The Rich Roll Podcast - Jedidiah Jenkins On Shaking The Sleeping Self & The Quest To Live Without Regrets

Episode Date: September 30, 2018

The late Anthony Bourdain once said, “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.” I think this quote beautifully captures the ethos of today's conversation. Travel as an agitator of self-understanding. A template to deeply explore the deep intertwined relationship that lives and breathes in that beautiful space between adventure and identity. Our cipher for this transcendent voyage — how exterior horizons influence scrutiny of our interior landscape — is many things: author, global adventurer, social entrepreneur, human rights activist, lawyer, filmmaker, and magazine publisher. But labels fail to capture what makes Jedidiah Jenkins special. Let's just call him beautiful human. I can’t quite recall how today's guest first came across my radar. What I do remember is happening upon his rather stunning Instagram feed as he neared the end of a spectacular bicycle-powered journey that took him from Oregon to Patagonia. Each photograph more arresting than the one prior, every image conveyed it’s own story that perfectly informed an engaging larger narrative. But it’s Jedidiah’s accompanying entries — beautifully composed, contemplative and quite poetic — that set his feed apart. Writings themed less by place than interior geography, it’s Instagram as dynamic journal — an experiment in blogging that camps out hundreds of miles beyond any travelogue, blog or vlog you’ve ever before seen. I was hypnotized. Who is this guy? A graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Pepperdine University School of Law, Jedidiah began his professional career as one of the founding leaders of Invisible Children, the small non-profit that overnight became world renown courtesy of a little social justice campaign you might have heard of called #Kony2012– a campaign that redefined internet virality. The progeny of adventurer journalist parents who quite famously graced the cover of National Geographic walking across America in the 1970’s, I think it’s fair to say that despite his desk-bound legal career, Jedidiah and the outdoors had a little destiny to sort out. And so, to celebrate his 30th birthday, Jedidiah quit the job he loved to unconsciously follow in his parents’ footsteps, scare himself, embrace the unknown and, like a character out of a Mark Twain novel, light out on the territory. Three years ago, I invited him on the podcast to share the story of his sixteen-month, 10,000 mile journey. To date it's one of my favorite conversations in the history of this podcast. That day I made him promise to return upon completion of the book chronicling that experience. Today is that day. This week marks the release of To Shake The Sleeping Self*. It's everything I hoped it would be. On the surface it captures his epic bicycle expedition in vivid detail. But beyond the literal, it's an elegant polemic about the search for identity, the cultivation of community, Enjoy! Rich

You know, the book is called To Shake the Sleeping Self, and there's like parts of you that need to be removed from their comfort zone. You can't do it yourself. You have to remove yourself from the routine, from the thing you know. And travel is a perfect way to do that. That's Jedediah Jenkins, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody.

How are you guys doing? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is my podcast. Welcome or welcome back. Real quick up top. Because I get tons of emails and DMs and inquiries and questions all about nutrition, how to improve the quality of your daily food intake. And there's just way too many of these for me to possibly answer. I just wanted to remind

all of you that the best way, in my opinion, to make healthy plant-based eating, not just simple, easy, and delicious, but also convenient and nutritious is by way of our Plant Power Meal Planner. Super proud of this online platform that we built that delivers thousands of totally customized plant-based recipes direct to you. You get unlimited customer support, grocery lists, even integrated with grocery delivery in most cities. And this is available for just $1.90 a week. So to learn more, go to meals.richroll.com or click on meal planner on the top menu on my website. Okay. So today we're going to talk about identity. We're going to talk about how travel and

adventure foments self-understanding. And I think a good way to launch into this is to talk a little bit about Anthony Bourdain, the master of travel and adventure. And I've been thinking a lot about Anthony in the wake of his death, and I've been doing a deep dive into a bunch of his writing and enjoying his television show. And I came across something that he said that I think is very apropos to today's conversation. Quote, travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world, you change things slightly. You leave marks behind, however small.

And in return, life and travel leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks on your body or on your heart are beautiful. Often though, they hurt. Quote. I think that beautifully captures the essence, the theme, the ethos of what I explore with today's guests. And our cipher for this exploration into the transcendent interior journey that is catalyzed by travel and adventure is none other than Jedediah Jenkins. Let me count the ways I love this man. It's very difficult to find a way to describe this individual. His formal intro just doesn't do it justice, but I'll give it to you

anyway. At 30 years old, Jed is a guy who quit his day job. He embarks on this 16-month, 10,000-mile bike trip that takes him from Oregon to Patagonia. And the idea behind this was that it would be a catalyst for pursuing Jedediah's dream of writing a book. Along the way, he chronicles his daily experiences online on Instagram. And his captions and his photographs are so stunning that he finds himself sort of an Instagram star along the way. He returns home to Los Angeles in the wake of this experience and sets about writing this book. And this is something that I explored with him about three years ago when he came on the podcast. That's episode 186, one of my favorite podcast conversations.

So if you missed that, please go back and listen to it. And we made a pact at that time that when he finished the book, that he returned to the show and tell us all about it. So today is that day. The book is called To Shake the Sleeping Self. It's what we're going to be discussing at length over the next couple hours.

And it's a book that on its surface, you're probably not surprised to hear, chronicles this expedition from Oregon to Patagonia. But really beneath the surface, it's this beautiful polemic, polemic about identity, community, what it means to struggle to find your place in the world and ultimately what it means to struggle, to find your place in the world, and ultimately, what it means to be human. And in this journey to kind of figure out how to describe Jedediah, there are a bunch of labels that you can attach to him, adventurer, social entrepreneur, author, former lawyer, and all of them certainly befit him, but they all kind of fall short. And all of them certainly befit him, but they all kind of fall short. I just think of him as a beautiful human. He's just a beautiful guy.

He's the kind of person that you want to hang out with for hours around a campfire. He's an incredible storyteller with this very elegant talent for not just words, but thoughts. He's got this unique way with the interior landscape, this facility for expressing himself, his perspective that also touches something deep, something pure and true about what is universal in all of us. And to get a sense of what I mean, all you got to do is pick any random post on his Instagram, read the caption, and I think you'll immediately understand what I'm poorly attempting to properly express. As I mentioned, I first met Jed three years ago when he came and did the podcast,

and I'm excited to pick things up where we left off. And I'm delighted to go deeper with him today. There's a few more things I want to add before we shake the sleeping self, but first. But first... with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level

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It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment, an experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, support and empower you to find the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type,

you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey.

When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. So Jedediah. I mean, Jedediah is just one of my favorite people. In episode 186, three years ago, we went deep into his backstory. So this conversation basically picks up where we left off at that point. We discussed the new book, of course, To Shake the Sleeping Self, which comes out this week, October 2. And I admit, embarrassingly, I had not yet read it when we did this podcast, which is unlike me. I always try to read the books of my guests, but it was due to a snafu getting me the book in time, blah, blah, blah.

But I'm way steep in it now, and I cannot recommend it enough. So please pick up that book immediately. This is, like I said, really a conversation about identity, Jedediah's journey with identity. But really the struggle we all confront in trying to figure out who we are and where we fit in the world. We talk about faith, sexuality, self-acceptance, the role of travel and adventure in this search for personal truth. We talk about what it means to defy the social contract, to exit out of entrapment. We discuss rites of passage, the writing process, the role of mentors, what it means to be eternally teachable, to be devoted to the truth. And if all of this

sounds a little bit ephemeral, I get it. I understand where you're coming from, but I can tell you it all weaves together beautifully in this conversation. So, let's have it. I'll be like driving and something will pop into my head like, oh man, I got to remember to do that thing. And I just have a Sharpie in my car and I write it. And draw on your hand. Yeah, so I don't forget. And then this is what happens when you're over 50. I looked at it the next morning and I have no idea what K means. You're like, I'm sure it's an important K. Yeah. I know it means something and I'm just waiting.

I'm waiting for that moment where it dawns on me. And I realize the moment has passed. This always happens to me where right as I'm going to bed, I'll have a thought, like an interesting thing that I'm like to bed, I'll have a thought, like an interesting thing that I'm like, want to write about. And I'm like, okay,

it's so clear to me right now, I'll remember this. And then I wake up and it's gone. Of course. So now like, I type it into my phone and I know that I do that.

Cool. Well, wait till you're 52. Yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, I already have the memory of a nervous chipmunk

who doesn't know where any of their acorns are, you know? I'm just I mean, I already have the memory of a nervous chipmunk who doesn't know where any of their acorns are, you know? I'm just like, uh, uh, uh. So. Well, welcome. It's been three years since I've seen you. I feel like we had this amazing conversation the last time that you did this oh so long ago. And I just remember thinking, we're going to be best friends. We're going to hang out all the time. And this is the first time that I've seen you. I don't know what happened. Well, LA is a big place and you live like in the mountains, like a hidden oak valley somewhere. Something like that. Yeah.

That was a barrier. That was a barrier. Like I have best friends who live in Santa Monica and I'm like, you live in Dubai, have a great life. Right. Well, you're an East Sider and you're the first person that I've had over to the downtown outpost of the podcast. We're breaking in this new space and it's very exciting to be in downtown and now on Proximate. So perhaps we will part ways after this and rejoin for social frivolity. Yeah. Well, there's so many restaurants and things down here that I need a reason to try. Right. Well, I'll go with you. There we go. When I go on your Instagram, I'm like, he's always hanging out with super cool people

having a great time. Like I have FOMO looking at your Instagram. But there's a lot of problems with social media. But one of the good things is that even though I haven't seen you in three years, I still feel very connected to you and everything that you're doing. So I'm just delighted to have you here today.

I love talking to you and everything that you're doing. So I'm just delighted to have you here today. I love talking to you. I mean, we talked for three hours last time and I felt like it was 30 minutes. It's such a fun mind meld. So I'm happy to be back. Well, I'm excited to get into it with you today. Although I will admit at the outset, I'm feeling very naked right now. I'm like a control freak about this whole thing. And when I have a guest on, I do tons of research. And quite often somebody has a book coming out and I make a point of reading that book. So I know what to talk to them about. And we had this conversation offline over the last day, because your book is coming out. I have not had the opportunity to read it yet. And we wanted to go ahead with this anyway. So we're going to talk about a book that I have not read, which I think is very appropriate because no one listening to this has read it either. So it's like them getting to ask me questions of like, why should I read this?

Right. But the ballast of like, who's in control of this podcast has shifted. Now you have to shoulder some responsibility to make it go. Well, but also that kind of makes sense. Like I need to convince you that it's worth your time, you know, and that's hopefully what I do. Right. Well, first of all, I'm super proud of you that you got this done when we first spoke. It was the very beginning of this adventure. You had set about beginning to crack this book open. The very beginning. And it took you three years, but you did it. Yeah. It took me about two years to do it, and then you turn turn it in and then it's a year until it comes out more or less you know so there's a lot of refining and and all these amazing details that publishers

are really good at which i am not and then it exists which so fun like it was it was so nascent and such like a dream in my head and so scary and a mountain that I could see from the valley when we first spoke. And now it's a physical thing that I can hold in my hands that now is given away to strangers who it'll become their experience now. They love it. They hate it. It means nothing to them. Like I can't control that anymore. It's now out.

How do you feel about that? control that anymore. It's now out. How do you feel about that? I feel pretty Zen about it because I live in LA surrounded by a bunch of artists who make art. They make TV shows, they make music, and I've witnessed them process this experience where they work on an album for years and it, boom, it comes out. Maybe there's some chatter about it, maybe not. And then they're like, wow, like what do I do? It's not like when you give birth to a child and now you have to raise the child forever. It's out and it's a thing.

And then whether it catches the zeitgeist of culture or not, there's not a lot you can do about it. Right. there's not a lot you can do about it. Right. I would say one distinction perhaps is that being a writer and putting a book out in the world, there's a certain responsibility that you have as the author to help people care about it.

If you're a musician, if you're making a TV show, you've got a gigantic infrastructure behind you to get people interested in watching that television program. It's a little bit different when you write a book. Yes, you have the publisher and that publishing house has a publicist and all that kind of stuff. But one thing I've learned is you really have to carry that mantle yourself. And I know you're doing that. You're going to be gone on a book tour for a while. Yeah, I'm doing just a few book events

and then we'll see if other ones manifest because I really enjoy talking to people live. It's really fun. But I don't, I mean, yes, I do carry that mantle because I believe my intention with writing the book was write the book I wish I could have read when I was 23. And my identity was totally in flux.

