[Male narrator #2] 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.

Every summer, we bring together three people from different backgrounds.

Together, they explore the country, interviewing inspiring individuals.

from all walks of life.

They hit the road in search of wisdom and guidance, to find what it actually takes to build a life around doing what you love.

This is what they found.

This is Roadtrip Nation.

[roadtripper #3] Rather than the straight shot, we took the scenic route.

We went up Pacific Coast Highway through Big Sur.

And that was a harrowing drive.

[roadtripper #2] In the beginning it was pretty foggy, so like you can look out and you know it's a drop down there, but you don't know what's at the bottom.

You don't know!

Until it like cleared up and suddenly it was like "woah."

[Ben] They basically just carved out a little road on the edge of this cliff, you know, and these mountain passes.

And it's a shot straight down to the bottom and it's ocean.

[Sofaya] Easily the most terrifying drive I've ever done.

[Ben] Yo, we're climbing on top of the RV and taking a selfie.

Let's go.

No, I'm not kidding, let's go.

[roadtripper #1] Yeah, there are no coasts like that on the east coast.

At all.

That I've ever seen.

It was just stunning.

It was absolutely gorgeous.

We're about to take a collective dump.

We're gonna dump the tanks that hold our waste.

Our tanks have been full so it's been smelling kinda stinky here for awhile.

[Ben] Is this clean in here?

Ready everyone?

[Martha] Oh yeah.

Ohhhh I feel it.

[Sofaya] It's going.

[Ben] A little chunky on our end.

All right, don't let.

Nice and easy, oh my god!

I said nice and easy!

No, put it in!

[Sofaya] I'm sorry.

Chill.

[Martha] We're about, I guess, a week and two days at this point into the trip.

[Ben] And there was so much in that first week.

The days feel really short because there's so much packed into each one.

Each time we sat with somebody and heard their story, and then left, kinda felt like I was walking out of a really cool movie that like changed my perspective of the world in a good way and pumped me up to go make something of my life, you know?

[leader #2 How do you reject that freaking cultural narrative that we're all told?

That you like, "Go to school, and you go and you get a job and you find a career."

And you know there's like this very specific road that you're supposed to take.

'Cuz the reality is it's different for everybody.

[Sofaya] I'm just standing at the intersection wondering where I'm supposed to go.

[Leader #2] We sell, "We wanna go, we gotta know, you gotta know."

Well, sometimes you don't know!

And that's okay!

And I know what that angst is like, guys.

I've had that angst most of my life.

[Leader #3] There is absolutely a place for all the things that you guys do and the things you love to do.

You just have to see the world to know where you plug it in.

[Leader #4] You're always kinda tweaking the dials.

Nature's got that figured out perfectly.

That's kind of the ultimate role model, I think, of how something can work.

It's like in the phase of life you guys are in, I think if we just emulate nature, you know, nature will go in one direction, and if it's not working it'll just turn a little bit.

Start pursuing something and if its a fit, keep at it, and if its not, you know, don't shackle yourselves.

[Leader#2] I've done things that I really didn't want and I knew, "This is not quite a fit for me."

And I kept doing it and I kept doing it.

And the more I kept trying to do it, the worse I was at it because I was fighting against my instinct.

The conversations have been unbelievable, they've been so good.

There's been so much content, that it's hard to process it all.

[Martha] So we're going to talk to Glynn Washington.

Who is the radio host of Snap Judgement.

Which is this really cool storytelling podcast.

Glynn Washington's story telling is really about people and about the different stories that people have to tell and what that says about the culture that they live in or the society and how like different pockets of the world influence how we live.

Hey, I'm Martha.

[Glynn] Hey, Martha.

[Martha] It's nice to meet you.

[Glynn] Nice to meet you as well.

Hi!

[Glynn] Hey, Sofaya.

[Ben] I'm Ben.

[Glynn] Hey, Ben.

[Martha] Where were you when you were 22, 23?

Or... Tell your story.

Yeah.

I was feeling pretty lost.

And it wasn't till my late teens that I kind of got out of it.

I ended up living in Japan for a year.

It's the best thing I could possibly have done.

