51;02 - 00;13;11;07
Bruce Feiler
So it was brutal. And I was in the hospital at a 17 hour surgery in which my femur was removed, replaced with titanium. They took my fibula from my calf and relocated it to my thigh where it now lives. So all this is descending on me? I get diagnosed on a Tuesday. You don't sleep. When you get a diagnosis like this, your life is turned upside down.

00;13;11;09 - 00;13;18;18
Bruce Feiler
And I thought in very rapid order. Well, you know, I've lived a full life, okay? No one's ever going to say I didn't live the hell out of my life.

00;13;18;24 - 00;13;19;24
Paul Sullivan
And how old are you at this point?

00;13;19;24 - 00;13;34;18
Bruce Feiler
How old are you? I was 43, okay. And I had bestselling books and hosted TV shows and, you know, was, you know, I had some sort of a name and footprint in the culture and people would have said, that's sad, but they would have moved on. And I thought my wife actually would be sad and it would be difficult.

00;13;34;18 - 00;13;53;06
Bruce Feiler
But she's a dynamic, active woman, and she would find love and life in her life. And I and I immediately went to the cat. Like this. The longest term impact was going to be on them. And I think it is because I was a writer, you know, it was sort of like the art projects. I wasn't going to mess up in the aisles.

00;13;53;06 - 00;14;09;03
Bruce Feiler
I wasn't going to walk down in the walks. I wasn't going to take with them. But it was my voice, like it was like, they're not going to have my voice. What would that have thought? What would he have done here? Right. And people would say to me, oh, they're very young. They're not going to remember. And I would say, that's the worst thing that I did.

00;14;09;03 - 00;14;09;27
Paul Sullivan
That's even worse.

00;14;09;27 - 00;14;32;11
Bruce Feiler
Yeah. I don't want them to not remember. I want them to remember. So three days later, I sort of awoke. I put that in air quotes because as I just said, you don't sleep. And I had this idea like I was going to reach out to men and I and, and I was going to create this group and it can't I have to say, it came to me fully formed, like it was.

00;14;32;11 - 00;14;49;09
Bruce Feiler
And I was going to call it the counsel of that. And I knew right away that that was the term I have now written. I'm even now I just turned in, I think it was my 16th book and I don't know your experience, but I know you've written a couple of books that, titles come on day one or day the last.

00;14;49;09 - 00;14;50;17
Bruce Feiler
They never come back.

00;14;50;17 - 00;14;52;03
Paul Sullivan
I'm in a shower or on a walk. Yeah.

00;14;52;04 - 00;15;06;02
Bruce Feiler
They never come in the middle. And this one, trust me. I just had one that came at the last time. That was very stressful. This one came to me the middle. Like I knew right away that that's what I wanted to call it, but I didn't know what it was. And I actually also decided that I was not going to tell my wife.

00;15;06;02 - 00;15;21;00
Bruce Feiler
Right. Because she's very upbeat. She's, as a friend of mine, said her her point of view comes ranges from thumbs up to thumbs sideways. She's just not a negative person. I kind of like wallowing in pain and despair and and and and and vulnerability and shame and fear. I love these things.

00;15;21;07 - 00;15;25;01
Paul Sullivan
They was southern Gothic in you, like the Savannah boyhood is this I know.

00;15;25;01 - 00;15;43;18
Bruce Feiler
And also for men. I think that there's no permission giving for men to to talk about their feelings. Like, I can talk about this for hours. And I wasn't going to tell her, but I couldn't control myself. And so a couple days later, we're driving. We had dropped the kids off with their grandparents, and we were actually going to be the surgeon who ultimately rebuilt my leg.

00;15;43;18 - 00;15;57;12
Bruce Feiler
And I was like, I have this idea. I want to tell you to ask a group of men. And she loved the idea, but she instantly rejected all of my nominees. Right? So she was like, well, I like Paul, but I would never ask him for advice.

00;15;57;12 - 00;15;58;10
Paul Sullivan
I don't know, not that guy.

00;15;58;16 - 00;16;03;01
Bruce Feiler
Yeah. And if I made Paul the writer guy, like, he would just never show up like, so I would never, you know.

00;16;03;03 - 00;16;04;22
Paul Sullivan
Say that. Don't say that.

00;16;04;24 - 00;16;07;27
Bruce Feiler
Okay. So he said, I told you I was going for.

