The Long Strange Trip Podcast Episode 1: Navigating Life's Transitions

About the Episode:

In this inaugural episode of the Long Strange Trip, host Josh Patrick introduces the podcast's mission to explore significant life transitions, including work-life integration, retirement as reinvention, and facing mortality. He emphasizes the importance of community and shared wisdom in navigating these challenges, positioning himself as a fellow traveler rather than an expert. The conversation delves into the lies we tell ourselves about work, retirement, and death, and sets the stage for a deeper exploration of these themes in future episodes.


Transcription:

Josh Patrick (00:01.112)

Welcome to the Long Strings Trip. I'm Josh, I'm the host of show. We're going to dig into six areas together. Finding real work-life integration instead of that brutal 95-5 split too many business owners live with. We're going to approach retirement as an actual reinvention rather than just stopping work. And we're facing death honestly and avoiding PTSD around it.

We're also building resilience when life throws us curveballs. We're sharing wisdom across generations. And finally, we're understanding the patterns that show up in all our transitions. I'm not coming at this as an expert with all the answers. I'm a fellow traveler, figuring this stuff out in real time, especially now as I navigate my own dual cancer diagnosis at 73. Welcome to the long, strange trip. I'm glad you're here.

Hey, how are you? This is Josh Patrick and you're at the Long Strange Trip Podcast. This is our first episode and the whole purpose of the episode is to give you a little bit of information about what the Long Strange Trip is about, why I started it and why I hope you come along and you agree to play with us on it. So you know what's strange? We spend more time planning a two week vacation than we do thinking about the three biggest transitions we'll ever face.

how we show up in our businesses and more importantly at home. What happens when we leave our business or our job or retire and how we deal with our own mortality. Now I'm Josh and this is the Long Strange Trip, which we've already said, but it's really important that we explore these areas. are massive life phases. as fellow travelers understand, I am not playing the role of a guru.

I am not playing the role of an expert. I am playing the role of a seeker and a student, hopefully just like you. And I have not even come close to figuring it all out. Even in areas where I do have some expertise, we're going to look for people who have other ideas about the same way you can get there. But the truth is there is no one way to do anything. There's always several ways to get there.

Josh Patrick (02:26.522)

They may be similar. may sound the same. They may be cousins, but they're not the same. So let's talk about why and how this all came about. I wasn't happy in my business and I didn't know I wasn't happy in my business. And this went on for four or five years. And the reason I finally figured out I wasn't happy in my business was that I didn't do the stuff I needed to do to keep the business going.

I wasn't willing to do cold calls. I wasn't willing to get on sales call. I wasn't even willing to really push stuff hard to get people to have a business conversation with me. The truth was I had become bored, unhappy, and wasn't happy with the value that I was adding to other people. And on top of that, playing the expert role in being the guru.

is not a fun place to be all the time. It's fun once in a while. I I enjoy doing it. I'm very good at it. But the truth is it's not intellectually stimulating because you do basically the same thing over and over and over. And here's what I learned over the last six months. I learned that I was much happier being a student and a seeker than I am as an expert. So how could I go about doing that?

And that's where the long strange trip came from. It essentially is from that need to do what I find interesting and what I hope you'll find interesting over. You know, here I am. I'm a 73 year old business owner. I'm currently navigating two different types of cancers at the same time. And I decide the long strange trip is not a destination. It's a journey itself. It has critical framing.

I'm not your expert. I'm your fellow seeker. So let's talk about the problem of the default path that people go on. There's essentially three big lies that we live with. First, let's talk about the business lie. And this is for business owners, but it also could be just as true for people working in large corporations and they're working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. Here's the business lie. We work hard now.

Josh Patrick (04:46.001)

Life comes later. We have a challenge with that. And it's a really big challenge. And the challenge is we have the 95 split that I think destroys families, where you're spending 95 % of your time and your effort and your intellectual thought on your business or your job. And your family gets 5 % of your time. And we say, well, we're just going to do this just until, just until the next thing happens, just until we get the next client.

Just until we have another person come on board, just until we have someone to take some of the pressure off me. But here's the problem with just until. Just until goes on for decades and decades and decades. And before we know it, 30, 40 years has gone by. Our family hardly knows us. Our family has made other plans on how they want to live their life.

and it doesn't include us. And you wake up one day, you're 60, 65, 70 years old, and you realize that that most important unit in your life, your family isn't there, and you're not going to know why. Unless you decide to look in the mirror and you decide that I need to think about how I can do this differently. How can I repair these relationships?