Because it gave me some time and some space.

And it opened up my eyes to a lot of different things that I just didn't know about.

Just in a lot of ways revealed just how ignorant I was, um, about everything.

[Martha] I'm curious what you learned when you were traveling in that kind of early stage.

Do you remember?

[Glynn] I learned how to live outside a comfort zone.

And being at ease with not knowing what's going to happen next.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Cuz we're kind of experiencing that right now.

It's kind of reassuring.

[Martha] What do you mean?

I mean, I'm not entirely the most comfortable getting on an RV for seven weeks.

[Martha] Oh yeah, yeah.

You know, and talking to people I've never met in cities I've never been to.

I'll tell you a story about my own background.

I was 19 when I moved to Japan.

And the first day I was there, I had to go and get some groceries.

And there's, I've got this group of maybe seven or eight older women, they've never seen a foreigner before.

And most certainly never seen a black dude before.

And they're running around, they're "hehehe," they're laughing at every single thing I do.

You know I'm just trying to put stuff in the car.

And at one point, it's like, "All right, crazy lady, I've had enough," right?

I take my little stuff, and I'm in my apartment unloading my groceries, knock on the door I open the door, it's a ittle woman from the grocery store.

Comes in my house, comes into my kitchen, and she grabs this bag of stuff.

And she's pointing at this little dog that's on this package.

And I'm like, "Oh she likes little doggies."

Right?

And then I'm like, "oh no no no no no.

This is for doggies."

She's trying to stop me from eating dog food.

"Thanks a lot!

Good tip!

Appreciate it, right?"

And then she's got a translation book.

And somehow she manages to say, "She needs to teach me the soul of Japan."

What's that?

What's that?

What's the soul?

And she's like, "The soul of Japan is in the tea."

And she goes through this book and she asks me, "Do I wanna learn?"

All right, let's do it.

I came to Japan for a reason.

Let's do this.

And so, I started learning Japanese tea ceremony where I think you'll go, and drink some tea.

No no no no no.

First you [sniffing noise] smell.

And you hold the cup, then you turn the cup, then you put in the powder, then you stir the powder.

And you use the language, and you pour the water, and you turn the cup again.

And finally, at long last, [sipping noise] you sip.

Put it back down.

Stir.

Turn.

The language.

Again.

"NO!

You've done it wrong!

NO!

Do it again!"

And the whole while I'm sitting and I'm like down on my knees in this crazy like yoga pose I can barely maintain.

I wanna scream the whole time, and every week she'd scream at me.

I'm not holding it right, I'm not sitting right, I'm not pouring it right.

Whatever it would be, she was really very, very adamant that I get this whole thing, this the soul of Japan is in these arts.

The soul of Japan.

And then a few months in, we go to a fair.

And she asks me to go sit down at a table and have some tea.

And I'm like, "Cool."

And I notice it's a bunch of older people at this table.

And I'm like, "I know what's going on here.

This is a tea ceremony."

So I do my little stir.

My little turn.

My pour.

My smell.

My classic Japanese language.

And the next day, she tells me that I'm one of the only foreigners to have made an apprentice status in a book.

It's the first time they're going to print a name in English in this book that she has of tea ceremony practitioners.

And I'm thinking, "Wow!"

And finally, I was going to leave.

It was time for me to go home back to Michigan.

And she came to say goodbye.

The lower you bow to someone, the more respect you're showing them in Japan.

And she came and I bowed very, very deep to her.

And she bowed lower than me.

And I was like, "Hell no!"

I bowed lower and she bowed lower again.

And I put my forehead on the ground.

And I said, "No."

"You have been my teacher and I appreciate everything that you've done."

And I cried and she cried.

I told her I would remember what she did for me forever.

And I do.

I told her I saw from a distance the soul of Japan, and I did.

And I told her, "I would never drink coffee.

But I will always drink tea."

And I do.

[Ben] A story to learn from for sure.

And I've said this before.

I got into this whole thing with a lot of hesitancy, like, you guys are going to force me out of my comfort zone.

We tend towards a retreat into the comfortable.

And traveling in that way didn't allow for that.

