The Rich Roll Podcast - Jedidiah Jenkins: The Pursuit of Wonder, The Power of Story & Finding Truth in Adventure

Episode Date: October 19, 2015

Author, global adventurer, social entrepreneur, human rights activist & lawyer, filmmaker and overall beautiful human. All of these labels certainly befit today's guest, yet all somehow manage to fall short. I can't quite recall how Jedidiah Jenkins 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 in 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 deskbound 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. In August, 2013, on two wheels powered only by two legs, Oregon to Patagonia began in Florence, Oregon and culminated in Patagonia is January 2015. A sixteen-month, 10,000 mile journey elegantly and thoughtfully captured and shared on his incredibly popular Instagram feed and soon to be the subject of his first book In so many ways, Jedidiah is exactly who I expected him to be. And yet his wit and warmth somehow managed to surprise me — a guy deeply connected to his personal truth and just so refreshingly present. This is a phenomenal conversation about: * the pursuit of wonder & adventure * the transformative power of story * the risk & reward of following your passion * global wealth disparity * dependence upon the kindness of strangers * combatting our culture of skepticism * behind the scenes of Kony 2012; and * the beauty and peril of pursuing the creative life Jedidiah is a very special guy. I am very excited to share this one with you. In all sincerity, I hope you enjoy the exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich

If you feel compelled to do something and there are barriers in the way, I think those barriers are like a gift from the universe that they're a lesson that you're meant to know. Like the more something scares you, the more I think there is a block that is an intended lesson for you. That's Jedediah Jenkins, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, what's going on? What's happening? What is the news?

I am Rich Roll. This is the podcast. Yeah, man, that's what's going on. The podcast where I sit down with the outliers, the big forward thinkers across all categories of positive paradigm breaking culture change. Why be a skeptic? Why be negative? There are too many things to be enthusiastic about, right? Why do I do this? To help all of us, myself included, of course, maybe mostly because of myself, to help us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves. So thank you so much for subscribing to the show today. We appreciate all the reviews you guys have left on iTunes. Thank you for using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. Where is the Amazon banner ad, you ask? I get emails about that all the time. Well, it's right there on the main podcast page. Basically can't miss it you click on that takes you to Amazon buy whatever

you're going to buy Amazon then kicks off some commission change it doesn't cost you guys anything extra and it's just a really easy nice way to support the show really and it doesn't really require any extra time for you, especially if you kind of take that URL and bookmark it to your own browser. So anyway, thanks so much to everybody who's made a habit of that. It really does help us out a lot and we greatly, greatly appreciate it. All right. So this is the part of the show where I do a little short intro about the guest, say a few words about who they are and what they do. And I've been sort of wrapping my head around what to say when it comes to Jedediah Jenkins,

because I think in certain ways, this is a guy, you know, he's, this is a guy who's tough to label, tough to define. You know, a bunch of words that kind of come to mind are adventurer, writer, human rights activist, lawyer, perhaps the most ironic of all labels for Jedediah, vagabond poet, filmmaker, and basically beautiful human. These are all true statements, of course, but I don't think any of them quite capture who this guy is, his essence. And for you guys, because I love you guys, I'm going to try to get to the bottom of it, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say

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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. All right, this week's guest, Jedediah Jenkins. So I've been racking my brain trying to remember exactly how Jedediah first came across my radar. And I just, I can't remember.

I'm not quite sure. All I do remember is stumbling upon his Instagram account in the latter phases of an adventure that he calls Oregon to Patagonia, which was this bike trip that he undertook that began, well, duh, in Oregon and became a fait accompli about 16 months later in Patagonia. And each entry in this Instagram account was just more beautiful than the one prior, just incredibly amazing, beautiful photographs. But it wasn't just the imagery that caught my attention. It was his incredibly contemplative and poetic entries

that accompanied each photograph, using Instagram as blog, essentially, but not really travelogue, because his writings were themed less by place description and much more by what Jedediah was experiencing emotionally. And I think that's what I tapped into. He is incredibly talented. He has quite the touch and acuity with the pen and an ability to really relate his emotions in a very powerful way. And I was just hooked. I was hooked

not just on his prose, but on his amazing story. And I remember thinking, man, I cannot wait until this guy finishes this trip so I can track him down, get him on the podcast, and force him to tell me all about it. So today is that day. And I know that I said that Jedediah defies labels, but let me at least try to lay a little foundation. Jedediah is a graduate of USC Film School who then, I think it's fair to say somewhat ironically, I suppose, went on to earn his law degree at Pepperdine. He began his professional career as one of the founding leaders of Invisible Children, which is the nonprofit you may know, you may be familiar with, from the very famous Coney 2012 moment in viral internet history. He is the progeny of adventure journalist parents who quite famously graced the cover of

National Geographic magazine after walking across the country in the 1970s. And I think it's fair to say that despite his legal career, Jedediah and the outdoors had a little destiny to sort out, an inherent spark to explore that found Jedediah up and quitting his job on his 30th birthday to scare himself, to embrace the unknown, and like a character out of a Mark Twain novel, light out on the territory. So at the end of August 2013, Jedediah launched a journey that began in Florence, Oregon, and moved south on two wheels, culminating in Patagonia in January of 2015. It was a 16-month, 10,000-mile journey that was very elegantly and thoughtfully and beautifully captured and shared on his incredibly popular Instagram feed and is soon to be the subject of his first book.

And it's weird because Jedediah, in certain respects, was exactly the guy I expected him to be when we met. He is contemplative. He is reflective. But he was also so much more. He was smarter and funnier and wittier and warmer. He's just a guy very deeply connected to his personal truth and just present, incredibly present. And I found that so refreshing and beautiful. This is a conversation about investing in adventure, the pursuit of wonder, the incredible power of story,

of sharing your truth. It's about the importance of doing something so big that scares you. It's about following your passion. It's about global wealth disparity. What can be learned when your survival is dependent upon the kindness of strangers. It's about combating our culture of skepticism, what it was like to be at the center of the Coney 2012 storm and aftermath. And basically, it's about the creative life, embracing writing as a profession. I love talking to Jedediah. He is a very special guy. And I'm just thrilled and super excited to share this one with you guys. So let's pedal a few miles with Jedediah Jenkins, shall we? Enjoy.

Look at that thing. It's so small. I know, but it's so powerful. That's what? It speaks to the world Jedediah I feel so immortal drinking this do you? good just for the audience we started by the way cantaloupe

hemp seed spirulina some plant based protein and I think that's it mainly because that's all we have in the house today and no ice so it's a little bit warm so sorry about that but you know like the body knows the moment it hits well my body knows the moment it hits my lips that it's like making me live longer and i just know that that's the thing about about uh green smoothies man i mean there's nothing that

you can drink or take into your body that immediately agrees with you in such a way where you're like, this is good for me. You know, I love that. Cool. Well, thanks for doing this, man. I'm stoked to be here. It's, uh, I've been following you for a long time and we went back and forth for a while. It was a little bit of a long time coming, but we're here today. I know. I'm super stoked. You know, I started, when you were over here the other week, I was trying to remember how you first came across my radar. It might have been through Bobby Bailey or something like, somebody reposting something that you had done. And I was like, oh, who's this guy?

And it was in the latter stages of your bike journey. So I wasn't there. I was not an early adopter on the Jedediah Jenkins story. But I remember like reading one of your first posts, which by the way, on Instagram, you know, when you post a picture, it's not just a caption. It's generally like a full, well thought out journal entry. And I was wrapped from the beginning and just was all about like following you and what you were doing. And I'm really glad to have you here to talk about the whole you and what you were doing. And, uh, and, uh, I'm really glad to have you here to talk about the whole thing and tell the story. Yeah. I, it might've been our,

cause Jay Ferris introduced us over email. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was having lunch with Jay and your name spontaneously came up and I was like, Oh, that guy, no, I'm following that guy. I got to meet that guy. And he's like, Oh, I'll introduce him. And he, I think he emailed you right then and there. It was such an organic thing talking about my journey in the instagram like i the whole intention of the trip was to write a book which i'm doing now but i wanted people to feel like they were on the trip with me and generally over the last 15 20 years people have done that when they travel they blog it was like check out my travel blog. And they write like 45 pages of how Paris looks at sunset or whatever. And I remember, I remember being like, I don't want people to have to click a link and go

to a blog. I want it to just be like, that's what's so interesting about Instagram is you're checking it for so many reasons, like just to see what your friends are doing or whatever. And then you just see, Oh, Jed's at Machu Picchu today. Right. Oh, that's cool. And then you keep going. And then people followed me for a year and a half, which is, and I didn't know what was coming next and neither did they. So it was just a very interesting experiment of like live blogging something that changed my life and like bringing people along with me and inviting their voice into the experience where they're writing to me telling me their immediate response to things which was really cool it was cool i mean a couple observations on that i mean the first thing is uh yeah when you read someone's

blog like i think the common mistake this happens athletes too, when they do their race reports, it's so episodic. Like it's like, then this happened and this happened and this happened, um, which can lose the reader. Like it quickly, you know, devolves into something quite boring, but you never did that. It wasn't like, Oh, I went here and I went there. It was more like, here's two paragraphs, three paragraphs that captures the essence of what i'm feeling right now it was more in a more kind of like your emotional state as to where you were rather than geographically based well i've always i have friends who are very good at journaling and they have shelves of their life but it's it is very episodic it's i went on this trip i talked to this person i met this person i broke up with this person and i've i've tried to do that because i actually have a terrible event memory and but but i have

an excellent idea memory like if you tell me an idea that really rings true to me i will remember it verbatim for the rest of my life but I will forget who told me like my brain latches onto things that I perceive to be true, but they don't accredit it to anyone, which is probably bad. But at the same time, it's just like, my brain is so attracted to true ideas. And so that's the only thing I've ever been able to journal is when I'm, if I'm biking over a mountain or I'm experiencing the Amazon, it's the emotion and the idea that came from the experience that I leave with. Well, that's the more important thing anyway, right? But I would think that in your case, given what you just said, that it might be more important for you to actually do like a timeline so that that can jog the idea when you sit down to actually write the book.

That's why I took pictures. You're not going to forget the idea, you know. But when you, I mean, it really became kind of a pure Instagram kind of viral thing. I mean, like how many, how many people were following you when you began versus when it, when it, you know. So I worked at a charity called Invisible Children for five years. And from that I had gathered, cause I spoke at high schools and colleges a lot. And so I had probably 7,000, which is a lot. Right.

But then over the course of the trip, it went up to 70,000. Right. And it wasn't like, I mean, it was people tagging their friends being like, oh my gosh, you need to read this. Oh my gosh, we were just talking about this. You know, those kind of things. That's how I found it. to read this oh my gosh we were just talking about this you know those kind of things which is so which is great and which is why like i really treat my instagram as a community of people that want to be there and because they want to be there i'll ask them questions i'll engage because

if they're there and they're following along the journey, they probably, we have a lot in common. If they're interested in what I have to say, then I'm probably interested in what they have to say. So it's been a really positive. The internet can be a very complex place and very destructive, especially for if you want to be constructive and you want to put something positive into the world, there's such a,

there's such a fever for skepticism and for cutting things down and cut clipping wings. And I've found that Instagram is kind of immune to a lot of that. Yeah. Maybe not immune, but certainly on the, on the positive end of that spectrum in a big way. Yeah. Which is cool. So, well, let's, let's, uh, you know, let's take it back a little bit. The origin story. Uh, you grew up in Nashville, um, the, uh, the product of two adventurers themselves who you would later, uh, sort of unconsciously follow in the footsteps of, but, uh, you know, what was it, what was it like? I mean, talk a little bit about, um, you know, who your parents are and kind of what they did.

Yeah, so my parents in the second half of the 70s walked across America for five years. My dad is named Peter Jenkins, and he started from upstate New York in Albany. I think it was Albany. And walked for two years from Albany to New Orleans. And his plan was to do a big V, go from New York to New Orleans, then up to the West Coast. You can't cut straight across because the entire Southwest is an impenetrable desert by foot, so you have to veer up

and cut over Oregon or Washington. So that was his plan and when he got to so he walked from new york to washington dc where he went to the national geographic headquarters and he walked in there and said i'm walking across america and i think you should give me a camera i'll take pictures for you and they were like no and then as he was leaving they ran out and said never never mind. Yes, here's a camera. Can you imagine that today, though?

