To Shake the Sleeping Self With Jedidiah Jenkins | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] well welcome it's been 3 years since I seen you I feel like we had this amazing conversation the last time that you did this oh so long ago and I just remember thinking we're gonna be best friends we're gonna hang out all the time well la is a big place and you live like in the mountains yeah like a hidden oak valley somewhere something like that yeah yeah it was a barrier that was a barrier like I have ideas from civility live in Santa Monica and I'm like you know can do bye have a great life right well you're an Eastsider and you're the first person that I've had over to the downtown outpost of the podcast hey hey hey breaking in this new space and it's very exciting to be a demo area now I'm proximate so perhaps we will part ways laughter this and then and and rejoin for social frivolity yeah well there's so many restaurants and things down here that I need a reason to try right well I'll go with you there we go when I go on your Instagram I'm like he's always hanging out with super cool people having a great time like I have FOMO looking but there's a lot of problems with social media but one of the good things is that even though I haven't seen you in three years like I still feel very connected to you and everything that you're doing so I'm just delighted to have you here today I love talking to you I mean we talked for three hours last time and I felt like it was 30 minutes it's such a fun mind meld so I'm happy to be back well excited to get into it with you today although I will admit at the outset I'm feeling very naked right now I'm like a control freak about this whole thing and when I have a guest on I do tons of research and quite often somebody has a book coming out and I make a point of reading that book so I know what to talk to them about and we had this conversation offline over the last day because your book is coming out I have not had the opportunity to read it yet and we wanted to go ahead with this anyway so we're gonna talk about a book that I have not read witch or bull which i think is very appropriate because no one listening to this has right either so it's like them getting to ask me questions of like why should I read this right but the the ballast of like who's in control of this podcast has shifted now you you have to shoulder some responsibility to make it go well but also that kind of makes sense like I need to convince you that it's worth your time mmm you know and that's hopefully what I do right well first of all I'm super proud of you that you got this done when we first spoke it was the very beginning of this adventure you had said about beginning to crack this book open and very big took you three years but you did it yeah it was about that's it took me about two years to do it and then you turn it in and then it's a year until it comes out right more or less right so there's a lot of refining and and all these amazing details that publishers are really good at which I am NOT and then it exists which so fun like it was it was so nascent and such like a dream in my head and so scary in a mountain that I could see from the valley when we first spoke mm-hmm and now it's a physical thing that I can hold in my hands that now is given away to strangers who it'll become their experience now right I love it they hate it it means nothing to them like I can't control that anymore it's now out how do you feel about that I feel pretty Zen about it because I live in LA surrounded by a bunch of artists who make art they make TV shows they make music and I've witnessed them process this experience where they work on an album for years and it boom it comes out mm-hmm maybe there's some chatter about it maybe not and then they're like wow like what do I do it's not like when you give birth to a child and now you have to raise the child forever it's out and it's a thing and then whether it catches the zeitgeist of culture or not there's not a lot you can do about it right I would say one one distinction perhaps is that being a writer and putting a book out in the world there's a certain responsibility that you have as as the author to help people care about it if you're a musician or if you're making a TV show you've got a gigantic infrastructure behind you to get people interested in watching that television program it's a little bit different when you when you write a book yes you have the publisher and that publishing house has a public you know published you have a publicist and all that kind of stuff but one thing I've learned is you really have to carry that mantle yourself and I know you're doing that you're going on this like you're gonna be gone I'm like a book tour for a while yeah it's I'm doing just a few book events and then we'll see if other ones manifest because I really enjoy talking to people in live it's really fun but I don't I mean yes I do carry that medal because I believe my intention with writing the book was write the book I wish I could have read when I was 23 and my identity was totally in flux mm-hmm and I was evangelical Christian and gay and didn't know how to reconcile those things and was doing my best and I wished I had somebody a little further along that that I could find that would speak my language because a lot of times the sexuality faith thing is such a precipice that when people when people really reconcile it their faith and they're all they're they're so wounded by the tradition in which they were raised that they reject it completely and so when I was still in it I was trained to fear people who rejected the faith as deceived and wrong and so I feared them so I couldn't find someone who was still speaking my language who could like Usher me into a new way of thinking and so I feel the burden of like doing my best and make sure young me whatever that looks like right gets gets the chance to read this book it's interesting you rejected the notion of being the rejecter yeah and it's like this journey to finding this middle place of comfort with faith and your sexuality yeah on the face like we chatted a little bit about this an email like on the face of the book it sort of seems like this is going to be a book about like finding your passion and like lighting out on the territory and like yeah you know exploring your you know finding you know finding your dream by like rejecting corporate America and perhaps that's you know the the hook on the lure that might bring in that young reader but then you kind of hoodwink them and take them on this on this journey that has a lot more depth and nuance to it yeah which i think is a big part of being human where you especially when you're young have lofty goals big ideas for your future and and you go forth and reach for them and then you might realize that they're counterfeit and they're not what you thought and you reject them and you try something else and really all of that pendulum swing see-sawing of life and seasons of life is a search for self acceptance identity completion wholeness and walking in that and and so what I thought was I want my dream career and I want to be a writer and I want to be known as a adventurous guy who does risky things was was really kind of the smoke from a deeper fire of I want to be ok with me mm-hmm and my bike trip really started peeling those layers back like once it got real hard once it got no longer cool and fine and it just became laborious and I really wanted to quit and all these things it started to it started to teach me lessons that I didn't even anticipate right like am i doing this because this is what I really want to do or am I doing this because I want to know be known as somebody who would you this exactly which is I think a lot of people never differentiate those two things and they don't realize that they're actually performing in such a way to be known as right Blanc but it was in the doing that you had the the doing was the vehicle for answering that question for yourself right there's a lot of talk in the Christian world and maybe outside of it as well about what legacy will you leave like what's your legacy what's your legacy which is a beautiful idea but also is the same thing as how do I want people to talk about me like what will my reputation be and I don't know I think if you're worried about your reputation rather than worried about who you are first and let that let your reputation radiate out and don't worry about how you're coming across worry about who you are and then how you come across will be great I just people I think people get the dominoes out of order yeah well it's difficult is really difficult because that requires the heart the hard work the heavy lifting of looking inward you know and I think I think most people are either afraid of that or we're just socially conditioned to not do that and to get our validation externally I I listened to the other day - you're you've all her re-interview which was fantastic is the best one I've heard of him yet and it's not often that you listen to a podcast and change your behavior the next day but I've never meditated in my life except like once when my friend gave me a group meditation for my birthday and the way you guys spoke about his meditation practice and really specifically what when he said eighteen years ago he did visit of a plasma and his teacher told him to just think about his breathing for 10 minutes and he couldn't do it for 10 seconds and and just being centered and starting your day of