[female narrator #3] Everywhere you turn, people try to tell you who to be and what to do.
But what about deciding for yourself?
Roadtrip Nation is a movement that empowers people to define their own Roads in life.
Ever since the original Roadtrip in 2001, the keys to the Green RV have been passed down to a new generation of Roadtrippers.
[Roadtripper #2] Me and two total strangers [Roadtripper #3] Are going to travel across the nation, interviewing [Roadtripper #2] People who have made lives out of passions.
[Roadtripper #1] We're trying to find out who we are and what we want to do with our lives.
[female narrator #3] This is Roadtrip Nation.
♪ [Roadtripper #2] Today is the 11th day of the trip.
It feels a lot longer than that because every day is so full of activities and thoughts and people.
So when we got to the Bay Area, we went to the Jelly Belly factory.
We met with Elise Benstein who is a food scientist and the sweetest woman I've met.
Oh!
Didn't even mean to make a pun there.
[Megan] Do you see these?
Look at these!
They're made of jelly beans!
That's nuts.
[Jackie] She's one of the people who makes Jelly Belly flavors.
[Megan] When you explain to people what your job is, what's a typical reaction?
[Elise] I have to tell you, my husband is an orchestra conductor.
I think that's pretty cool.
I think that's a very cool job.
But whenever he's talking to people and we introduce ourselves or whatever, and he says, "I'm an orchestra conductor, blah blah blah."
And then I tell them, "I work in R&D.
We develop the new flavors of jelly beans."
It's like he doesn't exist anymore.
[Roadtrippers laugh] [Elise] "What?
You work at Jelly Belly?"
And they just get so excited.
♪ [Elise] It sounds kind of corny, but we help to make people's lives a little bit happier for a little bit of time.
So to me, that kind of gives a purpose to my job.
In its own little way, it's making a positive difference in people's lives.
[Roadtrippers] Yum!
Mmm!
[Elise] You should see some of the ones in the very beginning when I started working here.
They were really pretty scary.
They would have ended up as 'Belly Flops' for sure!
And a lot of our test candy do end up as 'Belly Flops.'
Just because we rarely get it right the first time around.
I mean, we were working on 'pizza'.
We wanted a 'pizza' Jelly Belly.
And it was like, "Oh, we're going to make this really super tasty pizza!"
And we were throwing all kinds of flavors in there and stuff.
And when we tasted it, it was just so hideous!
So when we did the Harry Potter "Bertie Botts" Beans, it was like, "Oh, this would be perfect for 'vomit'!
For the 'vomit' beans!"
So it was a mistake, but it ended up being a success.
[Jackie] Cheers!
[Zachariah] Cheers!
[chewing] [Hands slam on table] [Jackie] Eww!
[Zachariah] Are you kidding?
[Elise] (laughs) [Zachariah] (exhales deeply) [Megan] Oh my god!
That's so bad!
[Elise] Good, that's the response we want!
[Jackie] Eww!
That is so awful!
[Zachariah] Every time you bite it a little more, it just gets bad again!
[laughter] [Jackie] That is just terrible!
[Elise] Thank you!
[Zachariah] All right.
Yeah, it's time!
[Jackie and Megan laugh] [Elise] He's got it now.
He got it.
[Elise] Don't be afraid to make mistakes.
Because, you know, I feel I'm at the forefront of developing new candy products.
And I never thought I would be doing that.
You just, you never know.
You just need to be open to opportunities, to be able to capture those opportunities when they present themselves.
And you've got to embrace those new concepts.
[Zachariah] If life gives you vomit, make a vomit jelly bean.
♪ [Zachariah] Saying "Goodbye" to my sweater, because I am not going to be needing it for... a long time.
Because we are going into Arizona, which is also known as "hell" at this time of year.
It's going to be hot.
♪ [Zachariah] Three, two, one... thousand miles driven!
(exhales deeply) That feels really rewarding, actually.
♪ [Jackie] We are in the outskirts of Phoenix.
And we are going to the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Facility.
We are interviewing Deon Clark.
He is an engineer.
He came from a poor neighborhood in Chicago.
So the way he escaped from drugs and violence was by joining the Navy.
[Deon] My brother is currently serving a 285-year prison sentence.
My sister just got out of jail.
And so, for me, remembering where I came from and these battles, that's the thing that I made a promise to myself and to my mother.
Come hell or high water, I will get here.
♪ The neighborhood that I grew up in was a place in Chicago, the South side of Chicago.
Lower income, poorer areas.
And so the Navy didn't go to these areas to find engineers and certain talent.
I went to the recruiter.
He sat me down.
I had to take an exam.
There's 107 questions, and you get seven minutes to do it.
It was like decoding.
You're not going to get that done.
And I remember I took the first four or five questions, and I took my time and went through them.
And there was a pattern.