00;16;08;00 - 00;16;08;10
Paul Sullivan
Like, good.

00;16;08;11 - 00;16;09;00
Bruce Feiler
I like the real thing.

00;16;09;03 - 00;16;25;13
Paul Sullivan
About who the guys who made the cut you had, like, you know, your buddy from kindergarten, you had, like, college roommate. Those are obviously you had a camp counselor, but you had a couple other guys in there. I mean, how did they actually make the cut? It's like the NFL combine to try to get through here. Like how do they get on the call?

00;16;25;17 - 00;16;33;20
Bruce Feiler
It was not like the NFL combine was if we're going to if you're going to go to sports, we're going to go to sports. If we're not going to like, this is such a freaking bad cliche. Oh, let's make it about sports.

00;16;33;28 - 00;16;42;16
Paul Sullivan
Okay, fine. I don't know how they made the cut, how these guys made the cut of all the guys. Unless you don't have a lot of friends and this is all you had left after your wife, like, vetoed everybody else.

00;16;42;18 - 00;16;57;24
Bruce Feiler
They were like a lot of them were Yale Jewish lawyers. Like this was the first problem. Like, there they were. There were a very kind of narrow, there was a narrow thing. So the answer is, what is not like the combine is that there were, you know, seven quarterbacks competing, or maybe there were seven Yale Jewish lawyers.

00;16;57;24 - 00;17;16;19
Bruce Feiler
But what was like the combine was that I wanted people from different parts of my life. Right, right. There could be different parts of my voice because my friend from kindergarten who, you know, is not as close a friend now can't address what I'm like in this situation or this buddy of mine that I traveled with for a lot of my early 20s.

00;17;16;19 - 00;17;34;04
Bruce Feiler
So. And then I did interesting enough what you said, which was, I gave him a role, and I think that this was an instinct. And to me, this gets to the question, that, you mentioned, like, I somehow we made a couple of rules. Okay, let me just first let me take a step back. We made a couple of rules.

00;17;34;06 - 00;17;52;26
Bruce Feiler
Only men. Okay. Probably half of my closest friend are women, but no, only men. We were going to do the dad boys, not family. They were already going to be there, so I didn't. I didn't in the various iterations of Hollywood who tried to make this into movies and television, people wanted family and whatever. I said, no family.

00;17;52;26 - 00;18;17;15
Bruce Feiler
They'll already be there. And then I said I wanted each dad to have a different value, like travels. Dad values, dad, you know, being an entrepreneur, dad, etc. I also said I also felt and never said out loud, but if I were doing it again, I would do it this way is you could swap people out, right? So in other words, if it turns out that my kids were interested.

00;18;17;18 - 00;18;26;27
Paul Sullivan
But you had like, like the Security Council at the UN and they're like rotating members or like, you know, one guy was China, whether or not he wasn't going anywhere, but the other.

00;18;26;29 - 00;18;47;05
Bruce Feiler
So what I think what I didn't fully realize that I think about now is number one, people are busy, right? So it's different. I actually wrote a piece, the piece that led to the column that became the, This Life column that I wrote for a decade in the times in the Sunday Style section was a piece about reimagining godparents.

00;18;47;05 - 00;19;05;18
Bruce Feiler
Right. So. And I think giving people a specific role, you are writer dad, right? So that when they have to write something, whether it's a vows or a college application or a, you know, a paper, they'll call you. I like that because it's confined, because, you know, you're a dad of your own now.

00;19;05;18 - 00;19;10;12
Paul Sullivan
You know you can you can accomplish that. Like I as writer dad, I when I was asked I could help on those.

00;19;10;12 - 00;19;11;00
Bruce Feiler
Around me and.

00;19;11;00 - 00;19;12;00
Paul Sullivan
I was like, yeah.

00;19;12;04 - 00;19;28;07
Bruce Feiler
And I like that. And what I mean by switching people out is just, let's just say that one of my kids turned out well. I'll give a real example. One of my kids turns out to really be interested in museums and art history and art conservation. There ain't nobody on the council of Dad's that knows anything about that, right?

00;19;28;07 - 00;20;00;05
Bruce Feiler
So I, I would say, now go get it. Somebody, a male in my life who knew me but could help them, like meet them where they are, they're interested in baseball or or rock music or art conservation. Go get somebody and make it a doable thing. And then, I guess the other thing that I would say is that what I, what I learned and maybe the greatest value of this thing is that the people themselves are play a different role.

