(male 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.

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) We're in New Orleans, LA, which we're all pretty stoked about because none of us have been.

(roadtripper #2) I feel really, uh, inspired that we made it all the way to New Orleans.

♪ (Ed) It's been so different from what I'm used to, you know.

We've had this whole range of experiences, and I just want that to continue.

I want to keep meeting new people who will just totally blow my mind.

We're about to go on Airboat Adventures and do an airboat across the swamps.

The ones with big fans, so it's gonna be awesome.

[roadtrippers] Oh yeah.

[country   music] (Ed) All right, keep an eye out for alligators.

Do they have them here?

(Tele'jon) We were just chillin' on the boat.

He got to the point where it 's like you stop and it's silent, and he asked, [Louisiana accent] "Y'all got any questions?"

And we started asking questions about alligators.

Like one thing led to another.

He was just like, "Yeah, I wrestle 'em."

And we were like, "Woah, wait.

You wrestle alligators."

"Yeah, I'm Louisiana State Champ, three years in a row."

[laughing] "Like what, really?"

(Paul) Yeah, I've been wrestling alligators since I was 10 years old.

Ah, that's what we used to do for fun, back in the old days, and that's also how my family hunts alligators down here.

They swim with 'em.

And then I was like, "How does one wrestle an alligator?"

Y'all wanna see it for y'allself?

(Tele'jon) Are you serious right now?

Yeah, I'm serious.

(Olivia) Oh my god!

We'll go show y'all.

There's a video, I think I was like, "Seriously?"

[roadtrippers laughing] So we went looking for an alligator.

We saw an alligator.

(Paul) Come here!

Come on!

And then, this is what happened.

So I'm like, "What if something happened?

Like, are we supposed to jump in and save him?"

'Cause I don't think I could jump in and save him.

[laughs] This guy is playing with an alligator.

(Ed) Woah.

(Olivia) How do I hold him?

(Paul) Like this.

(Olivia) Just like this?

Oh yeah.

(Paul) Been wrestling alligators for 27 years.

(Olivia) How many years you been champion?

(Paul) Last three years.

(Olivia) What's the size you won with?

Sixteen feet, eleven inches.

How long is this boat?

Seventeen feet.

♪ (Tele'jon) Yeah, of all the guides we could have gotten, we got the one who was like the best alligator wrestler in Louisiana.

[Louisiana accent] "Y'all wanna see it?"

[laughing] So I'm excited to be here 'cause Louisiana's where my family's from.

And it just, it always felt like one of those places that I would never go to.

I don't know why, there's just so much that felt out of reach.

There's people in Oakland that never leave Oakland.

I've never even dreamed of seeing all this stuff.

That's, I don't know.

Meetin' these people in these different places, and just like analyzing their situation and comparing it to the situation back in the Bay--all that kind of stuff--you know, that's something special.

That's something a lot of people don't get to do.

Like we're gonna do these interviews, you know, pick people's brains.

It's an excuse to just, somebody new that you don't even know, you know, just kind of go up to 'em and just be like, "So what was your life like?"

Can we talk about where you come from and what that means and like the struggles that come with it?

(Syrena) [Louisiana accent] Yeah, I come from uptown New Orleans.

If you've heard and read about it, it's one of like the grimiest places out here.

It's where a lot of the crime takes place.

I coulda went so many paths, I coulda did so many things, I coulda ended up in bad places from where I came from.

I chose not to do those things.

In the big scheme of things, I love to be in the kitchen, and I love to serve people.

I love to see their face when I give them something that I cooked.

Anything New Orleans, that's what I'm trying to promote.

I mean, that's, that's the whole thing.

New Orleans is a place that's fruitful of everything: music, food, like, people.

This is the perfect place for me.

(Ed) With every different person comes a different perspective.

And with every different person comes a different idea written on the roof of the RV.

(Syrena) Don't give up, it's not too late!

It's never too late!

(Ed) New Orleans had quite a lot of character in the range of people to talk to.

It's nice to get that whole cross-section.

(Olivia) So we went to, um, Chimp Haven.

(Dr. Jackson) We are a chimpanzee sanctuary.

We currently have 166 residents.

I knew pretty early on, as far as I can remember, that I-I loved animals and I wanted to be a veterinarian.

As a child, my dream was this.

This was my goal, and it's like now I've tackled this, and so now I'm in a place like, "Well, what's next?"

You know, and I had to realize it's time for me to start dreaming again.

(Ed) She was saying, you know, "When I was young, I really wanted to work with chimps.

"So I've got to that point.

What do I want now?"

And that's something I never really thought about, you know?

Like once you've "made it" in your own mind, then, then what do you do then?

In my mind, I've always just kind of stopped there mentally and just thought, "Oh, well I'll be fine then."

But people change, your interests change, and it's important just to keep dynamic.

My view on where I'm going in life has changed a lot just in a couple of weeks.

♪ Is there a Mississippi and a Missouri?

Missouri.

We're off to St. Louis, which is, uh, in Ohio.

Missouri.

(Olivia) St. Louis.

Follow this until you get there.