And so I said, "Well, I got four minutes left.
I have 102 questions to get through.
I have nothing to lose."
So I applied this pattern.
So it became... All the way down through.
I got done with the exam.
And I remember when the young lady came out and looked me dead in the eye and said, "The Navy don't want people like you."
I'm thinking, as 16-year-old, 17-year-old Deon, I said, "What do you mean?"
She said, "The Navy don't want people like you.
The Navy doesn't want cheaters."
I looked at her and I said, "Who cheats to go to the military?"
[Roadtrippers laugh] [Deon] Who does this?
So my recruiter came and said, "You figured out their pattern?"
I said, "I don't know.
You tell me."
"Are you saying that I did it accurately?"
Because I didn't know that.
And his next words were, "You're exactly what the Navy wants."
[Roadtrippers laugh] [Deon] So this began to open up the world of the Nuclear.
[Jackie] How were those years in the Navy?
[Deon] (sighs) It was rough.
See, I was 17 when I went in.
So imagine.
Fresh out of high school.
And the Navy's program was set up so that in 18 months, you went from know-nothing, to qualified to operate a naval nuclear power plant.
18 months.
15 hours a day.
Monday through Monday.
No weekends, no breaks.
[Zachariah] Wow!
[Deon] A hundred went in, 35 came out.
And so I got through the training.
And I had 42 people working for me on a nuclear aircraft carrier at age 19.
You're a leader.
You have 42 people who you're now assigning work to.
When you're done with that, you're taking apart some type of hydraulic actuary or turbine generator to repair it.
And you're 19.
That's the part that I loved about it.
You become a valuable, an asset to anyone and in any institution, because of that knowledge.
So the Navy was all right from that regard.
It was tough, but it paid off.
[Jackie] How was it for you to come back?
After you reached all this success and then came back to your home town?
[Deon] When I went back to Chicago, it was like seeing this sense of hopelessness.
So I started volunteering a lot of my time.
I would go to different high schools and just talk to students and share my story.
And I just started taking smaller gigs here and there.
Started teaching at colleges, writing curriculum.
Doing things of that nature.
I would find that these young people would lock in.
And they wanted to know, "How did you do it?"
[Zachariah] What do you teach kids at your organization?
[Deon] I explain to them what a "nerd" is.
Because I tell them, "You're getting ready to become a nerd."
And it has a negative connotation, typically.
But I asked a lot of the young folks.
I say, "How many of you all know nerds in your school?"
And of course hands go flying.
Some of them say, "There he is right there!"
And I ask them, "What is it about that kid that you would make him some kind of an outcast?
A geek?"
And they expressed that they always stay focused, they don't do anything, they don't hang out with anyone.
So I asked them a question that caused them to think about it.
I said, "Where does the nerd live?"
"Oh man, he lives down the street from me."
I said, "So what you're telling me is, "they see everything you see.
"They're exposed to everything you're exposed to.
"They have the exact same challenges as you have, "because you're all in the same environment.
"Yet somehow, that kid has the strength "to defy all the peer pressure and still do well in school and still survive."
I said, "That ain't no nerd.
"That's a tough kid, "to be able to deal with everything you deal with but not have the entourage and still make good grades."
I said, "That ain't no nerd."
Where you are is where you are.
But what are you willing to do to change that situation?
Many times, what you need to be willing to do is what most kids simply don't want to do.
It will not be easy.
I can almost guarantee that for most people, to get where you're going, you're going to have to separate from the people that you know.
The comfort zone that you're typically used to, at some point you're going to have to break that.
And it's a matter of, have you deemed why you're breaking that to be worth it?
And for me, it was worth it.
[Zachariah] Wow.
I guess just to wrap this all up, what advice do you have for our generation and the upcoming generations?
[Deon] One of the things that I think is probably the most powerful visual that we give the young folks is I ask them, "How many of you all believe you can survive a week without water?"
And no one believes you can, because the human body needs it.
I said, "So, if you have not had water in four days, if I set a bottle of water in front of you, what would it take for me to convince you to not drink that bottle of water?
How would I have to get into your brain enough that though that bottle of water is right there, in your reach, I'm going to cause you not to reach for it?"
And so they started to see that there is nothing you can do.
There's no way you'll stop me from it.
Then I kind of gave them the visual of... Well, is it safe to say that without education, there's a certain path that you're going to go down?
So if you know that you need education or you essentially perish, what then does another kid your age do to cause you to not go and get the thing that you know you will not survive without?
How powerful does another kid have to be to get in your brain and tell you, "Leave that cup of water.
Leave those books alone."
I said, "That's the part where you all have to be that nerd."
You got to be able to look at somebody and say, "Hey man.
I know what I need.
I know what I have to do.
It's a fact."
And for another little 13-year-old to somehow talk you out of doing your homework?