00;20;00;06 - 00;20;10;10
Bruce Feiler
Okay. So you're now in the dad business, right? And as a result, you were forced to have this kind of putrid conversation about work life balance. Right?

00;20;10;10 - 00;20;18;23
Paul Sullivan
And I actually, to be honest, I don't even use that phrase. I can't because I hate it. It's just life. And then you divide your life up, like sometimes you play golf, sometimes you, you know.

00;20;19;00 - 00;20;35;08
Bruce Feiler
It's a completely awful framework. But I do think there is in the, in the case of kind of people in our lives, there is this guitar there, which is that we have our family.

00;20;35;10 - 00;20;35;28
Paul Sullivan
Yeah.

00;20;36;00 - 00;20;58;27
Bruce Feiler
That's opportunity and that's fraught, right? We have our work, both the men and the women, the moms and dads. What has gotten pushed aside and contemporary life is friendship, because that is what we don't have time for. And I actually think that we're in a crisis of friendship that we don't talk about anywhere near enough, and that what this idea of a council of dads did was it created a new role in our lives.

00;20;58;29 - 00;21;26;19
Bruce Feiler
Right. Which is people that are not family. They're this new kind of category. They're not friends and they're not family. There's this new kind of heightened category. And that's great. And, and everybody feels it. And we feel at one of the men in the Council of Dads actually had some illness later in his life, and his child was having a milestone life event, which I will keep off stage to keep this story somewhat anonymous.

00;21;26;19 - 00;21;41;29
Bruce Feiler
For that, dad and I got a call from this man's spouse saying, you know, he's not going to be there for this. You don't have to show up. You're not going to see him. And I went to my wife and I was like, what do I do? Do I travel across the country to go to this event? And she's like, this is a Council of Dads moment.

00;21;41;29 - 00;21;43;09
Bruce Feiler
You must go now.

00;21;43;09 - 00;21;43;19
Paul Sullivan
You must.

00;21;43;25 - 00;21;50;18
Bruce Feiler
You have to step up. And so that kind of code has been invaluable.

00;21;50;20 - 00;22;09;09
Paul Sullivan
So I'll say the way you talked about, it's sort of that lack of friendship in these bonds. And you know, some of my, you know, if I, if I have, you know, 4 or 5 friends, good friends, three are from high school, one is from college, and the other is my, you know, golf partner. And I had lots of acquaintances, but rewind to 20, 20.

00;22;09;09 - 00;22;24;20
Paul Sullivan
You know, I write about this in my final, column in the New York Times. I remember I'd been a lead dad, for years, and it'd be. It's been something. I kept quiet. I walked around our town. I was near at times, dad. I was book writing, dad. I was a keynote speaking dad. But what I was really was the primary parent.

00;22;24;20 - 00;22;42;00
Paul Sullivan
And it was during Covid. When we're all trapped inside, my wife is worried about what's going to happen to her business, and I'm busier than I've ever been. And I said, this is kind of lonely. Like, I don't have my normal I'm not going in on the train going into New York Times. I'm not having a fancy lunch or a glass of wine with somebody after work.

00;22;42;00 - 00;23;02;28
Paul Sullivan
I'm not, you know, I'm I hear nothing. And I, like, you know, every other type of parent has a community. I go to work. Dad has his tons to community, stay at home moms. But in suburban America, lots community, every town, city, neighborhood in America reaches out to working moms. But what is there for, you know, fathers who are the primary parents?

00;23;02;28 - 00;23;23;23
Paul Sullivan
And that was. Yeah, as you were saying, like with council, that that was really the genesis for the company of dads because I thought we need something, you know, ring these. We're still guys, we still do guy thing, we still have fun. But we're we're different. We're fundamentally different than, you know, the go to work dad. And we're not always welcome among, you know, groups of, of of moms.

00;23;23;25 - 00;23;24;07
Paul Sullivan
So I think.

00;23;24;07 - 00;23;42;03
Bruce Feiler
That what's interesting about this and I, I don't want to say that I think that this is happening, but I believe that it might happen in my prognostication is that it has a good chance of happening, which is I think that we might very well, to your point, look back at the pandemic as a little bit of an inflection point.