And I was evangelical Christian and gay and didn't know how to reconcile those things and was doing my best. And I wished I had somebody a little further along that I could find that would speak my language. that I could find that would speak my language because a lot of times the sexuality faith thing is such a precipice that when people when people really reconcile it their faith and their their they're so wounded by the tradition in which they were raised that they reject it completely and so when I was still in it I was trained to fear people who rejected the faith as deceived and wrong. And so I feared them. So I couldn't find someone who was still speaking my language who could, like, usher me into a new way of thinking. And so I feel the burden of, like, doing my best to make sure young me,

whatever that looks like, gets the chance to read this book. It's interesting. You rejected the notion of being the rejecter. And it's like this journey to finding this middle place of comfort with faith and your sexuality. And on the face, like we chatted a little bit about this in email,

like on the face of the book, it a little bit about this in email, like on the face of the book, it sort of seems like this is going to be a book about like finding your passion and like lighting out on the territory and like, you know, exploring your, you know, finding, you know, finding your dream by like rejecting corporate America. And perhaps that's, you know, the, the hook on the lure that might bring in that young reader. But then you kind of hoodwink them and take them on this journey that has a lot more depth and nuance to it. Yeah, which I think is a big part of being human, where you, especially when you're young, have lofty goals, big ideas for your future, and you go forth and reach for them, and then you might realize that they're counterfeit, and they're not what you thought, and you reject them, and you try something else. And really, all of that pendulum swing,

seesawing of life and seasons of life is a search for self-acceptance, identity, completion, wholeness, and walking in that. And so what I thought was, I want my dream career and I want to be a writer and I want to be known as an adventurous guy who does risky things, was really kind of the smoke from a deeper fire of I want to be okay with me. And my bike trip really started peeling those layers back. Like once it got real hard, once it got no longer cool and fun, and it just became laborious, and I really wanted to quit and all these things, it started to, it started to teach me lessons that I didn't even anticipate. Right. Like, am I doing this because this is what I really want to do? Or am I doing this because I want to know, be known as somebody

who would do this? Exactly. Which is, I think a lot of people never differentiate those two things and they don't realize that they're actually performing in such a way to be known as blank. But it was in the doing that you had to, the doing was the vehicle for answering that question for yourself. Right. There's a lot of talk in the Christian world and maybe outside of it as well about what legacy will you leave? Like, what's your legacy? What's your legacy? Which is a beautiful idea, but also is the same thing as how do I want people to talk about me? Like, what will my reputation be? And I don't know.

I think if you're worried about your reputation rather than worried about who you are first and let your reputation radiate out and don't worry about how you're coming across, worry about who you are and then how you come across will be great. I think people get the dominoes out of order. Yeah, well, it's difficult. It's really difficult.

Because that requires the hard work, the heavy lifting of looking inward. And I think most people are either afraid of that or we're just socially conditioned to not do that and to get our validation externally. I listened the other day to your Yuval Harari interview, which was fantastic. It's the best one I've heard of him yet. And it's not often that you listen to a podcast and change your behavior the next day. But I've never meditated in my life except like once when my friend gave me a group meditation for my birthday. And the way you guys spoke about his meditation practice, and really specifically when he said 18 years ago he did, is it Vipassana?

Vipassana. And his teacher told him to just think about his breathing for 10 minutes, and he couldn't do it for 10 seconds. And just being centered and starting your day like that. I woke up today and sat in my bed and found like a YouTube guided thing. And just grounded myself in my body and really listened to my breathing for 10 minutes. And then if a thought came in, I observed it outside of that thought and let it float away like a balloon. And it was this amazing moment where I started my day realizing that I exist,

that I am here, that that is amazing, and that I am worthy. I don't know. It was this- In just one 10-minute meditation. In one, in this tiny little moment of your day, just starting your day like that. And it was, I don't know, it was really impactful and simple and felt like a little blessing on the day. And I think it's going to be a new practice. I mean, Yuval, it does 30, 45, 60 day silent retreats and meditates two hours a day. You know, we'll see if I get there. Well, it's super intimidating when you hear that. Right. But when you hear him say, yeah, he couldn't go 10 seconds without, you know, his mind attacking him. And then in the wake of these three gigantic books that have quite

literally reshaped culture and how we talk about so many issues, for him to credit those books, the ideas that he formulated in order to write those books, almost solely to his meditation practice is one of the most profound, impactful things that are here. The through line that really hit me and was the impetus of the challenge that changed my behavior was, he said, it teaches you how to focus or the way he says it focus or I love his accent and um

I really it's very hard for me to focus on anything for more than 10 seconds I mean we have our obviously our phones you have someone coming in the room there's a leaf blower outside, your brain is leaping constantly. Maybe now more than it's ever been. And the ability and writing this book taught me that I really struggle with focus. I could write, I had to do 20 minute spurts and then give myself 10 minutes allowed to look at my phone and then 20 minutes again, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. It was like, that's how I wrote the whole book. I think you've all wrote sapiens like a year after we did our first podcast. And he's honest, he just, this is the thing, his ability to focus is extraordinary because he exercises that muscle through meditation. And I was like, wow, if I could focus,

imagine the clarity of thought. And I was thinking as I was going to bed last night, which is why I took a note of it, reflecting on that podcast. There are like three types of thinking in the world. There's like the particulate thinker, the categorical thinker, and then the systems thinker. And the particulate thinker only responds to the like thing right in front of their face, which is I think most people, they don't analyze their life.

They're not thinking about an issue. They're thinking about reacting. They're reacting every moment. The categorical thinker maybe is somebody who like writes for the Washington Post about politics. They know a lot about a category and they think about it in a little bigger picture. But if I asked them about psychology or the environment, they would be like, I don't know anything about that. Yuval is a true systems thinker. He flies above the earth

and looks at the ecosystem of all things and somehow can synthesize it and pull the relevant patterns out and just speak it so crisply and clearly where it makes the world make a little more sense. And I know I'm a systems thinker. I'm nowhere near him, but that's like, I always am like feeling and absorbing the patterns that transpose over everything, like the unity of truth through nature, human behavior. I just see like a unity in the way things are. And I wanna exercise that muscle.

I think it would be a gift to humanity if you did that. I mean, I think I agree with you. I think what's unique about you and perhaps what distinguishes you from Yuval's approach is that your gift is in, yes, you're a systems thinker and you can find this unity, but it's all through the prism of your own personal experience. And you convey it with a personal truth that also strikes a court of universal truth. And I think that's why everyone connects to your writing so deeply because you may be talking about something that happened to you

or something that happened to you, you know, with respect to a relationship that you have, but we can all find some commonality in that experience. Like that's, that's where I feel your power and your strength is in what you write. Wow, thank you. Well, I... Yuval's not, he doesn't talk about like, he's not filtering it through his own personal experience. It's very, it's sort of antiseptic, you know?

Yeah, it's, yeah. And I mean, that's the kind of beauty of, if you look at the world like an orchestra, everyone has their instrument and their note to play. And each one brings its own important moment to the symphony. And maybe the way I communicate what I've learned or a truth or a feeling, the way that I communicate will impact someone more than the antiseptic, just history synthesized by a different type of book. And that's why I like encourage people when they're like, I don't even know,

I don't have anything original to say, you know, I don't know if I should write. I don't. And I'm like, no one has lived your life in that exact way. If you can just write truthfully about your experience, that will have value because you exist and you have value, period. But it requires you to connect deeply

with your interior life. And you have that. Meditation aside, whether you never meditate again, you're very in touch with your emotional landscape and you have an ability to bring voice to that? I think I've thought a lot about that because I don't know why I am that way, but I think it has to do with when I was a kid and realizing I was gay and realizing the world was not made for me, I didn't feel safe. I didn't think, oh, I'm not

safe, but I didn't feel like I was fitting in. And in that moment, my brain got real curious about how everything works. I needed to understand the lay of the land so that I could find ways to fit in and not get lost. And so very early on, I learned to like jump up above the city and look where the roads go so I don't get lost. Where a lot of people, if you're just like handsome or pretty in eighth grade and everything's working great for you and you had no awkward moment, you just float right on through and you never even think, how is this happening? You're just reacting and it's working out for you and you had no awkward moment, you just float right on through and you never even think, how is this happening? You're just reacting and it's working out for you. Right. So let's go back there. You grow up gay in an evangelical Christian environment.

gay in an evangelical Christian environment. And from what I understand, you felt compelled to kind of hide from that, I suppose, maybe you have a different word for other than that, and to kind of exert some semblance of masculinity to prove to the world that you were other than perhaps who you were or are. And that became expressed in being this adventurer and trying to show the world this masculine, you know, version of yourself or, or, or your idea of what like a man, a young man is supposed to be. Yeah. I think there's a lot of gay men who in those early years are, they become either performatively masculine or their natural disposition and their like feminine expression causes them so much hurt that they retreat and then, I mean, they're really wounded by their environment and they run away to West Hollywood

and finally are free, you know, and they're at the club and they're like, F you mom and dad, I'm free, you know, like compensating in the other extreme. Exactly. And I, I, I was in middle school. I had a really high voice and it must've been really feminine. I mean, I had middle schoolers say, ask me if I was a girl and I'm like, I don't think I am. I think I'm a boy. I, um, but I think, and it's not like I sat down and made decisions. I was just reacting to the world, trying to survive. And I tried to control the way I spoke. Um, so as not to get asked that again, I tried to control the way I moved my hands so as not to get asked that again. I tried to control the way I moved my hands, so as not to be noticed. I learned to be funny and silly and wacky. And that was a thing

where I thought, well, if I make fun of myself, I'll beat them to it and take the wind out of their sails. So if I'm the funny guy, I can insulate myself from mockery. And just all, I mean, all these survival and it worked, it worked really well to the point that by sophomore year of high school, I was pretty popular. I was really well liked. I, by junior year, like all my best friends were like the football and baseball players straight guys and And I don't know like I I was able to I don't want to say hide because I didn't feel like I was hiding

I just felt like I was me but I was playing the game That everyone plays to fit into the world that they're in. But you knew you knew you were gay. I knew I was gay. I knew something was, quote unquote, wrong with me in third grade because the kids were talking about boners and they asked me how what gives me boners. And I said, bodybuilders on ESPN. And they laughed.

And so I was like, oh, I can't talk about this. And then in seventh grade, I learned what the word was for when you like that stuff, when you are a boy and you like boys. But I didn't know that it wouldn't go away. I thought maybe like many people do, it was a phase. And as senior year approached, I realized this probably isn't going to change. Like this is who I am. Right. And at the same time, I was willing, I was willing to believe that God could bring a woman into my life that would inflame my passions. And, you know, maybe I'm not attracted to all women. Maybe I'm only attracted to my future wife. And when God brings her into my life, it'll be hot and heavy and I'll be, I'll make all the church happy and

it'll be great. Yeah. Well, that has to be coming directly from the doctrine that was getting hammered into you every Sunday, right? In this evangelical time. Well, yeah, and it's not always hammered. It is the like death from a thousand cuts of just talking about one Sunday, they'll talk about how people who interpret the Bible to get what they want are actually deceived. You know, they're taking the Bible as a buffet and they pick and choose what they want just to serve their own self. And so you're, you're taught,

that's the worst way to think. And you're, and you're taught, you know, a verse in Jeremiah, the heart is deceitful above all things. So I'm thinking, okay, so if I want something and it's not approved in the Bible, then that's me rejecting God's word. And that's me being selfish and seeking. That's me just being self-seeking. And therefore, I need to repent of that. And I'm just a selfish asshole. And that's a super high way to a shame spiral. And that's a super high way to a shame spiral.

Total shame. And total shame spiral because the real kicker is sexual identity is also tied into behavior. And so it took a while for the church to get this language down, but they were like, it's not a sin to be gay. It is a sin to act on it. And then they'll say things like, God gave you this challenge. He doesn't give you anything that he doesn't know that you can accomplish. He won't give you anything you can't handle. So he gave you this calling to celibacy as an invitation to true godly wisdom. And that's a real burden, but you're lucky. Thank you very much for that.

Well, and I believed that. I was like, wow, I must be so strong that God trusted me with this burden. And did you have anyone that you could talk to honestly? No. with this burden. And did you have anyone that you could talk to honestly? No, I had friends who I knew didn't, weren't super Christian and didn't take it that seriously. But, but because I was so deep in the faith and like wanted to prove how good of a Christian I was, I couldn't find someone who was higher up on the piety scale who was okay with gay marriage or being gay. So I couldn't find someone in authority to look to. I could find people, quote unquote, below me on the piety scale who would just like, would drink and smoke and they were just like hedonistic.

And so I'm like, well, thank you for accepting me, but you also accept a lot of other things I don't believe in. So that's not really helping. Right. And your parents, did they have any awareness of what was going on with you? They did. My dad, apparently, when I was two years old, old asked my mom do you think jet is gay

i don't know what i was doing but i and my mom was really hurt by that because she is a deep bible believing christian woman you know and and was like, why would you speak that over our son? And I then just, my dad's, I mean, then they got a divorce and my dad cheated and went to be with my stepmom and blah, blah, blah. So it was a whole hectic, chaotic world. My older sister was really damaged by the divorce. My younger brother had like physical disabilities that they were really, it was chaos for my mother. And so she couldn't really worry about that. Not to mention in this time in the eighties, all of a sudden she sees on the news that gay people are dying by the tens of thousands by a mystery gay cancer. And at the church, they're saying, see, the rewards for sin is death. And so, well, A plus B equals C, that's easy.

Let me make sure that, let me pray that this curse doesn't fall on Jed, which I totally understand her mindset there. And I learned to not rock the boat. As I got older, my sister is dating drug dealers. My little brother has his medical issues. And so I'm like, okay, I got to get straight A's. I got to be the best kid. I can't rock the boat. And that continued. That's a heavy burden to carry as a young kid too, on top of all the rest of it. And I just learned to do my own thing and do well.