that like that I woke up today and sat in my bed and found like a YouTube guided haha and and just grounded myself in my body and really listened to my breathing for ten minutes and then if a thought came in I observed it outside of that thought and let it float away like a balloon and and it was this amazing moment where I started my day realizing that I exist that I am here that that is amazing and that I am worthy I don't know it was this just one ten minute meditation and one in this tiny little moment of your day just starting your day like that and it was I don't know it was really impactful and and simple and felt like a little blessing on the day and I think it's gonna be a new practice I mean it you've all it does 30 45 60 day silent retreats and meditates 2 hours a day you know we'll see if I get there well it's super intimidating when you hear that right but when you hear him say yeah he couldn't go 10 seconds without you know his mind attacking him and then in the wake of these three gigantic books that have quite literally reshaped culture and how we talk about so many issues for him to credit those books the ideas that he that he formulated in order to write those books so almost solely to his meditation practice is one of the most profound yeah through lines that yeah the through line that really hit me and was the impetus of the challenge that changed my behavior was he said it teaches you how to focus or the way he says it focus or at London's accent and I realize very hard for me to focus on anything for more than 10 seconds I mean we have our obviously our phones you have someone coming in the room there's a leaf blower outside your brain is leaping constantly maybe now more than it's ever been and the ability in writing this book taught me that I really struggle with focus I could write I had to do 20 minute spurts and then give myself 10 minutes allowed to look at my phone and 20 minutes again minutes twenty minutes it was like oh that's I wrote the I think you've all wrote sapiens like a year after we did our first podcast oh that he's honest he just misses his ability to focus is extraordinary because he exercises that muscle through meditation and I was like wow if I could focus imagine the clarity of thought and I was thinking as I was going to bed last night which is why I took a note of it reflecting on that podcast there are like three types of thinking in the world there's like the particulate thinker the categorical thinker and then the systems thinker and the particulate thinker only responds to like thing right in front of their face which is I think most people they don't analyze their life they're not thinking about an issue their thing we're reacting read they're reacting every moment the categorical thinker maybe is somebody who like writes for The Washington Post about politics they know a lot about a category and they think about it in a little bigger picture but if I asked them about psychology or invite the environment they would be like I don't know anything about that you've all is a true systems thinker he flies above the earth and looks at the ecosystem of all things and somehow can synthesize it and pull the relevant patterns out and just speak it so crisply and clearly where it makes the world make a little more sense and I know I'm a systems thinker I'm nowhere near him but that's like I always am like feeling and absorbing the patterns that transpose over everything like the unity of truth through nature human behavior I just see it like a unity in the way things are and I want to exercise that muscle I think it would be a gift to humanity if you did that I mean I think I agree with you I think what's unique about you and perhaps what distinguishes you from you vols approach is that your gift is in yes you're a systems thinker and you can find this unity but it's all through the prism of your own personal experience and you convey it with a personal truth that also strikes a court of universal truth and I think that's why everyone connects to your writing so deeply because you may be talking about something that happened to you or something that happened to you you know with respect to or relationship that you have but we can all find some commonality in that experience like that's that's where I feel your power and your strength is and what you write Wow thank you well I Eve all's not he doesn't talk about like he's not filtering it through his own personal variants it's very it's it's sort of antiseptic yeah it's yeah and I mean that's the kind of beauty of if you look at the world like an orchestra everyone has their instrument and their note to play and it each one brings its own important moment to the symphony mm-hmm and maybe the way I communicate what I've learned or a truth or a feeling well the way that I communicate will impact someone more than the antiseptic just history synthesised uh-huh by a different type of book and that's why I like encourage people when they're like I don't even know I don't have anything original to say you know I don't know if I should write I don't and I'm like no one has lived your life in that exact way if you can just write truthfully about your experience that will have value because you exist and you have value period but it requires you to connect deeply with your interior life yeah and you have that you have you know meditation aside whether you've never met date again you're very in touch with your emotional landscape and you have an ability to bring voice to that I think I've thought a lot about that because I don't know why I am that way but I think it has to do with when I was a kid and realizing I was gay and realizing the world was not made for me I didn't feel safe I didn't think oh I'm not safe I didn't feel like I was fitting in and in that moment my brain got real curious about how everything works I needed to understand the lay of the land so that I could find ways to fit in and not as a circuit loss mechanism and so very early on I learned to like jump up above the city and look where the roads go so I don't get lost where a lot of people if if it were if you're just like handsome or pretty in eighth grade and everything's working great for you and you had no awkward moment you just float right on through and you never even think how how is this happening you're just reacting and it's working out for you right so let's go back there you grow up gay in an evangelical Christian environment and from what I understand you you felt compelled to kind of hide from that I suppose maybe you have a different word for other than that and to kind of exert some semblance of masculinity to prove to the world that you were other than perhaps who you were or are and that became expressed in being this adventurer and and trying to show the world this masculine you know version of yourself or your idea of what like a man a young man is supposed to be yeah I think there's a lot of gay men who in those early years are they become either performative ly masculine or their natural disposition and they're like feminine expression causes them so much hurt that they retreat and then I mean they're really wounded by their environment and they run away to West Hollywood and finally are free you know and they're at the club and they're like fu mom and dad I'm free you know I like compensating in the other extreme exactly I I was in middle school I had a really high voice and it must have been really feminine I mean I had uh middle schoolers say ask me if I was a girl and I'm like I don't think I am I think I'm a boy but I think in it's not like I sat down and made decisions I was just reacting to the world trying to survive and I tried to control the way I spoke so as not to get asked that again I tried to control the way I moved my hands so as not to be noticed I learned to be funny and silly and wacky and that was a thing where I thought well if I make fun of myself I'll beat them to it and take the wind out of their sails so if I'm the funny guy I can insulate myself from mockery and there's I mean all of these horrible and it worked it worked really well to the point that by sophomore year of high school I was pretty popular I was really well-liked I by junior year like all my best friends were like the football and baseball players straight guys and and I don't know like I I was able to I don't want to say hide because I didn't feel like I was hiding I just felt like I was me but I was playing the game that everyone plays to fit into the world the bread man but you knew you knew you were gay I knew I was gay I knew something was quote-unquote wrong with me in third grade because the kids were talking about boners and they asked me how what gives me boners and I said bodybuilders on ESPN and they laughed and so I was like oh I can't talk about this and then in seventh grade I learned what the word was for when you like that stuff when you own when you are a boy and you like boys but I didn't know that it wouldn't go away I thought maybe like many people do it was a phase mmm and as senior year approached I realized this probably isn't gonna change like this is Who I am right and at the same time I was willing I was willing to believe that God could bring a woman into my life that would inflame my passions and you know maybe I'm not attracted to all women maybe I'm only attracted to my future wife and when God brings her into my life it'll be hot and heavy and I'll be I'll make all the church happy and it'll be great yeah well that has to be coming