I know. Never. You wouldn't get in the front door past the receptionist. Yeah. And so I know it's amazing how many interesting stories start with like unfounded confidence and bravado of someone just like walking in somewhere and trying to make it happen i just i that's such a theme to living dramatically ignorance the ignorance is empowering right they always say on the end of it like if i'd known you know i would have never even attempted it but when you're just sort of blindly propelling yourself forward it seems that somehow you know magically

these things can fall into place yeah like. Like a huge ethos that I live by is cultivated naivete where you like hang on to it because if you lose that, if you get a little too wise to the world, then you just stop yourself because you analyze the risks more readily. But if you just have a little bravado and a little naivete you do a lot more yeah you know so anyway my dad had a lot of that and i really the intention of walking across america he was i think he was 21 and he had just graduated from college liberal liberal art school and it was during vietnam and he just had this kind of existential crisis where he hated his country he thought it was a bunch of bs and and then he kind of had this moment where existential crisis where he hated his country. He thought it was a bunch of

BS. And, and then he kind of had this moment where he was like, well, I, I'm from a liberal state. I went to a liberal school. I'm from bougie Greenwich, Connecticut. I don't really know the U S and what's interesting is my dad grew up in the only government housing project in Greenwich, Connecticut. There was one building where the poor kids lived. And my dad and his six siblings and his parents lived in a two-bedroom apartment. So he just grew up with this really weird juxtaposition. Right, so he's around horse farms and the white fences and the beautiful manicured green lawns. But that wasn't his reality.

And his rich best friends would come for dinner at his house because their mansions were so, like their parents hated each other and there was no life there. And they would come to my dad's like poor little hovel and they would just be laughing and screaming and fighting. And like, it was so full of life that really affected my dad.

So I think that kind of gave him a certain level of strength and personability and so he set out uh to really see america for what it was and the best way to do that was on foot and so he went in that geo people had done it it wasn't like no one had ever done something like that before right uh john muir actually walked from chicago to florida i think but i don't know if anyone famously did it or at least sort of documented it for a publication right like there are many great journeys in history but i don't know i know what's interesting i'm named after a fur trade trapper named jedediah Smith. And he was, I think, the first man of European descent to walk across the West and get to the West Coast.

Right. And, you know, I'm going to jump ahead a little bit and in a little bit of a haphazard way. But in my mind, when I hear that, I'm like, well, this is destiny. You know what I mean? Like, I know that part of your story is that you had this sort of lack of awareness when you began your journey that in any way you were following in your father's footsteps, but like, this is your namesake and you are the product, the genetic product of these parents who had done this. And here you are doing it again. It's like, of course, this is what you were going to do. And yet at the time that you had the idea of doing it, that did not enter your conscious mind. Well, there's a thing like, of course, this is what you were going to do. And yet at the time, you had the idea of doing it that did not enter your conscious mind.

Well, there's a thing like, it's so funny. You see in movies and you hear when you're a kid and you hear adults say things that you don't have experience of, but then they get lodged in your mind. And like the example being, I know so many people as they enter into adulthood and as they enter into parenthood, they say, oh my God, I am my mother or, oh my God, I am exactly like my dad. I never thought I would be. They start doing things unconsciously that, and then they'll kind of see themselves objectively and be like, that's exactly what my dad would have done. But there's a little, there's a difference between how you react in a scenario or a little, you know, mild tick or, or, you know, something like that. And like saying,

I'm going to go, you know, from Oregon to Patagonia, like my dad walks, you know, mild tick or, or, you know, something like that. And like saying, I'm going to go, you know, from Oregon to Patagonia, like my dad walks, you know, it's like such a glaring. Yeah, you're right. No, that is an extreme example. But the thing was, I truly, I swear to God, I thought that it was so original, the idea. That's hilarious. And, and what's my parents were actually really good about not allowing their walk across America to truly define their identity. Like I grew up in my, I knew my parents had written some famous books in the early eighties were on the cover of national geographic,

but they didn't talk about that. And like my dad would, and my mom would tell crazy stories. My mom would be like, Oh, we were walking across Colorado and these men were screaming they were going to rape me and they kept following us in cars,

so we had to hide in a coyote hole for a night. That was crazy. And then she'd like go back to stirring the mashed potatoes and I'd be like, oh my God. But it was wild, but I didn't like, I don't know. There's just such a mental block with seeing your parents as humans when you're a kid. They're something else. They're like a force that like watches over you and keeps you from eating candy.

And it just took me a long time to really realize how extraordinary what they had done was. It was just, this is something that it was always just, yeah, that's what they did. It was no big deal because you grew up with that. yeah that's what they did it was no big deal because you grew up with that but but so then when when i was in my late 20s i was 27 and there's something about 27 where you start to suddenly see 30 coming and i was like wow when people are in their 30s they like get mortgages and settle down and so like i i just had this like idea that time speeds up in your 30s and all of a sudden you're 60 and then all of a sudden you're dead and so i was like okay i promised myself when i turned 30 i'm i'm going to quit my job and spend a year doing something or the truth was i

i promise i'm going to quit my job and actually pursue becoming a writer because I know that's a dream of mine and I loved my job prior to working at the non-profit Invisible Children but I loved it so much that I knew I could blink and be there for 30 years and never have chased the thing that I had itching inside me to do so I gave my three-year notice at work and then kind of set in motion this idea of okay I'm gonna go on this journey and then I met a guy who had biked from New Jersey to Buenos Aires and I was like whoa that is such a good idea and then I immediately started telling people, guys, when I turn 30, I'm on a bicycle from the United States to Patagonia. And I knew that I was fast-tongued and I could get out of it if I wanted to. So I was very intentional about telling everyone that I was doing it so that the community would expect it of me and it would kind of create a social

pressure to do that. Yeah, that's a powerful thing, right? It takes it out of the idea of fantasy or pure ideation into reality with, you know, the social pressures and the construct that that creates that actually can compel you forward. Yeah, I think a lot of people have dreams or desires that they never speak out loud because they're afraid of ridicule. They're afraid of people clipping their wings or whatever. And if, if you keep it internal,

I really do believe it'll eat away at you. And it just, it truly transforms in a chrysalis and becomes like a rotten guilt that you harbor when you're older. I just am convinced of that. And so I try to speak things. I try to test the universe by saying them and see which ones stick. Like your own analog A-B testing in the real world.

In the real world. Yeah, so I just really wanted to make sure I did it because I also knew that it would scare me. Why is that important to you? Why is it important to speak it out? No. Why is it important to do something that scares you? Well, because there's a lot of, there's a lot of things I believe about taking risk. Um, one of the main ones is that if you feel compelled to do something and there are barriers in the way i think those barriers are like a gift from the universe that they're a lesson that you're meant to to know

like the more something scares you the more i think there is a block that is an intended lesson for you and i knew i wanted to do something adventurous and I knew there came with adventure a cost, which is danger and the unknown and discomfort. And it was very clear to me that those are the ingredients towards building character, building bravery, just building a life story that I want to tell. And so even though I knew that I intellectually knew the pain would come and the difficulty would come, I, and I am very averse to pain, but I knew I had to have it. And so just choosing to like set my, my train on the tracks where I knew it was coming, but you can't get off the tracks once the train is moving. And I wanted to like lock myself into it

so I couldn't dance away when it got too close. Right, well, you gave yourself a three-year window, right? To prepare mentally, yeah. Of getting ready for this kind of thing. So that even at like six months out, like that train's already left, right? Well, and that's because by me doing this, I've gotten a lot of questions even some pushback

of people being like oh I can't just quit my job and like I can't just do this I have responsibilities or how do you have the money to do that and I tell people depend everyone's different depending on your levels of responsibility but if you give yourself three years you can get a lot of preparation done and you can set up your life in a way. It doesn't mean you have to quit your job tomorrow. But what's so important in my brain is I could be in a bummer job. But if I knew there was a sunset to that day, I could always survive the day. I think the depression comes when you don't see the horizon anymore.

Right. Like, what are you working towards? Yeah. Like, like what are you working towards? Yeah. Like what's next? And then for me, that was always the thing is like I set the horizon there and I was always looking to it. So by the time I got there,

my brain had been there so long, I was so ready. And to be fair, I mean, it's not like you're married with kids or anything like that. Exactly. You own a home. I mean, you were pretty much free to make this kind of choice. But at the same time, it's not like you were working at Goldman Sachs either.

You weren't in the nonprofit world. I don't know if you had law school loans or anything like that. But it's not like I can't imagine you were taking home a very big paycheck. I mean, during that three-year period, are you just sort of stashing the chestnuts? Or how did that work? Stashing and then I sold my car because I wouldn't need it. And so it's not that expensive to ride a bicycle around south america it's pretty cheap right but still 16 months is a long time i mean did you have to work at all when you were on the road to like

make ends meet or were you able to just budget it so that you could get all the way to the end no i budgeted it budgeted it but i also under budgeted so when i was in bolivia i completely ran out of money like a hundred percent and that was a struggle but then i got actually talked into by a friend of mine who'd had several successful kickstarter campaigns he was like people are invested in your trip you have like tens of thousands of people watching this they want you to finish and they want you to write a book about it so see if they'll help you which was a whole another interesting experiment to like ask strangers to help you on a spirit quest it's just i mean that is a weird thing right it's so weird and it's never been done before and it's

a it's like a weird transfer of responsibility. And like, also to have people give you money that they work hard for, um, to believe that you have something to say to them is a huge responsibility that I take very seriously. And it's also really empowering that they, that what I've already said gives them enough confidence to believe that there's more to say and that they want to hear it. Well, that was an incredibly successful campaign, right? I think you had, I mean, when you launched it, what was the goal? Like 10 grand or something like that? $8,000. $8,000. And you raised like $42,000, right? So, I mean, that's an amazing vote of confidence that I'm sure made you feel the pressure, but also must be very gratifying. Like, oh, this content that I'm putting out predominantly on Instagram is, is, you know, fulfilling people or serving some kind of, you know, need that they have that they're willing to like actually, you know, pay their hard earned money.

That's amazing. Yeah. It's, it is a, it's a weird world to be in uh like it's weird like to officially start calling yourself a writer like i before this i wrote for i wrote campaigns i wrote uh scripts for documentaries um for my last job but i wasn't really like a writer i don't know if i would really call myself that And then I just started sort of in that way of speaking something into reality. I was just like, well, that's literally what I do. And that's what I am doing.

And I'm writing a book. I'm a writer. Owning that. Owning it. Yeah, stepping into that and really like letting it become part of your identity. Because it was really hard for me to do that. Because it was a dream dream and I didn't feel qualified because all my favorite writers are like such big shots, whether it's Kerouac,

Steinbeck, Hemingway, Wendell Berry, Emerson, these like icons. And I'm like, mythic figures come from some other alternative universe. Mythic figures. Yeah. Who come from some other alternative universe. Yeah, and I'm like, I can't call myself that. You really have to earn that. And then I was reading, it was so interesting, I was actually reading memoirs by Henry Miller,

who's one of my favorites, and also Kerouac. And they were very, like, Kerouac set out to write the best book ever written. Like he was very verbal about that. And it kind of, all of a sudden I was realizing he was doing what I was doing, which is shooting for the stars and saying that. But do you think that that's some kind of natural bravado that he had or by voicing that out into the ether,

that that created some kind of accountability for him to then execute on that dream. I think it's a combination. But if you, there's so much, especially in the creative world, there's so much self-deprecation. It's like, oh, it's just this little thing I'm doing. Oh, it's nothing. Oh, don't read it.