I mean, I was student body president in my high school and my mom didn't know. Yeah. Really? Yeah, until graduation. And I was like, I have to get there early. And she was like, why? And I'm like, well, I have to give a speech.

She's like, why? And I'm like, I'm student body president. She was so mad at me that I didn't tell her, but I had like built up this thing of like, I'm independent. I do my own thing. I'm not in your hair. Right.

And on some level, as somebody who's carrying a certain level of shame, whether consciously or unconsciously, to compensate by being this achiever, right? And that's actually big in the gay community. Like the internalized shame creates like superhumans because they're so intent on proving that they are worthy, that they make a lot of money, they get good jobs,

they get a nice car. I mean, that's like a big thing. And so was there a moment where you had a reckoning with this and became okay with being outwardly comfortable with it? Or was it a slow progression of acclimating? It was a slow progression in my... And then there was a moment of reckoning. For me, it was my mid twenties began my deconstruction, um, of my faith in the sense where the, the infrastructure of my life, which my mother had blessed me with to keep me safe and make the world make sense. It's like actually scientifically proven that when you raise a kid

in a structured environment, like in a faith community, they like are better prepared for the world than if it's chaos. And so I'm so grateful for that. But then as I'm finding it for myself in my twenties, becoming more and more adult and diving deeper and deeper into, deeper and deeper into, okay, if I'm gay and Christian, well, I'm tired of this. I need to figure it out. And so I went all the way. At like 25, I went to gay conversion therapy meetings. Oh, you did. Oh my God. Tell me more about that. Well, yeah. Well, it started with an elder in my church really confronted me and said, you need to figure this out. And I was like, okay. And she said, I know a couple men who had this struggle and God healed them of it, And now they're married with families and you should meet with them.

So I met with a couple of these men and one of them was inspiring. He was fun. He was chatty. He had a beautiful wife and a daughter. And he, he was just like, I couldn't, I lived the wild gay life in my twentiess, and I couldn't shake the shame. And I went to these meetings, and God healed me and brought my wife into my life, and now I'm happy. And he's like, it's not that I don't feel those feelings anymore. It's like I'm still attracted to men, but I choose my wife. Wow. Yeah.

And I was like— And you're like, but dude, you're gay. Oh, 100%. I'm like but dude, you're gay. Oh, a hundred percent. I'm like, bro, you're gay. But, but I also don't, I believe he does love his wife and I believe they may have a great marriage. I mean, it seemed like they did. Maybe they were putting it on their best performance, but I was like, this is, this is a real way of being. And what's interesting is in that season of life. Also, I would, I had began working, um, off and on in Uganda, um, for the charity invisible children, which we talked about last time. And they're in tight, like, especially in the traditional North,

you don't marry the person you love so much as you marry. Families set it up. It's a good deal. She's fertile. She's not barren. She'll give you 10 kids. Your kids can work the land. Your family will grow. Marriage is a business arrangement, not an expression of ultimate self-actualization with another person.

And that's a very individualized American Western idea. And so I had seen like, oh, marriage, especially in the Bible is not just find your true love and live happily ever after. It's a, it really like God maybe intended marriage to be this strategic partnership where you choose the person daily, even if it's hard. And so I was like, maybe that's what I meant to do. Maybe it is what I said before about the heart is deceitful. Like maybe I'm being selfish, wanting love. And so you go to gay conversion therapy. Yeah, which was this big meeting.

And I went to this other guy's house, and he was less believable in the sense that he seemed unhappy. He seemed unhappy to take me to this, which was interesting. Because in my mind, he was living my dream, which was he had been healed of this thing that caused conflict in my life, conflict in my family, conflict in my community, the fear of loss of my entire Christian community. And he had been rescued from it by God and was living with a wife and kids. And he was willing to take me to this meeting. And yet the feeling I got from him was that there was an invisible gun to his head making him take me.

I feel so bad for that guy. And he's begrudgingly bringing you, knowing that he's introducing you to this burden that he's carrying. So I went to this meeting and it was this man, this bald man on stage and they're singing worship songs. And then he's talking about, you know, you need to let go of whoever molested you, whoever hurt you, whoever. If your mother who over-mothered you, your dad who abandoned you, whoever.

Because that's the only reason. Right. There has to be a cause. Scream out and forgive them forgive them right now and so i'm saying they're like no one did like nobody did anything to me i loved my childhood every minute of it what do i scream and everyone's yelling and it's just this weird cacophony of noise and and then there there's some testimonies get up, and I'm looking around the room, and there's a verse in the Bible that I'm going to paraphrase what Jesus says, but it's like,

I come to give you life and life abundant. And you will know false teachers by the fruit they bear. If they bear good fruit, it is of the Lord. If they bear bad fruit, it is not. And so I was looking at this and I'm like, this is not good fruit. These people are so burdened by shame and they are not alive. They are not radiant. The people on stage who are supposed to be beacons of hope are like cold, dark zombies. The people in the audience are zombies. The guy who brought me is a zombie. I'm like, I don't think this is life and life abundant.

Right, it's life and resignation. And my brain started like going through like all these like factors of, okay, well, if you're raised with false shame, let me just like imagine what if God is actually cool with me being gay. And yet all of society tells you it's shameful. You're raised in that shame and you misappropriate the feeling or you misapply the feeling of shame as God's judgment, but it's actually your community's judgment. as God's judgment, but it's actually your community's judgment, then maybe we've got this all wrong. And so I, right at that moment, started to break, break, break, break, break it

down. How old were you? I was like 26. I mean, that's a pretty good self-awareness. I mean, well, that's what I, in middle school, I had to be like, figure out what am I, what is the world I had to, or else I would be swallowed up. And the real kicker is around that time, maybe a year later, I made a new really close friend who was a couple of years younger than me. And he didn't know I was gay. Most of my friends did, but I don't always super signal that I'm gay, especially to people who were a little oblivious. And so he didn't know. And we spent all of our time together. And this was still, I was in the headspace of figuring it out. I hadn't like realized I was, it was okay to be gay. I was like processing this.

And we were at this point, I'm, I think I was 26 or 27. I'd never kissed anybody. I'd never held hands with anybody. It was like buried, buried, buried. And we would, he would sleep over all the time. We spent 24 hours a day together. He's just my best friend straight as an arrow. he would sleep over all the time. We spent 24 hours a day together. He's just my best friend, straight as an arrow. And in his sleep, he was a sleep cuddler. He was like a deep, deep, deep sleeper. And he would just throw his leg over me because he'd like roll around.

We'd be sleeping on the floor, we'd be wherever. And I would be awakened with this jolt of like sexual desire that I had never felt in my life. And I wasn't really aware because I had sectioned off that side of my brain that I was in love with him. I had like written a narrative that he's my best friend. We do everything together, my soulmate, but I in love with attracted to were things I had moved into a basement that I wasn't allowed to look at, access, or think about. So it was interesting. I was compartmentalized, self-aware. I was really self-aware in certain ways and willfully ignorant to others. And he would do

this sleep cuddling all the time. And one night he laying like laying on top of me basically in his underwear and in this like rage of desire i put my hand in his underwear uh-huh and he woke up and this is my best friend who doesn't know i'm gay, and I'm touching him in his sleep, basically molesting him. And he woke up, and that was the, to this day, darkest moment of shame I have ever experienced. It was a feeling of out-of-body shame where I was looking at myself, and I didn't recognize myself. I was like, oh, my gosh.

And I will never forget, he said, he sat up, it was in the dark and he just goes, uh, he said, we have to talk about this. I'm an adult. I'm not six years old. Meaning like implying like I'm molesting a child or something. And when I tell you that that landed on me like the hardest, I mean, that's definitely the hardest thing I've ever heard. And we processed it over months and we're still best friends. And he's the most amazing. He gave me the most grace and the most forgiveness. But that was the true moment where I was like, if I don't tackle this head on and if I don't open all the doors in the basement,

this is why Catholic priests do this. This is why when you think you've got something under control, especially sexuality, you don't. Yeah. The, the unhealthy expression of repressed sexuality and emotion. And it will express itself. You think it won't, it will. That's a hundred percent of the time. And so that's amazing that you were able to navigate that with your friend though, and maintain that. Well, that's a testament to his wisdom, kindness. I mean, he's one of the most amazing people in my life and always will be. And he is a similar person to me where he seeks first understanding. He is a very confident, safe person. And so as we then processed me and he learned about my journey with sexuality and their oppression and all these things, he reached a place where he was like, bro, I get it. Like, he's like, I'm straight. I've been kissing girls since I was 15. I can't

imagine being 26 and completely removing sexuality out of my existence. Having had like no sexual experiences. None. And I was 26. Imagine doing that. I'm um condoning or excusing anything any priest has done but just imagine suppressing that for 45 years yeah you can compartmentalize your life and then you're in a position of power this is why like the celibacy the celibacy requirement in catholicism is a problem yeah it doesn't work. Clearly. Human beings are not wired to function in that way. No, and no. And it does, certainly what happens is not honor God.

And by having the prohibition on marriage just attracts that type of person to the priesthood. And I'll tell you, when I was deeply in love with God, wanting to serve Jesus, and people told me that I couldn't get married, and I wanted to be a good boy, and I wanted to excel, I was really attracted to that. I was like, well, then maybe I can marry God and then be in a position of respect. And finally, I can turn in this thing, this ball and chain in my life for a crown on my head. Like what a great exchange. But the trick is you never get rid of that ball

and chain because it's woven into your DNA. Right. The idea is that if you then do that, it will go away. It will vanish. It will dissipate. That has to be similar to what goes on in the minds of so many of these guys. Oh, I, it must be. I mean, we, it's so funny when you like, listen to Yuval Harari, you listen to these like people who've studied the evolution of man and evolution of life. And you realize that pretty much everything we do is so we can end up having sex like why do you brush your teeth so your teeth are white so they're not falling out of your mouth so that someone doesn't think you're gross so that you can kiss them so that it's like why do you want a good job why do you it's like so that you can procreate have a family i mean that's like

so deep in our wiring. And then obviously there's like complex scientific theories of like why homosexuality is three to 10% of the population, but it's gotta be in there somewhere. Like our sexuality is wired into us. Well, it's interesting to me that this was going on right around the time you were 27, which if memory serves me is kind of around the same time that you had this idea to do this bike ride, right? You announced it three years before you actually did it and you did it at 30, right? So what is the relationship between that desire to embark on that adventure and this kind of internal struggle that you were having coming to terms with your sexuality and who this person Jed is?

Well, it's a perfect example of me still operating in a compartmentalized fashion. I was dealing with my sexuality, deconstruction, faith thing over here. And that was giving me deep anxiety in my core. And yet I was in my job and I saw 30 coming and I was like, whoa, when you're 30, you aren't a kid anymore. You're not allowed to just like not know what's going on. That was like when you're in your twenties, like, whoa, 30. And, and I was in a job I loved, loved, but it wasn't a job I really chose for myself. It was a job I was working with friends. I was doing important work, but I was like, if I don't,

if I can choose my own career, now's when I should do it. And what do I want that to be? And so I thought, wow, I need to pursue my dream career of being a writer. I'm too young. It's like embarrassing to write a memoir in my twenties. Cause like, I just got to earth. Like what am I doing? So give me, let me go on a wild trip. And then at least if I write about that, it'll be objectively interesting. So the idea of writing about it was integral to the idea itself.

Yes. So there was this idea on some level, you were harboring this dream of being a writer. Totally. It's hard to imagine you doing anything differently. And I have a very hard time picturing you in law school. Well, I loved law school because it is a lot of reading and writing, as you know. But I liked learning how civilization works, like property law and tort law, like these things.

and tort law, like these things, all these words I had heard in the news, all of a sudden, the like specific ways in which if you have the intent to even touch someone, that can be a battery, even if it's nothing. You know, it's like all these like little details. I found that endlessly fascinating and realizing that law is actually the imagined infrastructure of civilization itself.

It is. It is. And I just had never really put that together. So law school was this endless discovery of the way the world works, which I fancy myself a systems thinker. So seeing that. So the greatest gift of law school is it trains you to think in a very specific way. Yeah. And I kind of didn't ever think I would be some

fancy John Grisham trial attorney, or I didn't know. I didn't know. I just thought maybe if I get this tool in my tool belt, it'll influence the direction of my life. But how much of it was driven by that child inside of you who's trying to be the good boy? 100% of it. I was like, I need to be impressive because the core of a big piece of my core being is a blemish. Mm-hmm. Fast forward to you sitting in an office working for a cruise line, right? Like as in-house counsel. Oh, that was, and that was the perfect example. That was during law school. And it was a perfect example of that. I've made more money that summer than I'd ever made in my life. And it was lifeless. I mean, I made some really good friends that summer as like human beings are always

interesting and fun, but just the, the work itself that I'm so glad I did that because that really woke me up quickly to, oh, you are not the type of person that can survive this. Like you will die in a cage. And, and so that's why I was like, okay, well, I'm just going to go work for this charity and make no money and be their lawyer because I got to do something else. Right. And these were guys that you met at USC Film School, right? Mm-hmm. And for people that didn't listen to our first conversation, Invisible Children, this is this incredible nonprofit organization, most famously known for the Kony 2012 video that like exploded the internet. Listen to our first conversation, we go really into it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is the only time I've ever done that on a podcast. Really? Yeah. Talked about that chapter in that way? Mm-hmm. It was a complicated thing, what happened with that. It's very hard to unpack it.