directly from the doctrine that was getting hammered into you every Sunday oh well yeah and it's it's not always hammered it is like death from a thousand cuts of just talking about one Sunday they'll talk about how people who interpret the Bible to get what they want are actually deceived you know it's they're they're taking the Bible as a buffet and they pick and choose what they want just to serve their own self and so your truck you're taught that's the worst way to think and you're in your talk you know adverse in Jeremiah the heart is deceitful above all things so I'm thinking okay so if I want something and it's not approved in the Bible then that's me rejecting God's Word and that's me being selfish and seeking that's me just being self seeking and therefore I need to repent of that and I'm just a selfish and that's a that's a super highway to a shame spiral total shame and total shame spiral because the real kicker is sexual identity is also tied into behavior and so it took a while for the church to get this language down but they were like it's not a sin to be gay it is it it is a sin to act on it mm-hmm and then they'll say things like God gave you this challenge he doesn't give you any thing that he doesn't know that you can accomplish he won't give you anything you can't handle so he gave you this calling to celibacy as an invitation to true godly wisdom and that's a real burden but yours but your love much for that well and I believed that I was like wow I must be so strong that God trusted me with this burden and did you have anyone that you could talk to honestly no I had friends who I knew didn't weren't super Christian it didn't take it that seriously uh-huh but but because I was so deep in the faith and like wanted to prove how good of a Christian I was I couldn't find someone who was higher up on the piety scale who was okay with gay marriage or being gay so I couldn't find someone in authority to look to I could find people quote-unquote below me on the piety scale who would just like would drink and smoke and and they were just like he'd hedonistic and so I'm like well thank you for accepting me but you also accept a lot of other things I don't believe in so that's not really helping right and your parents did they have any awareness of what was going on with you they did my dad apparently when I was two years old asked my mom do you think Jed is gay I don't know what I was doing but I and my mom was really hurt by that because she is a deep Bible believing Christian woman you know and and was like why would you speak that over our son and I then just like my dad's I mean then they got a divorce and my dad was cheated and went to be with my stepmom and bla bla so it was a whole hectic chaotic world my older sister was really damaged by the divorce my younger brother had like physical disabilities that they were really a it was chaos my mother mm-hmm and so she couldn't really worry about that not to mention in this time in the 80s all of a sudden she sees on the news that gay people are dying by the tens of thousands by a mystery gay cancer right and at the church they're saying see the rewards for sin is death and so well a plus B equals C that's easy let me make sure that let me pray that this does this curse doesn't fall on Jed which I totally understand her mindset there and and I learned to not rock the boat as I got older my sister is dating drug dealers my little brother is has you know his medical issues and so I'm like okay I got to get straight A's I got to be the best kid I can't rock the boat and that continued that's a heavy burden to carry as a young kid to on top of all the rest of it and I just learned to do my own thing and do well I mean I was student body president in my high school and my mom didn't know yeah really yeah until some graduation and I was like I have to get there early and she was like why and I'm like well I have to give a speech which is like why and I'm like I'm student body president she was so mad at me that I didn't tell her but I had like built up this thing of like I'm independent I do my own thing I'm not in your hair right and on some level as somebody who's who's carrying a certain level of shame whether consciously or unconsciously to compensate by being this achiever right and that's actually big in the gay community they like the internalized shame creates like superhumans because they're so intent on proving that they are worthy that they make a lot of money they get good jobs they get a nice car I mean that's like a big thing and so was there a moment where you had a reckoning with this and and became okay with with being outwardly you know comfortable with it or was it a slow progression of acclimate it was a slow progression and in my and then there was a moment of reckoning for me it was my mid-twenties began my deconstruction of my faith in the sense where the the infrastructure of my life which my mother had blessed me with to keep me safe and make the world make sense it's like actually scientifically proven that when you raise a kid in a structured environment like in a faith community they like are better prepared for the world than if it's chaos and so I'm so grateful for that but then as I'm finding it for myself in my twenties becoming more and more adult and diving deeper and deeper into okay if I'm gay and Christian well I'm tired of this I need to figure it out and so I went all the way at like 25 I went to a gay conversion therapy meetings did oh my god tell me more about that yeah well it started with a elder in my church really confronted me and said you need to figure this out and I was like okay and she said I know a couple men who had this struggle and God healed them of it and now they're married with families mm-hm and you should meet with them so I met with a couple of these men and one of them was inspiring he was fun he was chatty he had a beautiful wife and a daughter and he he was just like I couldn't I lived the wild gay life in my 20s and I I couldn't shake the shame and you know I went to these meetings and God healed me and brought my wife into my life and now I'm happy and he's like it's not that I don't feel those feelings anymore it's like I'm still attracted to men but I choose my wife Wow yeah and I was like and you're like but dude you're gay Oh hundred percent I'm like bro you're gay but but I also don't I believe he does love his wife and I believe they may have a great marriage I'm it seemed like they did maybe they were putting it on their best performance but I was like this is this is a real way of being and what's interesting is in that season of life also I would I had began working off and on in Uganda for the charity Invisible Children which we talked about last time and they're in tight like especially in the traditional north you don't marry the person you love so much as you you marry family set it up it's a good deal she's fertile she's not barren she'll give you ten kids your kids can work the land your family will grow marriage is a business arrangement not an expression of ultimate self-actualization with another person and that's a very individualized American Western idea and so I had seen like Oh marriage especially in the Bible is not just find your true love and live happily ever after it's a it really like God maybe intended marriage to be this strategic partnership where you choose the person daily even if it's hard and so I was like maybe that's what I meant to do maybe maybe it is what I said before about the heart is deceitful like maybe I'm being selfish wanting love and so you go to gay conversion therapy yeah which was this big meeting I went to one of the I went to this other guy's house and he was less he was less believable in the sense that he seemed unhappy he seemed unhappy to take me to this which was interesting mmm because in my mind he was living my dream which was he had been healed of this thing that caused conflict in my life conflict in my family conflict in my community the fear of loss of my entire Christian community and he had been rescued from it by God and was living with a wife and kids and he was willing to take me to this meeting and yet the feeling I got from him was that there was an invisible gun to his head making him take I feel so bad for that guy and I and and he's budging Lee bringing you knowing that he's you to this this burden that he's carrying so I went to this meeting and it was this man's bald man on stage and and they're singing worship songs and then he's talking about you know you need to let go of it whoever molested you whoever hurt you whoever if your mother who over mothered you your dad who abandoned you whoever because that's the only reason that right there has to be a cause scream out and forgive them forgive them right now and so I'm saying they're like no one did like nobody did anything to me I loved my childhood every minute of it mmm what do I scream and everyone's yelling and it it's just this weird cacophony of noise and and then they're there some testimonies get up and I'm looking around the room and there's a verse in the Bible that I'm gonna paraphrase what Jesus says but it's like I've come to give you life and life abundant and you will no false teachers by the fruit they bear if they bear good fruit it is of the Lord if they bear bad fruit it is not and so I was looking at this and I'm like this is not good fruit these people are so burdened by shame and they are not alive they are not radiant the people on stage who are supposed