[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.
[inhales] [bed creaks] [Roadtripper #1] Morning.
[Roadtripper #3] Good morning, beautiful.
Oh my god!
[Roadtripper #1] What happened?
[Roadtripper #3] Someone took the little one!
[Roadtripper #2] Today is Wednesday.
Which means five weeks ago today was the first day of our trip.
When Jackie, Zachariah, and I all landed in California.
That's nuts.
[Roadtripper #1] We are on the 5th week of the Roadtrip.
So we have two weeks left.
[Roadtripper #3] It's wild.
And it's starting to get kind of sad because I don't want it to end, ever.
Knowing that it's over in two and a half weeks to where there's more time behind me than there is in front of me...
It's a very interesting transition.
It's been such a journey.
It's been so beautiful.
It's been so great to get outside of my comfort zone and have the best pulled out of me because when you're comfortable, you're not struggling.
And if you're not struggling, you're not getting stronger.
Right now it feels good to know that I have some growth happening.
[Jackie] I'm literally just opening myself to all of these new things that I'm being exposed to.
Like with all these people that I have never met before, I am opening myself and I am telling them, "I am lost in this world!"
(laughs) I have been accepted to graduate school.
It's kind of like that question that I have, "I know what I'm doing but is this what I want to do for the rest of my life?"
On the Roadtrip, I'm hoping to find how else I can contribute to science, not only what they have told me in school.
What else is out there?
[Jackie] We are going to Ann Arbor, Michigan.
[Zachariah] From here, we drive to Cleveland.
And then from Cleveland we drive to Pittsburg.
[Megan] Pittsburg to Philly.
Philly to... New York!
[Zachariah] I'm just waiting to go see these roads.
Because these don't have as many little roads.
[Jackie] What happened to the Atlas?
Bring it out.
[Zachariah] I don't know how to operate that guy.
[Megan] Let's learn.
[Zachariah] Table of Contents!
[Megan] Our ancestors used these.
[Zachariah] Throughout all the interviews, it's been very cool to get people to articulate more on this ambiguous concept that everyone says: "Follow your passion."
It's great to follow your passion but that doesn't mean anything.
That's the aspect I'm trying to get at, is the specifics!
How did you talk to these people that were telling you, "You should do this"?
How did they respond?
How do you bridge that gap between what I want to do and doing it?
Which is hard!
It's so hard!
♪ [Zachariah] Oh!
Oh, oh, oh!
[vuvuzela] [Zachariah] Come on, more!
[vuvuzela] [Jackie] After we left Texas, I haven't been to any of the East coast states.
So I'm super excited for that.
[vuvuzela] [Megan] Our next destination is New York.
It's always hard to have had so many experiences and seen so many things and going back home, which I know is going to be the same.
But like...
I'm not the same anymore?
[Jackie] In New York City we're interviewing super big names.
[Megan] We're going to WNYC, which is the public radio station.
And we're going to interview Jad Abumrad.
He's one of the hosts of Radiolab, which is a really cool pop-culture science-communications show.
[radio] "You're listening to Radiolab.
"From New York public radio "Public radio... "This is Radiolab.
"I'm Jad Abumrad.
"Today on our program, "we're going to project our minds out there "in the great beyond.
"Let's begin by rewinding the clock back to 1977.
"This was a big year for the space program "because in August of that year, "NASA launched a spacecraft carrying a gold record."
[Megan] The fact that our context is always changing is keeping us very open to all these new ideas.
It's so easy to break out of the routine way of thinking when you're not having any sort of routine.
[Jackie] Yeah, so we don't... We don't have a shower.
(laughs) We've had some pretty interesting shower experiences.
♪ [Jackie] It's pretty different compared to the first weeks.
We were getting used to living on the Road and being with each other.
[Megan] Ah, it's in my eye.
[laughter] [Megan] So I don't know if it's getting out of my comfort zone.