That's no different from him talking you out of drinking a bottle of water that you know you need to survive.
[Zachariah] I mean, I needed to hear that.
That's... Wow.
[Zachariah] That water analogy.
It's like, there are so many factors convincing me not to just grab that water.
[Deon] It says, "Keep pressing forward."
And that's the message.
[Zachariah] One of my favorite quotes is, "The greatest nemesis to change is the conflict between what you want to become and how you want to feel."
And I really want to feel good all the time.
And that's really been degrading my growth.
It's been degrading my life.
It's been degrading kind of... everything I'm trying to accomplish.
And Deon gave this incredible formula.
That bottle of water is my education.
I did not get the grades I could have gotten this past year.
I can find other people to compare myself to, and feel good about myself.
But there's really no value in that.
And that terrifies me, to finally have this analogy in my head that can actually connect me with that consequence.
♪ [Zachariah] Right now we are driving down a beautiful, beautiful road that's just smeared with geometry everywhere.
And it is so unlike anything I've ever seen before, which gives it so much more amazing-ness!
♪ [Zachariah] (giggles in excitement) Oh my god!
♪ [Jackie] We are at Colombus, New Mexico.
And we are interviewing Paul Salopek.
He's a journalist, and he won two Pulitzer Prizes.
[Zachariah] Just two?
[Megan] He couldn't just be satisfied with one.
[Jackie] Yeah, I know.
[Megan] (laughs) [Jackie] Right now, he's about to start a seven-year journey across the globe.
[Megan] So in a nutshell, he's crazy cool.
[Jackie] Yeah.
[Megan] Ow!
[Jackie] Megan!
[Megan] Oww!
Oh god!
Oh my god!
Oh my god!
Oh my god!
[Jackie] Chill, chill.
[Megan] Oh!
Woah!
That hurts so badly!
[Zachariah] Let me use my teeth!
[Jackie] Didn't you see them?
[Zachariah] Suck the poison out, Jackie!
Jackie, suck the poison out!
[Megan] There's poison?
You're kidding.
Oh my god, you're really doing it.
[Zachariah] Oh, hello!
[Zachariah] How are you?
Are you Paul?
I'm Zachariah, nice to meet you!
[Jackie] Hi, Jackie.
[Megan] Hi, Megan.
♪ [Paul] My background is extremely eclectic and non-linear.
I do have a degree in biology from the University of California.
But no surprise, it has nothing to do with what I'm doing now.
It's just another piece of the mosaic that led me on the path to become a reporter.
From the time I was about 16, I was basically riding around on a motorcycle doing odd jobs, from installing walk-in freezers to working at a gold mine to working on fishing boats as a commercial fisherman.
And all that I consider to be part of my education.
[Zachariah] What led into the Journalism, from that point?
[Paul] Like most things in my life, an accident.
I had just finished my undergrad degree in environmental biology at UC Santa Barbara.
And I was going to take the summer off to go work on a shrimp boat in the Gulf of Texas.
And the motorcycle broke down in a place called Roswell, New Mexico.
And I had 60 dollars on me.
And it wasn't enough to repair it.
So I had to stay in this small town and find work.
I stayed in the home of an old woman who rented me a room for 25 dollars a week.
And she happened, by just the merest chance, to be a former journalist.
And she said, "There's a reporter job open at the local paper that'll pay you two bucks above minimum."
And they hired me on the strength of having a college degree.
I knew nothing about journalism.
And that just completely took my life in a completely different path.
[Jackie] Once you became a reporter in Roswell, New Mexico, what was the journey to come to where you are now?
[Paul] It was uneven.
I got bored with the Roswell job.
After less than a year, I went and worked on a ranch in Mexico for a year.
But then I came back.
I kept coming back to journalism.
I started regionally at a small newspaper.
Went to a little bigger newspaper.
And for the last 13 or 14 years, I've been based overseas.
So, I got to where I was by no pre-plotted line, no sort of, career-orientated, well thought-out plan.
It was going where the story was.
[Zachariah] What inner forces kind of... just led you down that?
Do you think this is a conscious process?
Or do you think it's just kind of happened as a subject of your life?
[Paul] I think both.
I think part of it's been accidental.
I hear a lot about the word "passion".
It's a very popular word these days in the United States.
I think it's overused.
It's been devalued.
I think it's like a coin that's been rubbed too much.
It's easy to say, "Find your passion," but people don't appreciate as much the power of serendipity in their lives.
Something has happened that's completely unexpected and it knocks you off-kilter.
And what's your reaction?
It might be irritation or frustration.
But when you look back on it ten years from now, you might say, "Wow.
I'm really glad that happened because I have accumulated this instead, in life experience."
So you have to be open to these "Y's" in your Road.
And open to being moved by new experiences.