to be beacons of Hope are like cold dark zombies the people in the audience or zombies the guy who brought me is a zombie I'm like I don't think this is life and life abundant right it's it's life and resignation and my brain started like but a little going through like all these like factors of okay well if you're raised with false shame let me just like imagine what if God is actually cool with me being gay and yet all of society tells you it's shameful you're raised in that shame and you misappropriate the feeling or you miss apply the feeling of shame as God's judgment but actually your community's judgment then maybe we've got this all wrong and so I right at that moment started to break break break break break it down how old were you I was like 26 I mean that's a pretty good self-awareness I mean well that's what I'm in middle school I had to be like figure out what am i what is the world I had to or else I would be swallowed up mm-hmm and the real kicker is around that time maybe a year later I made a new really close friend who was a couple years younger than me and he didn't know I was gay most of my friends did but I don't always super signal that I'm gay especially the people who were a little oblivious and so he didn't know and we spent all of our time together and this was still I was in the headspace of figuring it out I hadn't like realized I was it was okay to be gay I was like processing this and we were at this point I think I was 26 or 27 I'd never kissed anybody I'd never held hands with anybody it was like buried buried buried and we would he would sleep over all the time we spent 24 hours a day together he's just my best friend straight as an arrow and in his sleep he was a sleep cuddler he was like a deep deep deep sleeper and he would just throw his leg over me because he'd like roll around we'd be sleeping on the floor we'd been wherever and I would be awakened with this jolt of like sexual desire that I had never felt in my life and I wasn't really aware because I had sectioned off that side of my brain that I was in love with him I had like written a narrative that he's my best friend we do everything together my soul mate but I in love with attracted to were things I had moved into a basement that I wasn't allowed to look at access or think about so I was interesting I was compartmentalized self-aware I was really self-aware in certain ways and willfully ignorant others and he would do this sleep cuddling all the time and one night he was like laying like laying on top of me basically in his underwear and in this like rage of desire I put my hand in his underwear uh-huh and he woke up and it this is my best friend who doesn't know I'm gay and I'm touching him in his sleep basically molesting him and he woke up and that was the to this day darkest moment of shame I have ever experienced it was a feeling of out-of-body shame where I was looking at myself and I didn't recognize myself I was like oh my gosh and I will never forget he said he sat up it was in the dark and he just goes he said we have to talk about this I'm an adult I'm not six years old meaning like implying like I'm molesting a child or something and when I tell you that that landed on me like the hardest I mean that's definitely the hardest thing I've ever heard and we processed it over months and we're still best friends and he's the most amazing give me the most grace and the most forgiveness but that was the true moment where I was like if I don't tackle this head-on and I don't open all the doors in the basement this is why Catholic priests do this right this is why when when you think you've got something under control especially sexuality you don't yeah the the unhealthy expression of repressed sexuality and emotion and it will express itself you think it won't it will that's a hundred percent of the time and so that's amazing that you were able to navigate that with your friend though and maintain well that's a testament to his wisdom kindness I mean he's one of those amazing people in my life and always will be and he is a similar person in me where he seeks first understanding he is a very confident safe person and so as we then processed me and he learned about my journey with sexuality and their oppression and all these things he reached a place where he was like bro I get it like he's like I'm straight I've been kissing girls since I was 15 I can't imagine being 26 and completely removing sexuality out of my house had like no sexual experiences none and I was 26 imagine doing that I'm not condoning or excusing anything any priest has done but just imagine suppressing that for 45 years you know you can compartmentalize your life and then you're in a position of power this is why I like the cell it's the celibacy requirement and Catholicism is a problem yeah it doesn't work it clearly knees are not wired to function no way and no and it does certainly what am I having that the prohibition on on marriage just attracts that type of person to a priesthood and I'll tell you when I was deeply in love with God wanting to serve Jesus and people told me that I couldn't get married and I wanted to be a good boy and I wanted to excel I was really attracted to that I was like well then maybe I can marry God and then be in a position of like respect and finally like I can turn in this thing this ball and chain in my life for a crown on my head like what a great exchange but the trick is you never get rid of that bond chain because it's woven into your DNA right the idea is that if you then do that it will go away it will vanish it will dissipate that has to be similar to what goes on in the minds of so many of these guys oh I it must be I mean we it's so funny when you like listen to you've all her are you listen to these like people who've studied the evolution of man and evolution of life and you realize that pretty much everything we do is so we can end up having sex right like why do you brush your teeth so your teeth are white so they're not falling out of your mouth so that someone doesn't think you're gross so that you can kiss them so that it's like why do you want a good job why do you it's like so that you can procreate have a family I mean that's like so deep in our wiring and then obviously there's like complex scientific theories of like why homosexuality is 3 to 10% of the population but it's got to be in there somewhere like our sexuality is wired into us well it's interesting to me that this was going on right around the time you were 27 which memory serves me is kind of around the same time that you had this idea to do this bike ride right you now stood three years before you actually did it and you did it at 30 right so what is the relationship between that desire to embark on that adventure and this kind of internal struggle that you were having coming to terms with your sexuality and who this person Jed is well I it's a perfect example of me look me still operating in a compartmentalized fashion I was dealing with my sexuality deconstruction faith thing over here and that was giving me deep anxiety in my core and yet I was in my job and I saw a 30 coming and I was like whoa when you're 30 you aren't a kid anymore you're not allowed to just like not know what's going on that was like when you're in your 20s whoa 30 and and I was in a job I loved loved but it wasn't a job I really chose for myself it was a job I was working with friends I was doing important work but I was like if I don't if I can choose my own career now's when I should do it and what do I want that to be and so I thought well I need to pursue my dream career of being a writer I'm too it's like embarrassing to write a memoir in my 20s because like I just got to earth like what am i doing so give me a let me go on a wild trip and then at least if I write about that it'll be objectively interesting so the idea of writing about it was integral change idea itself yes and there was this idea on some level you were harboring this dream of being a writer totally it's hard to imagine you doing anything differently and I have a very hard time picturing you in law school well I love law school because it is a lot of reading and writing as you know but I I liked learning how civilization works like property law and tort law like these things all these words I had heard in the news all of a sudden the like specific ways in which if you have the intent to even touch someone that can be a battery even if it's nothing you know it's like all these like little detail I found that is endlessly fascinating and realizing that law is actually the imagined infrastructure of civilization itself it is it is and and I just had never really put that together so law school was this like endless discovery of the way the world works which I fancy myself a systems thinker so seeing that it's a what you you're the greatest gift of law school is it trains you to think in a very specific way yeah and I kind of didn't ever think I would be some fancy John Grisham trial attorney or I didn't know I didn't know I just thought maybe if I get this tool and my tool belt it'll influence the direction of my life but how much of it was driven by that that child inside of you who's trying to be the good boy a 100% of you I was like I need to be impressive because the core of a big piece of my core being is a blemish mm-hmm fast forward to you sitting in a office working for a cruise line right like in House Counsel was and and that was the perfect example that was during law school and it was a