Josh Johnson

I suffered from burnout a lot in nursing and that taught me how to compartmentalize, but then learning that compartmentalizing was also burning me out because you have to kind of separate your humanity from what's really going on and that wasn't working for me.

So what I learned was,

Their silver lining is in every single person's story.

So whether you're talking to someone, when I speak to these strangers, it's without question two to three hours long every time.

Throughout that two to three hour journey, there is a lot of tragedy.

But if you can gather the ability to look at this person and say, but they're here telling me the story.

They survived this event that they're going through.

That gives me a sense of almost pride to say like,

We're humans.

That shows how strong humans can be, how resilient they can be.

So when I go home after hearing a tragic story, I'm not so much sad as I am uplifted to know the person survived that.

When going through the book, you know, you've explained to me how you came across the questions in your mind that you want to ask and everything, but were there any stories that particularly stuck out to you?

Because the book is full of them.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was hard because we interviewed hundreds of strangers.

It was me and my fiancée, and she traveled the country with me.

She was my photographer for the book, by the way.

And she's a nurse, so she's not a photographer.

But so we interviewed hundreds of strangers.

And so even dwindling that down to the hundred that are in this book was very hard.