[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] You mad?

You mad that I'm goin'?

Hmm?

You're not happy with me.

Yeah.

Is six weeks too long for you?

Hmm?

Don't look so sad!

Get in the bag.

Come on.

You in there?

Short flight.

[roadtripper #3] It's like a rocking chair.

[old person voice] Eh, back in my day [roadtripper #2] In the middle?

[Roadtrip Nation Crew] Yeah.

When your hair rubs against it, it makes a little shhh [roadtripper #1] Should I just be looking at you?

[Roadtrip Nation Crew] Totally.

[roadtripper #1] Okay.

I'm ready!

Let's do this!

[Ben] I am leaving Rhode Island.

[Martha] Going on a six week road trip all around America.

[Sofaya] And talking to really cool people [Ben] really inspirational and passionate people.

[Martha] Starting on the west coast doing a big like loopdedoop.

[Sofaya] Ben, Martha, and I, just all happen to be East Coast people.

So it's gonna be a big adventure.

I've never been west of the Mississippi River before.

Pretty much the whole west coast I haven't seen.

Aside from New York and Chicago, I haven't been to any of the cities that we're going to.

So I'm fitting all of this, into this.

To go and see all of these in one summer, in six weeks, on an RV, is just gonna be a whirlwind of awesomeness, I think.

How's it going?

[Sofaya] Okay, I'm packing.

My setup looks like that.

Oh my god.

So the planning process has been doing weekly calls and pretty much constant emailing.

Like we gotta find everyone who's ever done anything cool and we're gonna interview them and we're never gonna sleep.

You know, like, this is it!

Still calling Glen Washington, who's the radio host of Snap Judgement.

There's so many interesting people out there.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, sorry, sorry, sorry.

I'm gonna get a pen.

You know, these people that you look up to.

I'm going to give Richard Hoover from Santa Cruz guitars a call.

Talk about connecting your passion to your career.

I mean, he gets it.

Yes!

[Martha] As much as the functionality of what people do is interesting, I think I'm most interested in, like, why people do what they do.

Why they keep coming back every day.

After grad on Saturday, are you heading back home?

[laughs] All this goes down.

I'm Sofaya Philemon.

I'm 22 years old.

I graduate tomorrow, which is, like, pretty big.

I have a really big family.

I got 20 graduation tickets and, like, the list is full.

Can't invite anymore people, I kept telling my parents.

My parents come from Haiti.

Their outlook on life is something, like, I hope that I've inherited, because, like, they came to America to have a better life and like to make a better life for their children, and they did a pretty good job.

So like, they did their job.

Now it's my turn to do my part.

[cheering and applause] It's, it's hard to say if I'm, if I'm excited about like what's coming next in my life because I don't really know what that's gonna be.

There's always been like another thing to look forward to.

Like there's always that next step.

That next grade, that next bit of school.

But now it's just like, I'm at the end of this experimenting phase, and now I have to kind of decide what I'm going to do with everything I've learned over the past four years.

I know a lot of people are like, "Oh I'm going to work for this design firm and I'm gonna design this and I'm gonna make shoes for the rest of my life or I'm gonna design like software," and I never really found that niche, and I don't really know where I belong as of now.

And I don't know if I do belong.

So... [airplane landing] Hey!

[Ben] This is team building exercises.

[Martha] Yeah, I'm a strong woman.

[Ben] Aim for the big green thing.

[Martha] There it is!

[Sofaya] Oh my god.

[cheering] [Ben] Ladies first.

[Martha] Oh my god.

Ahh!

Holy Moley!

[Sofaya] Oh my god.

[Ben] What?

Oh my gosh!

Home sweet home!

[Sofaya] We just went inside and we're just like opening cabinets and just like "oh there's a fridge!

Oh there's a closet!

Oh there's a bathroom!

Oh this is really cool.

Oh this is cool."

This is home.

For the next seven weeks.

This is home base.

We're here, we're going, we're doing this.

This is happening.

This is the team.

We're all together.

Let's roll.

[Martha] I'm gonna see what it feels like sitting here.

We are not driving this, there's no way.

[Sofaya] I know, right?!

[Martha] No!

No!

I just graduated from Skidmore College about a week ago today.

[cheering] [announcer] Martha Snow.

I think in a lot of ways I was ready to graduate.

Ahhh!

I just graduated!

Ahhh!

But I definitely was a dabbler in college.

You know I was at like a dance performance, then I had like an art show, and then I had also written like my American Studies Thesis.

But because I had my foot in like five doors, then its like uh, I wasn't like very well prepared for any of the things I wanted to do.

That was high school dance performance.