Yeah. And that's a cool gig, right? Very cool. If you're going to be a lawyer working with your friends. Traveling back and forth to Uganda and D.C. and meeting with Samantha Power and the Obama administration and getting laws passed. I mean, that was really cool.

Yeah, and you're like five seconds out of law school. Yeah. And yet I was really aware that it wasn't something I had chosen. I had come alongside my friends to help them do a thing, which was, I did for five years and was really life-changing, no doubt. But I did feel like I felt, I don't know what it is, to use Christian language, I felt a calling on my life that I had something I was supposed to do. It's interesting that you had that awareness, because juxtaposing that against this drive to be perceived in a certain way as this, you know, good person doing important things,

most people would have relented to, you know, the gestalt of the responsible, you know, path of security and, you know, the high-paying lawyer job. And stayed with that for perhaps decades only to act on that impulse, you know, when it might be too late. Well, and I don't want to give myself too credit because I didn't have college debt. I had a lot of financial aid at USC. And then my parents paid for law school because I'm a privileged kid from Nashville. And so I entered the world able to just like survive on $400 rent and bean and cheese burritos ready to roll. Do you know what I'm saying? And that is a very, that is a serious privilege.

Most people I know now, I'm 35, are still paying huge college debt. Yeah, and what most people do and what I did was in addition to that debt, I was able to tolerate a semi-intolerable professional existence by compensating, by buying a bunch of shit. Right. You're so miserable and annoyed. Leasing a car I can't afford.

You know, it's always like a little bit outside of your grasp. And that's the death knell because that's what gets you hooked. outside of your grasp. And that's the death knell because that's what gets you hooked. And that's what leads to that idea like, oh, I can't ever leave this because my life is now big and I have to maintain this. Right. Oh, yeah. The accumulating of things that were to, they were band-aids for your frustration. Because what else are you going to do? Otherwise, you just, you go to sleep and you go back to the job again. Well, and that was the real circumstantial privilege of immediately beginning my professional life working at Invisible Children. I was surrounded by people making pennies who were there for the passion of ending a war in Central East Africa and interns

volunteering their time. So it was very uncool if I pulled up in a BMW. That's like not the culture, right? The culture was to sleep on the floor, to stay up all night, to call your Senator, to call your Congressman, to go to Uganda. It was like deeply woven in and, and my Christian upbringing, it's like sacrifice service, all these things. It really scratched a lot of itches. And I loved it so much. Well, I think it speaks to, you know, the next move that you make and this decision to embark on this ride from Oregon to Patagonia speaks to this theme that you kind of address in the very first pages of the book, which is this tension between these mixed messages that were given when we're kind of coming of age,

which is, on the one hand, you know, seek the career that's going to put you on an upwardly mobile trajectory. And then out of the other side of the mouth of that same person is think different or live your passion. And those butt up against each other, and it becomes very difficult to reconcile what fits your own personal blueprint. personal blueprints. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is, is the, the circumstances of your youth often deeply influence. I mean, always influence that chain of events in your twenties. If you were raised where your parents were in crushing credit card debt and life was falling apart, you, you think I'm not going to be like them. I'm going to be financially responsible. I'm going to do the opposite. I have friends who were raised in fabulous wealth in Texas, and they went on to be barefoot serving

the homeless. I ain't going to be like that. And they're going to drive a beat up Camry to show that they don't want daddy's money. And so there's like a lot of identity, like pendulum fluctuation there. But I totally understand that it's society's duty to actually give you a certain flow chart of how to make it in this world, because it's really hard to do it, to figure it out on your own. So I don't fault society for like telling us, here's how you make it in this world because it's really hard to do it, to figure it out on your own. So I don't fault society for like telling us, here's how you do it. But I also would hope that society would say, there are a million ways to do this. Don't get sucked into the like,

to the allure of thinking you have to do it this way. And if you don't, you're going to fail. And I really think with the gig economy and the, and what's happening with now, now that millennials are in their thirties and late twenties, they're discovering really that they, that old pathway is not functioning the way it used to. And that's why, I mean, there's, I don't know the stats, but huge numbers of people my age and younger don't work in offices, don't have traditional jobs. Do you know anybody that has a normal job? I swear to you, I have to think about it. Yeah. Like I live in LA and to like go

on a hike on a Tuesday at 11 AM is the most normal thing in the world. It's so true. I mean, I think, you know, LA, I remember when I have a vivid memory of when I first moved to LA and I was a lawyer in San Francisco and I moved here for a law firm job. And this is pre-gig economy, but there's something very unique

and strange about Los Angeles because you could go into a Starbucks at 2 in the afternoon. And it's full. And it would be packed with people. And you're like, do any of these people work? Like, they all look like they took a shower this morning. You know, like, how does that even make sense? I remember it just blew my mind.

This city is more than any other. Yeah, but it expanded my horizons of what was possible. I mean, prior to moving here, it never would have occurred to me that you could find gainful employment pursuing something that you cared about in a way that defied our traditional notions of what that social contract looks like. Yes. Because of the entertainment industry, somebody who's very talented at carving faces out of styrofoam can actually have a career. Exactly. And you're like, how did you get there? Yeah. But that's what you're saying speaks so clearly to the importance of modeling or representation of different ways of being. I mean, in terms of representation in the arts

where you have people of color, you have people with different abilities and talents coming up in storytelling. I know that when I was a kid watching Will and Grace changed my life because I thought being gay was flamboyant in a pride parade. And then I saw Will, who's a lawyer in New York.

And I was like, oh, you can just be, you don't have to be in a thong. You can just hang out and be normal. Yeah. We have this idea that every young gay male is the kid who's sashaying down the hallway. Which is great if he is, like fantastic. But that wasn't me. And so I didn't see the, I thought, and so I didn't see the I thought oh okay all this all these things that the Christians are saying are true you either become hypersexual and hate God and you're in a parade this is like I don't want to assume that that's true I'm just saying that's what I perceived and I was like well where are the like happy married gay couples who like are clothed and have jobs like where are they and that was what really powerful with Will and Grace and and then

seeing that's what I love about all the different people you have on your podcast they show you like all the different careers and adventures they've been on and expertises you see model you see model different ways of making it in this world and make in contributing something important and that's really encouraging to me about gen z or whatever it is and millennials figuring out what they're doing i think there's going to be a lot of surprising contributions because of a certain level of just modeled access to ways of being. I think that's right. I think that's right. I mean, I think you see it. I mean, you see it manifest already. You know, people who are driven not by salaries and 401ks and benefits, but by impact. Like, how is taking this job going to move the needle in terms of making the world a better place?

Like that's certainly nothing that occurred to me when I was looking for my first job or my second job or my third job. But that is very much the mindset of young people now. And amidst all the craziness and the chaos and the lack of civility and everything that's going on right now, that gives me tremendous hope and

optimism for the future. Me too. And I, and I wonder, I mean, you have kids this exact age of just, I'm so curious about what the brandification of identity is going to do to young people where you're like worried about your brand in eighth grade like oh i need to wear this shirt i need to post this photo how many how many likes is it going to get that's such a tired conversation everyone that's a parent is like freaking out but it's i'm i'm curious i don't have skin in the game. How does it play out? Yeah, like are they going to become, are they going to get burned on not getting a job because someone went deep in their Instagram and found something?

Or are people going to become more open to just the fact that people grow and change? I think we're going to have to be. Yeah, your whole life is documented. Because now every moment is documented. And I think this idea of generations is being accelerated. You know, it's no longer boomers, Gen Xers, Gen Y. It's like now every three years is a new generation.

You know, my older boys are 22 and 23. That pendulum has swung towards analog. Like they're really, I mean. That's interesting. Yeah, they have Instagram accounts. Maybe once a month they post. They're not on Facebook. They're not on Twitter.

They're not interested. Yeah. You know, which is- That's cool. Maybe that's a reaction to, you know, how my wife and I are living or just what they're seeing amongst their peers. But that was very interesting

to see both of them make that choice. And now I have younger daughters who are very different from that. They're a totally different generation, even though they're only separated by a short number of years. I don't know how to delineate Christian influence from millennial influence of my own life, but I know making an impact was a really big deal to me always. And I don't know if it's like because you're a brand ambassador for Jesus, you need to be on your best behavior and you need to be an excellent brand ambassador. That's like wired into me in college and high school. And that's still a huge part of me now with my writing. I just, my only dream is that

some people who feel trapped in their identity, feel trapped in their tradition, feel and don't see a way out, read this book. And it just, it just models the sometimes difficult, sometimes tender exiting out of that entrapment. And what's fun about the time we live in is normally when you're a writer, you write a book and maybe you get some letters in the mail from people who were impacted by your words. Maybe someone writes a nice review. I write online mostly. And I see people being impacted by my thing. Yeah, the immediacy of it. Is astonishing. And it feels incredible. The very first sentence of the book is, if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine, which is such a fucking awesome sentence. How long did it take you to come up with that? I mean, the pressure, you know,

the first sentence of the book, it's like, it's so important. Like, I just, I was like, I read that and I was like, it's so great. And I'm like, how many versions of this sentence? That's what I knew I wanted to say in the first sentence. And then I wrote, I'm sure I wrote it a different way and would come back two weeks later and look at it and be like,

close, but not there. And then, I don't know. I mean, I don't think my words are that precious. Like I don't labor over them. If it makes sense, it can stay. If it's too cliche or too cheesy, it's got to go. And I just believe that. You know, the book is called To Shake the Sleeping Self.

And there's like parts of you that need to be removed from their comfort zone to even wake up. And you can't do it yourself. You have to remove yourself from the routine, from the thing you know. And travel is a perfect way to do that. Right. So the architecture of the book is you're going to ride your bike from Oregon to Patagonia. We're going to go along for this ride with you. And you are going to shake the sleeping self.

You are going to have this reckoning with who you are. And as we kind of talked about at the outset, going into it, the reader is perhaps lured into this notion that this is going to be, yeah, it's going to be a journey of self-discovery, but it's going to be so much more than that. It's going to be a reckoning of sexuality and faith and your place in the world and all of these themes that you then explore when you embarked on this, when you began this, either when you decided to do this bike journey or you began the journey, what level of awareness did you have that this was going to be your opportunity to really work this out for yourself and how much of it was, oh, I'm going to do this crazy adventure. So everyone, you know,

thinks of me as this, you know, masculine adventurous sort. Honestly, the performative masculinity bit of it came later through reflection. I didn't realize that I was trying to be the most outdoorsy, the most man. Like I know that I can't throw a football or throw any ball. And I know that there are certain like dude things that I just cannot abide. But I was like, I don't know a single dude who's ridden 14,000 miles on a bicycle. So at least I'll have that like metal on my jacket. But that was not so much conscious until later. I knew that it would be a rite of passage. I intended that. And in the like, especially maybe 10 years ago 15 years ago there was a big movement in like reclaiming masculinity in the christian world there was like a whole wild at heart all these

things and i that impacted me where and one of the things they talk about is like our culture does not have a rite of passage especially for men like to go from a boy to a man. And a lot of traditional cultures have had that for 50,000 years. And I love that idea, that sense of liturgy, that sense of putting your body in a thing that goes before I was this, and now I am this. And I was like, well, this is a very sign of the times that I'm going through my rite of passage, not at 13, but 30. But with any developed society, childhood is extended. So I extended it very far. And I knew it was a rite of passage for me, intentional. I didn't know what was on the other side. I didn't think it would be so much about figuring out my faith. I didn't think it would be so much about figuring

out my relationship with my family, sexuality, God. I really thought it would be going from an amateur writer to embarking on a project to become a real writer. That was what I was conscious of while it was happening. And it wasn't until the reflection of actually writing the damn thing that I realized what was really happening or what really had happened. Right. You had this, I read an interview with you where you quoted something your friend John Chu said, which is if you want to be good at something, you have to do it first. Yeah. Right.

He's a, he's an amazing director. He just directed crazy. What an insane success story. Oh my God. I mean, and I went to college with him and he was a star in college. He's just an amazing person.

So you knew like this guy was going to make big movies. But he, you know, and he's like made a lot of great movies, but he's, this is his moment to like become like to have the runway to do whatever he wants which i'm so proud of him he's just the best person in the world and he got asked quite often because he's you know a darling of usc

so he'd go back and speak to the film students and they'd ask like what do you suggest like how do we make it and he's like if you want to be good you have we make it? And he's like, if you want to be good, you have to do it first. He's like, you have an iPhone or a Samsung something, and that thing films really well. And if you're not making things all the time, then I don't believe you. Like, that just means you want to be famous. Yeah, you like the idea of being that person, but you're not actually in love with the actual craft of what it is to do it. If you want to be a writer and you don't write, then you don't want to be a writer. You want to be known as a writer. If you want to be an actor and you're not doing local theater, you don't want

to be an actor. You want to be famous. It's like, if you really want to do something, you'll do it wherever you are. And especially in this day and age, I mean, some of my favorite music, I find out that the girl in London made it in her bedroom on her laptop and put it on SoundCloud. And now it's like my favorite song in Los Angeles. Right. I think that's how Lorde's first album was made. Yeah. In some canyon in New Zealand.