You know, whatever. And you self-sabotage by not taking yourself seriously and not believing you have something to say you you the question of who am i to blah blah blah who am i to do this whatever is so crippling you you you sit down before you ever stood up and i like i'm kind of convincing myself that at 32 i don't have everything to say, but I have some things to say and I want to say them. Yeah. Well, you're on the backside of this extraordinary adventure that almost nobody gets to experience. And it kind of hearkens that Ben Franklin quote that I know

you're very fond of, which is either, uh, how does it go? Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing and you're doing both. Right. And that was, I remember, it's one of those things I totally believe that there's a confluence. When your life is about to change, there's often a confluence of signs to tell you that. And for me, it was like at 27, I decided I wanted to do something at age 30. The next week I was in Uganda and I met a guy named Andrew Morgan who had rode his bicycle for a year and a half. And then I was like, I want to do that and I want to become a writer.

And then I read that Benjamin Franklin quote and it was just this like whole cyclone of things happening at once where I was like, this is happening. The universe is conspiring now. The universe conspires to bless. When you have the balls to put it out there, things show up. When your heart's in the right place, you know, and you really are convicted. Yeah.

And so it's, it's just been a, I feel truly charmed to have been walking this journey and trying things out. Cause I feel like I feel in such friendship with the world. Like things just are so, even the challenges to me are like gentle spankings because my mind is already like, like either, wow,

I deserve this or like, this is exactly what I need right now. Well, it reminds me, I've told this story before on the podcast, but I had this guy, Dan Butner on, who wrote the Blue Zones books. And he tells this amazing story, kind of like a real pivotal moment in his life

was when he had the opportunity to work for George Plimpton when he was quite young, when he was like 20 or 21. And he was sort of navigating these high society circles in New York City where he was going to fancy cocktail parties with the kind of people that George was hanging out with. And George was a man of relatively modest means in comparison to kind of the Upper East Side elite, you know, the people that he kind of hung around with.

But everywhere they went, like like everyone would gravitate to George because George had the stories. Like, because George had lived his life. Like he had premised his life on adventure. And so whenever he had money, he would go and do these crazy things and then he would write about it, right? So he's living that Franklin edict and sharing it.

And then he becomes kind of the, um, the locus of, of attention because he's living this amazing life. And so I feel like in certain respects, like I'm sure when you decided to go on this event, like this is your own personal vision quest. And then it becomes something so much more like the idea that you're doing podcasts and talking to all these people about it and writing a book and all, like all of these things that perhaps you imagined, you know, would be a result of this are actually transpiring yeah i think that's i think the reason people were attracted to his stories at those cocktail parties is because i think everyone is looking for everyone's looking for meaning and they're

looking for truth and when someone is embodying that and living it they are very attractive to anyone and like life to me is just the universe saying walk down any path you want and when you get to a dead end change paths because you will find your way you're like a blind lemming bouncing off walls and to, and that's, I just think some people get stuck walking into a wall and they don't know to turn around and go somewhere else. And when you see someone exemplifying that it's very charging. And my dad grew up in the richest city on the East coast in a housing project, eating in a housing project eating like ridiculous dry noodles for dinner because they had no money and food stamps and yet all the rich kids were coming over to their house to play because the rich kids were like money does not answer our like sure we have a nice house and i sleep in a soft bed and

we have a maid that cooks our meals but we are miserable and so i feel like my dad is was kind of like raised with the gift of knowing that the traditional route of money equals happiness and the more you earn the better you are uh never really attracted him and was that kind of infused into the fabric of how you were raised, even like unconsciously? I mean, you still end up going to law school, right? Which is like the ultimate harbor for the safety seeker. So there's a certain built-in irony in that, I suppose.

Well, that was very much, so I studied film and creative writing at USC and I was so am so right-brained that I felt completely dysfunctional. Like I felt, I just felt out of balance and I was able to get a scholarship and go to law. My dad was like, I would love for you to like have this skill. You could be a human rights lawyer. You could be an entertainment attorney just to have this skill. It'd be very, it's like, my dad was like, I have the means to help you do this and like i never had that opportunity not even close growing up and neither did my mom like my mom grew up in the

ozarks in missouri i she tells stories of finding ten dollars as a little girl on the ground and it was the most money she'd ever seen and And she brought it home and that $10 bought her whole family, like all of her siblings and like new clothes. And they'd never had something new and just like this kind of whole nother world. And so I, I honestly went to law school. It's one of those confluence things where I was a pure creative soul. And my dad was saying, you should go to law school. I really think your brain would thrive there. And it would give you something in your tool belt that you could use for good. And I was like, dad, that is so conformist. I hate that. I'm not doing that.

And then I can be super punk rock if you use it in the right way. Well, and then I saw the, super punk rock if you use it in the right way well and then i saw the the documentary invisible children and the child soldier jacob who escapes from the lra he escapes in the night and he's 12 years old and he fears being captured and he says in the interview through tears he's like my dream is to be a lawyer but there's no money it'll never happen and he's like i is to be a lawyer, but there's no money. It'll never happen. And he's like, I want to be a lawyer and help my community. Explain what the LRA is. Oh, sorry. So the LRA is the Lord's Resistance Army. It's a rebel group that tried to overthrow the Ugandan government in the 80s.

They were pushed out, moved into the jungles of Congo, and Central African Republicans still are there, abducting children and women, though their ranks have greatly diminished due to international pressure. The Ugandan military pursuing them with the African Union. It's a whole mess in the jungle. But when they lost the rebellious support in Uganda, they started abducting children

so that they would have soldiers. And children are actually excellent soldiers because you can brainwash them and you can actually, if you abduct them early early enough you can completely remove their sense of conscience and so they become machines so this kid jacob was like my dream is to be a lawyer i never could be and i remember i had just told my dad stop pressuring me to do this i don't want to it's so conformist and then i saw this kid kid in Uganda whose life dream was to be a lawyer. And I was inconvenienced by having it thrown in my face versus a kid who could never

do that. That's so interesting that that invisible children kind of entered your your awareness prior to the decision of going to law school. I know. I mean, was that an idea like, oh, I'll go and I'll work for them. No, when the documentary came out, it wasn't a thing. It was just a documentary. There was no organization. Oh, this predates Invisible. I got you. This was the documentary that created the organization,

but they first made a film. Uh-huh, got you. And the film was, some of my best friends made it, so I'm watching it very early. You already knew these guys from film school? I went to USC with them. Right, right, right, right, right. Got you now.

Now I'm following you. Yeah, so. So, first of all of all all right hold on a second how many how many uh graduates of usc film school end up going to law school zero i mean maybe if you're in the peter stark program i suppose which is the producer program but like yeah that yeah, that's such a, it's an interesting, uh, U-turn, not U-turn, but like, well, I think early on in my life, I like came to this realization. I think it was maybe fifth grade and we had some like career person come talk like to kids about like, and they said something like the average person in their life changes careers three times. And it was sold to us as if like no one likes their job and they keep changing it. And like everyone's unhappy was kind of somehow how I perceived it as a kid.

And I was like, I like want to change jobs. Like I want to have my life in seasons because my brain wants to learn new things like i don't want to be one thing for 45 years and that's a that's a great deal of awareness for a young person to have yeah well i was i i realized i was gay in seventh grade so and i was at a christian school and so i was very self-contemplative because I think gay people become artists. A lot of the reason of that is because they have to analyze, they wake up into themselves in a universe

that is hostile to them to some degree and it causes them to analyze everything and be like, why are things the way they are? Why am I other? Why don't I fit in with these kids? Blah, blah, blah. And I think that creates an artistic sensibility. And so from a very young age,

I was trying to figure everything out because I was like, why am I the way I am? Right. But you must have been, I mean, what were you doing creatively that, I mean, you don't just get into USC film school unless you're doing cool stuff right well yeah i mean i was like really i was just really involved in my high school i did

all the things yeah if there was something to join like the like the really kind gay tracy flick exactly but really gregarious really loud really. But like my like I was student body president and the lead in the play. And my mom didn't know until I invited her to the play. How did she not know? Well, she was busy dealing with my other siblings and I was very independent. And I was I always like I've always loved my family and I would be like, oh, hey, mom, I'm off to do this or after. And she just was like, oh, my son is so involved you know like he's over there making crafts or whatever and and then i'd be like oh mom i have to give this

speech at graduation she's like why and i'm like well i'm student body president i have to like talk she's like oh my god i'm so proud i'm like it's the last day of college or high school oh my god that's hilarious yeah it was not my parents' fault for not knowing. It was me just like, leave me alone and let me do my thing. Uh-huh. Yeah. All right. So you do the film school thing.

Suddenly law school's on the radar. You go to Pepperdine Law School. And I mean, from the get-go, I i mean the marching order really was to be a human rights lawyer like you're not you're not going to go you know be a summer associate at devil boys in plimpton or something like that right well i don't want to pretend to like imply that i've always had this like clear vision of my life i was definitely in law school wavering in confusion i like entered it with this like altruistic idea. But then when I realized how much debt I would be in,

when I realized, and law school is just a crazy place. Like so many people go to law school for the express intention of being rich. And they will say that. And that energy hangs over the whole class you feel it like there's people and and the cutthroat mentality of trying to be top of your class because it's so interesting what the law firms and when they hire what they're looking for is not just that you pass the bar

it's that you beat everyone else and so camaraderie and teamwork is like not the spirit of the place. No, no. I mean, you know, the Socratic method doesn't, doesn't exactly, you know, breed companionship with your classmates, you know? And, you know, certainly my experience was plenty of people came in with altruistic, you know, goals and aspirations, but, you know, over that three year period, somehow that's, that becomes eroded, not with everybody, but with, you know, over that three year period, somehow that's, that becomes eroded, not with everybody, but with, you know, a good percentage of people. And then it becomes, well, I'll go do the big law firm thing and pay my loans off and then I'll go do this thing. And then I'll, and it's, it's, you know, it's analogous to what we're talking about, which is, you know, that

how long are you willing to, to defer that dream? And what is that thing inside of you that starts to eat away at you because it's underexpressed? And I think there's a lot of lawyers that are in that position and they become sort of ensconced in the gilded cage. And a lot of them never make it out, unfortunately, although they're good people and they had that kind of ideation of what they wanted to do with their career initially yeah i like i really really really like it's very difficult for me to judge anyone on their path i just know what felt on just didn't feel right for me i mean i know some of the people that I went to law school with, they came from poor, struggling for money families.

And they said, I'm getting out of here. And I could see in their eyes a spiritual belief that money was a savior and a solution to a whole smorgasbord of problems from their childhood. And in many ways it will, you know. Yeah, I mean, I empathize with that. A hundred percent. And I think that they, but what happens is, what's so interesting is I also met a lot of people who just wanted to do, like pay off their law school loans,

like work at the big firm, pay off the law school loans, and then go on and do their passion project or whatever but it's like you're saying the gilded cage you you work there for a few years you're paying off loans you're miserably overworked you need some escape you have quite a bit of money so then you're like i'm and maybe in those years you find a pretty girl and you like lavish her with gifts because like you just need an escape from work maybe you find a pretty girl and you like lavish her with gifts. Cause like you just need an escape from work. Maybe you get a Porsche. Cause you're like, I need something to make me smile. All of a sudden you're compiling these things. And then by the time you've got

your debts paid off, you're like on your way to partner. And you're like, well, I've given four years. I'm only three years from partner. Like I'm going to walk away from that. And then you just told the story of my life. You lie. No, I mean, I was right there. I was right there in that place. You know, I mean, I, you know, I got very caught, you know, I was in the big firm and I got caught up in all of that. And I was very unhappy. And I, you know, spent the money that I had on things that I couldn't quite afford, which keeps you coming back and keeps you, you know, it's like, and then you're always chasing that. And, you know, it just, I had to be in a nut. I had to be in so much pain in order to break that chain. And when I did, it was the most terrifying thing I've ever done.

Like walking out of that when your whole life is premised on this idea of this is who you are and this is what you do to then walk out. Like I, I quit my job. I didn't have, I had no idea what i was gonna do like no plan at all other other than i can't keep showing up here every day like i could not even i just couldn't do it at all what do you think about i'm taking over this podcast yeah i know what do you think about the saying you are okay so my friend john chu told me this quote which is really profound to me you are not what you say, you are what you do.