00;23;42;03 - 00;24;06;06
Bruce Feiler
And I think, in this conversation in the following way, because, well, first of all, in general, the pandemic was a pause, right? It was a collective in the language of the book. But the work I do now, collecting life stories and talking about life transitions and, and, this is what I've been doing for the last five years is, you know, and, and my book, Life Is in the transitions came out in the middle of the pandemic.

00;24;06;06 - 00;24;43;22
Bruce Feiler
It was a pause in pauses. Give us an opportunity, you know, not just to revisit ourselves, but to revisit habits and patterns and kind of establish things. And so there wasn't a way that everybody stopped and we looked at things. But the second thing that happened is that that's related to this is that everybody was at home. And I think that these issues, which have been still largely gendered, along, household management, who runs the family, right, all these kinds of things, everybody realized that that you could no longer gender it because everybody was.

00;24;43;28 - 00;24;51;19
Paul Sullivan
You also could lie about it. You couldn't say, I look at how busy I am. How can I possibly help with that? Like, you're you're working from home. I'm working from home. I see exactly what you're doing in not doing right.

00;24;51;19 - 00;25;10;23
Bruce Feiler
Exactly. So and we know that people, if you ask, you know, moms and dads, how much of the work you do. We know that they they both say about 80%. Yeah. So, and so I think that as we now go back into this hybrid world, right, this is the world that you wrote about and thought about for years, right?

00;25;10;23 - 00;25;37;19
Bruce Feiler
Is anybody ever going to show up in a white collar office on a Friday again? You know, the The Washington Post had a piece last week that said, no, right. Everybody's going to stay home on Fridays. Right. So we got and therefore a lot of these standards, are being rewritten collectively. Okay. My way. If my way of talking about this, Paul, is that the is the is that is that the divide that separates work from family is more porous than it's ever been.

00;25;37;22 - 00;26;00;08
Bruce Feiler
And it's for two reasons. One is that more women are in the workplace. And that I feel like as we talked about, we talk about a lot. Right. Three quarters of women now work outside the home. But what we don't talk about enough is that the dads are much more involved, in the parenting space. Okay. And the idea of leaving early to go coach, literally than having dinner.

00;26;00;08 - 00;26;20;07
Bruce Feiler
Right. You know, I'm fond of saying back to my happy family. A happy family part of my life. Yeah. The two most difficult times in every family are the hour after everybody wakes up, in the hour before everyone goes to bed. Like, those are the two nuclear winters to date myself, you know, and if if we could solve the problems in those two hours, we would make every family twice as happy in three weeks.

00;26;20;09 - 00;26;27;25
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. Which one would you pick if you had to get rid of one? Your kids are old. And if you had to get rid of one the hour in the morning or the hour at night, which one would you get rid of? You mean.

00;26;27;25 - 00;26;31;19
Bruce Feiler
If I. If I could solve for one which would? I saw our in the morning.

00;26;31;19 - 00;26;45;29
Paul Sullivan
Absolutely. Really? I do the opposite. The hour I'm. I'm up earlier than my kids. I'm ready to go. I get it all done. But it's at night when I'm tired. We've had dinner, we're trying to do the dishes and then it's like there is a book. There's a great kids book ten years ago. Go that, go the fuck to sleep.

00;26;46;04 - 00;26;50;15
Paul Sullivan
That's all I can think of. That always plays in my head like, oh, it's the lullaby, go to sleep.

00;26;50;18 - 00;27;18;03
Bruce Feiler
The reason I would say I would, I would focus more on the first hour of the morning is because I think that this hour, first of all, everybody's added at that time. Yeah, everybody is at their maximum stress. But also because it can introduce, ways of addressing problems that can that can spread out. Right. So I talk about, you know, agile gatherings.

00;27;18;03 - 00;27;27;24
Bruce Feiler
Right. They're very short. I talk about, you know, making, checklists for people to do. I talk about, you know, having parents pull back from trying to kind of control everything.

00;27;27;24 - 00;27;31;14
Paul Sullivan
I love the checklist. Like it's it's right here to check it off.

00;27;31;21 - 00;27;58;04
Bruce Feiler
Like, but do it yourself as opposed to mom and dad screaming mom or dad or mom and dad screaming at the children and or at each other. So to me, it's kind of a perfect petri dish for, in effect, trying to cede more control of the family away from the parents toward the children. Because, you know, when your kids are young, you you can get them to do things.