[Megan] His motorcycle broke down and he just stayed with a woman who happened to be a journalist and got him a journalism job and now his entire life trajectory is completely changed because of... [Zachariah] Yeah, because a chain broke on his motorcycle!
[Megan] Yeah, a flukey little thing like that!
That is unreal!
[Zachariah] He was open to serendipity.
[Megan] Yeah.
He's seen so much.
If I was in his situation and I just turned 50-years-old, and I was like, "Wow.
I've done a million things.
I have two Pulitzer Prizes under my belt."
But the fact that he's still driven to transverse the entire freaking world in seven years?
[Paul] Starting next year, I hope to set off on a self-propelled assignment.
And it'll be a walk across the world in the pathways of the first anatomically modern humans to successfully disperse out of Africa about 50,000 years ago.
It'll be rendering current events as a form of pilgrimage, if you will.
It'll take about seven years by my calculation.
It will leave the Rift Valley and head North into the Middle East, up the coast of China, into Siberia, to Alaska, and then ramble down the length of the new world.
And I'll be writing as I go.
It'll basically be a transect of what it's like to be alive today in the world.
[Megan] So we are traveling for seven weeks and I know this took us a lot of time and energy to plan this seven week trip, which in comparison looks pretty rinky dink.
When did you conceive of this and how did that planning process come to be?
[Paul] I thought about it about two years ago.
The idea is to plan it, but not over-plan it.
It goes back to my talk earlier about serendipity.
I'll run into obstacles the way our ancestors did.
If I come to the Hindu Kush and the passes are frozen up, I spend three months at the foot of the Hindu Kush, writing.
What happens when I go into a place that's previously been stable but suddenly there's a conflict?
All these contingencies will be unanswerable until I get there.
I've spent a career parachuting into stories around the world.
But what I've been missing my entire life are all the places in between that none of us see because we fly over them or drive through them.
We don't slow down enough.
The connective tissue between stories is as important as the so-called "stories" themselves.
"A genuine pleasure meeting comrade voyagers.
"Bonne journee.
Safari njema.
"I'll see you all out on the trail.
Abrazos."
♪ [Zachariah] This is wild!
Whoohoohoo!
[Megan] Oh my..!
(laughs) Augh!
Pfft!
(laughs) Fail!
♪ [Zachariah] What was really cool was having Deon and then Paul Salopek.
Deon said you need to hone in on a skill set, so you have that security.
[Deon] Military's training caused me to become very, very useful in the corporate nuclear world.
My advice is lock in on a skill.
Master it, such that now you have something to fall back on.
[Zachariah] Paul was the opposite.
Paul said make yourself broad so that you can connect with anybody.
[Paul] I know how to shoe a mule.
I can go into a laboratory and have a hopefully intelligent discussion with a geneticist.
All of this stuff.
Thanks to what seemed to be a fairly unfocused background.
[Zachariah] Another incredible perspective that I totally agree with.
That's what's getting really cool about this trip, is I can define my own perspective.
I'm not modeling my Road off of other people.
I'm figuring out what works for me.
[Zachariah] Morning, from Texas!
[Jackie] (laughs) [Zachariah] I like how all these interviews are blurring together.
[Megan] Every one has his own unique story, but they have so many commonalities.
[Zachariah] Um, hi!
I was calling about the U.F.O.
that you have for sale?
[Jackie] I want something more than just the research.
I-I-I...need something else.
[Jackie} How do you know when you should stop trying?
[woman #1] When you're not having fun.
[rain falling] [Zachariah] Oh, what are you doing, Houston?
[Female narrator #4] Roadtrip Nation extends beyond the program you just watched.
It's a movement that empowers students to define their own Roads in life.
Here's a quick snapshot of the Roadtrip Nation experience in the classroom.
[student #1] When I was in 1st grade, I always wanted to be a lawyer.
But as time progressed, it changed.
Roadtrip nation is helping me find my passion and which way I should lead it.
[student #2] Roadtrip Nation helped me build my self-confidence and find my passion, which is becoming a traveling nurse, so I can one day help my niece.
[female narrator #4] The Education Policy Improvement Center recently conducted a study to determine the impact of the Roadtrip Nation Experience curriculum on high school students.
Two key discoveries were made: Roadtrip Nation students' GPAs increased at twice the rate of non-Roadtrip Nation students because of the behaviors and attitudes they developed that relate to academic success.
Furthermore, they found a clear rise in student self-efficacy.
Roadtrip Nation students not only identified the need to do better they did better.
[student #3] In the journals and everything I'm doing I feel comfortable expressing everything I'm feeling.
[student #1] Roadtrip Nation can help you find yourself, really, on what you really want.
[female narrator #4] To find out about this report and to view other students' experiences, visit Roadtripnation.org.
[female narrator #4] If you're living a life you love, and want to share your story with the next generation, or if you're looking to define your own Road, head to Roadtripnation.com to join the movement.
♪