I'm continuously expanding what I'm comfortable with.
It's like, you never know what you're comfortable with until you try desperately to find things that should make you uncomfortable.
I should be uncomfortable.
I'm sleeping on a kitchen table.
I should be physically and mentally uncomfortable but I'm really like...
I'm very content with my lot in life right now.
[Megan] I've been...
I think the most...
The most unexpected struggle would be how I still haven't found a teaching job.
I've applied to... geez!
Like something like...
It's getting close to a hundred.
It's getting close to a hundred schools, districts... Something like 25 states.
Still, nothing really has come together.
We're in Pennsylvania.
It's a bittersweet situation because this was my home for four years and then I was kicked out because they had to graduate me.
But now Ms. Doyle's back.
Oh wow.
It's been a really long time since I've been Ms. Doyle.
[thump] [sigh] It's kind of discouraging because there's been so much preparation and preparation.
And I loved it.
I loved all the classes that I took.
I loved my student teaching experience.
I loved all the people that I interacted with.
But it was all preparation for getting a teaching job.
And it's really startled me that that hasn't come together.
Because it was almost...
I almost assumed that it was granted.
♪ [Jackie] The day has finally come.
We are driving to Manhattan, which is going to be epic.
[Zachariah] We will ride our mighty green chariot into Manhattan like a thunderbolt thrown from the hand of Zeus!
And we will find a parking spot!
It's going to be crazy.
It's going to be pretty wild.
[Jackie] Where's the horn?
[vuvuzela] [Zachariah] We're in New York City!
Big old New York City!
[Megan] You know how I can tell we're in New York?
People are not even phased in the slightest that we're driving a 36-foot bus.
[Zachariah] Just go slow.
Everybody already hates everybody else, so... [Megan] To come in not only a car, but in a 36-foot long bright green RV was pretty funny.
[Zachariah] Muah!
I want a group hug right now!
[Roadtrippers] Aww!
[Megan] Let's do it.
[Jackie] Sounds good.
[Megan] Yum!
[Zachariah] Mmm.
Perfect.
It's going to be perfect every time.
Because it's New York pizza.
Mmm!
[Megan] I'm getting kind of nervous!
This is so cool to think that all of the stuff we've been listening to came from this room.
[Jackie] Hi, Jackie.
[Jad] Jackie, good to meet you.
[Megan] Megan.
Nice to meet you.
[Jad] Nice to meet you guys.
[Zachariah] Your voice sounds exactly the same.
[Jackie] Yeah!
[laughter] ♪ [Jad] So where have you guys traveled so far?
[Megan] We started in Southern California and we did San Diego, LA, San Francisco, Phoenix, Las Cruces, Houston, Dallas, Chicago... [Jad] Wow.
All in one shot?
[Megan] It's been five weeks.
It's the 5th week of our trip.
[Jad] Wow, and it's been a continuous trip?
[Jad] No kidding.
That sounds like a blast.
[Megan] It's been really fun.
[Jad] And you've just been talking to people along the way?
[Megan] Yeah, in each city, we interview a couple people who have kind of atypical careers.
[Zachariah] So our first question for you is, what were you like at our age?
Getting out of college and trying to figure out what you were going to do?
[Jad] Um...
I went to school for music.
So music composition.
And I pretty much was sure, not just actually at that point but for a long, long time that the thing that I was going to be when I got out of school was a musician.
Specifically writing music for films.
So I would get out of school.
I would hook up with some student film makers.
I'd figure out how to write music for them and eventually I'd write for some features.
And that would be my life.
That didn't really work out.
I mean, I just wasn't very good at it.
And so at a certain point I just kind of gave it up.
I was like, "I'm clearly not a good musician.
I'm not a good film scorer."
That's what I was thinking at that time.
And so I thought I had failed.
I thought that my plan was wrong.
[Zachariah] What defined that point when you realized, you know, "I've been trying to hold on to this path, but this just isn't working"?
