Bruce Viler is the author of Six consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including

Walking the Bible and Council of Daz, the presenter of two prime time series on PBS,

and the inspiration for the Council of Dad series on NBC. He kind of describes himself,

as you'll hear as an experiencer and an explainer. Growing up in Savannah, Georgia, for his

long as he can remember, he has loved going out into the world, creating powerful experiences,

then sharing what he has discovered, first in letters home, and then eventually in books and

talks and TV. He writes the this life column in the New York Times and has contributed to the New

Yorker parade and gourmet, but his latest set of experiences were ones he neither sought out

nor sought coming nor wanted for that matter. Collectively, they dropped him to his knees and

nearly took his life. Still, fueled by that sort of relentless curiosity that has been this

through line his whole life, Bruce became fascinated with the moments of profound transition

that we all experience or lifequakes as he calls them, where life afterwards just looks very

different than life looked before. So he spent years traveling the country investigating this phenomenon,

gathering and coding stories, and that has led to the groundbreaking new book Life is in the

transitions, mastering change at any age. Bruce's experiences and ideas, it really helped me reframe

and better understand how to navigate the disruptions and bigger lifequakes for which many of us,

this is something we're in the middle of right now. So it's the perfect time to dive into this

conversation cannot wait to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

For the seventh year on the Code Switch podcast, conversations about race and identity go way

beyond the day's headlines. Because we know what's part of every person is part of every story.

We're bringing that perspective with new episodes every week. Listen on the Code Switch podcast from NPR.

For me, I grew up five generations of Jews in the South. So that's actually two storytelling

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