And now she's a household name. So if it doesn't billow out of you, out of necessity, then you're doing it for the wrong reason. And you cut your teeth. You literally cut your teeth as a writer on Instagram. Well, so I didn't know I was a writer until I was told I was. So this happened in Invisible Children. Who told you? I started as their lawyer.

And then we would be in meetings and trying to figure out how to articulate the campaign for high schools, how to like synthesize this information. And then they would ask me what I thought and I would say what I thought and they would be like, write that down. That's exactly it. And then that led to, okay, Jed, will you just write this out for us? And then we're going to use that. And then that led to, okay, we don't want you to be our lawyer anymore. Hire someone else and do this full time. And then all of a sudden they're telling me you're really gifted at articulating, synthesizing ideas in a way that is approachable, in a way that a high school kid can understand this complex issue. And it just kept being affirmed in me, just something I was doing

naturally. And it was right around then that Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, came out. And that concept of 10,000 hours was being talked about everywhere. And I was just sitting with some friends. I don't know what we were doing, drinking coffee. And we were like, what would you be willing, you know, in our 20s, we're trying to figure out what is our 10,000 hours. I was like, what would you be willing to even do for 10,000 hours? And for me, it was, it dawned on me in that moment,

well, I actually really enjoy writing. And my favorite thing in the world is underlining sentences in books. That's my favorite feeling. When I read something and somebody says it and I didn't even know, I didn't even know you could articulate something so perfectly that was just a gray cloud in my head. I didn't even know I thought until I read it.

It would be my dream to create sentences like that. And I would be willing to spend 10,000 hours doing it. And so that gave me the confidence when I started my bike trip. Well, it gave me the confidence to then commit to, I want to be a writer. I'm going to do this trip. I'm going to write about it.

And also I'm going to write about it online and just, yeah, see if I'm any good. And I was just really willing to risk it and maybe be bad. Yeah. I don't know. But that declarative act of like saying out loud, I think is so important.

Well, the same way that that's how your bike trip actually came to be, right? You had to like announce it. 100%. I mean, I am a coward. I love to cancel plans. I love to think I'm going to do something and then not. And so I

knew I needed social pressure and I needed to announce I'm going to do this thing. Everyone's got to know three years out so that I can't, I mean, it's not like road tripping to Yosemite. It was a year and a half on a bicycle in countries where my mom told me that I would be beheaded. So that's like a big deal. I needed to really psych myself up. And in this three-year period of preparing to do this ride, actually there wasn't that much preparation, right? There was three years in between announcing it. Yeah, you were acclimating to the idea of it.

But during this phase, it didn't dawn on you that you were in certain respects walking in the footsteps of your parents who were made famous by their amazing trek across America, which we talked about last time. Right. But it's like, how's that possible that it didn't occur to you that you were doing something that was so, so much, so similar in so many ways to that defining, you know, act that they are most well known for? You know, really looking back on it, I think a lot of that has to do with this theme of compartmentalization that we've been talking about. I,

in order to not ruffle the feathers of my family, I really built my own life. I went to high school alone. My sister and brother went to different high schools. I went to high school alone. My sister and brother went to different high schools. I just really felt autonomous. And so that's what's funny is like I didn't acknowledge that I was the result of an amazing family, of an amazing upbringing, of an incredible faith tradition, of a sense of safety, of creative parents who encourage creativity and fearlessness and do what you love. I was just, I thought I was this unique flower that grew in a desert.

And that was just a real awakening when all of a sudden you're literally imitating your parents almost exactly and their vocation, like travel writing memoir. I thought I had invented that category. like travel, writing, memoir. I thought I had invented that category. Yeah. It's, it's incredible how willfully, willfully ignorant I can be. I want to explore the, the faith aspect of this a little bit more deeply, like in the, in the process of, of this adventure that you go on, how ha and in the wake of that, and now writing about it, like where are you today in your relationship

to Christianity, your faith, the evangelical church? I've really been influenced by a teacher named Father Richard Rohr. He's a Franciscan friar, I believe. And he's written a lot about non-dualism. And similar to these amazing writers like Thomas Merton, and he's kind of expanded outside of Christianity is just this or that. You believe Jesus is the son of God or you don't, you believe he literally rose from the dead on the third day or you don't, you're a Christian or you're not.

And there's such a simple, that's such a simplistic view of the world. And what father Richard says is the path to enlightenment is to transcend and include. And so when you move, when you feel like you've moved through something and it's no longer for you, understand that it was for you because it brought you here. And it's not saying that like, I'm wiser than evangelical Christianity or something. I'm just saying that I tried it. than evangelical Christianity or something. I'm just saying that I tried it.

I tried it my damnedest. I went full bore and had my first kiss at 28. First time I had sex was 30. And that's because I tried it real hard. I went, I led Bible studies. I would like leave law school every Tuesday, every Friday and lead these high school Bible studies because I was like, I'm going to be the best. I'm going to like fail my classes.

I almost failed a semester of law school because a friend of mine went into a coma and we did intercessory prayer every night. I didn't sleep. I didn't even go to classes trying to save him, which didn't work. And I mean, I did a full bore that and it did that, just that worldview did not serve me to speak very pragmatically. And yet it certainly did serve me. It like gave me a lot of the infrastructure of my mind, which I now hold very dear. And so, but to transcend and include is to thank it for what it is, but, and, and understand that it's incredibly integral into the fabric of reality, but also there's more. And so I would say I still might call myself a Christian. I would call myself a mystic Christian in the sense where I reject.

I reject is a strong word. I do not feel drawn to evangelical Christianity's obsession with certainty. Either you believe the Bible like us or you're deceived. You know, like this is exactly how old the earth is. This is exactly what God meant. There's just a lot of obsession with certainty because when the world is chaotic, it's actually nice to know some things for certain and to have somebody stand on stage and tell you life is exactly like this. And if you do A, B, and C, you're going to live for eternity in paradise. If your world is falling

apart, that is very comforting. Yeah, it's an antidote to fear. It allows you to sleep well at night. And so I really respect and love that. And I love Jesus. And I believe a lot of things about Jesus. But I just don't believe in the certainty and the exclusion and the tightness of that narrative anymore. It sounds not dissimilar from the kind of things that Rob Belt talks about. Well, that's, I mean, the ever-widening circle. If you go on this journey and you have the disposition to be curious about other ways of thinking and you don't lock in, I mean, that was the thing where like there was evangelicalism never stood a chance with me because I'm too curious and I, and I too deeply like, um, hold

things with an open hand. I don't lock to me locking in like, this must be how life is only this. And then I see it bang up against reality over and over and over and over again. And then all of a sudden your brain has to be a lawyer to like convince you that your old worldview still fits in with reality. And you're constantly in this like legal battle with the worldview you accepted as truth and new evidence. I mean, that's the history of the Christian church is them like scrambling to, and I was like, that just is not, I don't want to constantly scramble. I just want to hold it with an open hand and see what comes, but also understand that I come from a tradition.

I come from a sincere relationship with God that I still have. And while my language may have expanded, my understanding of the universe may have changed, expanded, I don't reject it. I don't believe it. I don't want to even say it hurt me. It taught me. I was at a conference this past weekend on the East Coast, and one of the speakers was so amazing. This woman, Nadia Bowles Weber, have you ever heard of her? She's a Lutheran pastor. But if you saw her, you would think that she plays bass in a punk rock band in the East Village.

Cool. She's got sleeve tattoos down both arms, like this wild gray hair. She's about my age. And just like fire in her eyes and like this wild gray hair, she's about my age, and just like fire in her eyes and like this spirit. And she rocks like the collar, but she cuts the sleeves off the shirt. And it's just like, I'm like, who is this person? Yeah, like, wow, she was really, really powerful. I'm gonna try to get her on the podcast,

but you know, Lutheran pastor in Denver. I mean, it's a really special thing. There's, I mean, I don't remember the exact statistic, but it's something like 85 million Americans consider themselves born again Christians, which is a lot. It's almost a third. And then if you include Catholics

and all these other things, it's like most of America. And so if you cannot speak that language and you cannot see the world that way, then you're going to lose a lot of communication and connection with human beings all around you. It's such an important point. I mean, as somebody who grew up in Tennessee, born of the evangelical tradition, this mystic stuck in a millennial body, as Tom Shadyak, how do you, you know, what's your perspective when you look at the dialogue that we're having right now about culture, about politics, about social mores? It's a very toxic scenario that we find ourselves in. And I'm always thinking about ways to bridge that divide. You know, we're so siloed, of course.

I mean, it's a trope at this point, but if we don't find ways to exude compassion and ways of shelving our judgment in the interest of trying to bridge this divide so that we can be the United States of America, we're in big trouble. Well, Jonathan Haidt talks a lot about this in his book, Righteous Mind, which was so influential in my thinking. I recommend everybody read it. But in order to have unity of any kind of nationalistic unity, you need a common enemy. So the more divided a

country gets often, it means the more, the more we bicker about smaller and smaller things, it's actually like a, it signifies a pretty healthy society where you're freaking out over little nuanced things happening in government. Whereas like when you have a common enemy like Pearl Harbor or Hitler, I mean, that's why the greatest, the greatest generation rose out of the world having a common enemy, the Axis powers. And it's, it created this entire generation of Americans that felt unified in, we are America, we stand for virtue, we stand for valor, we stand for democracy against tyrants. war is so bifurcated into things that don't feel like war. They feel like response to terrorism. They feel like so provincial and strange and alien and complex. And like, why are we even fighting this? To where now, you know, a lot of people my age see someone in uniform and they have mixed emotions about it. They're not like, wow, what a hero. They're like, wow, what are you doing

over there? You know? And that really, you know, the breakdown probably began with Vietnam. I wasn't alive, but what I perceive of history. And so, and we felt it a little bit in my lifetime with 9-11, where America became America for like six months or something. And I remember feeling that, like, I remember seeing an American flag on like September 19th, 2001 and thinking, I love this country and what we stand for. And I want to kiss everyone I see on the street because there was this idea of having a common enemy. We're very complex apes who are a tribe and our tribes have just continued to expand. So the more complex we get, the more difficult

it will be to have unity as a globalized world, as a nation. And so Yuval Harari, as he said on your show, thinks climate change could do that. But as you said, it's so ephemeral, it's really hard to hate a temperature degree difference. You know, like what does that even look like? In terms of the way in which we speak to each other and the like complete falling apart of civil discourse, I think a lot of it has to do with us reverting to these natural instincts of creating enemies out of those that disagree

with us. The moment you can like call a group of people cockroaches, you dehumanize them and, you know, or deplorables or whatever you want to say. And you create a categorical stereotype that is now able to be crushed. And I was listening to this interview of Oprah by Van Jones the other day. And Van Jones asked her, if you had 10 minutes alone with Donald Trump, what would you say to him? And I loved her answer. I'm still thinking about her answer. But she said, I don't know. I don't really speak to people if I won't, I won't speak to someone if I know I

won't be heard. And so I'd probably be silent or she said something like that. And I really thought about if you can't be heard and this is what happens when a liberal and a conservative are shouting at each other. Yeah. Nobody's listening. No one's listening. I mean, and that's actually brain chemistry. When you're in an argument, the part of your brain that learns new information loses blood. The part of your brain that is the filing cabinets

of your own argument is raging with neuron, like firing. And so the part of you that learns is turned off. The part of you that defends its pre-held positions is on raging. And so heated arguments, that's why nothing good has ever happened on Twitter except being surprised by news. It's like no one in a Twitter battle ever reaches a new idea. It's rare. I'm sure it's happened. So I think there's places, certainly important places for people to be angry.

Anger is an expression of pain, is an important expression of pain, and it gets attention and draws attention to a cause. And then I think there's important places for people who fly 30,000 feet above and say, let's understand where you're coming from. Let's understand where you're coming from. Let's understand where you're coming from. And let's let, let you both reach a place of relative safety where you can hear each other. And so how do you do that in a one-on-one? I mean, you live, you live in Silver Lake, but you, you go home, like you're home all the time, right? You're in Tennessee. You're, you're, you're, you're part of that community still back there.

Oh, yeah. So when you are engaging somebody, you know, one-on-one or at a dinner party or you're with your mom, what does that look like? If you do not have respect for the person you're talking to, and if you cannot entertain the fact that you might be wrong, you cannot have civil discourse. It becomes charity at that point. It becomes patronizing. It becomes propaganda. I don't know that everything I believe is true. I believe certain things have significant evidence and other things do not. I've never seen a polar bear die from global warming, but I know a lot of scientists agree that it's happening. And so I tend to trust experts.

I am a progressive person. I'm socially progressive. I've seen how progressive policies have impacted my life as a gay man and the life of my black friends, the life of people of color in my life. I've seen how progressive policies have changed history. I've also seen how hyper far left policies have destroyed entire nations. And so fiscally conservative people have a lot of good ideas. And for me, you can have a good conversation with anyone if you're curious about what they think and why they think it. And a lot of times people have never asked them. And so I tend to remove myself.