What experience kind of brought it out?
[Jad] I was sitting...
I used to live in a loft in Williamsburg with my girlfriend, who is now my wife.
I remember we were sitting on the bed.
It was hot as hell.
And I was just feeling kind of like everything that I'd tried hadn't worked.
I was seeing a lot of people around me being very successful, doing the things I wanted to do.
And it was easy for them, and I wasn't finding it easy.
So I was like, "What's... What's wrong?"
And she made the suggestion, "Well, you know, you kind of like to write.
You kind of like to make music.
You're not really good at either on their own terms, but maybe you could somehow find the middle ground.
Try out radio.
Why not?"
And she said, "Just go volunteer."
So I went and I volunteered for a year making no money, working odd jobs when I could to sort of support myself.
And feeling really crappy the whole time.
Feeling like, "What?
I'm not...
There's no career in this."
But it's fun.
Like I had this immediate sense of satisfaction.
When you go out, you're doing interviews, You've got this piece of tape.
Because I used to actually work on tape.
And then you cut the part that you like and you stitch it together with some other tape.
And you say something between point A and point B.
And you put it on the air.
It's just like this great immediate thing.
Like, "Wow, you can really just do that?"
It somehow turned out to be more interesting than I expected.
It was like this little arrow that pointed me in a direction.
And I was like, "Oh, I'll just follow that!"
And so I sort of see it as like your future self is leading you, in some sense.
It's dropping little hints.
And so I got into Radio and you know, just fast forward a bunch of years.
I'm sitting here now making this show Radiolab, which I'm continually struck by how weirdly close it was to the thing I always wanted to do.
I just somehow wrote the script wrong, you know?
I wanted to be a film scorer but I think I'm doing that now, weirdly.
But I would never have known that this is actually the job that I was imagining.
I didn't somehow have the tools to imagine forward far enough.
So, I don't know.
I mean, if I could translate that to you guys, it's like...
There's a feeling of dread and a feeling of anxiety that you have at this point.
And there's a tendency to want to curtail the uncertainty.
And you do have to make decisions, obviously.
But premature certainty is the enemy.
It's always the enemy.
It's the enemy in everything that I do.
It's that tendency to want to endgame it.
To jump to the end of it and be like, "Okay.
I'm there.
I'm done.
I can no longer worry about this."
And that's the enemy.
You have to ride the uncertainty.
You have to walk through it.
Because every point in that story I just told you up until this point, has been filled with that dread.
It's been filled with that anxiety.
Like, "What the hell am I doing?"
"Who am I?"
That's the question that's just there all the time.
I mean even now, you get stuck on a story, those questions rush back in.
You're like, "I'm terrible at this!
Why can't I figure this out?"
But somehow if you don't feel that, I would be more worried about you than if you do.
[Zachariah] That's very interesting.
One thing that comes up a lot is we're about defining our own Roads as opposed to taking somebody else's Road.
But how did you kind of take it to that next level of, being more open to other options and things like that?
[Jad] Um... Let me think... Let me get abstract for a second.
I'm going to bring in some high-falutin.
And you can tell me to be concrete.
There's this theory in evolution called 'The Adjacent Possible,' which is that if you imagine the primordial soup, it's full of all these chemicals.
Like arsenic was in there, there were some amino acids floating around.
Those things aren't going to suddenly bump into each other and create a human being.
Or even a flower.
It's not part of the possibility of that space to create the flower, you know?
But you can take an amino acid, and you can take a fat cell.
You can slam them together.
Suddenly, you've got a cell.
And suddenly that cell has more possibilities.
A two-celled organism, and eventually an amoeba or something, I don't know.
So you have to ask yourself, what is your adjacent possible?
In some sense.
Rght now, you're way in your own primordial soup of dreams.
But you have to think of your possibilities in both the most expansive and the most constrained.