00;27;58;04 - 00;28;28;20
Bruce Feiler
Maybe right as they get older every now and then. But parenting is unlike anything I've ever discovered in one key aspect, which is that our children are born entirely dependent on us, and our job is to put ourselves out of business. Yeah, our job is to make our children independent from us. And the only way that's going to work is if slowly, gradually, in an age appropriate way, you, you cede more of the gears, to them.

00;28;28;25 - 00;28;33;23
Bruce Feiler
And the morning is the perfect time to kind of, test and, make that happen.

00;28;33;25 - 00;28;51;01
Paul Sullivan
So I want to touch on the transition book at the very end at that minute. But I want to come back, you know, to happy families. You obviously wrote the book way before the pandemic. There's lots of good stuff in there, particularly there's this whole notion of the oscillating family narrative, which is like, we weren't as a straight line.

00;28;51;01 - 00;29;19;29
Paul Sullivan
The successor started up here and everything with shit. It's really the ups and downs of life that makes kids margin. But how did the pandemic and this fundamental, unplanned, unworn, did, you know, pause or shift in the lives we've been leading? How do you think that has impacted or will impact, happy families? How is it how they incorporate it into their narrative, or how do you see it, you know, playing out over the next, you know, generation?

00;29;20;01 - 00;29;43;18
Bruce Feiler
So when I set out to to work on that book, it's sort of the core idea of it was that everybody's stuck. Okay. You know, we're we're a century. We're a century into modern psychology. And, you know, we've heard all the things from the psychologist. We're all still confused. Right. And so what do we do? Right? We like call our parents, but their experience is so dated as to be irrelevant.

00;29;43;18 - 00;30;03;16
Bruce Feiler
Right. Are we Facebook our friends? And they're just as close as we are and everybody's stuck. So what if we go out? But there's a lot of knowledge up there about, you know, how to manage time, right? And how to make teams run more, effectively, how to have difficult conversations. And like, what if I went and talked to, largely dads in other organs?

00;30;03;19 - 00;30;22;17
Bruce Feiler
Like, what wisdom do you have? Yeah, that can can make my family run more, run more effectively. And I said at the beginning I was going to do I made one promise to my wife. She's like, okay, I got it. You were a circus clown. Like, you walk the Bible like, I get it, you're going to go do these things, but don't bring me like, theory.

00;30;22;17 - 00;30;44;00
Bruce Feiler
Bring me things that actual families are doing. And I'm going to try, and, I made that promise to her, and, I kept that promise to her. I made a promise to myself, and I broke both of them. One was, I wasn't going to talk to any therapist because they've had their say. I talked to a sex therapist and, had to talk to kids about sex, and I, you know, everybody seems happy that I did that, so I broke that one.

00;30;44;05 - 00;31;00;06
Bruce Feiler
The other one I broke to myself. And this was after the early years of the internet, right when everything was like a listicle. Remember that term, right? So I was like, I'm not going to turn this into a list of the three or 7 or 10 things you need to do to have a happy family, because I hate those lists, right?

00;31;00;06 - 00;31;16;17
Bruce Feiler
I mean, as a writer, I have to produce them from time to time. But I hate them because I, I usually disagree with number seven, and I forget number three and my kid from ever get into college, right? So, but when I, when I start talking to people, low and behold, it turns out that there are like certain things that they do in common.

00;31;16;17 - 00;31;21;07
Bruce Feiler
So I sort of made this non list list of things that that high functioning families have in.

00;31;21;07 - 00;31;26;06
Paul Sullivan
Common to that the book publishers that hey, this is really good. But what about let's.

00;31;26;09 - 00;31;31;15
Bruce Feiler
Get this on TV, you know on the today show with the.

00;31;31;17 - 00;31;33;19
Paul Sullivan
Number one. Number one.

00;31;33;21 - 00;31;35;23
Bruce Feiler
They adapt all the time, right?

00;31;35;23 - 00;31;36;18
Paul Sullivan
So, so.

00;31;36;20 - 00;31;56;04
Bruce Feiler
I thought, oh, I'm a dad. I'll make three rules and I'll stick to these rules. Right. You know, and it doesn't work that way. Right. Because we're all dynamic role interacting. Okay. You know, Paul is going to leave his stable job, right, to, to to run a startup. And then there's a pandemic. And then, you know, what did you just say?