Here's something that happened with me. I really screwed this up. I truly screwed this up because I kept treating my eight year olds, seven year olds, 10 year olds, like they were employees at my business. I would do command and control with them instead of answering them questions, being part of their life. Heck, I was hardly around at all. I was just always talking to myself. Well, we're going to run out of money. If I don't do this.

then we really have a problem. And that was actually true. And for a lot of business owners, it is true. We're working and we're swimming upstream, trying to keep our business afloat and we work hard at it. And by the time we get the business afloat, we don't know how to do anything else because we haven't really thought about it. So that's number one lie. Number two lie is a retirement lie. And this is you're going to figure out who you are once you stop working. But here's the problem. The phone stops.

Josh Patrick (07:10.246)

ringing immediately. You become a non-person with all those people who you thought were really good friends of yours. retirement isn't about stopping and going and playing golf. It's about reinvention, at least in my opinion. And we're going to investigate what does reinvention mean with retirement? How can we look at retirement and make it a really different and important part of our life?

I'm hoping that this project, the Long Strange Trip, is going to do that for me. But the question is, what's going to do it for you? And finally, we have financial planning does not equal identity planning. No one is going to warn you about the emptiness that you're going to feel after you leave and the phone stops ringing. If you've done financial planning, great. I'm glad you've done that. If you have enough money for retirement,

Glad I'm great you've done that also. But here's something I think you really need to be thinking about. What does reinvention look like for you as you move from working in your business or working in your job and moving into retirement? And the third thing, which I think is a really big thing, is probably the most interesting part of the investigations or the thought processes we're going to work on, which is the death lie. You know, you don't have to think about it till you have to.

Boy, that's such a bad idea. You one of the things I believe, and I've talked to a whole bunch of healthcare professionals about this, I kind of believe that for many of us and probably most of us, we have PTSD around our death. We have PTSD around our mortality. We don't want to think about it. We don't want to talk about it. We'll deal with it when we have to deal with it. That's sort of how I hear people talk all the time, but that's not setting up a good death. I mean, the truth is we're going to die.

And most of us have really, really hard times thinking about it. We don't even want to do the basic planning. And what does that do? That provides chaos after we're leaving behind is that fair to our family? know, avoidance doesn't do us any good. All it does is deal with the clarity that we need. So if the default path isn't working, and clearly for most of us, including me, what's the alternative?

Josh Patrick (09:34.909)

That's what we're here to figure out together. So we have six areas of investigation. Why are these six areas really important? Why are these six areas things that I would really want us to be talking about? So let's talk about how we're framing this up. I've organized this exploration in the six areas, not because I have all the answers, but because these are territories we need to map together. So let's talk about the six areas.

We've already talked about the first three, but we'll go over that again. How do we do work differently beyond the 95, five split? How do we have different energy at work versus home? Now that's a really big deal. And this is especially true for my friends who are first generation business owners or type A's who have great energy, lots of direction, lots of really great stuff that they do at work where they motivate people. Sometimes they have to be blunt.

Sometimes they have to ask good questions, but the truth is they are employees, team members. They're not part of our family. And more importantly, they're not eight years old. They're 30, 35, 40, 50, 60, maybe 70 years old. They've grown up. Now our employees and team members do have baggage they bring with them from the way they grew up. But what I'm talking about here is how can you

run a great business, manage a great business, and at the same time have great energy for helping your children become responsible adults. And I don't mean becoming responsible adults because you yell at them and you tell them exactly what they need to do. This means you need to be listening to them. You need to be asking them really good questions and different questions. I want to work with people who have some ideas about this. I blew it.

And the challenge with blowing it is I'm now 73 years old. I've mentioned that. I'll probably mention that a lot. At the same time, I didn't build great relationships with my children. I don't have the relationships I would like to have my children. The relationships I have with my children are not the ones that I think are valuable for me, certainly. And I even don't think it's valuable for them. But the question is, because I've closed them down,

Josh Patrick (12:02.026)

By the way, I brought them up. They're scared to have an honest conversation with me because they don't know how I'm going to react. Because when they were young, I often reacted with anger. And as an adult, I often rang, reacted with, I know more than you, so you should listen to what I say and only what I say. Remember, this is a really big deal. So we need to find out ways to do this. I'm looking for seekers who are thinking about this themselves.

I'm thinking about experts who can come on and help us think about this. Now understand, when we bring an expert on, it's not that this is the only way to do it. They may talk about that, but I will be making sure I said, is a way, this is a path. It may not be the only path. You know, when I was in my early thirties, my children were five years old, eight and six years old.