I feel like a very small ant on a very large planet. And so screaming at my cousin for voting for Trump and believing that climate change is not real feels like it's going to give me high blood pressure and I don't know what's going to change. Whereas if I am curious about why he thinks that way and then I make him feel safe and respected, he may be curious about why he thinks that way. And then I make him feel safe and respected. He may be curious about why I feel that way. And I mean, and I've had conservative friends tell me, you're the only liberal person I can talk to. And they're like, why is everyone so angry?

And I like try to break it down. And I'm like, because they're scared. Yeah. And that's a two-way street. But I'm like, cause they're scared. Yeah. And that, that, that, that's a two way street. But I think if you approach those conversations from a perspective of, of curiosity, like you said, uh, you know, or, or to come from this place of, that's interesting. Tell me more about that. You know, I want to understand. And I feel like that's the note I play in the conversation. That's my personality. I believe that the angry screaming activist is also an instrument in the conversation. That's my personality. I believe that the angry, screaming activist is also an instrument in the orchestra.

I believe it. Yeah, everybody has their part to play. Those people are important because they toe that line or they show you where that line is. And they may not be converting people to their perspective, but they're letting you know where that line for them exists. And I'll speak from experience. This, uh, Ferguson, the marches in Ferguson happened in 2014 while I was on my bike trip. And I thought I was this open-eyed progressive Los Angeles person. And I remember they were marching through the streets

and I was like, why are these black people so angry? Like, how did they just mobilize after this one random person was killed? Like, I just was so ignorant. And that rage and mobilization that I was like, there must be some current of truth in what's going on and what they're saying, or these people could not unify to make a statement like this. The streets are full of weeping black people. And that expression of rage, anger, woke me up to start asking questions and say clearly what I thought was a post-racial America was wrong. And that is like, obviously led our whole country down this conversation.

And the tipping point was anger. We're in downtown LA. Yeah. There's construction. What are you gonna do? It's gonna happen. Very true. You know, very true.

I've had my own journey with that as well, where you think, oh, you know, I'm a liberal. I know what's going on. And then something gets thrown in your face and you realize like, oh, I still have growth. Yeah. In this place. But to be able to hear that

and not just react and be defensive, but to like take it in, pause, meditate for 10 minutes. Well, and people who are defensive, people who are quick to anger, that is always rooted in fear and the fact that- Fear that it just might be true. And fear that their safety is compromised.

And it's sincere. And so you learning like through other people, of course, some people are hotheads and they're angry too often over small things. But oftentimes, especially when there is an entire angry culture or there's an entire movement, then you need to listen. There is truth. There is deep truth woven in there. That is the immune system of humanity flaring up. That is the immune system of humanity flaring up.

Speaking of truth, truth is the touchdown in your writing. It's all about personal truth and trying to find a way to tap into universal truth by expressing your personal truth. And I know firsthand how difficult that can be when you're writing a book that people are going to read and there's other human beings involved that happen to be real people in your life. So how do you, how did you, you know, tiptoe around that? Yeah. When you, if you want to write memoirs and you write about your real life, it's really hard because you don't live, probably you don't live alone on an Island. You live around people that you love who maybe there aren't, maybe they aren't even villains or evil. Maybe they love you. And through their love of you, they hurt you. You know what I'm saying? Like, this is my relationship with

my family. They all, we love each other so much. And by very nature of doing your best and the circumstance of my identity and figuring it out, there was pain. And everyone is doing their best and just outpouring love and there's incredible pain. And it wasn't intentional, the infliction of that pain. Never. And none of them signed up to be written about in a book. Exactly. and it wasn't intentional, the infliction of that pain. And none of them signed up to be written about in a book.

Exactly. And so one thing that was really influential for me was I bought Jack Kerouac's book, Big Sur. I think it was this book. It was one of his books. And I always read the introduction because these literary professors write such great overviews of what's going on. And one of read the introduction because these like literary professors write such great like overviews of what's going on. And one of the things this intro said was Jack Kerouac,

his books are full of colorful, inappropriate, wild people, and you'll never hear him say a bad word about any of them. And what it is, is he's able to paint these people, but you can tell he likes them, even though they're doing the craziest shit and they're being horrible to him or whatever. He likes them. And you can, you can feel that in the page and on the page and in the way he talks about them. And I am that way. I don't have any enemies in this world. I couldn't love my family more. I, I love them the most. I couldn't love my family more. I love them the most. I couldn't love my friend Weston who went on the trip with me. His real name is Philip and he is the... Well, if you're going to say it here, why didn't you just write Philip in the book?

Well, no. The thing is, it's the same reason Sia covers her face with a wig. You can Google her face at any moment, but it's just, just one level. It's one, one step removed just gives like, I don't know, a little bit more privacy. And he is very wild in the book. I mean, compared to me, who's like recovering goody two shoes. So I was just like, I'm going to give you one step removed. He didn't want me to do that. one step removed. He didn't want me to do that. I just wanted to. And that's probably a little bit of being triggered by Kony 2012. And you never know when you put something out into the world, how people are going to take it. And so I was like, I'm just going to give you one, one click. But I wanted to write honestly about people from the position of, I love you, but what you do is interesting.

And that kind of like disconnection and disassociation I hope is conveyed in the book. Did you have that conversation with certain people beforehand? No, I did it afterwards. Well, with Philip, I did. He said he gave me permission to write whatever I wanted. With my parents, I didn't. I actually thought I was extra loving and generous in trying to write about them, but also truthfully. And it was hard. My mom read the book and was really hurt by the way I spoke about her. hurt by the way I spoke about her. And that's, you know, if I'm just like rich, you're like one of the best guys, we're like best friends. And just like, you know, you're kind of like, he's kind of cheap, but he's like the best guy. Like all you'll hear is you think I'm cheap. You know, you, you,

your brain, if someone speaks about you in anything but an overflowingly congratulatory or celebratory way, that's what you latch on to. And especially when they have somewhat of a, it's going to be in public and you don't have a way to defend yourself or give your own perspective. I learned so much about my mom from her reaction to my book and my misunderstanding of my own childhood. Such as? Such as I thought she was this like just Jesus loving, I mean, she is,

person who forced us to go to church all the time because we just had to love Jesus. Little did I really comprehend how hard it is to raise three kids alone. And when your dad is off somewhere writing books and not in the picture enough, and it's on you and you have no money, the only real safe place to go in that time was for her to take us to all these church events and take us on retreats and make us go on these things. Because it's like, I can't handle all these kids at once. I mean, I have friends who are married raising one kid right now and they can hardly brush their teeth. So I'm like, how on earth did my mother do this? I have no idea. And so that's something, of course, I never perceived that my mom was a human until I was about 22.

I thought she was this like force of nature as a lot of us do. And there are those moments that land on you like bricks, where you realize that your mom is a 16-year-old girl who got older. You know, your mom is you who got a little older. And that, I mean, that's just things I can't see. And when you look back on your own childhood, your truth is your truth. So I don't, I didn't change it in the book of how I perceived it, because that is exactly how it is.

But she gave me some perspectives of her experience that I was like, wow. And I included some of that in there. And is she okay now? She's okay. Is she nervous about the book coming out? Listen, she is a wise woman who's been through a lot and walked across America

and had a very public, brutal divorce with a famous author and her famous, and she's lived. And so she is not a fragile woman and she's got God on her side. And yes, she does. So I'm not worried about her. I mean, our relationship is complicated, you know? Um, and it's, I mean, I'm in that flux as we record this podcast. I don't know when I talk to her next what it'll be like. But we both, even when we have really intense email exchanges, we're not very confrontational in person, but we're both writers.

So we get real deep in the emails. It's almost like we took conflict resolution courses. So we get real deep in the emails and they begin. It's almost like we took conflict resolution courses. They always begin and end with utter adoration and love. And I will never leave you. I will never stop loving you. And then you say the really hard shit and then you land it with, I will never stop loving you. I will never leave you.

I will be there. And that like. So it's safe. It just, it allows you to like express this thing and know you're not about to lose a relationship. There might be boundaries. There might be things we never see eye to eye on, but the foundation of the relationship will never leave. Right.

Barb, right? Yeah, the dream. The best is when you do these Instagram stories and you're with Barb and she's getting loose with her friends. Unbelievable. No, they're, they're, I mean, they're like, this is the thing. She's very easy to love. I mean, she's the most incredible woman. My dad is an amazing man. My family is amazing, but I, that's, that's the, a big complicated. I mean,

and guess what? I'm not, I'm not like the first person to write about. I'm not the first gay boy to write about their mother in a memoir. Do you know what I'm saying? This is like worn territory, right? But it's not running with scissors.

No, it's different. And that's like, what's so interesting is every time you hear someone tell a true story, no matter how extreme it is, you're able to transpose that over your life and glean some truth about your own experience. One of my best friends out here has raised this beautiful woman. She's raised Orthodox Jewish and never met a Gentile until she was 19. And lived like Pico Robertson, like right in the middle of LA.

And incredibly Jewish family, incredible Jewish family. And she is in her 30s now and unmarried. And that's really hard for her family. And she feels like a failure and yet she she also is like the dopest girl i've ever met and the coolest and lives the most amazing life and everyone loves her and is so successful and she has this so similar to me experience of shame and the influence of the culture and tradition in which she was raised her love of god and wanted to do right by god her love of of family and wanted to do right by family and so when i was telling her about my book and and how it breaks down she started like crying

and she was like that's my story wow i'm like no it's not i'm a gay christian boy and she's like no that is my exact story wow and so it's just interesting I'm a gay Christian boy. And she's like, no, that is my exact story. Wow. And so it's just interesting how human experience- Well, that's because truth supersedes all, right? And if you're speaking from a place of truth, you're gonna tap into some vein of humanity that we all share. And that's what great writing is.

Well, and that's where I remember reading, I think it's the Paris Review. They do these amazing collections of author interviews. And one of the guys, the guy interviewed this woman and said, when you're writing this novel, did you know what it would mean? Did you like intentionally put in your message in the story? And she's like, I don't believe in doing that. She's like, I don't believe in doing that. She's like,

I just believe in telling true stories because the truth is the teacher, not me. And so if I just tell the truth, then it'll have a message. Whatever message is meant to be conveyed will percolate out of that. Right. And the moment you try to be the teacher, then you're probably getting it a little wrong. And so that with this book, I really tried and you can tell I I'm very open about everything. And I'm very much so like that in the book, because I'm like, it doesn't serve me to hold a secret. It sits inside my core and like burns and rots. I might as well puke it up in this book and then it's out there. And then I saw this with, I've seen this happen time and time again, especially in the Christian world, hidden secrets that destroy someone's reputation and identity when they come out

later, destroy. And so I'm like, well, if I have no secrets, then guess what? You can't destroy my reputation because if you know me, you know me. No one can get anything on you because you're out about it. But that doesn't mean that it isn't difficult to be that vulnerable on the page. It takes a lot of courage to be like, okay, am I really going to say this about myself or this thing that I'm not proud of or this, you know, event that occurred around which I still harbor some shame. It's terrifying. You know, a lot of that terror is mitigated when you have a really tight knit community of friends that you respect and that respect you.

Did you let them read pages? How does that work? I let my best friend Lauren read it first, but I didn't let people read it as I was going because I didn't want the ship to keep turning over and over again at night. I wanted to get it all out and then figure out what it was. And so once it was all out and my editors went at it, because I also, my editors didn't know me. And so I really respected their notes because most readers of a book don't

know you hopefully. And so if they're like, this doesn't make sense, their notes are important. And, so once they had gone through and we'd done all those edits, then I gave it to my friends to read because they're my true, my goal is actually to make them like it. If they respect my work, then I'm done because I respect them the most. respect my work, then I'm done because I respect them the most. And so, and, and what's so special about it is that the ones that have read it are really touched by it and they're proud of me and they've underlined things, which is my dream. Right. And so you've already won. Hasn't even

come out yet. I feel a hundred percent. I feel people ask me, am I nervous? No. The thing is, like, I've written a thing that is now a tool that I hope it gets in the hands of a lot of people struggling with identity. And I'm proud of it. My friends are proud of me. You're living a blessed life. I know. And that's the thing is if you can, if you are lucky enough to find a community of friends that you respect, that respect you, you, a lot of things that people call courage just become natural, like being open and honest about your life. I don't fear abandonment at all because my, this community of friends that I have know everything about me and already won't leave me. I was gonna say, you're somebody who's amazing with friends. And then I realized like,

well, I haven't seen you in three years and I'm basing that entirely on this like projected relationship that I have with you based on me following your social media. But all indicia is there that you surround yourself with a lot of good people that you trust and rely on. And you're very much a part of a community. Yeah. And that is, I'm a hyper-social person. I'm a double extrovert. I get energy by being around other people and I think by

speaking. So if I'm alone, I'm asleep and, or meditating now. Yeah. That's my new thing. Breathe. So I just am very fortunate to have tracked these people down and forced them to be my friends against their will. And it's just, I don't know. I really feel like when a human being is in community, they are most alive, at least for me. And the fullness of purpose and identity, a lot of those things come through when you feel part of, and maybe this is our evolved DNA to be in a tribe. And when the tribe is united and feeling really close knit, you feel safe. You feel like you can take on any bad guys. You feel like you're going to make it. And with that foundation of a sense of safety, you can start moving up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You know,

you can start pursuing self-actualization. You can start cultivating respect and character. Because the safety net is there. Yeah. For me, that's the biggest thing. And I always, when people are not ready, if you're 46 and in the closet, if you don't feel safe, I don't blame you for staying in that closet. If you're in any kind of situation and you don't feel safe, I don't blame you for staying in that closet. If you're in any kind of situation and you don't feel safe, that's courage. When you step out and you do not feel safe, but something in you demands that you take that step. I have rarely done that. I mean, I was scared to do this bike trip for sure. That's like the most courageous thing I've ever done. But

I was scared to do this bike trip for sure. That's like the most courageous thing I've ever done. But most of the things I do are because I feel unconditional love and therefore can really pursue the truth of who I am with gusto. Right. It's powerful, man. It's really powerful. In the writing of this book, the original idea was that you were going to do this as a self-published thing, right? And then a certain wise person talked you out of it. So, I mean, originally, of course, I wanted it to be published by a publisher, but I tried and no one was biting.