00;31;56;04 - 00;32;11;01
Bruce Feiler
Your your your wife's business is challenged. And by the way, you know, this kid has lacrosse practice on the near side of town, and that kid now is tutoring math or being tutored in math on the far side of town. And it's a week later, it's going to be different. So you need to adapt. And like we need systems that that.

00;32;11;01 - 00;32;31;19
Bruce Feiler
That's why family meetings and check boards and all these things that have sort of the ideas that have emerged from that book, oscillating family narratives, that's adapting, but you can't adapt all the time. You've got to have some core. So the second is high functioning families talk a lot. Okay. Family mission statements. Right. Values have to have difficult conversations.

00;32;31;23 - 00;32;53;18
Bruce Feiler
This is all part of the talking. And not just, you know, about problems, but about what it means to be part of a family. Like, what is it that we hold dear? Okay. And then third, they go out and play, right? Because you've got to have some positive memories that balance out. The challenging times which are going to come so.

00;32;53;18 - 00;32;55;03
Paul Sullivan
Right. So, so, so Covid, the answer.

00;32;55;03 - 00;32;56;02
Bruce Feiler
To the question is can't.

00;32;56;03 - 00;33;06;04
Paul Sullivan
You can adapt and Covid, you're sick of talking to each other and you're not allowed to go out and play. So so how do we, you know, how do these lessons apply to those, you know, the 18 month period or more?

00;33;06;04 - 00;33;21;16
Bruce Feiler
Okay. So how did we in fact we get through? Well, first of all, we came up with and we had to rewrite all the rules. Yeah. In real time. Okay. Wait a minute now. Okay. This is your workspace. And if I'm doing this, you can't walk through the back. You know, we've had a tool. Where are you?

00;33;21;16 - 00;33;27;11
Paul Sullivan
Can the BBC guy. But he went viral. And now, like, it happens all the time, right?

00;33;27;12 - 00;33;44;04
Bruce Feiler
Okay. So fine. So we rewrote those rules. You don't need a quiet space. Sorry. Okay. Or we need to move. Okay. Or we're going to move. Right? I mean, to jump ahead to like transition. 60% of people move in a life transition. And we saw that, right. All the people who have moved in the pandemic. So in fact, that's adaptability.

00;33;44;05 - 00;34;03;26
Bruce Feiler
We're going to have to change all of our expectations and rewrite our rules in real time. How are we going to do this? Are we just going to do it? No, we have to talk about it. We need to say, what do you need? What do I need? What is it changing how you know. So the only way, you know, I mean, the only way to adapt is either for one person by fiat to insist.

00;34;03;28 - 00;34;23;19
Bruce Feiler
But in this case, everybody, all the marbles are moving at the same time, right? It's not like I mean the pandemic. Okay. Can I pull this off? I'm not going to pull this off, but I'm going to try, okay. The pandemic was not billiards, right? Where where everyone is stable, you know, in a little triangle and one person is changing.

00;34;23;22 - 00;34;45;15
Bruce Feiler
Okay. It's not like I'm quitting my job and everything else is stable. So I'm the cue ball going in. I'm going to beat this to death into the little triangle. There's probably a better word for it, of billiard balls. It's marbles. Right? You know, in a bowl, everybody is moving at the same time and and clashing up against one another, in different ways.

00;34;45;21 - 00;35;09;07
Bruce Feiler
And therefore, the only way to accommodate it is to talk about this change that you're doing. Okay. And then as for the play, what did people do? They started baking, right? They started gardening. They started board gaming. They started puzzles. They started all of these things that we now think of as pandemic activities, from right peloton to, you know, master class.

00;35;09;10 - 00;35;14;17
Paul Sullivan
I eat my sourdough bread on my peloton, and I feel that you see that at 2020.

00;35;14;19 - 00;35;35;14
Bruce Feiler
Yes, that's the point. Right. And you listen to clubhouse at the time. Right. So that's right. So right. So these are what new ways both to play together but also to escape, and get time to yourself. It's all the thing. So the I actually feel like that those three benchmarks, were not rewritten because.

00;35;35;17 - 00;35;35;29
Paul Sullivan
There.

00;35;36;06 - 00;35;37;13
Bruce Feiler
Were. Absolutely. Yeah.

