Glenn lays out three scenarios about how society could go from here, not necessarily all of them positive, but they are at least possible. He also talks about how we could find a group of Americans that are so Martin Luther King-ish that they are willing to stand peacefully through anything, including Black Lives Matter.
00:00:22.600It's pretty interesting and hopefully won't ruin your weekend entirely.
00:00:26.100Bruce Feiler joins us. You know, there's been a lot of times here that we've had difficult situations to deal with over the past few months.
00:00:35.420He's got a great book about changing the way we look at those negative events.
00:00:40.660It's called Life is in the Transitions, Mastering Change at Any Age.
00:00:46.020It's a pretty helpful thing to see and hear about right now.
00:00:50.560And Maximo Alvarez is a guy who's a Cuban immigrant and is warning that, look, we've seen this before.
00:07:56.340You know, if I would have said this to you, if I would have said this to you six years ago, I wouldn't have said it because it wouldn't have seemed possible.
00:15:16.820Well, I have to say, Glenn, you were in my mind a lot as I was working on this project, because not only have you had a lot of pivot points and transitions in your life,
00:15:27.520but you've also been incredibly open as a public figure in talking about them and sort of helping to model the idea that the old kind of fantasy linear life that we were told where you'd have, you know, low-level job, mid-level job, high-level job, right?
00:15:42.640You would date, and you'd get married.
00:15:44.600You go to the, like, that that's gone.
00:15:46.660And so, you know, you mentioned when we met, and you were exactly right, it was more than probably a dozen years ago at this point.
00:15:54.460I mean, I was working on America's Profit at that time, and, you know, I was having a kind of linear uphill life, and then I just got walloped by life, right?
00:16:06.660And as you know, my book, Life is in the Transitions that we're talking about now, begins with my dad, who has Parkinson's, never depressed a minute in his life in Savannah, Georgia, tries to take his own life, actually multiple times in the course of a month.
00:16:19.900And so I start this kind of storytelling project with my dad, where I send him a question every Monday morning about his life.
00:16:27.000Like, tell me about the house you grew up with, the toys, the, you know, how'd you become an Eagle Scout?
00:16:58.120I went on this journey, crisscrossed the country.
00:17:00.640I got hundreds of life stories of Americans, all 50 states, like every state in this country, people who lost homes, lost limbs, changed careers.
00:17:09.700I have military veterans who lost limbs in the Middle East.
00:17:13.240I have, you know, alcoholics who got sober, people who got out of bad marriage, incredible stories of recovery and redemption.
00:17:20.880And I then spent a year, like, with a team of 12 people, like, looking through, trying to find a toolkit to help all of us as we have to manage these life quakes.
00:17:30.160And then, oh, my gosh, lo and behold, this book comes out at a moment when the entire planet is going through a life quake at the same time, which is why this book out this week has just sort of exploded out of the gates.
00:17:42.700It's interesting, Bruce, because I've been sad.
00:17:49.180We can look at what's happening to us right now and take it in a negative way and be angry and let it destroy us and say that it has destroyed us.
00:18:01.380Or we can say it's going to put my feet on a different path, and I don't know what it is yet, but it's going to be good and search for the meaning out of out of suffering and everything else.
00:18:14.860And when we honestly do that with an optimistic spirit and a trusting spirit, it changes everything, everything.
00:18:25.900Well, I love your idea that we're going into the weekend and we need a bit of positivity.
00:18:29.980And so here's what I discovered is that the life quake itself, like the massive change that comes over us, it can be positive.
00:18:37.760Having children is often a life quake.
00:18:40.080Starting a new venture is a life quake.
00:18:42.020I have a story in my book about a truck driver who became a male nurse.
00:18:47.100Like people can make these changes and they are positive, constructive, or they can be negative, right?
00:18:51.480You can have a diagnosis, you can lose your job, you can lose a loved one.
00:18:54.840But the transition that comes out of the life quake, that must be voluntary.
00:18:59.560Like you have to lean in to decide to go through the roadmap I'm going to lay out for you and take the steps to turn that situation, that negativity, into positivity.
00:19:34.900The question is, do you want to make the choice to go into the transition and get yourself to a better place?
00:19:42.560So this is also – I mean, it's deeply personal, but it is the answer to almost all of the strife that we're feeling right now.
00:19:51.980Not just in COVID, not just in the struggle, but also in the apparent non-forgiveness of sins of the past.
00:20:01.980If you choose to take the things that have happened in your life and choose to look – look at Nelson Mandela – and choose and say, okay, those things happened.
00:20:26.640And it's the message that I think much of America is missing right now.
00:20:30.500Well, this is why I think – and I wrote it in the Wall Street Journal this week and in the New York Times today,
00:20:36.780and it's the reason this book is sitting in the top 20 of Amazon right now – is because learning to master life transitions turns out to be the most urgent life skill people have right now, people need right now.
00:20:48.420And we haven't really talked about transitions.
00:20:52.100The last kind of big book on this was 50 years ago.