When you get to a foreign environment that essentially reduces you to like infantile status, you take in the world in a whole different way.

You see everything different ways.

You realize things that you thought were normal, things that you thought were, "Oh this is just the way people do stuff.

This is the way people operate."

No that's the way you operate.

And that just, it just reduces you and allows you to pull yourself back up again.

[Ben] It's a step into that uncertainty and like I have no idea what I'm getting into for 49 days.

Like, I barely know these people, I've never been to any of these places, I've never met any of these leaders before, but I've got an excuse to go do it right now.

I always grew up with music.

So that was always an interest of mine, a passion, a hobby of mine.

Santa Cruz Guitar Company, it looked like a small enough of a company, that I could pick up the phone and get somebody on the phone.

Not only did I get somebody on the phone, I got the founder of Santa Cruz Guitars on the phone.

Hi, Richard!

My name's Ben.

Nice to talk to you.

I'm actually calling to see if you'd be around in mid-June.

Richard was more than accommodating in setting it up, and it worked out perfectly.

Thank you so much.

I'm really excited to meet you.

Yeah, definitely, I'll talk to you soon.

Yes!

We're all kinda on this trip because we're looking for the next step in our life.

Whether it's career and like where to go.

[Richard] Yeah, that's inspiring.

What a beautiful place to be.

[Ben] It's incredible.

Yeah.

So maybe we can hear your story a little bit?

Like how you started.

[Richard] Well, I love everything about guitar.

I was sitting on the curb one day waiting for my girlfriend to come back to our house after school, and I went, "How the heck do they make these?"

Ya know?

And it didn't take more than a fraction of a second for me to go into the garage and start taking it apart.

I was performing at that time.

On track to be the next Bob Dylan so I thought.

And uh my guitar got stolen.

And I went to this storefront finance place where you give a ring or whatever and they loan you money.

And the guy that was managing it built guitars as a hobby.

It was complete serendipity.

So what he did is he took a night out of his week, he had kids to raise, a job to do, and he taught me guitar building.

I used to take him a six pack of beer, or movie tickets or whatever.

And finally he sat me down and he says, "I'm not doing this for what you bring in.

In fact it makes me uncomfortable that you think you have to pay me.

You can pay me back by doing the same thing for other people."

So there's the beginning of the philosophy of this company which is you always get more than you give, you know?

You really can't give stuff away.

So that's how I began.

I took my guitar apart.

I looked at other instruments.

I began the process of assembling the team that you see today.

And with that, we pooled our savings and bought an ad that was about this big.

It was a picture of one guitar and a phone number, you know?

And the address.

The response to that was minimal, but one of them was a letter from Eric Clapton.

[Ben] Really?

[Richard] Yeah.

[Ben] Incredible.

[Richard] Yeah, so selling guitars was really hard, but once Eric Clapton bought a guitar, then it became okay.

So in a real short period of time we had instant credibility.

Yeah.

[Richard] And an audience and a format.

So we got a reputation for doing custom sounding guitars, and that really wasn't available.

Nobody was doing that.

So, it actually created a niche in the market.

So from a marketing standpoint and a branding standpoint, Eric Clapton started it off.

Um, Eric Clapton was big, but it could've stopped there.

It really could've stopped there.

I get billed as a master luthier, but really what I train myself to be is a master coach.

Nobody's ever made a Santa Cruz Guitar on their own.

It's always been a team effort.

And me personally, I've only made under 20 instruments completely start to finish by myself.

But I've done the components hundreds and hundreds of times here and there as a team.

[Martha] It's interesting, these conversations.

It's cool to see that even the most creative people aren't just saying, "This is my brilliant idea that I thought of."

And that it really takes dedication and being willing to dig in to whatever you're interested in.

[Richard] My legacy is what everybody here will do.

And that's very satisfying for me.

When this is polished, under bright light it'll look like a hologram.

It's startling how it looks 3D.

[Ben] So is that a guitar for someone?

Oh, yeah, all of them are.

You said, you know you were making what you loved, or you said something along those lines.

I guess I'm curious if you have any times when it was hard to kind of keep that in line with your work.

[Richard] Yeah, I did, uh.

As we grew, I lost the thread.