00;35;37;15 - 00;35;58;28
Paul Sullivan
But now we come out of this and, you know, a year ago, the economy is roaring. You know, inflation's in check. Can I get you nerdy here? But, you know, the unemployment rate is super low, so workers have the upper hand. Now, as we're talking now things are starting to to shift. Inflation is up. You know, people are trying to figure out how do I go back to work?

00;35;59;00 - 00;36;16;19
Paul Sullivan
I feel like we had this moment coming out of the pandemic where workers were going to say, look, and this is something I'm super passionate about. There's no need to go back to 2019. We found that this can work unless you are an open heart surgeon. You can do most activities from home some of the time. Not all the time.

00;36;16;24 - 00;36;37;12
Paul Sullivan
We need to meet human being. We need to be together and brainstorm. But you can do a lot of those things. And now you have some of these companies that have invested billions and billions of dollars in physical real estate. And they're like, well, wait a second, I don't want to sit here by myself. I want to people come in and because of, you know, who knows is going to be economies fluid, but the seemingly changing economic dynamics, they're trying to claw some of that back.

00;36;37;12 - 00;36;56;20
Paul Sullivan
So if you are you know when you think about transition. So now we're going to the third. We think about transitions. And you know there's this families who came up with a way that was somewhat working during the pandemic to to have a they dad have a working mom or, or vice versa and be somewhat happy talking more, adapting more, playing well.

00;36;56;23 - 00;37;12;22
Paul Sullivan
And now you're in this super uncertain time where, you know, you said nobody will go into an office again on a Friday. And I talked to this guy, a firm, and his office has specifically said that you will not go in. The only days you can stay home are Tuesday and Thursday because of everybody stayed home. On Friday.

00;37;12;22 - 00;37;33;01
Paul Sullivan
They just go, you know, they have time to themselves to be with the kids. So they're trying to cut that off. There's two random to, you know, but what do we do now? Like this? Is this this is kind of a forced transition or, you know, gradual forced transition back into a world of work that, you know, most of us haven't seen in in three plus years.

00;37;33;01 - 00;37;46;00
Paul Sullivan
So, I mean, who has the upper hand? How do we adapt, how to how to parents think through, this, this moment with their life, not work life balance, but as you and I have agreed with their, their life.

00;37;46;02 - 00;38;06;17
Bruce Feiler
So I'm going to throw a curveball into this conversation by saying that I'm actually not going to talk about, the books that we've been talking about. I'm actually going to talk about, the book I just finished, which is really all about this, and it is about the future of work. And, and I'm going to make a kind of meta point that that links all of these ideas, all of these ideas together.

00;38;06;19 - 00;38;28;18
Bruce Feiler
Let me put this up by saying what I've been doing the last five years. Okay. And that is, I have, I've been collecting and analyzing life stories. I went through a series of disruptive life events, from getting cancer to having financial trouble to having my father, who had Parkinson's at the time, tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks.

00;38;28;21 - 00;38;45;20
Bruce Feiler
And in fact, growing out of that work that I did and happy Families about how to write your family narrative, and a piece that I wrote in The New York Times called The Stories That Bind Us, that, that was the most viral thing I've ever written. I, I didn't know how to tell my, my life story anymore.

00;38;45;22 - 00;39;11;18
Bruce Feiler
And I and I didn't tell it for a long time. And when I did, what I realized is that everybody has a story of how their life was, disrupted or interrupted or beaten up or, or setback in some way. And so I've spent the last five years crisscrossing the country, collecting now what has become 400 life stories, in five years, 1500 pages, 1500 hours of conversations, 10,000 pages of transcripts.

00;39;11;20 - 00;39;40;11
Bruce Feiler
And I've analyzed them both for this book called Life Is and the transitions That Came out of the middle of the pandemic. And a new book called The Search, which will be out in, in the spring of 2023. And when I say that there's a big idea that links all of the things that we've been talking about, it is the following that what any of these events are is a break in the normal.

00;39;40;11 - 00;40;12;23
Bruce Feiler
Right. It's a rupture in the story we're telling a certain story, and then there's a break and we need to tell a new story. Okay. And the way I think about this, the term I use is that there is what I call a life quake, right? Which is an event that a massive burst of change in your life, what you're talking about here and work is there what I call work quakes, things that kind of break the normal and the way to think about these events, from my point of view, is that they are meaning vacuum is that they suck the normal way of processing and making sense of the world.