perfect sample of I've made more money that summer than I'd ever made in my life and it was lifeless I I mean I made some really good friends that summer as like human beings are always interesting and fun but just the work itself that I'm so glad I did that because that really woke me up quickly - oh you are not the type of person that can survive this like you will die in a cage and and so that's why I was like okay well like I'm just gonna go work for this charity and make no money and be their lawyer because I got to do something right and these were these were guys that you met at USC film school right mm-hmm and for for people that didn't listen to our first conversation Invisible Children this is this incredible nonprofit organization most famously known for the Kony 2012 video that like exploded the internet listen to our first conversation we go really into it yeah yeah yeah which is the only time I've ever done that on a podcast really talked about that yet doctor in that way mm-hmm it's a it was a complicated thing what happened with that it's very hard to unpack it yeah and that's a cool gig right if you're gonna be working with your friends you're traveling back and forth to maganda and DC and meeting with samantha power and the Obama administration and getting laws passed I mean that was really cool yeah and you're like five seconds out of Law School yeah and yet I was really aware that it wasn't something I had chosen I had come alongside my friends to help them do a thing which was I did for five years and was really life-changing no doubt but I did feel like I felt I don't know what it is to use Christian language I felt a calling on my life that I had something I was supposed to do mm-hmm it's interesting that you had that awareness because juxtaposing that against this drive to be Percy in a certain way as this you know good person doing important things most people would have relented to you know the gestalt of the responsible you know path of security and you know the high paying lawyer job and and and stayed with that for perhaps decades only to act on that impulse you know when it might be too late well and I don't want to give myself to credit because I didn't have college debt I was I had a lot of financial aid at USC and then my parents paid for law school because I'm a privileged kid from Nashville and so I entered the world able to just like survive on $400 rent and bean and cheese burritos ready to roll you know I'm saying and that is a very that is a serious but which most people I know now I'm 35 are still paying huge college debt yeah and and what most people do and what I did was in addition to that debt I I was able to tolerate a semi intolerable professional existence by compensating by buying a bunch of right now you're you're so miserable and annoying a car I can't afford yeah you know it's always like a little bit outside of your grasp and that that's the death knell because that's what gets you hooked and that's what leads to that idea like oh I can't ever leave this because my life is now big and I have to maintain this right oh yeah the accumulating of things that were - they were band-aids for your frustration because what else you gonna do otherwise you just you'd go to sleep when you go back to the job again well and that was the real circumstantial privilege of immediately beginning my professional life working at Invisible Children I was surrounded by people making pennies who were there for the passion of ending a war in Central East Africa and interns volunteering their time so it was very uncool if I pulled up in a BMW uh-huh that's like not the culture right the culture was to sleep on the floor to stay up all night to call your senator to call your Congressman to go to Uganda it was like deeply woven in and and my Christian upbringing it's like sacrifice service all they say it really scratched a lot of itches and I loved it mm-hmm so much well I think it speaks to you know the the the next move that you make and this decision to embark on this this ride from Oregon to Patagonia speaks to this theme that that that you kind of address in the very first pages of the book which is this tension between these mixed messages that that were given when we're kind of coming of age which is on the one hand you know seek the seek the you know the career that's gonna be that put you on an upwardly mobile trajectory and then out of the other side of the mouth of that same person is you know think different or you know leave your passion and those but up against each other and it becomes very difficult to reconcile what fits your own personal blueprint yeah I mean that's the thing is is the the circumstances of your youth often deeply influenced I mean always influenced that chain of events in your 20s if you were raised where your parents were in crushing credit card debt and life was falling apart you you think I'm not gonna be like them I'm gonna be financially responsible I'm gonna do the opposite if you're I have friends who were raised in fabulous wealth in Texas and they went on to be barefoot serving the homeless I ain't gonna be like that and they're gonna drive a beat-up Camry to show that they don't want daddy's money and so there's like a lot of identity like pendulum fluctuation there but I totally understand that it's society's duty to actually give you a certain flow chart of how to make it in this world because is really hard to do it to figure it out on your own so I don't fault society for like telling us here's how you do it but I also would hope that society would say there are a million ways to do this don't get sucked into the like to the allure of thinking you have to do it this way and if you don't you're gonna fail mm-hm and I really think with the gig economy and them and what's happening with now now that Millennials are in in their 30s and late 20s they're they're discovering really that they that old pathway is not functioning the way it used to and that's why I mean there's I don't know the stats but huge numbers of people my age and younger don't work in offices don't have traditional Jo anybody that has a normal job I I swear to you I have to think about it yeah like I live in LA and to like go on a hike on a Tuesday at 11 a.m. is the North's normal thing in the world it's so true and it's I don't know and that's like I mean I think you know la I remember when I have a vivid memory of when I first moved to LA and I was a lawyer in San Francisco and I moved here for a law firm job and this is pre gig economy but there's something very unique and strange about Los Angeles because you could go into a Starbucks at 2:00 in the afternoon and it would be packed with people and you're like did any these people work like they all look like they took a shower this morning but like how does that even make sense I remember I just blew my mom this city is madder than any other yeah but it expanded my horizons of what was possible I mean prior to moving here I I never it never would have occurred to me that you could find gainful employment pursuing something that you cared about in a way that that defied our traditional notions of what that social contract looks like yes because of the entertainment industry somebody who like who's very talented at carving faces out of styrofoam can actually have a career you know I exactly when you're like yeah but that's what you're saying speak so clearly to the importance of modeling or representation of different ways of being I mean in terms of representation in arts where you have people of color you have people with different abilities and and talents coming up in storytelling I know that when I was a kid watching Will & Grace changed my life because I saw I thought being gay was flamboyant and a pride parade and then I saw will who was a lawyer in New York and I was like oh you can just be you don't have to be in a thong yeah you can just hang out and be normal yeah we have this idea that that every young gay male is the kid who sang down the right way which is straight if he is like fantastic but that wasn't me and so I didn't see though I thought oh okay all this all these things that the Christians are saying are true you either become hyper sexual and hate God and you're in a parade this is like I don't want to assume that that's true I'm just saying that's what I perceived and I was like well where are the like happy married gay couples who like are clothed and have jobs like where are they and that was what really powerful with Will and Grace and then seeing that's what I love about all the different people you have on your podcast they show you like all the different careers and adventures they've been on and expertise is you see model you see model different ways of making it in this world and making contributing something important and that's really encouraging to me about Gen Z or whatever it is and Millennials figuring out what they're doing I think there's going to be a lot of surprising contributions because of a certain level of just modeled access to I think that's right of being I think that's right I mean I think you know me you see it I mean you see it manifest already you know people who are driven not by salaries and 401ks and benefits but by impact like how is how is taking this job going to move the needle in terms of making the world a better place like that's certainly nothing that occurred to me when I was looking for my first job or second job or my third job but that is very much the mindset of young people