I think that's very true. And it really impacted me because someone once told me this story of her dad. Her dad was a criminal defense attorney for like 50 years. And he always said, that's what I do, that's not who I am. But then 50 years later, when you've been spending 11 hours a day of your waking day doing that and you've spent the majority of your conscious life doing a thing isn't that who you are that is who you are yeah for sure I mean it's not the entirety of who you are but it's certainly a significant part of who you are I I remember one guy who, who told me, I mean,

this guy was so overworked, but young partner in this firm. And he said, this is my job. The law is my career. This is just my job. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that. I'm still not sure I understand it. Like, I'm not sure whether that's some kind of convenient mental gymnastics to justify, you know, something or whether that gave him, I believe it gave him some peace, but I don't know. What do you think of that? Well, yeah, that's, I think it's so important. And I think the reason why companies that have a strong ethos and like,

like philosophical brand behind them generally have happier work people that work there because they they can like hook their day job to a star and like drag them a little bit through the trudge and the mud of the boring paperwork because you believe it has meaning and so if you're in the like horrible paperwork practice of of law and and and then but you believe you're seeking justice and you're bringing justice in the world and and trusting this system that is basically the backbone of civilization yeah that makes you sleep better and better at night that's what i loved about law school studying my favorite class was constitutional law because i realized that our entire civilization is built on law.

And just that it's actually built on philosophy. And there's so much philosophy behind it. I had the time of my life reading the Constitution. Yeah, and I liked law school. I enjoyed it. And just to be clear, I don't want this to be like a law firm bashing thing. I had a very similar conversation with another guest not too long ago, and I got some feedback like, you know, listen, if you're listening to this and like you want to be a lawyer and you're passionate about that, that's great. Like I have no issue with that

whatsoever. I'm just sharing some of my own personal experience. Well, yeah, it's your story is true for you, period. And that's, I know I have friends who I went to law school with who are badass lawyers and love it. And they feel very fulfilled. And they have a natural inclination towards working like machines for something that they're good at. And they're so good at it. And one of my mentors and heroes is a guy named Luis Moreno Ocampo. And he was the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. So he was a high-powered attorney in Argentina. He was made famous in the 80s for prosecuting the crimes against humanity

done by the government, and it was a big deal. And then he got appointed to the Hague in Europe, chasing down warlords and putting them on trial. That's intense. And, I mean, he's using the law and it's so amazing. Like that is, that is why law is amazing. Cool.

So while you're in law school, your film school buddies start to form this invisible children organization, right? This is happening while you're in school. And, uh, and then it becomes kind of a natural thing for you to just join your friends right is that how it unfolds well so i was stressed in law school about where i was going to get money

what i was going to do at this point in my life my parents were really struggling for money my parents divorced when i was young so particularly my mom and i was like i need to make a lot of money because i'm gonna have to take care of my mom pretty soon like she's like broke and so that was weighing on me heavily and uh then so I was like I was entertaining all options I wasn't about to go work for a firm that was like representing Exxon or something bless them but no I wasn't going to do that but I wanted to do I was like maybe I'll be just like an entertainment lawyer and like represent production companies or something which I don't know maybe that I just want to stay in LA I want

to do something at least creative um and then Invisible Children actually like stalked me to be to work for them they were like my friends my friends were like, we don't, we want an in-house attorney. We need someone to help us with nonprofit compliance, with licensing. And one of the summers of law school, I worked in house counsel for a huge corporation and I felt like a cog in the machine. And I remember I was reprimanded for an email I sent because I finished a sentence with four exclamation points. And my supervisor came to me and she goes, we have a policy where you cannot have more than one exclamation point in your email. And you have four in one sentence.

And she was dead serious. And I was like, I have to get out of here. That's like out of some like mike judge movie i know no it was a hundred percent real and i remember my other friend who was an intern with me she got offered this awesome externship with the judge in the fall and i'm like oh my gosh janet i'm so proud of you and my supervisor was like um excuse me mr. Jenkins, never say you're proud of someone if you're not their superior because it's condescending. Oh, my God. And I was like, what?

I am proud of her. That word has many, yeah. So I just knew. So then when Invisible Children came knocking and it was this like grassroots movement of like hooligans who are artists and they need an attorney. And I was like. It's the best of both worlds. Yeah. I was like, I want to work in a small organic place where, you know, everybody were like relational capital is as valuable as it is as valued as other types of capital. And so, and that was like the best decision I ever made changed my life.

And what year was that? I started invisible children in the fall of 2008. Right when the global economic crisis. Right, right, right. And then when did the whole Kony thing happen? 2012. So you were there when that happened. Oh, yeah.

I wrote Kony 2012. So let's talk a little bit about that. There's a lot of sort of misunderstandings about all of that. I mean, you know, I didn't know anything about Invisible Children until Kony happened. And then, of course, everybody knew all about it. But, you know, perhaps, you know, provide a little backdrop as to, you know, what that was all about. Well, that was an Internet moment bar none. Oh, yeah, that was that was the worst experience of my life.

But I'll explain that. So also Invisible Children was the best experience of my life. So 2004, they make the documentary Invisible Children that inspired me to go to law school. That was about, in 2004 they they were on their way these filmmakers bobby being your friend jason russell and laron were on their way to sudan to document the genocide in sudan but sudan was a no-fly zone so they couldn't fly there they flew into uganda they got into a car and drove you fly into um in tebi which is about eight hours from the border of sudan so

they're driving up through northern uganda and the driver of the car is like i want to stop and show you something and so they take the boys these young filmmakers before they ever even get into sudan and um if i'm remembering this very quickly i might be getting things out of order but they show them thousands and thousands of children age six to twelve sleeping in piles in the bus park which is like this basically the town square and there's guards surrounding them like thousands of children an ocean of children and the the filmmakers are like what is this and the their driver explains well there's a rebel army that abducts children at night sneaks into their huts steals them and forces them to become child

soldiers and usually lines them up and has selects one of them to kill another one at random, or usually has abducted kids kill one of their family members so that they cannot return home because then they tell them they're murderers. So it was this horrible thing. It's so heavy. So heavy. So they make this documentary about these boys, Jacob being the boy who wanted to be a lawyer

I was talking about earlier. He escaped at night. And they come home and basically make this documentary thinking, wow, no one knows about earlier. He escaped at night. And they come home and basically make this documentary thinking, wow, no one knows about this. Once we show it to a congressman or somebody, the news, everyone's going to talk about it and this will be stopped. And that didn't happen. People were like, oh, there's so many problems in the world. Like, we don't know what to do about that. So they were like, we're going to start an organization we're going to screen this film around the country and get grassroots support and over the course of from 2005 until 2012 invisible children made 10 documentaries about

child soldiers and about joseph coney's reign of terror over this rebel group and we toured those around high school so i came on in 2008 and i helped write the films i started out as the attorney and then i was trained as a writer in undergrad and writing is my passion and so they kept pulling me into writers meetings and then they ultimately were just like you do it and so i might we hired another lawyer and i kind of transitioned into the filmmaking writing side. Oh, wow. And, um, and so we were, we kept making different films about different characters and different children living through it and touring them each season in high school. And so, and then we'd have these big events where a hundred thousand kids would come out. And like, we did one thing called the global night commute where kids came and slept in their city centers in the town square just like the kids

in uganda to raise awareness um we did a displacement camp thing we did like a like abducting ourselves all these like demonstrations right right so that was over the course of of eight years and so after our 10 movies jason like the main filmmaker and leader of Invisible Children, the founder, he, one of the founders, he, he was ready to give up. He was like, this doesn't like, we have done everything we can. We've gotten bills passed in Congress. We've gotten Obama's signature on things. We've gotten troops deployed to help like nothing's going to happen.

like nothing's going to happen and one of our policy advisors in um dc said casually under his breath he goes it would be so much easier if joseph coney was famous and we couldn't stop thinking about that how if everyone knew who he was like if we knew who like we know who osama bin laden is we know who hitler is like right you got to put a you got to you got to give people an emotional way to connect like you got to create a villain right like and so we were like if people knew who he was they would want to stop him and so we were like let's make an internet video that lets people know who he is and this will be our last try to like get people to care and so we built a campaign around this idea and i jason and i are both avid internet addicts and so we basically used our instincts to be like okay how long can we pay attention to a video like what hooks people into

a video like we was we were very intentional about like we have the shortest psychology yeah what's gonna to work. And so we were like, this better work. We're going to make Joseph Kony a household name. And from that, people will care. And then they'll rally. And then we'll finally stop this guy. But just because you want your video to go viral does not make it so.

No. But we were very intentional. So our dream was, was okay if we make this video shorter than 30 minutes it's really captivating it's moving then at least our if our invisible children supporters like our hundred thousand kids in high schools and clubs if they show their parents and their families then we we'll get 500,000 views in the first six months. And that's like a lot of views. And then we were going to do this thing called cover the night where once

April comes around, we're going to put up posters and we designed all these amazing posters of like, like it was like a three bar thing. It had Hitler's face, Osama bin Laden's face and Joseph Coney's face. And we were in, this was 2012.oseph coney's face and we were and this was 2012 so it was an election year and we were making all these like election signs coney

that's why it's called coney 2012 right and who came up with that probably our designer tyler fordham yeah we did like a whole pitch thing it was it was really fun to work on that project because we were like our goal is to make a bad guy known as a bad guy and you got to be inflammatory yeah and you have to you have to convey the gravity of his crimes simply and that and the thing was is that it was always a grassroots movement mouth-to-mouth with kids and that was the thing we weren't ready for was making an internet video that was as viral as we wanted it to be. Cause we'd never actually gotten, we'd made these films that we were really proud of.

And we were always like, not enough people have seen this. Nobody like no film festivals will take this. No one like we were, we were kind of like 500,000 views was like, would have been more views than we've ever gotten on anything and so we were like yes we're gonna get five maybe we'll get a million in a year so what happens and so we got a hundred million in seven days and it became this national

conversation and the weird interesting thing was a hundred million because week yeah because it was the fastest video of all time to get to 100 million views in a week. The story transitioned from who is Joseph Kony and what are his crimes to how did this little San Diego nonprofit take over the internet? What's their secret? And you can't control that narrative. No, you cannot control that narrative no you cannot control that narrative and it's so it was so defeating to us that everyone was trying to talk to us about how we made a viral video as opposed to the content right and then there was all this skepticism about well they couldn't

have done it truly grassroots they must have deep pockets they must have oh they got a bill signed to get the military sent to stop joseph coney in 2011 they must be they must be a front for the military because they're so pro-military or whatever that and so they all of a sudden because it was so abnormal it created this hurricane of conspiracy theories of how we spend our money, all these fascinating things. Yeah, suddenly invisible children's under the microscope. Was there like a tipping point moment that allowed the video to just go insane?

I mean, what was it that made it, other than the content itself, and I don't want to have a conversation about a viral video, but, you know, I mean, did it get into somebody's hands and then share it? Like, when you do like a forensic analysis on it, like what actually happened that made the difference? It's hard to know. Yeah.

I think it was was so there's the movie starts with a victor hugo quote that says all the armies in the world cannot stop an idea whose time has come and i think the film tapped into this idea of like global empathy and response through the internet like everyone like the arab spring had happened two years before, and we were still confused by that, but inspired, but then also a little shell-shocked. And so there was just a climate of young people wanting to be empowered to do something, and the film was very geared towards that.

And it was geared towards making someone famous, which doesn't require a lot of action. It requires sharing something. But I think it was that situation that you anticipated of young people sharing it with their parents. That definitely happened. And that was exactly what we wanted to happen. And we did every trick in the book.