And I had this amazing agent and she was like, I'm sorry, I've sent it to so many people and they're just not biting. Maybe we need to rework it. I don't know. What was the feedback? Just, this is a travel log. The feedback was, oh great. Another gay guy, like mad at his mom. Wow. You like are on a bicycle. They're just like, and really it was really, it was, um, oh, you're like Instagram famous. That's not legitimate literature. So no. And I was like, well, you know, and this Invisible Children trained me to be like a raucous punk. So I was like, we're in a new time and publishing is dying and I'm going to self-publish and I'm going to show you.

And so I started to- And that is a way. 100% it's a way. And people have had huge success doing it. It's an incredible thing. I do not mean to deny that. But one thing that I know that I am is really scatterbrained and bad at a lot of things

that involve any level of organization. And so I was at a conference up in Northern California and Cheryl Strayed was there. And I had met her once before in Telluride at a film festival. And so we kind of knew each other, hi, hi, hi, you know? And then I had given a talk that morning. So she had heard me give my talk,

which like gives you a little bit of legitimacy of like, they know a little bit about you. You've been vetted. A little bit. Yeah. So we're, we're sitting at lunch and she, I probably sat next to her just like, Hey, this seat taken and sat there and she goes, tell me about this book you're working on. Like what's tell me about it. And she's just like such a good listener. And there's, she has this magic je ne sais quoi that makes you just want to tell her everything, which is why she's such a great advice columnist and vice giver. Um, and I told her that I tried to publish and nobody would buy it and it's a new world and I'm just going to self publish and do it myself. And she said to me,

new world and I'm just going to self-publish and do it myself. And she said to me, I mean, I don't even know her. And she said to me, okay, do you want me to encourage you or do you want my advice? Which I loved. I was like, whoa, badass. Yes, I want your advice. I can take it. And she said, if you're anything like me, you don't want to be a publicist, a marketer, a copy editor, an editor, a shipping company, and a graphic designer, a graphic designer, and develop relationships with 6,000 bookstores across the U.S. If you're anything like me, you want to be a writer. You want to focus on writing. And she was like, you can self-publish if you want, but all of those other pieces are very important to success. And so what's great about traditional publishing is that they are professional. They have hired

actual individuals who do all of those jobs exceptionally well. And so you get to write and focus on writing. And she was like, what I'm going to tell you is that if no one's biting, I would say it's probably not good enough yet. You need to keep working on it. And that's a hard pill to swallow. But it was the best advice anyone ever gave me. I said, thank you. I'm going to do that. I'm going to think about it. And then I'm going to do that. And right at that moment, I had this other agent reach out to me. And he said, I can get your book sold. Give me a chance. And my other, my agent at the time, who was a dream,

she was like, listen, it's my job to get you a book deal. If I can't do that for you, go for it. Like if someone thinks they can, like all I want is for you to get this book done. So she released me. I went with this new guy. We reworked it, retooled it, went out a couple months later and sold it to. Did you go back to houses you had already submitted to? Yes. Because that's like, that's not coming from zero. That's coming from behind. Yeah.

They already are coming in saying, didn't I say no to this already? Yeah. This new agent was older and had real cred with certain imprints at these publishers. And so he was like, we've reworked this. I want you to look at it again. And they get so many submissions, they probably barely remembered what I had submitted before. And a few of them really liked it. And specifically Penguin Random House's imprint Convergent really liked it. And specifically Penguin Random Houses, Imprint Convergent,

really liked it. And they courted me. And I mean, it was a really special experience and a dream come true. And I think, wow, if Cheryl Strayed hadn't spoken her truth to me in a way in which to bring it back to what we were saying before, I was in a position to hear her. I wasn't defensive. You overcame your millennial snowflake ism. Yeah. I literally let the snowflake melt and just became water and absorbed her. And I heard her and it changed my life. And now I have this book and she gave us this amazing blurb, which we couldn't print on the first one. Oh my gosh, she's so special and such an incredible influence on so many people's lives. And as I step into this world where I speak openly about myself, my problems, my mistakes, my shames, she has walked that road really successfully. Yeah, she's the standard bearer. I mean, for the three people that are listening

who don't know who she is, she wrote Wild, this incredible memoirs made into a movie. Tiny beautiful things. Yeah, with Reese Witherspoon. She writes Dear Sugars, The Calm. I guess it's also a podcast. Amazing podcast. She's an incredible human being.

Yeah, so, and for her to read the book, that was my biggest fear was for her to be like oh proud of you you did it you know like a very general look what you did which is a code for i was so bored and she really liked the book and gave me this beautiful quote um that we're going to print on the second pass and just i mean that it's one thing to have my best friends who know me to my core get what I'm trying to say, but to have someone who knows me tangentially, not really, and really through a professional context,

who is like the peak of their career, to look down at me at the bottom of the mountain and say, you're doing a good job, is really a powerful thing to hear. It's huge. And continuing in that vein of like mentors and like, for some reason, you being this magnet for hanging out with cool people. How did, I know Tom Shadiac has been like this mentor to you and has had this impact on you? I mean, how did that come about? And what is it that he injected into the JET equation? He has injected more into the equation

than anyone in my life, I would venture to say, in terms of giving me language to restructure my entire thinking. And sometimes he did it in ways that I wasn't able to hear. Like he told me things that I didn't like that I liked three years later. And it's so funny. Like about storytelling or about life? About my worldview. I mean, he told me early on when I was telling him that I don't act on my sexuality because the Bible says so,

he goes, you got to let the Bible go. And I was not ready to hear that. I was like, aha, you're a heretic. I can't trust you anymore. And what he meant by that is you can't worship the Bible. You need to worship God. And another thing he told me once when I'm processing all this with him, he's so generous with his time to even talk to me back then was, you know, I was talking about dealing with sexuality and faith and all these things. And I was so deep in it. And he said, Jed, let me ask you a question. Where does your allegiance lie? Is your allegiance with your tradition? Is your allegiance with Christianity? Or is your allegiance with the truth? And I was like, well, I think that's a trick question because Christianity is the truth,

but I would say the truth. And he goes, okay, that's all I ask is that you keep it there. And that was like somebody with a hammer and a nail and a marble statue just going, ding, ding, ding, and making that one little crack to break my whole worship of certainty apart. Where if my allegiance is with the truth, then I do not fear new evidence from experience, from the outside world, from my heart, because the truth is the truth is the truth.

It is unshakable. So God is not scared by someone challenging him or her or it. The Bible is not scared. The truth is not scared. The truth is not scared. And yet there was so much anxiety in defending this tiny little bit of certain truth that my worldview had. And it was so anxious of being perverted and changed and somebody ruining it that when he said that, those words, and when he said it then, it didn't land on me the way it lands on me now. He's just really good at telling you things that you're not ready to hear. And then you thank him years later.

And so how does that manifest in your life and in your awareness and in your writing and how you carry yourself? Well, I mean, fully it manifests in I am eternally teachable. Well, I mean, fully it manifests in I am eternally teachable. There is nothing that I believe that I could not change my belief about. Because I'm like, I don't actually care what the truth is. I just believe that it exists. I have no allegiance to what I think it is. It could change.

And now, of course, the more evidence... It's like, it's such a relief. It is such a relief. I have nothing to defend. And it just, the truth is God is so much bigger that it doesn't need defense. And that is such a exhale of life that I try to embody every day. So when you're mining your psyche and your experience to find that truth and make its way onto the page, what are the devices that you use?

Like, what is the litmus test of truth for you? Great question. I think I pursue truth, not because it's important, but because it feels good. It just, when I learn something new that feels true and I recognize it as true, it feels, it is a rush. But these are your feelings. Of course. I mean, I don't actually believe in anything but feelings. I mean, there's obviously math and physics, but humans are feelings. And our limbic system is way older than the rest of our frontal cortex. So it's like there's a lot of truth in there.

in there. And when I learn something new, like my phone, the notes section on my phone is full of moments that were that electricity of recognition shocked me. And I'm like, and I write it down. And then that often becomes something I write about on Instagram. And I feel no compulsion to write regularly. I feel no compulsion like, oh, I haven't done. The moment I have an electric thought, I write it down and then I process it and then I put it out there. And maybe it's a dumb thought, but it felt like something true. And I'm just going to test it.

And what's fun about testing those thoughts with the world is that if you get pushback or someone says you're thinking wrongly or that's not my experience, then I'm like, ooh, good point. You know, like let's roll with this. And so, yeah, my litmus test is really as I observe and absorb living as a human being and my brain, the pattern recognition software in my brain recognizes things work like this, things don't work like this. So when I see something new that lights up and matches other patterns, that interests me. Yeah. And that's my like ding, ding, ding. You've like conditioned yourself to recognize it. Yeah, you know it.

And then I try to find language for it. And oftentimes the language comes in just a few words and then I'll unpack it, which is, I mean, it's the best feeling. It's so, it's my favorite thing to do. When I read these posts on Instagram, they're so naturalistic, but it feels like on some level, a stream of consciousness, but it's also so well-crafted and composed. And I'm like, God damn it. It looks like he wrote that in 10 seconds. Please tell me it took him like three hours to get that out. I mean, sometimes, usually it takes me just, I don't know, 15 minutes or something. And I generally do it where I type it out in the notes section so that I can read it and reread it. Yeah, you don't just natively put it into Instagram.

It depends on what it is. I used to do that a lot, but then Instagram would freeze or something and I would lose it. So I'm scared. Also, the composition window is so narrow. Right. And I need to see it. So I do it in the notes section, and I'm normally sitting on my couch or at a coffee shop, and it'll just come. I'll be reading a book or doing some other work, working on emails, and some electric thought will hit me, and I have to get it out or I can't work. And that's like where posts come from. Like they bother me. That's why you're a real writer.

I have to, yeah. I cannot think about anything else until I figure out how to word this. And then once I've like exhaled it, then I can go about my business. So what is it that you want people to take from this book? My hope is, and now that it's done, I hadn't actually read it until I recorded the audio book because in the past I had read it over and over again during edits.

And so I would keep catching things and then like rewrite it. So it wasn't this flow But never from beginning to end. Let me ask you, let me interrupt you to ask you one question. Yeah. Did you have that experience? You were speaking about the benefits of that Chill Strayed was telling you about like going with a publisher and they handle all these, they're expert in all these various specialties with regard to publishing.

Did you have that experience where you turned in the manuscript and you're like, this thing is tight. Like you're like, every word is exactly the way that I want it. I've read it a million times. The punctuation is perfect. And then they have the copy editor go through it and it comes back. Just, you just can't, there's literally red marks on every line. Oh yeah. Bloodbath. It's literally red marks on every oh yeah bloodbath it's like graphic right all the amount of blood there's a censored bar over it i definitely had that except i turned it in without having labored over every word i'm i am a external processor a lot of my writing i never read again i just this is first draft i wrote it now i really hate you and then it's out

and i send it to them because i like wow i get so caught up in thinking new thoughts when i'm reading something that i'm like i must have thought it best that time because i'm just going to go off on another direction if i go back in there and it and then once they in their clarity and lucidity we're like this doesn't make sense. You jumped from here to here. I know you want this to be an emotional moment, but you didn't set it up before to knock it down. So you got to set it up. They were really good at teaching me those things. And so there was many, many back and forths, but I'm not, I'm not someone who labors over my words. I just, I write, like I speak, I hope. And it's just like, whatever I'm thinking. Yeah. But there is structure to it, which is interesting.