now and amidst all the craziness and the chaos and the lack of civility and everything that's going on right now that gives me tremendous hope and optimism for the future me too and I and I wonder I mean you have kids this exact age of just I'm so curious about what the brand af-- ocation of identity is gonna do to young people where you're like worried about your brand in eighth grade like oh I need to wear this shirt I need to post this photo how many how many likes is it gonna get that's such a tired conversation everyone that's a parent is like freaking out but it's I'm I'm curious I don't have skin in the game I'm just like way out yeah like are they going to become are they gonna get burned on not getting a job because someone went deep in their Instagram have found and found something or are people gonna become more open to just the fact that people grow and change and I think we're gonna have to be yeah your dominance documented and I think this idea of generations is being accelerated you know it's no longer boomers Gen Xers yeah Gen Y it's like now to every every three years is a new generation you know my older boys are 22 and 23 they're that pendulum has swung towards analog like they're really I mean that's interesting yeah they have Instagram accounts maybe once a month they post they're not on Facebook they're not on Twitter they're not they're not interested yeah you know which is cool maybe that's a reaction to you know how my wife and I are living or just what they're seeing amongst their peers but that was very interesting to see both of them make that choice and now I have younger daughters who are very different from that they're a totally different generation even though they're only separated by a short number of years I I don't know how to delineate Christian influence from millennial influence of my own life but I know making an impact was a really big deal to me always and I don't I don't know if it's like because you're a brand ambassador for Jesus you need to be on your best behavior and you need to be an excellent brand ambassador that's like wired into me in college in high school and that's still a huge part of me now with my writing I just my only dream is that some people who feel trapped in their identity feel trapped in their tradition feel and don't see a way out read this book and it just shot it just models the sometimes difficult sometimes tender exiting out of that entrapment yeah and and I and I what's fun about the time we live in is normally when you're a writer you write a book and maybe you get some letters in the mail from people who were impacted by your words maybe someone writes a nice review I write online mostly and I see people being impacted by my via the immediacy of it is astonishing and it feels incredible the very first sentence of the book is if discontent is your disease travel as medicine which is such a awesome how long did it take you to come over that I mean the pressure you know the first sentence of things it's like it's so important like I just I was like I read that and I was like it's so great not my God thank you how many versions of this sentence dude that's what that's what I knew I wanted to say in the first sentence and then I would I'd wrote I'm sure I wrote it a different way and would come back two weeks later and look at it and be like mmm close but not there and then I don't know I mean I didn't I don't I don't think my words are that precious like I don't labor over them if it makes sense it can stay if it's too cliche or too cheesy it's gotta go uh-huh and I I just believe that you know the book is called to shake the sleeping self and there's like parts of you that need to be removed from their comfort zone to even wake up and you can't do it yourself you have to remove yourself from the routine from the thing you know and travel is a perfect way to do that right so the architecture of the book is you're gonna ride your bike from Oregon to Patagonia we're gonna go along for this ride with you and you are going to shake the sleeping self you are gonna have this reckoning with who you are and as we kind of talked about at the outset going into it the reader is perhaps lured into this notion that this is going to be yeah it's gonna be a journey of self-discovery but but it's going to be so much more than that it's going to be a reckoning of sexuality and faith in your place in the world and and all of these themes that you then explore when you embarked on this when you when you began this when you either when you decided to do this this bike journey or you began the journey what level of awareness did you have that this was going to be your opportunity to really work this out for yourself and how much of it was all I'm gonna do this crazy adventure so everyone you know thinks of me as this you know masculine adventurous sort honestly the performative masculinity bit of of it came later through reflection I didn't realize that I was trying to be the most outdoorsy the most man-like I know that I can't throw a football or throw any ball and I know that there are certain like dude things that I just cannot abide but I was like I don't know a single dude who's ridden 14,000 miles on a bicycle so at least I'll have that uh-huh like metal on my jacket but that was not so much conscious until later I knew that it would be a rite of passage I intended that and and like that especially maybe 10 years ago 15 years ago there was a big move like reclaiming masculinity in the Christian world there was like a whole wild at heart all these things and I that impacted me where and one of the things they talk about is like our culture does not have a rite of passage and especially for men like to go from a boy to a man and a lot of traditional cultures have had that for 50 thousand years and I love that idea that that sense of liturgy that sense of putting your body and a thing that goes before I was this and now I am this and I was like well this is a very sign of the times that I'm going through my rite of passage not at 13 but 30 but with any developed Society childhood is extended so I extended it very far yeah and I knew it was a rite of passage for me intentional I didn't know what was on the other side I didn't think it would be so much about figuring out my faith I didn't think it would be so much about figuring out my relationship with my family sexuality god I really thought it would be going from an amateur writer to embarking on a project to become a real writer that was what I was conscious of while it was happening and it wasn't until the reflection of actually writing the damn thing that I realized what was really happening or what really had happened right you had this I've read an interview with you where you you quoted something your friend John Shue said which is if you want to be good at something you have to do it first Yeah right he's he's an amazing director he just directed crazy radiations what an insane success story oh my god I mean and I went to college with him and he was a star in college he's just an amazing so usually like this guy was gonna yeah big movies but he you know and he's like made a lot of great movies but he this is his moment to like become like to have the runway to do whatever he wants yes I'm so proud of him he's just the best person in the world and he got asked quite often because he's you know a darling of USC so he'd go back and speak to the film students and they dad like what do you suggest like how do we make it and he's like if you want to be good you have to do it first if he's like you have an iPhone or a samsung something and that thing films really well and if you're not making things all the time then I don't believe you like that just means you want to be famous yeah you like the idea of being that person but you're not actually in love if you yea actual craft of what it is to do it if you want to be a writer and you don't write then you don't want to be a writer you want to be known as a writer mm-hmm if you want to be an actor and you're not doing local theater you don't wanna be an actor you want to be famous it's like that's if you really want to do something you'll do it wherever you are and especially in this day and age I mean some of my favorite music I find out that the girl in London made it in her bedroom on her laptop and put it on soundcloud and now it's like my favorite song in Los Angeles I think that's how Lords first album was made yeah and you know in some Canyon and New Zealand and now she's a household name so if it is if it doesn't bellow out of you out of out of necessity then you're doing it for the wrong reason and you cut your teeth you literally cut your teeth as a writer on Instagram well so I didn't know I was a writer until I was told I was so this happened in Invisible Children I started you as I started as their lawyer and then we would be in meetings and trying to our figure out how to articulate the campaign for high schools how to like synthesize this information and then they would ask me what I thought and I would say what I thought and they would be like write that down that's exactly it and that then that led to okay Jed will you just write this out for us and then we're gonna use that and then that led to okay we don't want you to be our lawyer anymore hire someone else and do this full-time and then all of a sudden they're telling me you're really gifted at articulating synthesizing ideas in a way that is approachable in a way that a high school kid can understand this