I remember we would watch the film and try to make people keep watching it. And one of the things, I think Jason had this idea, was start the film by saying, this is an experiment. The important thing is to pay attention. So that's like the first thing you read. And so all of a sudden you're like,

you're daring me to watch this video. Maybe I will. And then it keeps hooking you. So anyway, it was, and then just like, we were such a small little organization trying so sincerely to do something meaningful that when the whole world turned, it's like beam on us and accused us of all these false things not only did it drive our

founder to literal insanity for a week yeah he meant i mean it did literally well we i mean because it came very personal he's in the film his son is in the film which he grappled with very difficultly to put his son even in a film that was going to show to 500,000 kids in high school he was like I don't know if I want my five-year-old son his face to be and then imagine that becoming a hundred million people people are making memes

out of his son they're accusing they're questioning his from everything from sexuality to wanting to be rich and he's like hello I'm what do you want from me I'm trying to stop a warlord and you're calling me like the antichrist and like he just broke him broke him how's he doing now he's better than ever i he's better than ever in the sense where he's he's healthy of course amazingly and

but also he he just has this amazing newfound wisdom about not only the fragility of the human mind, but also like personal boundaries. And he also has something very interesting to say about doing what you love in the public eye and how dangerous that can be and responding to people having an opinion about everything about you. Which I fear that I it's that's, have you seen the documentary Amy about Amy Winehouse? No, not yet. It's on my list though. It's fantastic. And she, she's being interviewed. This was so poignant to me. She's being interviewed when she was like 19 before she'd had a big, big record. And the interview was like, you're gonna be famous one day like are you ready and she goes

no i'm not gonna be famous i'm a jazz musician we're not famous and i would go mad if i went i was famous i'll never be famous i'd go mad and she said that so sincerely and she knew and that that movie haunts me but it's just that kind of, when the whole world looks at you, it is a terrifying thing. It is a terrifying thing. I mean, I would imagine this is something that you think about. I mean, you live your life fairly transparently online. I'm sure you have boundaries around that. But, you know, I think it's something to be well considered, you know, myself included.

Like, as we kind of, you know, are open and living transparently online, it's a weird world that we live in, you know? Well, that's the whole, it's like putting out these nuggets. Like whenever you put something on the internet, it is, it is of course, without context, it's even without a certain level of body language and like being the energy that you receive by being in the room with someone so misinterpretation is so easy right and the great quote um you do not see art as it is but as you are so you you consume things and put them through the lens of your own experience and so if you have a critical eye on the world if you think everyone's out to get something trying to get rich if everyone's trying to be lazy if everyone's trying to take advantage of you, then anything you perceive, especially someone who is sincere and genuine, you immediately think that they're

phony and you let them know online. Yeah. You're projecting that you're projecting your own personal experience and transferring it onto them. And we all do that in the lens through which you're, you know, you're, you're having your human experience, which is the, you know, that's our human condition. And then the people like us who put ourselves in a place where we invite that because we want people to feel known and we want people to belong. And that's why we share our stories because I'm assuming, I know for me, my number one dream of being on this planet is to make someone say, me too. And that idea of putting words to thoughts that everyone has is my favorite thing.

But putting those things out there, sometimes people are going to say, that's not me. You're an idiot. And that is hurtful. Yeah, and it goes with the territory. It goes with the territory. All right. So, Kony 2012 happens. and that is hurtful yeah and it goes with the territory goes with the territory all right so coney 2012 happens and so what becomes of invisible children i mean it survives this hurricane somehow uh you continue to work there i mean you guys must have had to like put the

pieces together after all of this yeah it was i mean i i don't feel um I don't feel entitled to use the term PTSD but I feel like I have some hint of what it was like where I was in autopilot where like I went I clicked into survival mode and there's so much like I can hardly remember about that year. Cause that movie came out, I think March 6th and it was just, I mean, my best friend is in an insane asylum. We're being like audited because people think we're stealing money, which were like,

we're all barely able to pay our rent and people are accusing us of trying to get rich. And so, I mean, that's like a really strange, and there's, there are Ugandan diaspora protesting. Like we're there trying to save child soldiers lives.

And there are Ugandan diaspora protesting outside our office because they think we're pro Museveni, which is the president who has certain president of Uganda, who certainly has his own problems. But in order for us to have a military offensive against the rebel army, we have to work with the government. So it's a whole thing, and we're all navigating this, and the majority of our staff is under the age of 23.

Right, and how many are there of you guys? So on full-time staff, when most of the like full-time staff are in their late 20s early 30s there was maybe 25 30 and then we had like 40 interns just volunteers who were like making phone calls and like folding t-shirts and whatever but so very quick what was interesting is very quickly after the Kony 2012 campaign, like our sustainability immediately dried up. We had like enough money to last for a little while because we'd sold a bunch of t-shirts and action kits from Kony 2012.

But we implemented the vast, vast majority of that immediately on the ground in Central East Africa. we implemented the vast, vast majority of that immediately on the ground in central East Africa. And so we had just enough to keep our U S office open for another, about two years, but the U S office existed because it was about awareness. It was about grassroots activism. And now all of a sudden the whole planet knew about Joseph Coney and we had a full-time constituency in, um D.C., whose entire job was to work with Congress to help them and the State Department to help them manage

and deal with pursuing the LRA. And so we really realized after about a year and a half, two years, that the grassroots advocacy side of Invisible Children should be greatly downsized. We don't need these huge tours and filmmaking works. We sort of were here for a season and we did what... Our dream was, we always said, we don't want to be one of those non-profits

that becomes a machine, always trying to get donations to stay afloat. We want to be what a nonprofit should be, which is pick a problem, solve it, and then you're out of a job, which is a little naive, but that is how it is. And so we were like,

we are going to work here and give it our all until Joseph Kony is off the battlefield and the LRA is dismantled, and then we'll go off and do something else. But this is why we're here. And so we made a lot of progress in that. I mean, a lot.

But Joseph Kony right now is still out there. And so we shrunk Invisible Children down to just a handful of people in the U.S. who are in Washington, D.C. And then we still have our work in Central African Republic and Congo working to basically track the LRA. What's really interesting about this is that this is a passionate job that you had. I'm sure it's a job you loved and gave your everything to.

So when you make this decision to go on this bike ride, uh, it's not like, Oh, I got to get out of this job. Cause I got to go, you know, feel myself again. Like you were having a very fulfilling, the most tumultuous, but fulfilling experience. And then to still say, I'm still going to do this. Yeah. It was just about, I knew that I knew that my, Just about, I knew that I would regret not having tried to do the thing that I dreamt, which is be a writer. And that I didn't want to... And you felt like in order to be a writer, you're going to have to have this extreme experience.

You would not be entitled to be a writer otherwise. Right, unless I was older. Is there some kind of rite of passage? In my mind, I was like... You could have written a book about invisible children or what's going on in... I mean, it's not like your life was free of amazing experiences. Yeah, you're right.

I don't know. I just knew that... It took what it took. Yeah, There was something bubbling up inside me where I knew, because I remember wanting to be a writer and realizing that like my favorite thing in the world is reading a book. And when I read a passage that is so profound to me, I have to underline it. And it's, and I say, there you are, those are the words I've been looking for my whole life,

and I've never had them. And so it was pretty in my early 20s where I was in law school, and I was like, I think I am on this planet to help find words for things that people want to have words for. What do you think led to that realization? Just a lot. I think it was just the natural, what do you like to do, Jed?

What do you do with your free time? And for me, it was like, or like what makes you feel the most alive? And I would say, when I read something like that, that is my favorite moment. When I'm like, I cannot wait to read this to somebody.

This is like changing my life. And to be the creator of something like that, that would have that kind of impact on somebody else. And that was kind of like a friend of mine who's a musician. He said, he gets, we have this conversation a lot about follow your dreams and follow your passions and how sometimes that's so vacuous and meaningless because some people shouldn't be doing, you shouldn't just like leave your family and go be a circus clown or what, you know, it's like, maybe you should,

maybe you shouldn't, but there's just a lot of talk about that. And it seems convenient to talk about that when you're like on the top. But, and so what my friend says, he goes, the question is not just what do you love, but what loves you back like what when you when you give something out there does it respond back to you and if it responds back you should step closer you should step closer that's interesting and for me i loved reading and writing and once i started writing for invisible children i would write paragraphs i would write campaign material i would put into words some ethos that we have and people at my job would be like oh my god you did it like we have been trying to say that for five years and you just spewed it out and that

was like oh i i think i can do this thing that i love the most. And it was kind of this dance that we did. And that was what gave me the confidence in my late 20s to be like, I'm going to do that. Interesting. All right. So the day arrives, the 7,000. It was 7,000 miles, right? I did more math and it's closer to 10.

Is it? Okay. Because you can't. Well, so my little like bike odometer clicky thing that tells you no big fancy like satellite garment no no i had one of those little clicky things and it died in baja so i lost literally the one like from the 70s where the numbers click no no no no it's digital but it's very small i don't even yeah a little sensor on the front of my tire but it died in baja so i was like 15 i was like 1500 miles and when it croaked and then i couldn't find another one

like in the middle of the desert so also there's all this jockeying around and you know you're having the bikes breaking yeah i'm hitchhiking here it's like you're gonna take a bus into the city and whatever so yeah it's not i was never worried about it's not about that clicking numbers and like breaking some sort of record because there's people that have biked around the world for like i met a korean couple this amazing korean couple married who have been living on their bicycles for seven years biking the planet and they're like generally i kind of expected them to be a little bit cuckoo because i'm like what are you running from for them they were so cool and normal i was like be my friends you're like so traveled and great so anyway i was just doing this for the it's not like i'm gonna be mr extreme you're just like i'm

gonna go have this experience and i see where it leads and i want to go on a bicycle because i like the i like the speed like i don't want to be in a motorcycle because then you can just zip through a town like i wanted to walking's a little too slow walking is your dad did it your parents did that already if i would have walked it would have triggered in me that i was copying my parents but somehow i deceived myself into thinking I was original, which is so interesting. Like even to add to that, when I told my dad my plan, he goes, oh, that was my original plan.

I was going to ride a motorcycle from New York to Patagonia. And I was like, what? Oh, my God. It just gets weirder and weirder. So weird. It's like so bred into you, you know? I know. And my dad's a writer.

But what's so funny is the different angles by which it comes. Because my dad didn't consider himself a writer. He never studied it. He was forced into it because Nat Geo, he originally just wanted to take photos. And National Geographic was like, we want you to write about your stories. And so he has this very conversational writing style. It's very as he speaks because he's not some classically trained writer. He's just telling stories, true stories from his life.

So what was the thesis of that National Geographic cover piece that your parents wrote together? Well, so my dad wrote one. By the way, we didn't even mention, like your dad met your mom on the walk. Yeah, in New Orleans. She was like in a nunnery or something. She was in seminary studying the Holy Scriptures.

And my dad said, you should drop out and marry me and let's walk to Oregon. And she said no. And then like on their final date, she said, God, give me a sign. This is like the last time she was ever going to see him. They went to church together, and the subject of the sermon, which was, will you go with this man?

And it's like the Bible story of this woman deciding to go with this, marry this man and go. And so it was like, my mom was like, well, that was easy. So that was it all right so they they have this amazing walk and it becomes the subject of a of a national geographic cover story right so the gist of that like what was the angle on that the angle was in the kind of writing careers that both my parents took after that sprung from that idea of just what like do you know your own country like do you know the everyday people that live in the like the backwoods and on the side streets that are off the freeway do you know what their

life is like do you like how amazing is your country in like the flyover states like these places that nobody knows like let's if you walk through in that pace it was just interesting for americans to read about sheep farmers in idaho or whoever it was ranchers in an era where it's all about you know hate ashbury and kent state right right there was this spirit of like young people are supposed to hate the united states and my parents in their 20s were like well let's kind of see what it's like and they found it to be amazing and the simplest common people in the mountains and this in the prayer on the prairies were incredibly rich in wisdom, great friends, full of stories.