I think in living it's really hard to avoid compromises.

Likewise a business required a lot of compromises.

So I suffered.

You know?

I suffered through it.

I was asleep for a long time, just busy, and worrying about stuff, and some of these things became just stuff to me.

To the point I felt I was eroding my soul being in business.

And I considered just quitting.

Just giving up.

So what motivated you to keep doing it or how did you... Now this is great.

And it has a lot to do with a near death experience.

You guys have heard of near death experiences and they can go, they can be instantaneous or they can last a little bit.

And what this was, is a realization that I was no longer alive and I was no longer in my body.

And what I can see is, everything in its place.

You know?

Everything good.

Everything bad.

My past.

My future.

My relevance.

And it was all exactly the same.

I knew what it looked like to be content.

Everything is truly in place, and most of our consternation is the struggle trying to control it.

We are so busy, and so noisy, just trying to get by, you forget.

And so was that, just to go back to that image that you saw during that near death experience, was that kind of that point of quiet?

[Richard] Yeah, you're asking me to verbalize that.

We've all felt this.

You feel it sometimes when you're in love.

You feel it sometimes when you just get overwhelmed with contentment.

Something's gone really right.

Or we see it in something inspirational in nature, or whatever, and you get that little second where all is right with the world.

Ya know, its like "Ah its okay after all."

And that's truly how it is.

If I could take you up into the giant redwoods that are almost 300 feet tall, you'll see it.

And you'll go "Oh.

I remember."

'Cause you will remember.

That's how it is.

[Sofaya] Richard Hoover is just a really great sage of a wizard man.

I wish I could see the world through Richard Hoover goggles.

[Martha] His message of finding contentment kind of became this crescendo.

And then there was this moment.

And then you just needed to like reset and have a moment to really reevaluate what's important.

[Ben] While we're experiencing life in regards to careers and jobs and those types of things, he kinds of just threw us this curve ball where he's like, "We're not gonna talk business."

So that was really cool.

It opened my mind to some other places I wasn't expecting to go to.

♪ [Leader #5] When I was at USC, somebody called the campus and said "We're looking for some young student who can come and work on this film called 'The Star Wars'."

[Leader #6] A lot of people get stuck in what they do.

Take yourself out of that and go experience the rest of the world.

[Ben] Driving from San Francisco to Portland, was like, that felt like open road.

[Leader #7] I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do, because I didn't fit in in engineering.

I was so sure that I didn't belong.

[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 at Big Ideas Fest.

[Student #1] I'm a junior and I'm at Big Ideas Fest.

[Student #2] So me and some other students from San Francisco High School are here to interview people.

[Student #3] We're in Half Moon Bay.

It's such a beautiful hotel, I feel like oh my gosh, I feel like I'm in a castle.

At this age, a lot of us don't know what we're gonna do.

When I'm older and I have a job, I don't want to have a job where I'm just miserable with my life.

[Student #4] My dad always tells me, like, "You dream too much.

You dream too much."

I just don't want to be working.

I want something bigger than that.

And I feel like by those interviews, they could really help.

"How did you choose what you wanted to be?"

Did you know what you were gonna do when you were our age?

Not even close.

Not even close, no.

I definitely had some phone calls home where I was like, "I'm too stupid to be here."

[Leader #3] There's no one right answer.

You really can't be wrong if you're just open to possibilities.

[Leader #4] Just know that, whatever decision you make, go 100% forward, whatever it is you wanna do, go for it.

So I just wanna, I wish you all the best.

[Student #6] To me, what they were just saying, is like, whatever makes you happy, you really should do it because it is your life, you know, and you only have one time to do it.

[Student #7] I'd say, like, this is one of the greatest experiences I've had.

[Student #3] So in my life, when things get rough, if it's something I'm really passionate about, I'm not just going to give up on it, 'cause I don't give up on my dreams.

[Female #1] No matter what you do.

Or where you come from.

You've got wisdom to pass down.

[Male narrator #1] Help young people find their way by sharing the lessons you've learned Take 15 minutes to tell us what you love to do.

The doors open.

We're all ears.

Become a leader at shareyourroad.com