Like, "Okay, I can't be Michael Jordan, "but maybe I can go play in a pick-up game and work on my jump shot."
Or something like that.
There is a way in which you always have to ask yourself, "What is possible right outside my border?"
In some sense.
How would you answer that for yourself?
[Zachariah] That's a good question.
[Megan] I don't know.
I mean, I just graduated with a degree in elementary education and I'm kind of in that point right now where I really know that I want to teach, but I'm not getting any jobs.
So it's kind of that uncertainty principle.
And I want to figure out how to better cope with that and how to be more open to Plan B and C and D. [Jad] Yeah, sure.
[Megan] And it's unnatural for me to be kind of... open to what might pop up.
Because I'm definitely more of a planner.
I want to prepare.
[Jad] Sure, sure.
[Megan] So... [Jad] What do you define as a teaching position?
[Megan] I guess that's really the... What I need to come to terms with.
[Jad] Maybe that's an elastic term and you can sort of stretch it a little bit.
It may not end up looking at all like you expect.
It may shape shift on you.
And the career you thought you were heading towards becomes something very different.
[Megan] I mean, that definitely makes a lot of sense.
I'm thinking back to your story, when you referred to premature certainty.
[Jad] Mm Hmm.
[Megan] How do you know whether or not you can go further or do something different when one particular thing feels kind of comfortable?
[Jad] If you're doing something and you feel like you're in a good groove?
[Megan] Yeah.
[Jad] Uh... Well.
I'll tell you this story.
When we first...
So we started the show on Sunday nights on the AM and it was largely ignored.
Eventually, they decided, "Well, let's see what happens if we take it off this very neglected little space on the schedule and move it to a place that's a little more high profile."
I was handed an excel spreadsheet the next week, of all the listeners that had called in with one comment or another.
And it was literally pages and pages and pages of hatred.
It was just like, "Where the hell is Terry Gross?
"Who are these two guys?
"Get them off of my radio!
"What are all these sound effects?
"Why do they have to be so clever?
"Just stop!
Stop!"
And it was like...
There were like 120 of those comments.
But my boss at the time, still my boss actually, he told me something I'll never forget.
He said, "You know, all those people freaking out just means you're doing your job."
You know?
And the importance of that statement has continued to bloom in my life.
Because really what he's saying is, Part of your job is to periodically alienate your audience, whether your audience are listeners on the other side of the radio, or maybe it's your family.
Maybe it's the people who expect you to do certain things.
Maybe it's the person in you who hates the idea that you're not going to be what you think you are.
Part of your job is to royal that person.
Ruffle their feathers a little bit.
And so you know, we've been doing-- In the life cycle of Radiolab right now, it's been around for about eight years, we have this thing now and it's working.
People are listening.
There's this big machinery that's grown up around the show.
It's really easy to just do the same old thing.
It's really easy.
But it's just we're desperate.
We're trying anything and everything we can think of to shock us out of our comfort zone.
Because that's going to lead you to the next version of yourself.
Like who you are the next year and the year after that, That's unknown to me.
And I want to get to that person.
And I want to be surprised when I meet him.
You know?
I don't want to just look into the future and see the person I thought I was going to be.
That's the worst thing in the world.
So I think that kind of relates back to something you were saying.
I just want to be surprised at who I become.
And what this show becomes.
[Zachariah] That just rocked me.
It's going to be going through my head for the rest of the day.
[laughter] [Jackie] All right.
So we want to be respectful of your time and we appreciate it very much.
So we have one last question.
[Jad] Sure.
[Jackie] what advice do you have for us twenty-somethings that are kind of lost in this world and trying to make sense of our lives?
[laughter] [Megan] No pressure!
[laughter] [Jad] Um... What advice do I have?
You should be panicking a certain percentage of the time, because then you're right at the edge of what you can do.
You need a little bit of "uh-oh" I think, in your creative life.
Just enough.
And it's a simple but radical thing I'm saying, is that you can reframe terrible feelings to make them an indication of what you should be doing.