And so it was just this, like, really, in a way, heartwarming piece on the country that everyone had kind of, like, grossed out about. And it resonated, right? I mean, this ultimately led to, to you know a lot of notoriety for them and you know a good deal of success that that ultimately kind of sowed the seeds for the destruction of the relationship right is that a fair representation so in a weird way like you know and looking at kind of the arc of your life, you have this experience where you're like,

wow, like, you know, you do this thing, you get everything you think that you want and look at the destruction as a result of that. And then in comparison to, you know, Coney 2012 and that experience, I mean, does that make you, and now here you are, you've had this experience, you have some level of, you know, public spotlight on you and anticipation of this book. Like, does that give you pause or, you know, how does that inform how you conduct yourself like in the public eye? Wow. That is really, really profound. Um, it definitely informs me. I saw how fame affected my family and ultimately broke it up before I was even really aware of what was going on but I saw the aftermath of that um and then it's just like

it's this interesting idea that I can't stop thinking about which is that money and fame are energy. And energy, when focused into something, is powerful. It's like electricity. And if you have a thin wire, it will blow your circuits. But it's always meant to pass through you. And I think if you aren't equipped with the equipment to handle a lot of energy flowing through you, it is very difficult to survive that. And that can be fame.

That can be an enormous amount of money. There's a reason why, what is it? 95% of people who win the lottery go bankrupt, have get divorced all these, because all this energy suddenly gets the, the switch is flipped into their life. And it's like flowing through them in such an intense degree that it fries their circuits.

And so I'm very like, and that's how I felt with Coney 2012. And, and it just really, I don't want to say like, it did injure my naivete a little bit. My like altruistic belief that people are good. Like for the first five days i was like

people are amazing they're sharing this video people want to help and then when people were so quick to turn and uh just turn away from it i was very i was disenfranchised with the human species but then i kind of stepped into that and that was also so serendipitous because I was planning originally in December of 2012 to start my trip. I ended up not going until August. And by all accounts from what I've read and kind of understand about your journey is that, you know,

the, the, the bike trip must have restored some of that because it sounds like the experiences that you had were pretty unanimously amazing. A hundred and that was i don't know that was so interesting i had like gone to this dark place where i was like the world is unsavable and does not deserve to be so or be saved and then in a same sense my dad with vietnam was like the world is terrible i'm gonna go see it for myself and the universe kind of worked its way that he has this redemptive experience yeah and so that's interesting yeah and so now i have seen every smiling face from oregon to patagonia and i have

only fallen more in love with this planet and everyone in it, like so deeply. So I would imagine that the first couple days or couple weeks of this ride is you're kind of on your pink cloud with the whole thing. There's got to be some point where you're like, oh, man, I'm going to be doing this for a year. Like next year at this time, I'm still going to be doing this for a year, like next year at this time, I'm still going to be doing this. Like when does that idea kind of settle in the reality of like

what you've actually tackled? Well, I intentionally, so I started in Oregon at the very beach where my parents walked into the Pacific ocean. So at that point you've, you, you are definitely now aware that I became aware. Yes. yes. Very ceremoniously aware. And then, because I was originally going to start in Alaska, but then I realized that it would take me too long because you've got to chase the seasons because Alaska and Patagonia have the same weather and it's the very short summer

and you can't bike there in the winter. So I'm not an athlete i'm not coordinated i am just like a pretty nerdy artsy guy and but but i just i do love the outdoors and i do i'm pretty good at like sleeping in the dirt in a hammock somewhere like i know i can do that so and i'm also one that just says yes to things. So I was like, okay, when I start in Oregon, I'll have all of Oregon and California to get used to living on a bicycle in comfortable United States speaks English. Like that's a thousand miles to get my, you know, my sea legs. And so that was great. And was like i started in oregon where i didn't know anybody or i knew

people in portland but i came down and then was really in the wilderness for a minute and then i'm in san francisco where my friends live and then i'm down the central coast where friends are biking with us then i'm in la where i lived and you had a friend with you yeah all the way through to peru right yeah and he was more of a bike expert. So that was great because I didn't know how to change a tire. But so by the time in October when we got to Mexico, I felt comfortable on the bike. But I had been seeing friends. It had been so fun.

And like the whole honeymoon phase of, oh, my God, it's happening was in full effect. of oh my god it's happening was in full effect but then once i got south of tijuana and really south of encinada into the most godforsaken desert with hundreds of miles hundred mile stretches with not a single house and just baking heat and freezing temperatures at night. And we were in hammocks, so at night it would be so cold underneath the hammock. I would just lay there in misery. If you've ever slept in a place where you're so cold and there is no escape, like you aren't prepared, it is such a miserable, sustained discomfort and panic.

What have I done? So then in the daytime, I would be biking, and this is October. I'd already been on the road over a month. And I was like, oh, my God. One year from now, I'll still be on this trip. Like so much more trip. And I'm so homesick already. I hate everything.

And that was like total, that I was starting to figure out ways to like, how can I get out of this? Like, should I get injured? Right. Should I, maybe I could i maybe i could most like convenient way of doing it where i'll maintain the least amount of repercussion yeah i was like maybe i can do a thing where i bike for a month and then i'm home for a month riding and then i'm bike and then i'm home and i like seriously was like planning that selling yourself on these yeah

because i was like i can't now this is not okay like life is short i'm miserable the end i'm not doing this and then like how unique and lucky am i to have parents who have done that and so i call my dad and i'm like dad i am so homesick i'm so miserable i don't know if i can do this and And he said, he said, Jed, you can get used to anything. He said, your brain is not like you, you have not acclimated to life on the road. Your brain still craves community and constancy. Your brain will adjust and it'll actually consider the road home. And when that happens, you won't think twice about it and he goes i was gone for five years and when i got back all my friends were still smoking pot on the porch and everyone

was like oh there you are you're already back he's like you fear that like your friends are moving on without you life is going you get back and you will realize that nothing has changed and if it has it's great like no one's forgetting you no one like you're not missing anything you're the one that's living and they're wishing they were doing that and i was just it was like one of those moments where i was like i can't believe i'm doing the weirdest journey ever and i have a dad that can like speak wisdom to me about it and a mom. So, and you can still, uh, engage community through Instagram.

I mean, was the, was the frequency of Instagramming, you know, more happening a lot more when you were feeling that more alone? Well, the thing is, is Instagram really did help because when I was really feeling alone,

like in Baja, I didn't have internet very much. And so that was like the death spiral of my own thoughts where it's like sometimes, you know, people say, oh, you need to like quit being so distracted and go be with your thoughts in the woods.

And it's like, But that's, but you know, look, that's the thing to write about. You know, everything is material. If that's what you were experiencing, then that's just, that's something to say and express. Exactly.

Which is the whole point of why you were going. Right. And so the, and what was fun is like in so, I knew it was interesting as I was doing it. Cause I'd never seen anyone else do it, even though I'm certain I wasn't the first, but to like post my thoughts live as they were happening.

And so people would see and feel. If I learned something crazy and new that day, I would tell tens of thousands of people. Which was so fun because I'm sitting there when my legs are aching and I've got a cold and I'm getting altitude sickness and it's miserable. And then a mom from North Carolina will write, I have four kids.

I can hardly ever leave the house, and because of you, I'm seeing the world as I would never have seen it myself. Like, I'm so grateful. And that was just like... That's beautiful. Yeah, I will never forget stuff like that, because I'm like, what a crazy world we live in.

Like, my dad had to find a pay phone just to let his mom know he was alive when he walked across America. And like my, I'm like sending selfies to my mom, like, look at this weird cactus I'm eating, you know, like immediate response.

So strange, so strange. But it was also like kind of going back to the Kony 2012 idea, which the whole ethos of that film is this idea that we live in a connected world where we, and that connectivity creates friendship, which from that springs a responsibility to help each other. And so kind of being somewhat and remaining connected on this spirit quest

was interesting because I was like bringing my community with me, but there's nothing that really replaces physical presence. Like writing, internet, social media, but also just like reading a book. Like, yes, reading a book is amazing and it can bring you into someone else's mind like nothing else can. But reading a book about Paris will never put you in Paris.

And so that was what was so interesting to me was to be kind of a window for people and for myself, but also stepping through that window and being there. Well, what's also cool is that I think is the way that you kind of approached it without an agenda. It's not like you had your map and you're like, by day here,

I have to be here and I have to be here. And this is how many miles I have to do every day. You like none of that. Like, okay, what am I doing today? Like, I have an idea that I want to get to this place. Right. But if life intervenes and takes me to this other, on this other route, like, that's awesome. Right. Just being open to that experience and i would imagine that probably the best experiences were were the unplanned ones yeah like two two that come to my oh really three of my favorite experiences are which is strange to say and and i don't mean it to be insensitive but when i was in michoacan we got stuck in a little town on the beach because the cartel went to war with the military and we were stranded there we were planning on leaving and we couldn't and so then we ended up

like becoming best friends with these people in this town that we were like stranded and having to drink their milk and eat their food because we couldn't get anywhere and that was like one of the most profound moments of my trip was this time when I wanted to leave and I couldn't. Another time was I didn't want to go to the Amazon because I don't like humidity and I don't like bugs. Really big bugs. Giant blood-sucking monsters. But my friends who were visiting me when we were in Bolivia,

they were like, we are right here. We have got to go. And we did, and it ended up being maybe my favorite memory of the whole trip was swimming with the dolphins and catching piranhas. So you were in Peru. Where were you in Peru when that happened? Bolivia. Bolivia, right.

But you didn't, did you have to take a little puddle jump on a plane? Yeah, so we left our bikes at the, there's like this biker- hostel in la paz like in an old austrian house it's like really weird so we just left our bikes there and then you take like a little puddle jumper because you're up i think la paz is the highest major city in the world it's at 13 000 feet so you you cannot climb a step without like collapsing then you just it's so wild you just get in a plane hop over the mountain and then just descend all the way into green green green forest and then that's the beginning of the amazon

so wild and so then we just spent a few days there and it was one of those things where it's like i do not want to go this is going to be terrible and it was so extraordinary uh like just the water and the animals that like i got really tipsy one night and ended up like catching anacondas in the river like just feeling invincible like little ones there weren't like full grown but definitely baby anacondas. But they definitely wrapped around my arm and bit the snark out of me. Wow. But you know,

when you're tipsy, you can't feel anything. But it was really, really fun. And swimming with these dolphins that played with me for 45 minutes, dragging me through the water with its mouth until it cut my foot a little bit.

And then it would attract piranhas. So I had to get out. But it was like all these memories. Like I'll never forget and i didn't want to go i wouldn't have gone if my friends hadn't been there and forced me i definitely wouldn't have gone what is the most surprising thing that you've taken away from the trip like that you didn't expect like either positive or negative what is the most surprising i would say the most surprising thing to me that i didn't know is that it's more it's more like a classic me it's more an idea than just knowledge but it's this idea that you can normalize anything like i lived on a bicycle out of two rubber bags and slept in

ditches and like would hide under bridges and like hide from people every night and that became so normal like i I was like fully homeless and just it didn't. Totally fine. Totally fine. Like something that would be someone's worst nightmare would be like I didn't sleep in a nice bed for so

long and now like every time I get in a bed I'm like wow a bed. Like look at this bed. Right. I would imagine that that's very powerful in that it gives you this sense of self-sufficiency, like, oh, you know, like what's the worst that could happen? Like I can survive, like I've done all these things, I know what it's like to just sleep on the side of the road,

like I'll be fine. Well, when you have things stripped away from you one by one, you learn the composite parts of where happiness lives and like what it is and so i think there's this like idea in the united states or the developed world where we see someone who lives in a mud hut and we're like oh bless their hearts like they don't even have like a tv or a fridge like they're so poor like i'm so sad and then you go there's this amazing um index that this they do this like international poll it's like i forget what it's called like the global happiness quotient or something where they they generally they ask people these series of questions that determine their like joy like how often are you extremely happy how often do you think you laugh really hard how often

do you feel fulfilled and so and it was so interesting where a lot of the developed world was low where there was this like gnawing sense of lack whereas these developing emerging market nations were very high these places where we would have pity on their poverty right which yes of course they're they need better health care they need less corruption and like there's many basic services that would be great for them to have but it is interesting when the things that we equate with excellence are not necessary for joy. And it's so interesting to see that empirically as opposed to just that like cheesy thing people say when they travel internationally. Yeah. To really viscerally experience that. I would imagine you were in, you know, village after village after village where you saw, you know, firsthand life experiences

of people living very, very differently than we're used to in our, you know, sort of Western, you know, worldview, uh, and contrasting that with our kind of daily life. And then, you know, you sort of running that happiness quotient. I mean, if you had to extract out like certain consistent things that you observed as principles for, for living that would inform that happiness quotient? How would you articulate that? I think it is very difficult to be happy when you're wet. I know that's a very basic one, but we'll start there.