[Son of Dov singing "King   of the World"] ♪ We are in the cold cold fear ♪ ♪ driftin' far away from here ♪ ♪ maybe we can disappear ♪ ♪ at the bottom of it all ♪♪ (Olivia) I like‚ the feeling of homelessness.

You can do the endless array of meeting new people and having new experiences in the city you live in.

But you're battling habit, and habit creeps in so quickly.

And there's no habitual safety net on the road.

You can just let yourself go, become the new version of yourself you wanna be, and‚ it's like taking the cage and rattling, like rattling the cage really hard, and that's sometimes what I enjoy doing to life.

And all of this traveling, seeing the different type of people, that's like a way to rattle the cage, and I love it.

♪ at the bottom of it all ♪♪ (Olivia) Ahh!

We're in St. Louis, MO, and uh, we're about to do the zombie fun run, or the zombie run.

Um, uh yeah, we're gonna do, we're gonna do 5K, gonna try not to get eaten alive.

[Olivia making zombie noises, Ed laughing] (Ed) I'm slightly worried we won't be able to get her out of character at the end.

[Olivia making more zombie noises] [cameraman] Good luck to you.

(Tele'jon) Peace.

♪ It was shocking how seriously people took their jobs.

[zombie noises] (Ed) Uh, I got half a mile into that race, and I was knackered because‚ I had been running for my life.

There were like hundreds of zombies on the path You'd have to like sprint around them.

And I died in a mile and a half.

I got my brains eaten.

I think a lot of it is that you need to keep an open mind because at the end of the day, there's availability to do so many things, like I go around the country staging zombie apocalypses.

If five years ago, I said to someone like, "Oh yeah, when I'm 20, I'm gonna‚ they'd be like, "What are you talking about?

That's not possible."

But you'd be surprised.

I think you pick something that you're really passionate about, everything starts to fall together.

(Ed) Yeah, brilliant.

In a zombie apocalypse, how long would you last?

(Andrew) Oh my god, not long at all.

♪ (Ed) So originally, when we got the RV, the previous owners had like a little map with stickers with all the states on.

You could stick on the stickers of states that you've been to.

So we ended up cutting out a load of Roadtrip Nation stickers, sticking them on the states.

And the idea is that hopefully, future generations will try and kinda cover all of the states eventually.

I mean, I think we're doing like 24 states or something, so.

(cameraman) Do you know how many we've done so far?

(Ed) We've done 12 states so far.

So uh, so it's a nice little like green belt going across the country now, like down the south and then going up towards the northeast.

(leader #2) So my name is Ben Drexler.

I live here in Washington, D.C., and I originally came here to work in human rights, but uh, over the course of a number of years, was discovering that I was way more happy and feeling way more fulfilled spinning things on the ends of ropes, which is uh, definitely not the experience that I was expecting when I came here.

[Melodic Synthesizer] [Flame whooshing] (Olivia) What's the first time you saw proper spinning?

(Ben) Umm, Burning Man in 2006.

For most of my life, I've felt just kind of a step out of pace with a lot of the people around me.

And Burning Man was the first place I ever went where I'm just like, "It's an entire city of people just like me.

I am home."

I can't even begin to describe how transformative an experience it was to see it that night.

But I was terrible at it when I started, absolutely terrible.

I decided, "Okay, I'm terrible at it now.

Let's see what happens in two years.

Let's see what happens in five years."

And things took a turn from there.

We've got some rope beginners in here tonight, so I'm gonna give y'all my Poi 101 class, yeah?

This is where you start.

(Tele'jon) That keeps happening!

[laughing] I'm sorry, guys!

(Ben) I've always had a love of learning, and in college, a friend had actually taken me to go see, uh, Hotel Rwanda.

And when I came out of that movie, it really, really moved me on a deep level, and you know, from watching PBS, I'd known that uh, you know, there was a conflict going on in Darfur at that point.

And it really motivated me to go see if there was anything I could do.

And, um, I got in touch with a whole bunch of local activists, and that gradually became a bigger and bigger thing for me.

I was loving what I was doing and I wanted to pursue it as a full-time career.

So, finally, an organization here in D.C. called Genocide Intervention Network hired me.

(Tele'jon) How do you‚ how do you go from human rights to this?

'Cause I mean like human rights is like, it's a little different than like just changing your passion 'cause like once you go there, it's like, you almost have an obligation to like really help other people.

(Ben) Absolutely.

(Tele'jon) Um, so how do you justify like leaving the human rights field, and do you see like what you're doing now as still like helping other people?

(Ben) Sure, absolutely.

So, a big part of the reason was just discovering the internal politics behind the organizations that work on it.

Truth be told, like, there came to be a point when I saw some of the things that some of the organizations were doing, and these activities that they had weren't helping.

They were actually hurting the people tha-that we wanted to, that we wanted to help.

And about that time, um, I got an opportunity actually to travel to Kenya and teach fire-dancing there for a month.

And I felt like I had accomplished more in that month, seeing those kids face to face and interacting with them and finding out what their lives were like, than I had in the entire I think it was two years that I had worked at the organization before that.

And regardless of any other change that you're gonna make in the world, you know, having that is huge.

It wasn't an article of faith; it was being able to see something I had done right.