complex issue and it just kept being affirmed in me just something I was doing naturally and it was right around then that Malcolm Gladwell's book outliers came in that concept of 10,000 hours was being talked about everywhere and I was just sitting with some friends I don't know we were doing drinking coffee and we were like what would you would be willing you know in our 20s we're trying to figure out what is our 10,000 I was like what would you be willing to even do for 10,000 hours and for me it was I donned on me in that moment well I actually really enjoy writing and my favorite thing in the world is underlining sentences and books uh-huh that's my favorite feeling when I when I read something and somebody says it and I didn't even know I didn't even know you could articulate something so perfectly that was just a great cloud in my head I didn't even know I thought until I read it I it would be my dream to create sentences like that and I'll be willing to spend 10,000 hours doing it and so that gave me the confidence when I started my bike trip well it gave me the confidence to then commit to I want to be a writer I'm gonna do this trip I'm gonna write about it and also I'm gonna write about it online and just yeah see if I'm any good and that and I was just really willing to to risk it and maybe be bad yeah I don't know but that declarative act of like saying out loud I think is so important well the same way that that's how your bike trip actually came to be right you had to like announce it 100 I mean I am a coward I love to cancel plans I love to think I'm gonna do something and then not and so I knew I needed social pressure and I needed to announce I'm gonna do this thing everyone's got to know three years out so that I can't I mean it's not like road tripping to Yosemite it was a year and a half on a bicycle in countries where my mom told me I would be beheaded so that's like a big deal I know they're really psyched myself and in this three-year period of preparing to do this ride actually there wasn't that much preparation right there was there was yeah you're acclimating to the idea but during this phase it didn't dawn on you that you were in certain respects walking in the footsteps of your parents who were made famous by their amazing trek across America which we talked about last night right but it's like how is that possible that it didn't occur to you that you were doing something that was so so much so similar in so many ways to that defining you know act that they are most well-known for you know really looking back on it I think a lot of that has to do with this theme of compartmentalization that we've been talking about I in order to not ruffle the feathers of my family I really built my own life I went to high school alone my sister and brother went to different high schools I just really felt autonomous and so that's what's funny is like I didn't acknowledge that I was the result of an amazing family of an amazing upbringing of an incredible faith tradition of a sense of safety of creative parents who encourage creativity and fearlessness and do what you love I was just I thought I was this the likes unique flower that grew in a desert and you know that is just a real awakening when all the sudden you're literally imitating your parents almost exactly and and their and their vocation like travel writing memoir I invented that right category yeah it's it's incredible how willfully it will for it willfully ignorant I can be I want to explore the the faith aspect of this a little bit more deeply like in the in the process of this adventure that you go on how hat you know and in the wake of that and now writing about it like where where are you today in your relationship to Christianity your faith the Evangelical Church I've really been influenced by a teacher named father Richard Rohr he's a Franciscan friar I believe and he's written a lot about non-dualism and similar to his amazing writers like Thomas Merton and he's kind of expanded outside of is just this or that you believe Jesus is the Son of God or you don't you believe he literally rose from the dead on the third day or you don't you're a Christian or you're not and there's such a Simplot that's such a simplistic view of the world and what father Richard says is the path to enlightenment is to transcend and include and so when you move when you feel like you've moved through something and it's no longer for you understand that it was for you because it brought you here mmm and and it's not saying that like I'm wiser than evangelical Christianity or something I'm just saying that I tried it I tried it my damndest I went full bore and had my first kiss at 28 first time I had sex was 30 and that's because I tried it real hard I went I led Bible studies I would like leave law school every Tuesday every Friday and lead these high school Bible studies because I'm gonna be the best I'm gonna like fail my classes I almost failed a semester of law school because a friend of mine went into a coma and we did intercessory prayer every night I didn't sleep I didn't even go to classes trying to save him which didn't work and I mean I did a full-bore that and it did that just that worldview did not serve me to speak very pragmatically and yeah it certainly did serve me it like gave me a lot of the infrastructure of my mind which I now hold very dear and so but to transcend and include is to thank it for what it is but and and understand that it's incredibly integral into the fabric of reality but also there's more and so I would say I still not call myself a Christian I would call myself a mystic Christian in the sense where I reject I reject as a strong word I do not feel drawn to evangelical Christianity's obsession with certainty either you believe the Bible like us or you're deceived you know like this is exactly how old the earth is this is exact what God meant there's just a lot of obsession with certainty because when the world is chaotic it's actually nice to know some some things for certain and to have somebody stand onstage and tell you life is exactly like this and if you do a B and C you're gonna live for eternity and paradise if you if your world is falling apart that is very comforting yeah it's an antidote to fear it allows you to sleep well at night and and so I really respect and love that and I love Jesus and I I believe a lot of things about Jesus but I just don't believe in the certainty and the exclusion and the the tightness of that narrative anymore it sounds not dissimilar from the kind of things that rob belt talks about well that's I mean the the ever-widening circle if you go on this journey and you have the disposition to be curious about other ways of thinking and you don't lock in I mean that was the thing where like there was a evangelicalism never stood a chance with me because I'm too curious and I and I too deeply like hold things with an open hand I don't love to me locking in like this must be how life is only this and then I see it bang up against reality over and over and over and over again and then all of a sudden your brain has to be a lawyer to like convince you that your old worldview still fits in with reality and you're constantly in this like legal battle with the worldview you accepted as truth and new evidence I mean that's the history of the Christian Church is them like scrambling to and I was like that just is not I I don't want to constantly scramble I just want to hold it with an open hand and see what comes but also understand that I come from a tradition I come from a sincere relationship with God that I still have and while my language may have expanded my understanding my understanding of the universe may have changed expanded I don't reject it I don't believe it I don't want to even say it hurt me it taught me I was at a conference this past weekend on the East Coast and one of the speaker's was so amazing this woman Nadia Bowles Webber have you ever heard of her mm-hmm she's a Lutheran pastor but if you saw her you would think that she plays bass in a punk rock band in the East Village cool she's got sleeve tattoos down both arms like this while gray hairs about my age and just like fire in her eyes and like this spirit and she walks like the the caller but she cuts the sleeves off the shirt she's just like I'm like I love it yeah like wow she was really really powerful I'm gonna try to get her on the podcast but you know pastor lutheran pastor in Denver I mean it's a really special thing there's I mean I don't remember the exact statistic but it's something like 85 million Americans consider themselves born-again Christians which is a lot it's almost a third and that and then if you include Catholics and all these other things it's like most of America and so if you cannot speak that language and you cannot see the world that way then you're then you're gonna lose a lot of communication and connection with human beings all around you it's such an important point I mean is somebody who who grew up in Tennessee born of the evangelical tradition this this mystics stuck in a millennial body as in Tom Shadyac this referred to you as and as somebody who you know grew up in it and and what sounds like a relatively conservative community but you being this progressive how do you you know what's your perspective when you look at the dialogue that we're having right now about culture about politics about social mores it's a very toxic scenario that we find ourselves and and I'm always thinking about ways to bridge