If you are damp and cold, like just having a shelter that is dry is such a basic need. But when you haven't had that and you get that, you are so happy. And really, one of the main ingredients in happiness is a fulfilled desire or filled need. So it's the juxtaposition between the two. It's the moment when the need is met. And so if you have no needs, then you're not happy very often because you, maybe you're, you've reached a level of contentment, but if all of your needs are met, then you start looking for new needs. But if you actually do have a life where you have real needs and those needs are met, there is so much joy.

And that's what I found. Like when you are living on a bicycle, you have a lot of needs. Your bike breaks and you need someone to come pick you up. And they do. And you are so happy. And you are out of food and you are starving. Or out of water and a trucker comes by. And he stops the truck and he gets out and he has like ice cold water and like a candy bar in like columbia and you're like that's oh my god this is the best food

i've ever had you know and it's those it's like just that juxtaposition that is so profound when you put yourself in a place of discomfort to actually feel that intense juxtaposition, which brings so much joy and like really wakes up your nerves and your senses. And so for me, like that was just learning to put myself in those places of challenge and discomfort to really keep those senses fresh. And, and, and the thing is is there's a lot of people who don't have that choice. Like they don't choose being in need. You know, they just are.

But I mean, the thing is like a lot of these places where their happiness quotient is very high, they want to live in Beverly Hills. They'll tell you, they're not like, oh, I love my shack. They're like. That's're not like, Oh, I love my shack. Right. They're like, that's an important point. I think, you know, I think we, we, we, we, we assume, or we make this judgment that like, they just like it like that. No, they, it's actually strange. Cause like our, one of our biggest exports in this country is entertainment. So they know every, everything about the way we live, which is so weird. I was... They're watching Big Bang Theory.

No, I'm dead serious. I was in like a random Mexican town, like middle of nowhere. And I met these kids who they could speak English really well. And I was like, how are you so good at English? And they're like, well, we learned it in school, but our teachers are very bad. And I'm like, how do you know English so well then? And they go, TV. My favorite show is Breaking Bad. Oh, wow. And I'm like, you watch Breaking Bad?

You're 13. That's crazy. But there's just this. And so they, I mean, all the way down, they knew everything about our culture, which is so interesting to think of like does responsibility flow from that and the things that we export but but so they see they're like wow like i remember i was uh hanging out with a brazilian friend and he was visiting the united states and i took him on a night hike we like hopped a fence and snuck into griffith park and he was like this

is so american and i'm like what why and he's like you just hop a fence and snuck into Griffith Park. And he was like, this is so American. And I'm like, what, why? And he's like, you just hop a fence and do what you want. It's like, no one's going to shoot you. You just do what you, it's an adventure. And I'm like, whoa, like I've never thought about that before. Like that going on a night adventure would be American. Well, it's an interesting thing because you can, like in our culture, you can think like, ooh, I'm kind of being daring and aren't I doing something cool and creative?

But really the risk level is so low. Like, yeah, there's many places in the world where that's just a really bad idea. Well, it wasn't until really parts of Argentina, Mexico to Argentina which is not close I did not see every single house had a wall with barbed wire or glass broken glass to protect every single house and I grew up in Tennessee where every house doesn't have a fence you like your yard blends into your neighbor's yard and you don't even really know. And there's no bars on the windows. You just walk up and it's probably unlocked.

Like if you want a bar of some sugar, just come on in. So that's like something that is just this, it is very important to like say like the disparities, the disparities and wealth each come with lessons and you can't devalue one or the other. It's like there's a lot of wisdom and joy that can be found in relative poverty, not abject destitution, but a simple life we all know brings a lot of wisdom and a life where your needs are met and you're not worried about your kids eating is also great. And that is something we should fight for.

But there, I mean, I don't know. It's something that I'm still processing. Like I'm really writing about this in my book because there's these poor kids. The starkest contrast I saw is actually with the Quechua and the indigenous people of the Andes. There's like incredible racism in South America against the indigenous. It's very interesting. And in just meeting some of these kids, and they just dream of being rich in America and like having nice cars and

like all these things, like there's this idolatry of wealth and they are so far from access to that wealth. And when, when that chasm is so great and you just like dream of having those things and like, it is meaningless for me to say, those things are not going to give you the meaning you want because I don't know their life. Like that is so profoundly different than my life experience. But at the same time, like it just creates this like tension in my spirit that I don't know how to navigate, which is why I'm trying to like write a book about it. Well, yeah, hopefully the book, you know, the process of like, you know, engaging that in that wrestling match of, you know,

pulling your hair out and doing the deal as a writer will help you gain clarity on that. Yeah. That's that I'm very much an external processor. And so like, I, I think by writing and by speaking and when I see words out or when I hear them, I'm like, oh yeah, that's what I think. Or no, I didn't mean, I didn't mean that. Is that true to me? Yeah. You know, I mean, right now, you know, so how long has it been since you finished? I finished December 22nd. Okay. 14, 16 months. I was gone 16 months. Right. Finishing in Patagonia. Um, a couple of things. I mean, the first thing is like, you have a little bit of perspective on it now because some time has passed and you are putting together this book. I mean, what do you, you know, what is, what is the,

if you had to kind of capture like the essence of the significance of this for you, I mean, what would that be? What would that be? I mean, do you have a grip on that yet? Um, yet um i think i i do not have a firm grip i don't really know what it all means i sometimes feel like and i feel very fulfilled in this but i do feel like sometimes i'm walking possessed towards something to which i don't know like have you seen close encounters of the third kind where, where, yeah,

where they don't know why they want to go to the devil's tower. They just need to go there. You're like sculpting the mashed potatoes right now. Exactly. I definitely, I definitely feel like in my spirit and the like fabric of who I am, there are, there are lessons that there are lessons universal to the human experience and like the rules of the

universe that are hidden only that are exposed only through experience the more things you do and try the more lessons you can extrapolate from that and and so i think I want to consume living intentionally, like, and pour it through the strainer of my mind and come out with nuggets. That's kind of. Yeah. And not to not to be like, oh, what's your advice for people out there? But like if there's, you know, something of significance that you learn through this experience that you just feel like, I wish people could understand this better, this one thing. I would say I wish people knew that. How do I say this? Because it always gets me in trouble.

Cause I, I almost hesitate giving people any kind of advice. That's why I'm saying this. It's not advice. Like, you know, some perspective. Yeah.

The perspective for me that has really just changed my life is this idea of being intentional about being the person that I want to be. And so I want to be a writer. I want to be wise. Like I made this list and I remember this in my journal. I made this list of things I want to be remembered for and what I want to be and become. And then I got busy about the business of becoming those things very intentionally. Because to me, there's this, I think it's honestly this,

the motto of one of the branches of the military, but it's Latin and it says, which means to be rather than to appear. And that was really impactful to me. I was like, I want to be things. I don't want to appear successful. I don't want to appear to have the perfect American family. I don't want to, I want to be some things and then whatever comes from that, at least they'll have been something. And so this idea, I just feel like in the pursuit of this bike trip and in the pursuit of writing this book, it, it wasn't about, I'm going to be this amazing athlete. I'm going, it's like, I want to be a writer and I want to be true when I say I'm here to like learn lessons from living and then tell people what I've learned.

Hmm. A lot of people make lists about things that they want to be and do, but life, you know, intervenes or obstacles appear that prevent them from ever actually really tackling those things. So, you know, what do you think is the difference, um, in your equation that allowed you to actually, you know, follow through on this? You know, I will say that I have, I have very little temptation towards tradition or standard society. And I think it's because I was raised by parents who walked across America and became travel writers. And so growing up as like a weird, nerdy, little girly kid, my parents never forced me to play sports.

They never forced me to be anything but myself and so i have a very intact sense of like of love from my family and i very i and i do not i give that a lot of credit for like an unfounded sense of confidence in the in the concept that everything will work out and so because of that risk doesn't carry so much. I don't have kids. I don't have a mortgage intentionally. And the word intentional is so overused, but I really believe that that's the thing. Because if you can look into your own mind

and think about your your true motives i think a lot of people get married and have kids because they want a sense of belonging and they want a sense of purpose and maybe their career doesn't give them that well and sometimes that that you know that desire is unconscious like if you ask them they wouldn't they would say no that's not what it is but certainly some aspect of that is at play there's so many desires that are unconscious and that isn't that's another thing where i have so much patience with myself and with other people because it's like i want things i don't even know that i want like i do things that i don't even know why i'm doing them like i was just saying i'm i'm literally going to

the devil's tower making mashed potato towers for no reason i don don't know why, but I know I'm supposed to do that. Yeah. Yeah. And well, it's having the, uh, the sense of self to trust that instinct and not say, you know, Oh, that's weird. I shouldn't, I don't know why I feel like that, but I need to repress that. And you're, and you're running towards it. Here's a, here's a perfect example of how I don't remember where I heard something, but I remember the thing that I heard. I was reading an interview with an author and don't, I know it was a girl. Don't know who it was. And the interviewer said, what is the meaning of your new novel?

Like what is the meaning behind it? Or what's the message? That's what they said. What's the message? And she said, my books don't have a message. She thinks, she said,

I think that's disingenuous because it implies an understanding of the way the world works that is more than just telling the truth. And she goes, I just tell the truth. I tell true stories. And there's always a message in there because the truth is always true. She's like, I don't make stuff up. a message in there because the truth is always true she's like i don't make stuff up and she's like and what's amazing is everyone is experiencing the universe at once and learning things from different angles but the truth is always there whatever that means and and so when you tell a true story and they see that they're gonna learn a message that you couldn't have told them if you had made it obvious

yeah you had intended it well that's amazing but i also but i can't help but also think well what is truth though like that's that's her truth you know what i mean as soon as you string together a sentence that describes something that's a subjective evaluation of what perhaps may be a universal truth but but it's a take on that. Yes. You can't, you can't extrapolate truth from perspective. I totally agree.

And I think that's what she was saying, which is where she doesn't want to be too heavy handed with her, with ascribing meaning to her perspective. It's like she wants to share her perspective and then let you take the meaning from it as opposed to say this is what this means when you live like this yeah and so when you're when you're approaching the page you know it has to be is this honest to you is this you know an authentic representation of of your experience and let the rest let you know let interpret let people interpret as they may without trying to force some kind of

thematic, you know, through line upon it. Well, and that's why it's so funny to me when, whether it's pop music or Hollywood blockbusters or whatever, when they hire a screenwriter to write something and they don't like a good screenwriter will never write something that they don't know anything about

because you, like a good screenwriter will never write something that they don't know anything about. Cause you, you can't write something true that you have no experience of. And that's how, like, I remember when we were at invisible children and we would try to be like, like,

how do we make a film that will, that will engage mommies? Like we need mommies to like care. And I'm like, I am not a mommy. I do not know. I have no idea. Like I know whaties to like care. And I'm like, I am not a mommy. I do not know. I have no idea. Like I know what would make me care.

So let's try to do that. And if maybe if I care, they'll care because I'm a human. And, and so that's kind of my whole perspective with writing this book, with going on this trip, with expressing myself with my writing online is just i'm learning lessons live and i'm going to tell you what i learn and some of these things feel very universal the human experience but they might not be true to you but i also like i'm also wary of over contextual is over contextual i I can't say that. What do you mean by that?

Over contextualizing. I needed to get it out. What I mean by that is when you devalue, like when you believe something to be true, like if like sex will bring you all happiness is false. Like I believe that to be true. Now I could say, well,

I don't know your truth. Maybe it does bring you full happiness, but I'm going to venture to say like with somewhat for some sense of confidence that for most people, sex alone will not make you happy. And so there's certain, there's certain levels of like things that I will learn and say, and say them with a certain level of confidence of like this,

this I've learned and tried and tested over and over again. And it's interesting to me. And this definitely in my life works or doesn't work. But I also am, I am like, as a writer, I'm very sensitive to assuming someone understands or lives my life the same as me.