I mean, when you tell the truth, like nature has structure. So it comes out, it's so interesting, the flow of the book and how it's set up. And when I read it, I was like, wow, this really worked, you know, but I credit my editors with that because I don't know what I was doing. Yeah. I think, you know, what you were doing. I mean, some simple guidelines of tell the truth, try to, if you're going to, if something's going to happen, you need to explain why it matters, you know, and set it up before, like little things like that. I knew. But outside of that, I mean, I've never done this before. And so we're going to work our way back to that original question about what you want people to take from the book. But, but on this subject of, you know, going through the book for

the first time from beginning to end, when you do the audio book, what is the, you know, what, what did the book teach you? Like what I'm interested in, like your journey through it from this place of what you thought it would be when you began to what it is now. And, and, you know, what that, what that process was like for you in terms of teach, you know, a teachable moment for yourself in the doing, right. As John Chu. Yeah. Well, it's funny because in,

in the, in like when scientists research memory and stuff, they, when you tell a memory, the telling of it changes the actual memory. Like the truest memory you'll ever have is the one that you tell for the first time. It's actually the one you never tell. You know, it's like the moment you speak it, the neurons rearrange. And like, there's stories from my childhood that I've told so many times, I'm certain none of it's true anymore. Well, you have that little prefatory paragraph at the beginning of the book.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is fun. Yeah. I say at the beginning of the book. Yeah. Yeah. Which is fun. Yeah. I say at the beginning of the book, like receive this book as you would a long story told by a friend over dinner, you know? And like, if they're telling a long story about their past, you're not like fact-checking them too hard. Even though like in truth, the book is very true, but there are things that I jumped over and things I simplified because... Well, you have to define truth. Like sometimes the truth of a story isn't in the specific factual unfoldment of it, right? Totally. So what did it teach me? Well, I would say one thing is interesting is as you read a book, your brain constructs the narrator and it can,

you can almost see them. You can feel them as a real person. And as you get to know them, especially a book written in the first person, which this one is. And what is interesting is that narrator isn't exactly me, which as I was reading it, I was like, whoa, the narrow, it's like me ish. It's me with a little more understanding than I had at the time. It's me a little bit clearer,

which is like, it's just an interesting thing to like, imagine myself as like a character in a movie that looks like me with just like the eyes are a little close together and the beard's a little something. And, and with a little bit armed with a little bit more insight. It was a tricky, it was an interesting thing to like feel that. Um, and I, I don't know what else I learned. I mean, I learned that it's really fun to read your own book as I just had the best time and it's fun to read it with a director and an engineer through the glass

and they haven't read it. And so they're, or at least the engineer hasn't read it. And so they're experiencing, like sometimes I would see through the glass, he would be laughing or whatever. And it was just really cool to experience that live exchange. I don't know. I don't know what I learned. Well, what do you want people to take from it? I would hope that people would enjoy the book as an adventure story because it is. It really is. I mean, there is so much magic in Latin America that is put on display in this book. And I was so blessed by that entire part of the world. I mean, oh my God, every country, Mexico,

all of Central America, I mean, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, like each place is so different and so special. And so that alone is like just yum. But then the journey into the interior of who you are, what you believe and why, if people aren't taking that journey in their life, they're missing a huge part of what it means to be human. And as the title suggests, I hope that people are willing to watch me do that in a beautiful location in their imagination.

And it gives them maybe some tools, maybe some do's and don'ts of taking that journey themselves. Do you think that you would have been able to take that journey without going on this bike ride? Yes. I think a lot of people, and I know people in my own life who are on that journey now, while they have a nine to five job, not in LA, but in other cities. No one works nine to five here. No, no. But I do believe that it helps to take yourself out of the structure that your life is built on because it does shake you awake. It does expose patterns of thinking and other ways of thinking and being when you go and remove yourself from your comfort zone that begin this process for you. There's a line in

Wild, I believe it is, where Cheryl Strait's mother told her to put herself in the way of beauty. And I just think about that all the time. It's like, you need to put yourself in the way because it's not necessarily going to come through your front door. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you have this beautiful passage in the introduction where you talk about how when we're young and everything's new and everything's an adventure and we have no preconceived ideas about what to expect, about what is going to happen when we walk through the next door, because everything is shiny and different.

And then we get inured to our lives. you know, is gonna happen when we walk through the next door because everything is shiny and different. Yeah. And then we get, you know, inured to our lives. And even if we live interesting, happy, dynamic lives, we're still habits of creature. And there is a dimming switch that occurs with that. But when you travel to new places, suddenly you're able to connect with that childlike nature because everything is indeed new again. Right. Well, and of course we're that way. If we were shocked by

everything that happened every day, we would get nothing done. You know, like, of course we get used to things. We're like elf. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we don't want that, but I will say they're cultivating childlike wonder once in a while at different phases and transitions in life is important and does resensitize you to the beauty of life and also the willful choosing of your own journey and path. You know, accept and flow down the river, but also feel like you chose it. That's the beautiful sweet spot. feel like you chose it. That's the beautiful sweet spot. And we have lost touch with these rites of passage and these rituals that were part and parcel of growing up in a bygone era. And there's something sad about that. I mean, there's just a lot of things. I never grew up in a real liturgical church where you just go through all these motions and you have these readings and you go to the front and you get the communion.

But there is some, I mean, there's a reason why those things have lasted thousands of years. There is something about when a human performs something ceremonious, ceremonial. Ceremonial. Sometimes I lose my words. ceremonious, ceremonial. Ceremonial. Sometimes I lose my words. When a human performs something ceremonial,

it's almost like language. It gives them a metaphor, a frame around this much bigger thing. Like a marriage ceremony gives you a before and after. Whatever it is. You know, when someone dies and you take their ashes out on a surfboard and everyone circles around and like that ceremony and reverence gives that feeling, that heaviness, that weight of before and after. And that is helpful in the human brain that likes chapters. I think ritual is important. Even if these ceremonies are as simple as, you know, the way you prepare tea or, you know, the 10 minutes of meditation. I think the more that we can kind of connect with whatever is primordial about that, it girds our lives with a level of meaning and depth that we know is true, even if it doesn't

seem to make logical sense. I hope to have kids someday. We'll see. But if and when I do, I will institutionalize a gap year, a gap two year, a situation where it's like you go from high school to college and you work and it's not going to be in this country and you have to. And it is like, and every kid knows that the younger one's like, oh God, it's coming up. And the other one's like, oh wow. I mean, something like that I just feel is really powerful.

And you do feel like removed from the conveyor belt of education and all of a sudden you feel, whoa, I have to make my own money. Whoa, life is actually not that easy. You have to work hard. I don't know. So I'm just like thinking like something like that there, like my dad did this thing with us, which was really special, which is after we graduated college, he took us on solo adventures. So when I graduated college, I went on a seven-week motorcycle trip with my dad across the U.S. Wow. And it was all back roads, no freeways allowed. And it was so special. And I felt so seen and loved by him. And he had done it with my sister, and he did it with my brother, and whatever. And that felt like, I don't know if it was a rite of passage, but it definitely felt

like a tradition that I was a part of and that I had earned finally my turn, which is a feeling people want to feel. Yeah. But adventure was sort of woven into your, your growing up experience. You guys went on camping trips and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, and both my parents were writers. So if you live in that world, it's feast or famine or famine and famine, you know, it's, it's rarely, you make a lot of money. So they were a big shots in the early eighties and made some good money. And then the coffers dried up. And so my childhood is like, we don't fly on planes. We don't go to fancy things. So we go camping because you can drive there and it's cheap. And so it's interesting. My love of camping in nature was also like a bit of necessity for this is what we can afford to do

and still do things as a family and see the world that we love. Yeah. All right. We got to wind this down. I got to pick up my daughter at school. So leave us with some parting thoughts about the book, about this journey that you're about to embark on a new adventure, a new journey of kind of going out and sharing about the book. I already asked you, you know, what you want people to take away from the book. But, you know, I wanna hear, like if there's one kind of core message

that you wanna leave people with about your writing, about your life, about this book, what would that be? I would say, I would say there's a lot of anxiety, stress, sadness, loneliness in the world. And if that is true, one would hope that the opposite is also true. And listen, I don't know how it happened. I don't know who I am. I've had a lot of struggles in my life, but I am living my dream. I am writing every day to people who will actually read it and seem to like it. I am surrounded by a community of friends that I respect and respect me.

I love my family. It's complicated. We get in it, but we love each other and life is good. And so I'm telling you that when something is true, the opposite is also true. And like a lot of times you're like, well, am I just always going to hate my job? Am I just always going to hate the circumstance? Am I always going to have, not necessarily, it can be really good. And I, I am so, so grateful and to the circumstances of my life. And I don't know how it happened, by the way, I do not know. You live an amazing life. Uh, I think it's definitely true. You cannot judge your future based on your current circumstances. I think that the universe rewards those who strive. this person whose experience could have gone sideways, you know, a gay kid feeling very isolated and ashamed in an evangelical home.

I mean, that's a recipe for a lot of things, but not necessarily somebody who's living their best, most authentic life, surrounded by people that love them and in the fullest expression of your creative voice. So that is something to be celebrated. And it's icing on the cake that you are so gifted at writing. And so not just eloquent in your prose, but in your commitment to the truth.

And there is true beauty in what you express. Like I am so touched. Every time I get to read one of your Instagram posts. I'm just, I'm delighted by you in every regard. I think, I think you really do have a gift. And this was awkward for me because I didn't, I was only able to read the first 10 pages of this book and I wish that I had read the whole thing. But I have no doubt that my praise would only be more effusive. And I wish you only the best. And I'm so excited for this next chapter

where you get to share what I already know with people all over the country who are gonna now enjoy your words for the very first time. Well, it's a true, true privilege to talk to somebody as thoughtful and big hearted as you, because epiphanies just pour out my brain because I'm just amazed. The way that you open someone up is truly unique and why this podcast is so special, why you are so special. I appreciate that, man. So you're going out on the road.

If people want to come and give you a hug and get a book signed by you, how can they learn more about where you're going to be and how to make that happen? Yeah, so October 3rd, I'll be at Parnassus Books in Nashville at 6.30 p.m. October 8th, I'll be at Barnes & Noble at The Grove in Los Angeles at 7.30. And then there may be other dates added on. I don't have any yet because I'm just kind of like, I, I did a tour this summer, um, that I ended up in the ER from stress because I had stress caused gastritis from overexerting myself, loving on people. I just like want to hug everybody and

talk until midnight. And my body was like, you can't do that every day. You're not Alma the hugging saint? No, I am indeed not. And so I'm just kind of taking care of myself a little bit and seeing what comes. But yeah, I mean, if people want to come hang, I'll be at those two places and more to come for sure. Cool. And I forgot to ask you about this thing

that you're involved in. Oh yeah, my Bita cup. It's Bita. I was like, is it Bita? Is it Bita? Well, there is no real way to, it's a Swedish word and they pronounce it like Bita, which we don't, I don't know. But it's this travel mug company that I designed and started with my friend just because I was so tired of throwing away so many cups and red cups at parties, paper cups at coffee shops because I was so tired of throwing away so many cups. Red cups at parties, paper cups at coffee shops. I was like, I just want to carry one that is pretty, that is like me everywhere. And then who knows, I'll save a thousand cups a year.

That's kind of cool. And so that's what I did. And so you designed that? Yeah. That's cool. Because I see these things all over the place and all kinds of people on social media are using them and talking about them. Yeah, they're cool. It's very fun to make stuff.

I mean, that's like another podcast, but it's really fun. All right. So people should buy this thing. Where do you get that? Mybetabyta.com. And did you bring me a copy of the freaking book? I have one in my car,

but there's one in the mail on its way to you. I mean, I don't know if you just want to be underwater with books. You're supposed to get in like two days. I want your, I need your book. If you mailed it to me, that's good enough. Yeah. It's on it. It's like in the sky now. All right, cool. I release you to your life. If you want to connect with Jed, probably the best way to do that is Instagram, Jed Adia Jenkins, where you can read his musings. You have a website, but that's not really the gig, right? I mean, yeah, there's like links of like podcasts and interviews I've done, but. Right. But the most important thing is to pick up the book, To Shake the Sleeping Self.

Yeah. This podcast is going up soon. It's September. I mean, by the time this is going up, it's right when the book is coming out, I think. So pre-order it or just buy it and read the audio book. It's fun to go to a real bookstore and just pick it up and it's in your hand. Get the hard cover, right? Yeah. Awesome.

Thank you, my friend. Thank you. Much love, much success with this book launch and come back and talk to me again. You know I will. And can we hang out at least once in the next three years? All right, cool. Peace.

Were you expecting that? I was not expecting that. Actually, that's not entirely true. I knew that it would be amazing. I just didn't know the form of amazing it would take. I hope you have fallen in love with Jed as much as I have. And so please show him that love by picking up his new book, To Shake the Sleeping Self, link in the show notes where you can also peruse all manner of interesting articles about Jed and the other people that we mentioned today to expand your experience of this conversation

with further immersion beyond the audio waves currently flowing into your inner ear. Do me a solid and share your thoughts on today's conversation with Jed himself. You can find him on Instagram at Jedediah Jenkins. And if you would like to support my work, our work, I should more appropriately say, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or on whatever platform you enjoy this content.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel, where you can also watch this entire conversation at youtube.com forward slash Rich Roll, and just share it with your friends on social media. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today, Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for filming today's experience. Margo Lubin for editing and graphics. DK, my man DK, for sponsor relationships. And Reese Robinson for today's portraits that accompany the episode on my website.

And theme music, as as always by analema thanks for the love you guys see you back here next week when is my what is my next episode let me make sure i know what i'm talking about here um oh we have who do we have oh kj del antonia it's coming up it's a conversation about parenting. That's a great one. So you have that to look forward to. Until then, may you shake the sleeping self. Thank you.