00;40;12;25 - 00;40;14;00
Bruce Feiler
They suck it out.

00;40;14;02 - 00;40;15;02
Paul Sullivan


00;40;15;05 - 00;40;38;28
Bruce Feiler
So what a a life transition is, is it's a meaning factory. It is the process of creating and generating and new meaning in your life. Writing a new chapter in your life story. Right? So the the life quake, puts you on your heels, and the life transition is what puts you back on your toes. So to, to to get to the specific question that you asked.

00;40;39;00 - 00;40;55;29
Bruce Feiler
Yes, I believe that there is that the that the power has been moving toward the worker who says, I want more control over my life, I want more freedom. I want to work harder hybrid in some way. I want my I'm tired of keeping my family. Also, I'm tired of keeping my personal life out of the office.

00;40;56;02 - 00;41;16;01
Bruce Feiler
Okay. I also do a lot of speaking as you do. And I'm now getting more and more speeches, you know, invitations for large corporations who now have mental, well, you know, mental health. Yeah. Conversations. You can't. I wrote a piece on the Harvard Business Review about this. You cannot the old days when you can say, go deal with your personal problem on your own, and I'll send you a fruit basket.

00;41;16;03 - 00;41;38;18
Bruce Feiler
Okay? You can't do that anymore because everybody's personal life is now in the office. And that that that membrane is more porous than it's ever been. As I was, as I was starting to say earlier. So, yes, we may go through a downturn. Is it going to be as deep as the the 0809 downturn? Maybe. Probably not. Maybe it'll be shallower.

00;41;38;18 - 00;41;58;21
Bruce Feiler
We don't even yet know if it's going to have a large scale layoffs. People are starting to talk about a downturn that doesn't have large scale layoffs, because companies learned in the last time that rehiring is too is too challenging. But the number of people who have quit their job okay. Every month. Okay. And you know this, the quick rate has gone up every year except for one for 20 years.

00;41;58;22 - 00;42;19;10
Bruce Feiler
These are long term trends, that are happening in the workplace. And meaning is inseparable from work. We know all of the data. You know it four times better than I do, that every generation. Okay. We know in the family space, right. And you look at the numbers, they're very, very clear in the dad space in particular okay.

00;42;19;11 - 00;42;38;23
Bruce Feiler
The extra dads more involved in boomer dads, millennial dads, more involved, than extra dads and the z ers, insofar as the older z-ers out there are also saying we want equality, right? That's the generation of of of of the rewriting the gender roles in real time. So people don't always meet those goals, but that is the goals.

00;42;38;23 - 00;42;51;08
Bruce Feiler
It's the same thing with meaning. Every generation has said, I want more meaning out of my life and more meaning out of my work than ever before. And this a 6 or 18 month recession is not going to change this generation.

00;42;51;08 - 00;42;52;03
Paul Sullivan
The desire for that.

00;42;52;03 - 00;43;16;23
Bruce Feiler
That's what I feel. I feel like that we that that we are moving from a means based economy to a meaning based economy and that that is an inexorable change that has yet to reach everybody but will reach more and more people. And that the worker fundamentally has the ability to write their own story. The days when you have to do what your mother, your parents, wanted you to do, or do what you did, you know you majored in college.

00;43;16;27 - 00;43;24;14
Bruce Feiler
That is long gone. Okay. And, I've written a whole new book that will help you, in fact, write your own work story that.

00;43;24;17 - 00;43;48;21
Paul Sullivan
I love it. So that's where we're going to end, Bruce Filer, thank you, so much for being my guest on the Company of Dads podcast. I always like to end with, that was a great way to end. But a lighter question, direct dad, advice from you, I have to ask, was being a circus clown did that give you any sort of leg up in parenting particularly, you got teenage daughters, you know, finishing up high school, being a clown any like.

00;43;48;21 - 00;43;52;15
Bruce Feiler
Up in the moment of highest tension. Crack a joke.

00;43;52;17 - 00;43;58;08
Paul Sullivan
There you go. That's all we need now, Bruce. Thank you again for me. And my guest is have been wonderful.

00;43;58;10 - 00;44;00;21
Bruce Feiler
Best of luck with the company. We're all cheering you on, Paul. Thank you.