I would treat them often like an underperforming employee, especially when they made a mistake. Now, the truth is we all know that when we make mistakes, are learning opportunities, but we don't treat them like that. And I certainly didn't at that age. So that was a real challenge that we had or I had with my kids. So that's number one. Number two is how to retire differently.

your identity reconstruction, not just actively planning your retirement. You need to start well before you retire. We need to be thinking, I don't have this all figured out. I'm not really sure what we need to be doing to have a transition from work into retirement. The truth is I'm often very lonely. Why am I very lonely? Because all my relationships were tied up in my business world.

As I've left my wealth management business and left my consulting business and stopped going to meetings about this, stopped having relationships with people. Where I live in the Burlington, Vermont area, I only have three or four people who I talk to on a semi-regular basis. And this is not a regular basis. So if can, are weeks that go by where I don't talk to anybody, that's a problem for me. It may become a problem for you. If you go through this for a lot of people, I know.

Josh Patrick (14:20.845)

They've done this well. They have full and fulfilling relationships that are outside their business, outside their jobs. I really didn't do a good job of this. So I'm hoping I'm going to have people to come along and help me to figure this out. And third, we have how to face death differently. And this is the practical stuff everybody skips. We need to have conversations about what a good death looks like. We need to have conversations about

Well, what happens if you get cancer? I've got two types of cancer. I'm going to be talking with people about what are the options that I have if the cancer becomes one that's going to take my life. And there's a pretty good chance that's going to happen. I don't know if it's going to be this year, three years from now, 10 years from now, but it's likely that's what's going to get me because both cancers are aggressive and both cancers right now are sort of behaving themselves.

But my experience is only a matter time before that changes. And when that changes, what is a good death going to look like for me? Have I done what I need to do and said the same things I need to say? And that's really, really, really important for me to the things I need to say and listen to the things that people need to tell me about what their feelings are while I'm alive. I don't want wait till I'm dead before this stuff happens.

And more importantly, what have we done to make sure our affairs are in order? Too often because we have PTSD around death, we don't want to take a good look at what we need to be doing to keep our family in a great place after we're gone. You know, when you face your death, it creates clarity for the people who are living and for you as you live. You know, for me, I'm not afraid of death. I spend a lot of time thinking about it.

And when the time comes, am I going to be happy to leave this world? No. But what I am going to be happy about is I think I may have a peaceful death because of the planning that I've done around what death means for me. So let's go to number four. Number four is how to share wisdom and overcoming ageism. Now this is something that I think is really sort of drives me out of my mind. I'm 73 years old.

Josh Patrick (16:45.079)

I've been reading a book a week for over 50 years. I've attended well over a hundred programs on how to make my life better and how to make my business better. I've taught a ton of programs on both topics over the years. So I have, I think, gained some wisdom about some things. But here's the challenge. Nobody wants to hear it. And I've developed a ton of wisdom over the years.

That's what I think I've done. And I want to share that experience, but it's, Hey, boomer, you're an old guy. What do you know? So how do we bridge generation gaps, create value without becoming a burden? And while doing that is something that is really, really important, at least for me, probably for many other people. mean, one of the things I hear from people my age on a regular basis is nobody wants to listen to me. I've become invisible.

Well, one of the things we're going to work on in this project is how do we make ourselves visible and how do we figure out what is the value we've developed? Have we had one year of experience 50 times or we had 50 years of experience by doing different things and trying different things along the way? I'm sort of in that second camp. I know a lot of people who are very, very rigid and they've had the same experience over and over. My question becomes, where's the wisdom that's gotten developed there?

So I want to help us figure out how we create wisdom and how we share wisdom and how we get people who are 30 years younger from us to value that wisdom that we have. Now I understand this is not an issue in Japan. It's not an issue in China. This is an issue in North America. So I'm talking to North America about these things today. I'm not talking to people outside our country or outside our hemisphere. So

Let's talk about building resilience and accepting health challenges. You know, the truth is you get older, you're going to have health challenges. You get older, people don't want to listen to you. You get older and all your friends drop off by thing. We need to build resilience as we age. In fact, I think we need resilience at every age we have. And one of the gifts that we can help our children learn is how to become resilient.

Josh Patrick (19:08.42)

In today's society, becoming resilient becomes less and less because nobody takes personal responsibility. It's always somebody else's fault. For me, personal responsibility has been a touchstone for the last 40 years or so, 45 years or so of my life. It certainly wasn't when I was younger, but personal responsibility and building resilience. We're going to investigate this. There are tons of people who work on resilience. There are tons of experts who have resilience.

There's tons of people I believe who have shown resilience and have great stories to tell. So what we want to do next is we worked on resilience and then we go into what we call transitions planning. Now here's what I've learned, or I learned this at the modern elder Academy. Actually there's 26 minor transitions we have in six major transitions in our life.