You know, rendered right in front of me.

Nice!

That's what I'm talking about, right there.

Beautiful!

You know, it was like a night and day kind of reaction of, you know, wondering if I was making any kind of positive difference versus having people come up to me and telling me that I was making a difference in their world, you know?

You know, once I started posting videos online and I started running into people at the fire festivals and everything, they were telling me, "Oh my god, I'm so glad that you're doing this.

Like everything that I've learned so far, you know, this stuff is coming from the videos that you're putting out.

And, you know, it was a risky, risky decision to make at the time 'cause there was nobody making a living spinning poi at that point.

Absolutely nobody.

I hemmed and I hawed over this for years.

You know, I've got great benefits, I've got a great salary, but here's this other thing.

And when I'm doing this other thing, I'm not just like‚ really happy; I'm like extremely happy.

I made the choices that brought me the greatest joy in the time that I got to have here, which, you know, y-you take the age of the universe and even the age of the earth, and you realize how unbelievably lucky any of us are to have that gift of being here for however many years we get.

And what are you gonna do with that gift?

You know?

I can't imagine doing anything with it other than finding a way to enjoy the blessings of it as much as I can, you know?

When you light up a set of fire poi, it's just about losing yourself in it for hours, where it-it stops being about the immediate gains and it becomes more about almost like meditation, you know?

The thing is swirling around you leaving a trail of fire.

You feel the heat, you hear the noise-- the noise is the huge thing.

It's this loud whooshing that just, you know, starts in your ears and just works its way through your entire body.

Actually, so here's an offer, if any of you guys wanna take me up on it: if you can spin these for five minutes without hitting yourself--and I don't care what the trick is--you can light up.

He was like, "All right.

You guys wanna light up?"

And I'm just like, "Seriously?

You're gonna let us do this?

So I like, I jumped on it.

I'm not gonna pass this opportunity up.

(Ben) There you are.

Woah.

[everyone laughing] (Ben) Right?

The whoosh.

As soon as that like first spin comes around and you hear it, man, I was like [sighs] (man #1) You've gone past the five minutes.

(Ben) Here you go.

(Ed) T, he was awesome.

Like, he looked really comfortable doing it.

(Ben) Nicely done, sir.

(Ed) And then I kinda felt like, "Well, I have to do it."

But it was surprising.

I was--and I think it probably came across, but--I was pretty nervous.

And there was a moment when I kind of lost what my left arm was doing, and that freaked me out.

(Tele'jon) Woah.

Woah!

[laughs] He almost killed himself.

(Ed) All right, lads.

(Olivia) Wow, what a man!

(Ed) I really like him.

I don't think I've seen anyone describe their passion in such like an articulate way.

(Tele'jon) And when you see that kind of stuff, you don't think that that's something that somebody just loves that much.

You guys gonna wake up, you're gonna see me spinning something on fire.

(Olivia) That was pretty cool.

There's something about it that speaks to the soul.

A major thing I took away is like "Find your people."

Drex talked about when he‚ went to Burning Man, he was at home.

We can find our people; there are 7 billion people in the world.

We can find the ones that act like us, look like us.

You know, I'm sure there's a‚ thousand bald, tattooed women out there.

I mean, it's beautiful.

We all have our niche, and then at the same time, amidst a world of classification.

Hopefully we understand that, uh, we're really not all that separate.

It's okay to run with your people and then like connect in different ways.

And poi was like that, you know, spinning poi.

You can provide this gift that crosses boundaries.

(Tele'jon) Yeah, it doesn't even feel like it actually happened.

It's just, man, it's just one of those things you're probably never gonna forget.

Made me feel like, you know, when I'm at home, there's just so much that felt out of reach, and I feel like that's just part of like my socialization comin' up.

Just so much just seemed out of reach.

Um, when I lived in Manteca, our neighbors had an RV, and I was just like, "That looks dope, but I'm never gonna be in an RV."

It was out of reach, and it's so weird that I'm traveling the country in one.

Um, going to the South, I heard so many stories but it's like, it was always just another one of those things--just out of reach.

So much still sometimes feels so out of reach, but after this‚ man, things just aren't out of reach, dude.

This is awesome.

So we're halfway in the trip; we just reached our hallway point.

(Ed) So, D.C., I guess all I knew was that the White House was there.

(leader #3) If I got a call right now that said, "You won the lottery," I guarantee you I'd still be here Monday morning.

(leader #4) The adults make the experience for students in a school.

And how children are treated?

That's how they will feel as a human being.

(Tele'jon) I feel like I have way more than I expected to come out with already.

(female narrator #1) Roadtrip Nation extends beyond the program you just watched.

While on the road, Tele'jon and the Roadtrip Nation crew created this experimental short video as another way to share their experience.

Check it out.

[Tele'jon rapping] (girl #1) No matter what you do (boy #1) Or where you come from (boy #2) You've got wisdom to pass down (male narrator #1) Help young people find their way by sharing the lessons you've learned.

Take fifteen minutes to tell us what you love to do (boy #1) The door's open (boy #2) We're all ears.

(girl #1) Become a leader at ShareYourRoad.com   ♪