I'm really interested in art, culture, and media, which is related to documentary filmmaking, but then there's like all the social stuff that I've been thinking about too.

And like race, class, gender, privilege issues.

I've also led some outdoor trips and like love nature and the environment.

Maybe I wanna like, be an outdoor hike leader.

Maybe I wanna be like a travel photographer.

Or like, I don't know, I've gotten really good at a few specific things related to academia, like, I know how to write a good paper, I know how to bull**** in class.

But in no way did I feel prepared for the real world.

[Ben] All the wisdom.

So rad.

I'm basically at point in my life where I've graduated college, I have my degree in communications, a minor in business.

It's super broad.

Like you can apply that to anything and that's exciting and daunting at the same time cause its how do you apply it?

Where do you take that next step?

We're at Scarborough State Beach right now which is where I've been a life guard and life guard captain for nine years.

And spent a lot of my time surfing and umm the reality of growing up in the capacity of like paying bills and like "oh man I need like health coverage?

And like ah oh I owe taxes on my car?"

And like it just starts pilling up and you're like, "Woah, I need something."

There is a pressure to have it figured out.

Like, "What do you mean you don't know?

You were supposed to decide when you were a freshman.

Like, that's why you got a major!"

[Martha] I think talking to a lot of people about the meaning that they find within their jobs will be really helpful for me in kind of understanding ways that people are making it work.

It's always good to have multiple different perspectives before you make a major life decision.

So if anything, just that kind of exposure would just kind of put me in a better mind space.

Definitely getting out and exploring is I got the itch, ya know?

You gotta go see other things to really appreciate what you do have, or you find that other thing that's gonna stick.

Who knows?

Maybe I'll find that this summer.

Ya know I was like feeling really good about this, and now it's like happening.

It's big.

Mm we're about to learn how to drive this monster truck.

Other cars being on the road is scary and imagining trying to find a place to park.

You can't just like stop where ever you want [Ben] Buckle up.

For safety.

Buckle up for safety.

Put it in drive.

Hey guys, there's a thing, you gotta put it in drive.

Ben is driving the RV.

He's killing it, actually.

I'm impressed.

He looks like an old pro.

I'm excited.

I actually am excited to try it now.

Gonna be huge!

Because there's three of us, I think it's cool because we come from the same region, but we come from really different backgrounds, in terms of why design is important to us.

We are going 24 miles per hour.

I see it in more like a social-cultural context.

And Sofaya sees it in this very applied context and has so many like intimidating practical skills around design.

And then Ben is coming at it from a kind of communication, marketing standpoint.

So I'm really excited to see the breadth of people we're going to be able to talk to just based on all our different interests.

This next week is just gonna be nonstop like "go here, go there.

And then this.

And then that."

The first phase of our trip is just ridiculously awesome and jam-packed with all kinds of good stuff.

It's a little high pressure in that sense where it's like, We have never done an interview before and it's like we're just [whooshing sounds] going right in.

We're going straight into it.

We're doing an interview today.

Two bit circus.

Um.

Brent Bushnel and Eric Gradman Gladman [Sofaya] Brent and Eric.

[Martha] Brent and Eric.

Basically mixing engineering and inventing and like play.

So their interactive circus stuff, but it's also encouraging kids to like invent.

Yeah so we can, just introduce ourselves a little bit.

My name's Martha.

I'm originally from Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Which is a little bit north of Boston.

So I grew up in a really creative family.

My dad's a game designer and my mom's an architect.

And I've always been really creative.

[Brent] Cool!

What kind of games?

[Martha] He does educational computer games.

[Brent] Neat.

[Martha] So I've always been surrounded by a lot of creative stuff.

And I've been creative in my own way.

I'm a dancer and a visual artist.

But um when I got to college I was also really interested in kind of exploring the social-cultural world so I ended up being an American studies major.

Now I'm trying to figure out the way to integrate a lot of interests and I'm just trying to figure out how to kind of do this, with all of these.

That's kind of where I'm coming from.

[Brent] All right!

That's a nice pallet!

Good thing to draw from.

Let's learn about where you guys are coming from.

Like how did you end up making really cool big kid toys, ya know?

Like how did you get from the point where we are, fresh out of college, or whatever, 22 years old.

if you, whatever you were when you were 22, 23.

To where you are now.

Ya know.

I had a little bit of a nontraditional route in that I didn't even, I never finished school uh, ya know, I went to school for electrical engineering for a little while and then it was right in the middle of the dot com sort of craziness.

The first web sort of 1.0.

And all I wanted to do is be working.

So I left school, moved to San Francisco, started my first company, and uh uh.