There are times when you want to sort of just stand in them.
And be in them.
Because you might be at the margins of something great.
And things always get tense at the margins.
You know?
It's like the physics of a liquid changing to a gas.
The molecules start to vibrate and they get very agitated and they change to a gas.
So things are never happy at the moment of change.
Things are always unhappy.
And sometimes, that unhappiness means that you're doing something worth doing.
So... that would be my only advice.
[Megan] I feel like he just tapped into my brain.
This was a 45-minute conversation and I'm not even being dramatic, It changed my entire life.
I just feel like I needed to hear everything he just said at this exact literally at this day in my life.
I have a plan that's not working out.
And I never ever ever thought that I'd be in the position to have to reevaluate that plan.
And when he said something about having a certain percentage of "uh-oh" and panic in your life.
If I'm not panicking a little bit, then I'm not at that margin that he spoke of.
And I want to be there.
I want to continually be at that precipice.
God, I just love him!
"Be unsatisfied.
"Be restless.
"Follow the uncertainty and change the world.
Jad Abumrad."
♪ [Zachariah] I want to capture this moment.
It's such a powerful moment to just be in so much experience and so much growth and have so much happening.
[Jackie] The Roadtrip has definitely helped me be more confident about, "Okay.
It's okay.
It's okay not to know everything.
It's okay to make changes."
[Megan] It's easy to hear, "Expect the unexpected" or "be open" when it's just advice.
And it's also really easy to ignore.
But I think the fact that he was just so personal with the details of his own dread.
That's a great word that he kept on using because I was like, "Nailed it.
Dread!"
It's kind of reassuring to see that just because your plan gets a little bit derailed doesn't mean you can't ultimately reach where you want to be.
You just maybe have to do it in a way that you didn't expect.
[Zachariah] Hello.
Good how are you?
♪ [Zachariah] I'm going to lose the camera guys, watch.
[Jackie] (laughs) [Megan] You know they can hear you, right?
[Zachariah] Yeah.
[Megan] You're in their ear.
[Megan] It's our six week anniversary.
[Zachariah] Woah.
[Jackie] We are in New York City.
[female #1] When I was going for that first newspaper job, people would say to me, "Oh, newspaper?
You'll never get a job."
I thought, "Why not?
It could happen.
It could happen to me."
[female #2] I think sometimes you just need to stop wondering what you want to do with your life and go out and do something.
[Zachariah] We're going to fail!
Fail!
One, two, three... [Roadtrippers] Fail!
[laughter] [female narrator #4] Roadtrip Nation extends beyond the program you just watched.
Online, you fill find an extensive archive with even more stories from the Road.
Here's a quick snapshot of another interview from this Roadtrip.
[male #1] We're doing the next generation of aviation fuel.
Some of the things that we are doing have flown as bio fuel on commercial airlines.
Those are the four species of Salicornia that have the best oil content.
[Megan] So the oil is what creates the energy that you can use in planes and rockets and everything?
[male #1] Fresh water.
It is a scarce resource.
97% of the world's water is salt water.
We use salt water.
You're never going to run out of salt water!
[male #1] My parents instilled in me, no matter what happens to you, no one can take your education away.
Now I took education probably to the extreme.
I have six college degrees.
[Megan] So is one of your six degrees in biology?
[male #1] In college I didn't have a television.
I had a fish tank.
There was a meeting of the minds at NASA Headquarters.
And they said, "Well, we have to think outside of the box and use salt water."
And so he knew that I installed tanks and MBA players.
And said, "Can you do this?"
I was like, "Let me think...Yeah!
I can do it."
This is a hobby turned into a mad profession.
I have what some people will call a "dream job".
The reason why I say that is, 95% of the things we do at NASA are failures.
But we learn from them.
The only way to learn is to fail.
[female narrator #5] If you're living a life you love and you 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.
♪
