What do you think happened for you to... well first of all when you were four you just felt it okay and it took you up to 30. i mean you you you got in all what i would call the manly occupation so to speak yeah so what what was it that enabled you to feel free you know because one of the things you said how conventional expectations can become invisible barriers

Yeah, I had to get to rock bottom.

I mean, I was married for years before I transitioned.

I had always told my then wife that I could never be happy.

I was miserable.

I knew I had gender issues, but I couldn't fully accept that I needed to transition until I got to the point where I realized...

Here's what happened is I was doing manly, manly things.

What would you tell them?

okay is it is there a way we can tie what you do to either helping them save money or helping them make more money

yes so i'm uh in the process i think i told you this um before that but i'm writing a book And the book is on how to build this framework in your organization.

And there's three ways to increase profit margin by using this methodology.

One is you reduce the churn between changing your strategy and your execution.

So your execution activities are always directly tied to strategy.

So you don't have a mismatch.

So you're saving time and effort by just not having that mismatch.

What do you

What do you think people will miss about what it really is?

Yeah, when people hear about Burning Man, there are lots of people that have never heard of it, but the people that do hear about it typically hear about it through the news and they hear about it in terms of its spectacle, the big party, the big crowds, et cetera, the crazy costuming.

But if that's all Burning Man was, I would have gone once and had a nice experience and that would have been enough.

what really undergirds the event and the experience out there is that it operates uniquely from anything else.

And what I mean by that, it has a culture out there that's designed by 10 principles, but some of them stand out to me to be really critical to creating the event as it is.

The first one is that it's what's called a gift economy.

And what that means is You take care of yourself completely.

What do you think we are missing when it comes to building meaningful communities?

So the question is for listeners who don't know what the Burning Man experience is, can you briefly tell us what it is all about?

Yeah, it's interesting because people that have never been have only seen, either don't know about it or what they've seen is a spectacle and they just think it's a big party in the desert.

What it is is something quite a bit more nuanced than that.

It is a large event.

These days, about 80,000 people go out to this event and it's in the most... remote desert in the United States, the Black Rock Desert.

And it's on a large lake bed, a large salt flat, much like near Salt Lake City in Utah, only it is very isolated.

And they put the event out there.

Now, okay, for my final question for you, for someone listening who is feeling trapped in life or an identity they've outgrown or doesn't know what to do next or what comes next, Now, what would you tell the person about having the courage to step into the unfamiliar version of themselves?

How did you persevere through that process?

So I was certainly I was working my regular job and I had a daughter and so was raising her as well.

And I had this idea for a story that I tried to shop out to other people that I thought could write it, but nobody would buy.

Nobody would take me up on it.

So it was it was me to write it.

And I was I was I'm a business writer and a technical writer, but I didn't ever consider myself a fictional writer.

Um, so I wrote a, I wrote a draft and it was awful and I got plenty of feedback about how I can improvement.

What do you think— a lay person myself, will get out of the book in terms of just life lessons?