[Eric] I'm sorry, I just gotta jump into contrast his story with mine because when I graduated, just a couple of years later, we were in the middle of web 1.0 crashing and rather than leaving school to work, I hid out in graduate school for another two years.

[laughing] he took off and made a life for himself.

I'm just like, "I can't go out there!

I can't go out there!"

I really wanted to get out there and try a bunch of different stuff.

Man, I worked in DNA synthesis, fiber optics, ya know testing measurement equipment, retail, uh furniture.

I was even a sushi chef for a little while.

Yeah!

Ya know I still can't really believe that happened.

[Sofaya] We're gonna get back to that.

[Brent] I find just trying lots of different stuff [Eric] Don't find your niche.

[Brent] Yeah, yeah.

[Eric] Struggle not to find your niche as long as possible.

[Brent] How about you?

[Eric] I've always been a huge nerd, and I studied engineering in college.

And at some weird point in the middle of college I decided to join a touring band and a circus.

And I became a circus performer.

Uh.

Touring on the road, whilst also completing an engineering degree.

What did you do in the circus?

I did a whole bunch of everything.

I was an acrobat, I was an aerialist, I was a clown, I was a fire dancer.

There's no circus in my family background.

Ya know, my dad's a doctor.

Good Jewish family.

Like there's no circus.

How did that conversation go?

Poorly at first.

Poorly at first.

Although, I do remember the first time my mom allowed me to spin fire in her presence.

Yeah.

That was big day.

It was like "Okay.

You're not dead.

You've survived this long."

Although, thats how I got my first mohawk, by the way.

Is um, I burned off all the hair on one side of my head and I had to even it out.

[Martha] Has it been that way ever since?

It has been that way, literally, I've had the same haircut for ten years.

So I stuck around in graduate school.

I got a master's degree in computer science.

But really I was just feeding my circus habit.

Ya know, I was just clocking time.

And when I graduated, I took a series of completely uninteresting, unproductive boring engineering jobs.

Just horrible programming stuff.

And then, I sort of reached this crossroads where I had to say to myself, "What's it gonna be?

Am I gonna like, buckle down and be a professional engineer?

Or am I gonna be a full time performer?"

I kinda coulda gone in either direction.

An extension of that is, how do you reject that freaking cultural narrative that we're all told?

Like "You 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.

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

I mean ya know the world will sort of present you with all sorts of different opportunities.

And you know not get bogged down with sort of what you think you should be doing.

You know, like, Eric and I ended up meeting, and really we both just wanted something else to do nights and weekends.

Go and sort of use all the new technology of the day, cheap sensors and what not.

Just sort of as a passion project, we started building interactive art.

I started falling in love with engineering again, right?

And really it happened when we started making interactive art together.

You know, a whole bunch of people would get together after work a couple times a month, you know, maybe once a week, and talk about all the fun things we wanted to build.

So we started making stuff and some of it was totally terrible and nobody wanted to play at all and some of it people liked.

As we started building more and more stuff that was completely unrelated to work and served absolutely no practical purpose in the world, we're just making technology for technology's sake, we had no idea it was art.

Until other people started calling it art.

And we're like "woah" [Brent] "We're not artists" [Eric] "We're not artists.

Nah, there's no way."

So, we've been making lots of stuff.

I made this one project that got invited to a film festival, and they paid me money, and I used that money to pay my rent.

And you know this whole time Brent's been saying, "Quit!

Quit!

Let's start a company.

Let's start a company.

Let's start a company" [Brent] I don't know if thats the devil or the angel but [Eric] The angel at this point.

It was the best decision I ever made.

So, I quit.

And we just started doing what we loved full time.

So I'm curious, you guys, it seems like you have this whole kind of education portion of your organization.

How did you guys get into the whole like steam idea?

[Brent] We felt like as inventors and game makers who love what we do we sort of had an opportunity to help rebrand what it means to be an engineer.

A lot of kids, especially ones who are not interested in math and science think, "Oh math and science.

It's not for me.

It's terrible.

White lab coats, pencil ties, I'm going to be in a clean room my whole life."

And no.

Does this look like a clean room?

I wore a collared shirt for you guys today and thats about it, you know?

Kids wanna be what they can see.

So it's no wonder they want to be basketball players and DJs and that kind of stuff but if you show them, "Oh my god.

There's a job of traveling across the country in an RV and interviewing people.

There's a job of making video games, and huge games, in a traveling carnival."

Even to the basketball player, right?

It's not just the basketball player.

There's a thousand other jobs in there from the video production to the guys running the ticketing to ya know, that rabbit hole goes so deep.

And I think there's a lot of creativity to be found at the intersection of domains.

Like I love computer science and I love circus.