In other words, being sensitive to the idea that there's a different perspective and not trying to be the sort of authoritarian word on any one thing. Yeah, I'm not. The only thing I'm going to,

you share your experience openly and honestly and specifically, right. It's that weird thing of like, uh, the more specific you are, uh, then actually that sort of translates to, you know,

that can, yeah, well, yeah. Broader truths and connecting with a larger number of people. Ironically, that is so true. Yeah.

So where are you in the book? How's it going? I'm about, well, I'm jumping around. I've written probably 150 pages. You get distracted easily. So distracted. Oh, so-and-so's going to Joshua Park. Joshua Tree.

Well, I'm just such a life junkie it's really problematic and so so what I'm working on now is actually getting I'm gonna I'm collecting these numbers these chapters that we're putting into a proposal like and then that will get me an editor so because I need an editor to basically boss me around Like I'm a little bit of a paint splatter and I need a, I need a frame to like hang me on the wall or else I'm just a mess. And so I've, I'm far into the book. I'm like deep into the journey, but I'm still kind of discovering what it,

what the book is. What it wants to be. And I'm going to, I'm pulling up Instagram. I'm pulling up your Instagram right now. I know this is great podcasting, but the point that I want to make is if you're not hip to Jedediah's Instagram,

get on it, Jedediah Jenkins. And like I said at the outset, every entry is just this beautiful kind of reflection and journal entry. And I'm just at the outset, like every entry is just this beautiful kind of reflection and journal entry. And I'm just picking the latest one that you just put up earlier today, right? There's a picture. Is this a picture of you standing on a rock? Looks like you're camping.

I was camping in Ottawa on Friday. It's my friend Gavin. I'm writing a scene. Who knows if it'll make it in the book, but it's a difficult conversation between two friends. One is agnostic. The other is a sincere Christian who hasn't been directly challenged before. I'm having so much fun writing this, though. It's stirring up old and current battles in my heart.

Here's a snippet. I wanted to jump in. I had a lot to say, but for some reason I didn't. I wanted to watch. We were walking through the most beautiful place on the planet with the largest masses of earth piled around us. The physical world was towering, and these two were looking at the ground. They were somewhere else.

They were back in their own histories. Between these two brains, the intellectual and spiritual worlds were warring. No blood was spilling. No physical thing could be observed. But the makeup of the whole universe, as it is ordered in the thoughts of man was being rattled hit with a sledgehammer the solar system knocked

over see like it goes on a little bit but like that's beautiful man it really is and i feel like if all you did was compile these entries and somehow organize them into a book that it's going to be a magnificent book. And I know that you're doing so much more than that. So it's pretty cool. And I, and I also know like from you show these pictures of your journals where you're also illustrating and doing, I mean, it's, you have a lot to work with, man. It's going to be cool. It's going to be cool. So I just want to see you get it done. Oh, you got to focus, man. I know i that was my word i can't believe you said that i was just asked what my like word is and it's focus because the there's just i i'm such a consumer of life and that that's like why i go on these trips it's why i'm like so hungry for devouring books

and and learning and then like once I sit down to distill it, there's so much trying to fit through the funnel that like a few sentences trickle out and then I'm like, yay, got to go. Got to go. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, yeah, it's, there's no, you know, there's no end run around that. Like again, you know,

that wrestling match that you're going to have to have to get it done, but it's going to be cool, man. I know. I, I, wrestling match that you're gonna have to have to get it done but it's gonna be cool man i know i i the good thing about my personality is that i am addicted to productivity like if i'm not producing something i feel very just i know stagnant's the obvious word but just dead i like need to make and so i'm always taking notes for the book or writing a scene or this or that so I have like an enormous amount of material and like the 150 pages of my book are not even my Instagram

like when that compiled is 75 pages so it's like well it's all gonna you do two books like sort of the illustrated one with your your your doodlings and your your illustrations from your journal and the photographs from instagram and then just the pure book right oh yeah you're you're like yeah i know it's all happening well i i want to i mean who knows but that's what i think it'd be fun i kind of started to make a book like that which turned out to be harder than i thought i wanted to make a book like that, which turned out to be harder than I thought. I wanted to make a book like that for my parents for Christmas. Just like you endured worrying about me for this whole time. So like, here's, so I'm still working on it might end up being next Christmas. It's already, it's just so fun there's such a strong

sense of meaning to me in producing something that is like you can look at it and when and to any of the people who listen to your podcast if they have a job where they actually make something whether it's physical or they or they teach piano lessons and then they see the student perform. When there's visible progress in the work of your hands, I think that is so spiritually fulfilling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's so many jobs in the complex economy where that doesn't happen, where you file

a memo and you clock in and this and that. And I could see how that creates this frustration in your spirit of like, what am I even doing? Like, what am I contributing? Cause you want to feel like you contribute. And that's like what I'm chasing right now is like, I want to contribute something that I can hold in my hands. It's a beautiful aspiration. I think it's a good place to, to close it down, but I want to end it with your thoughts on one final thing, which is, you know, somebody's listening and they're inspired by your message, but they're feeling stuck in their life.

And I'm sure you've weathered this question many, many times. Like, you know, I just, I would love to do something like that or, you know, just some version of that or maybe not as extreme, but like, how can I can i you know how can i tap into something more authentic and sort of visceral and and true to myself and express that more in my life i mean what you know how do you usually respond to that well i i respond to that by saying whether it's for example my I grew up with a single mom. My mom had cussed at me when I was a kid, and she had no money. And she had three kids. And so she had both incredible responsibility, no money, and three children.

And she knew that we couldn't go on vacations. We couldn't travel the world like these rich Nashville mommies could. And so she piled us in the back of her busted ass station wagon and we would go camping in rural Tennessee. We would, we drove one time, we took the train all the way to Colorado. Um, train all the way to Colorado. Um, and I grew up in boulders and trees and like camping and like in crappy tents and like horrible used campers that my mom would, who knows where she got them. And, and there is just like, I think that getting out of doing something that is out of your comfort zone and particularly in nature is so life affirming. And so it rearranges the cells in your brain. I truly believe that.

And that is such a step when you realize like I, I grew up thinking that I could go anywhere because my mom made it happen even though she paid ten dollars for the campsite and we ate Vienna sausages out of cans which is probably why I was like heavy as a kid but I I loved it and and I just think that there's so many people who feel trapped and there are things you, I mean, you can go camping just on a Saturday night. Right. Just for one night. I think you just, you just posted the other day. You just went up to Idlewild.

Yeah. For Friday night. Right. And it's like, and it was so, we kept being like the guys that I went with were like, I can't believe we can just do this whenever we want. Like it's right here. It's two hours away. We're right here.

And this is so beautiful and and so i think the thing people are asking is like i what they're asking is how do i break up this sense of monotony and meaninglessness that is driving me mad and that i just think it starts with like baby steps and showing yourself that you can do something that surprises you. And if it can be in nature, it's hard to like, there's 4 billion years of like the planet getting itself ready to show itself to you. It's like, go look at it. Yeah. I love this idea, uh, that you've expressed in other things that I was looking at the idea that, um, routine is the enemy of time, right? And that time is this elastic thing, right?

That expands and contracts in relationship to, you know, your kind of subjective experience of it, like whether you're learning or being stimulated or stuck in the repetitive. It expands or contracts in relation to how closely you're paying attention. If you're a little kid and you're new to this planet, you're paying attention to everything because you want to know how it works. And through that attention, time slows down.

I mean, I remember so clearly being six years old and thinking I would never be seven. I'm like, I have been six forever. Right, or like when you're like three weeks away from Christmas, you I'm like, I have been six forever. Right. Or like, like when you're like three weeks away from Christmas, you're just like, yeah, how can the, how can the clock be such an enemy? It never changes. It's been three o'clock all day. But so that's like, that's the idea is I think as we build routine, our brain figures it can do most things on autopilot. And so it does. And then, and that's why breaking that routine up is so,

and that's sort of what we were talking about earlier with like switching careers in your life. Sometimes like taking those risks, when you take those risks, your child brain comes back on and all of a sudden you're the new kid on the playground and you're like, am I going to get beat up or am i gonna rule this place to suddenly pay attention in a really acute way to what's going on because you're it's you're in some

kind of survival mode all of a sudden yeah i'm so the concept of paying attention i think is like the the foundational law of the universe it's so hard though i know because we're so sleepy i get so sleepy all right man well this was awesome thanks for so awesome yeah i really appreciate it will you come back and talk to me when the book is done a hundred percent awesome man cool hopefully i'll have some more like pointed things to say then no this was fantastic are you kidding man very very cool such a pleasure to talk to you man i really appreciate it i can't wait to come back this is great cool so if you're digging on jedediah uh check him out on instagram first and foremost at jedediah jenkins and uh shred on twitter right i went surfing once and my surfing buddies named me that where else could

people find you um those are the main places i mean and then if you ever want to talk to me that where else could people find you um those are the main places i mean and then if you ever want to talk to me my email is actually on my instagram i know it's bold i like it i get emails all the time of people and how fun i just get to like people write me the most beautiful things you've ever it's so crazy cool so all right so write you at a diet an email yes i would love that cool man thanks peace peace out plants So, all right. So write Jed a diet in email. Yes. How about that? I would love that. Cool, man. Thanks. Peace. Peace out.

Plants. Hey, did you guys enjoy that? I enjoyed that. I hope you guys enjoyed that. I really think that Jed's a special guy. I really love that conversation. And I hope that you guys tapped into that as well. Make sure you visit the show

notes on the episode page at which role.com to read up, learn more and take your knowledge base and podcast experience beyond the earbuds. And as a matter of fact, since I recorded this conversation, which took place a couple of months ago, end of the summer, Jedediah published a rather moving piece for the Paris review. It's called Sheltered. I'll put a link to that in the show notes among many other gems, including the National Geographic cover of his parents walking across the United States, which is pretty epic.

But it's a really beautiful piece and it's really worth your attention and time. And I think it'll give you a good flavor of where Judd's coming from and what his writing style is like and what to expect in his impending book. So do that, you guys. If you live in the LA area or your travels take you through this part of the world, be sure to check out a few of the businesses that I've partnered with. Joy Cafe, it's our organic plant-based and gluten-free eatery in Westlake

Village. You can often find me eating there at lunchtime. I'm also partnered with the Karma Baker, which is a vegan and gluten-free bakery also in Westlake Village. You know, right now, I'm in Frankfurt, Germany, doing a bunch of talks. We've been at the Frankfurt Book Fair, helping launch the German language edition of the Plant Power Way. It's called Das Plant Power Kutschbuch. I don't know how you say it exactly. And it's been really cool to be in Europe and to meet so many people who listen to the podcast and have been enjoying the message in the books and all of that. And what's great about the podcast is it's like this, you know, global kind of envoy of this message. And it really feels really cool to be a steward of that. But it's also really great to serve my local community.

And that's what Joy Cafe and Karma Baker are all about. So if you're in the area, please check them out, say hello, and maybe I'll be there and we can say hello to each other. That would be great, right? For all your plant power needs, visit richroll.com. You can get the Plant Power Way if you haven't already. You can get signed copies of Finding Ultra. You can get Julie's meditation program. You can get a cool Plant Power t-shirt made out of 100% organic cotton. You can get a tech t-shirt, Plant Power Way, Plant Power, tech t-shirt.

So you can rock the message while you're out running. We got sticker packs. We got all kinds of cool stuff. We got nutrition products. Basically, all sorts of all sorts of things to help take your health to the next level. Thanks so much for supporting the show, you guys, for telling your friends, for sharing it on social media. I really appreciate it. I'm loving this podcast mission,

and I love you guys for taking this leap with me and going on this very long adventure. So I'll see you back in a couple days and make it a great one, everybody. Peace. Plants.