00:20:55.520And I've sort of been discovering that we have many – life comes out of them much faster now.
00:21:00.320I mean, the good news is we have freedom.
00:21:01.700We can live where we want to live and believe what we want to believe, right, and be in the relationship we want to be in and have the job we want to have.
00:21:07.860But that's a greater burden on us to kind of make that choice.
00:21:11.440And so what happens is when you go into the life transition, right, you feel one of two things, either like chaotic and out of control, like I've got to do this, I've got to do that, or you feel stuck.
00:21:19.420But I know what you definitely feel, which is I'm the only one going through this.
00:21:24.060But when you sit, as I did two, three, four times across from people – you know, I have an army sergeant who had his face blown off in the Taliban on the brink of suicide, who's turned to poetry and painting and built himself anew.
00:21:41.080I have a CIA agent who lost his marriage.
00:21:44.220I have a two-time cancer survivor who climbed Mount Everest.
00:21:47.640I have incredible stories of people with addiction who overcame one, one I'm going to tell you in a minute.
00:21:53.080But when you get into this, it turns out there's kind of a structure.
00:22:33.860You're going to find people just like you who've been through this.
00:22:36.580And you're going to find things that they did that will help you almost exactly where you are right now.
00:22:43.440One of the most amazing things in my journey is – and the most clear example of it was – or maybe it was just the first example of it – was I was just asking the bigger questions of life.
00:22:58.300And I read – I began to read Plato for my own search, not because somebody assigned it to me.
00:23:06.020And I realized, I've been asking these questions from the beginning of time.
00:23:13.800These problems and crosses and solutions have been experienced since the beginning of mankind.
00:23:24.740And when we can get out of ourselves and look to others currently and to others who have accomplished something in the past, life just becomes so much easier and so much more pleasant because you start to notice the people around you who are kind of in the same place.
00:23:44.880And you start talking, you're like, right?
00:24:43.800I've always admired your way of thinking.
00:24:47.260I admire you for being one of the few people in the press who really tell our country what is going on as objectively as possible,
00:24:58.940because everybody's afraid to tell the truth, I guess.
00:25:03.620In the name of being politically correct, everybody's become literally a hypocrite.
00:25:08.860Maximo, I'm so glad to have you on, because one of the things, I've always had a big fan base of immigrants,
00:25:22.600especially the immigrants that come from communist countries in the Eastern Bloc or Cuba.
00:25:29.540And I think they have the most important voice, and it's not being highlighted.
00:25:33.860And I've got to believe that even though you were young, you remember enough of what was happening over in Cuba that it must be a little terrifying for people who came here and have seen communism and Marxism and how it overthrows countries.
00:25:57.360Glenn, it really goes further than that.
00:26:01.240I happen to have learned from mom and dad who had to migrate from Spain to Cuba at the turn of the century, running away from communism.
00:26:13.860So I knew firsthand how difficult and how painful it was for families who were being destroyed for no reason, families who had nothing to do with politics, families who had nothing to do with government.
00:26:32.600So I grew up in that environment, and then soon enough, by the time I'm 11 years old, the same thing happens in Cuba.
00:26:46.360And I remember my dad trying to convince my mom while listening to Castro's words while he was up in the mountains.
00:26:57.980He used to broadcast radio at night, you know, shortwave radio.
00:27:03.660And I remember my dad, and I mentioned this when the president was here, my dad used to tell my mother how he thought that that SOB was a communist.
00:27:14.160And my mother used to even argue with him and said, how can you say that?
00:27:21.020You know, he was raised by the Jesuits.
00:27:24.380He's a Roman Catholic, his entire family.
00:27:28.140As a matter of fact, the very Catholic church helped save his life.
00:27:34.060The very Catholic church pretty much helped finance his revolution.
00:27:37.980And then I happened to be part of a Catholic church.
00:29:14.380So I had the chance to speak in the panel when President Trump was here and just told me to tell you a story.
00:29:24.920And I'm humbled to tell you it's amazing how my little story has impacted so many people.
00:29:32.160Because I'm telling you, Glenn, my story is just one of many, many, many, many, many millions of people running away from communism, looking for the land of the free.
00:32:56.600If you look at the, just go on the library, any of the books, any of the history books, where they have these pictures coming down from the mountains, every rebel, everyone had a rosary hanging from their necks.
00:33:11.060And he always claimed that he was, as I said, católico apostólico y romano, that's Roman Catholic.
00:33:24.620And it was not until two years after he had taken all the power that he declares that he's a Marxist.
00:33:32.420And if you look at, and if you have read the book by Saul Alinsky, if you see what is happening, that's exactly what is happening in every of this country.
00:33:46.220That's what's happening in our backyard today.
00:37:33.660And I'm telling you what they have done to Goya is the best thing because I'm telling you Goya is now going to double their business because they have provided them with great free publicity.
00:37:46.920Because Goya Foods is a very great product.
00:37:51.720The owners of that company have been very, very generous for many, many years.
00:37:57.740And people who know that will help them and endorse them much more than ever before.