Transitions have different stages. Some people think there's three stages, some people think there's four stages. In the way I work in transitions, I find four stages works really well. I'll be looking for other people who have different ideas about transitions other than I that can help us think about transitions in different ways. But the truth is, if there's 26 minor transitions and six major transitions,

We're probably going through multiple transitions at multiple stages at the same time. And my God, that is just confusing as heck. So we need to be working on that and coming up with what that means. So why these six? These aren't random topics. There's a territories that I want to navigate together. And I believe that if we focus on those six areas and there's some sub areas.

I haven't made gratitude into a major area, but I'm going to tell you that we're going to be talking about gratitude a lot because often we're not showing that we're grateful for others. And when we don't show that we're grateful, there isn't a lot of impetus on their part to do stuff for us. So gratitude is going to be something we'll do. And I'm sure we're going to come up with lots of other sub areas, but those are the six major areas that we're going to keep tying back to again and again and again.

Josh Patrick (21:26.033)

We can't solve everything, but we can work on these six things and I bet we can come up with better answers than most of us have today. So let's put together the pieces. We're fellow travelers. We're not experts. We're not gurus. We are going to be students. And here's why this matters so much. Why I keep saying we and together instead of positioning myself as a guy with all the answers. Number one, nobody has it all figured out.

Even experts are often guessing, but they're guessing with some information that they have that they've learned over the years in their narrow area. I'm more of a fan of being a generalist. So I'm going to be looking at this from a generalist point of view, not an expert point of view. We're going to be looking out to move out the level that we're working. We're not going to be looking to narrow it down. So the wider we can make it, I think the better information we're going to have.

And the better choices that we can make too. You know, one thing I've learned, life is pretty complex and it's too complex for one size fit all answers. You know, I'm navigating a lot of this stuff in real time. I don't know where I'm going or how I'm going to get there a lot of times. And when that happens, I'm going to tell you about it. I've got plenty of warts and things that I've done wrong. I've talked about my children and how I didn't do so well with them.

Well, wait until I tell you stories about my business or what I did with friends when I was younger, when I was being a know-it-all. And now, well, they're all gone because who wants to deal with a know-it-all? There's many things that we've done and I've done. And I hope to lead by example in this area. And I hope that that example will help you to share where your warts are also, because it's the warts where we learned from.

as long as we're learning to look in the mirror. And finally, the best thing happens in community. You know, in my experience, when we have a group of people to get together and we work on something, the crowd can often come up with better perspectives, better different areas, get it behind the blind spots than the experts can. And here's something else I know. A lot of times the questions matter more than the answers. You know, for years I've said, you know,

Josh Patrick (23:52.598)

The best thing I can do is ask a good question. And the things that I've been struggling with might be exactly what you need to hear. What you're struggling with might be exactly what I need to hear. The seeker model, in my opinion, is more honest. We're all figuring this out as we go. Mistakes and struggles are data. They're not failures. They're a learning experience. And we have to give ourselves permission to not

have it be perfect. This is a conversation, not a lecture. So what this means practically, I'll share what I'm learning and struggling with. You'll bring your experiences and questions. We'll ask better questions together. Nobody's getting graded on how well they navigate. So here's what you can expect going forward. Each episode dives deep into one area. Real stories, honest struggles, practical experiments.

Questions that make you think versus answers that shut down conversation. Frameworks we can test together, not rigid systems. Understand that the long strange trip is really the long strange trip that we've gone through in our lives. It's not the same for each of us. In fact, each of our trips are different. And I use the long strange trip on purpose. You may have recognized the line from the Grateful Dead song, Trucking.

that this comes from. Essentially, the Grateful Dead, I've seen them over hundred times. They've been an integral part of my life. We'll probably bring some music in every once in while. happen to love jam bands. And we'll learn about what we love about things and we'll learn, well, maybe we should give this stuff up. But the truth is, with the Grateful Dead, there are tons of lessons for us to learn. And one is, we've all been, and we all are, on long strange trips.

So this is Josh Patrick. You're at the Long Strange Trip. I'm really glad you watched or listened to this first episode. I hope you got some value from it. I hope you found out what we're about. And I hope you come back to listen to us again. Thanks a lot.

Josh Patrick (26:09.224)

Thanks for spending this time with me today. I really appreciate you being part of this journey. I'd be grateful if you'd leave an honest rating and review. It helps other people find these conversations, lets me know what's landing with you and what isn't. If you love the show, give us five stars. And if you hate it, give it one star and I'll just cry a little bit. Keep asking the hard questions. Keep being honest about what's difficult and remember

We're all just trying to figure this out together. I'll talk to you next time on the Long Strings Trip. Thanks for stopping by.