Okay what sort of weird things can come out of those two things combined?

Ya know we've been sort of exploring that.

I think the combination thing is what we're all trying to find in some way.

And its cool to see that you can meld a lot of different ones and they can do this and it doesn't mean you're saying like, "Okay I'm going to drop everything and go be an accountant."

And then go be like a painter.

It's that it's all a lot more nuanced.

And that you find the creativity in the intersections.

[Eric] I'm a computer scientist and a roboticist.

And I love architecture, and economics, and industrial design.

And those are sort of like blending into me as, maybe computer science blends out a little bit.

Because I'm sort of moving continuously through different careers.

One of my favorite quotes is like Helmuth von Elder or something, ya know old war guy.

German war guy, he said, "No battle plan survives engagement with the enemy."

It doesn't mean don't have a plan.

It's good to have a plan.

Have some plan, but it's like, it's a rough plan.

They're guideposts.

And then you actually go in and engage and that plan is always up for review.

You incorporate new data and now the plan changes go this way.

Don't stick rigidly to that plan.

You know its a rough set of rules.

[Eric] That's good coming from the German military.

[Martha] Just play it by ear.

They were both just so positive and energetic and so in love with what they did.

[Ben] I just thought it was cool how gung-ho they were about just trying whatever it is you have on your plate.

Whatever it is you have in your mind, you can create.

[Martha] You just have to be willing to take all these ideas from different things and then like put them together.

It can become this other thing and just like the way it morphs I think is really cool.

[Sofaya] And then they have this whole approach to the planning stage, 'cause I know from experience it's really easy to get caught up in the planning and the drawing and the thinking.

A lot of times the idea that you start with is not even close to the idea that you finish with.

But the one that you finish with is so much better.

[Ben] I just felt like that was a complete metaphor for life, too.

Because you're saying like, you're taking all these little pieces and try all these different things.

He's saying like, "Don't find a niche.

If you get stuck in a niche.

Have somebody kick you out."

That is a reflection of the way jobs are in this day and age too, 'cause like he said.

They're taking bits and pieces and evolving into something more meaningful.

We have another nearly six weeks to go.

We've got a long way to go.

And we're going to be meeting with a ton of amazing people.

We're in one little corner so far, and we've got the whole United States to travel.

[Martha] I mean I'm just excited.

I was thinking about New Orleans the other day like "Oh my god!"

Yeah I'm just excited to see different cities and do all the stuff.

There's so much stuff to do!

[Ben] I guess at this point in my life, I'm not sure what my next step is gonna be.

And to leave Rhode Island and travel, experiencing so many different things, I think that exposure is just going to be a really great self-discovery process for me.

[Sofaya] Just in general, just by the time I get to New York, just I don't even know what the end is going to look like.

It's a little bit different then like a kind of "Eat Pray Love" kind of soul searching.

I have six more weeks to go so I feel like by the time I get to New York I'm just gonna be like spit out of this machine and I'm just gonna be like, "Woah, I need a nap."

[Ben] We learned how to fly jet packs.

Which is the first step in becoming a true superhero.

We're going straight into multiple interviews in LA.

Christian Troy from Ways for Water.

Laney Grattis from Frame Store, and Wayne from Disney animation.

[Martha] Even from being here just 20 minutes, there's such a unique culture here at Patagonia.

What about this drew you to this job?

[leader #3] I just feel lucky my personal goals and philosophies paralleled that of the organization.

[Male Narrator #4] Roadtrip Nation extends beyond the program you just watched.

It's a movement that empowers people to define their own roads in life.

Here's a quick snapshot of an interview with John Legend a leader from another roadtrip.

[John Legend] I was definitely a fish out of water when I first arrived in Philadelphia.

My parents didn't have all the tools that they needed to give me great advice on how to do that so, you know, you have to meet other people and connect with other people that can help you.

You know, there were record labels that turned me down and people did say no to me but I never felt like any doors were completely closed.

I always looked at is as, "No for now and come back later and maybe we'll say yes."

[roadtripper #4] As a successful recording artist, how would you define success?

[John] Well I think success has a lot to do with finding something you love and putting everything you have into it.

And if you do that you're going to end up being really good at it, because you put so much time and energy into it.

And you're going to get joy from doing it.

You have to be able to get past these obstacles that are in your way.

You know you're going to struggle with certain things.

You may have issues paying for college.

You may have issues not knowing all the skills that you need to navigate the situation because you're first generation.

It's going to be harder for you than for other people, but whats going to make you successful is if you despite these challenges, figure out a way to make it work.

And you can do it.

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 door's open We're all ears Become a leader at shareyourroad.com