that divide you know we're so siloed of course I mean it's a it's a trope at this point but if we don't find ways to exude compassion and ways of shelving our judgement in the interest of trying to bridge this divide so that we can be the United the United States of America we're in big trouble well Jonathan Hite talks a lot about this in his book righteous mind which was so influential am I thinking I recommend everybody read it but in in order to have unity of any kind of nationalistic unity you need a common enemy so the more divided a country gets often it means the more the more we bicker about smaller and smaller things it's actually like a it signifies a pretty healthy society where you're freaking out over little nuance things happening in government whereas like when you have a common enemy like Pearl Harbor or Hitler I mean that's why the greatest the greatest generation rose out of the world having a common enemy the Axis powers and it's it created this entire generation of Americans that felt unified in we are America we stand for virtue we stand for valor we stand for democracy against tyrants and you still see people using that language in a generation like mine where war is so bifurcated into things that don't feel like war they feel like response to terrorism they feel like so provincial and strange and alien and and complex and like why are we even fighting this to where now you know a lot of people my age see someone in uniform and they have mixed emotions about it they're not like wow what a hero they're like wow what are you doing over there you know and that really you know the breakdown probably be with Vietnam I wasn't alive but what I perceive of history and so and we felt it a little bit in my lifetime with 9/11 where America became America for like six months or something and I remember feeling that like I remember seeing an American flag on like September 19th 2001 and thinking I love this country and what we stand for and I want to kiss everyone I see on the street because there was this idea of having a common enemy we're very complex apes who are a tribe and our tribes have just continued to expand so the more complex we get the the more difficult it will be to have unity as a globalized world as a nation and so you've all her re as he said on your show thinks climate change could do that but as you said it's so ephemeral it's really hard to like hate a temperature degree difference yeah you know like what does that even look like in terms of the way in which we speak to each other and the like complete falling apart of civil discourse I think a lot of it has to do with us reverting to these natural instincts of creating enemies out of those that disagree with us you the moment you can like call a group of people cockroaches you dehumanize them and you know or deplorable or whatever you want to say and you you create a categorical stereotype that is now able to be crushed and I was listening to this interview of Oprah by Van Jones the other day and Van Jones asked her if you had 10 minutes alone with Donald Trump what would you say to him and I loved her answer I'm still thinking about her answer but she said I don't know I don't really speak to people if I won't I won't speak to someone if I know I won't be heard mm-hmm and so I'd probably be silent or she said something like that and I really thought about if you can't be heard and this is what happens when a liberal and a conservative are shouting at each other yeah listening no one's listening I mean and that's actually brain chemistry when you're in an argument the part of your brain that learned some information loses blood the part of your brain that is the filing cabinets of your own argument is raging with neuron like firing and so you the part of you that learns is turned off the part of you the defense it's pre held positions is on raging and so heated arguments that's why that's why nothing good has ever happened on Twitter except being surprised by news is like no one in a Twitter battle ever reaches a new idea it's rare I'm sure it's happened but so I think I think there's places certainly important places for people to be angry anger is an expression of pain is an important expression of pain and it gets attention and draws attention to a cause and then I think there's important places for people who fly 30,000 feet above and say let's understand where you're coming from let's understand where you're coming from and let's let let you both reach a place of relative safety where you can hear each other and so how do you do that in a one-on-one I mean you live you live in Silver Lake but you you go home like you're home all the time right you're in Tennessee you're you're you're you're part of that community still back there oh yeah so when you are engaging somebody you know one-on-one or at a dinner party or you're with your mom what does that look like if you do not have respect for the person you're talking to and if you cannot entertain the fact that you might be wrong you cannot have civil discourse it's it becomes charity at that point it becomes patronizing it becomes propaganda I don't know that everything I believe is true I believe certain things have significant evidence and other things do not I've never seen a polar bear die from global warming but I know a lot of scientists agree that it's happening and so I tend to trust experts I and a progressive person I'm socially progressive I've seen how progressive policies have impacted my life as a gay man and the life of my black friends the life of my people who have people of color in my life I've seen how progressive policies have changed history I've also seen how hyper far-left policies have destroyed entire nations and so fiscally conservative people have a lot of good ideas I and I for me you can have a good conversation with anyone if you're curious about what they think and why they think it and a lot of times people have never asked them and so I tend to remove myself I feel like a very small ant on a very large planet and so screaming at my cousin for voting for Trump and believing that climate change is not real feels like it's gonna give me high blood pressure and I don't know what's gonna change mm-hmm whereas if I am curious about why he thinks that way and then I make him feel safe and respected he may be curious about why I feel that way and I mean and I've had conservative friends tell me you're the only liberal person I can talk to mm-hmm and they're like why is everyone so angry and you know and I like try to break it down and I'm like because they're scared yeah and that that's a two-way street but I think if you approach those conversations from a perspective of of curiosity like you said you know or to come from this place of that's interesting tell me more about that you know I want to understand and I feel like that's the note I play and the conversation that's my personality I believe that the angry screaming activist is also an instrument in the orchestra I believe it yeah although everybody has their part to play those people are important because they they they tow that line or they show you where that line is and they not they may not be converting people to their perspective but they're letting you know where the where that line for them exists and I'll speak from experience this hat Furguson the Marches and Ferguson happened in 2014 miles on my bike trip and I thought I was this open-eyed progressive Los Angeles person and I remember they were marching through the streets and I was like why are these black people so angry like how did they just mobilize after this one random person was killed like I just was so ignorant and that rage and mobilization that I was like there must be some current of truth and what's going on and what they're saying are they these people could not unify to make a statement like this the streets are full of weeping black people and that like that expression of rage anger woke me up 2x start asking questions and say clearly what I thought was a post-racial America was wrong mm-hmm and that is like obviously let our whole country down this conversation and the tipping point was anger very true you know very true I've had my own journey with that as well where you think oh you know I'm a liberal I know what's going on and then something gets thrown in your face and you realize like I still have growth yeah in this place but to be able to hear that and not just react and be defensive but to like take it in pause meditate for ten minutes well and it's and people who are defensive people who are quick to anger that is always rooted in fear and the fact that feel that admit just might be true and fear that that their safety is compromised you know it and it's sincere and so you learning like through other people of course some people are hot Headz and they're angry too often over small things but often times especially when there's an entire angry culture or there's an entire movement then you need to listen that there is truth there is deep truth woven in there that is the immune system of humanity flaring up mm-hmm speaking of truth truth is the touchstone in your writing it's all about personal truth and trying to find a way to tap into universal universal truth by by expressing your personal truth and I know firsthand how difficult that can be when you're writing a book that people are going to read and there's other human beings involved that happen to be real people in your life mmm so how do you how did you you know tiptoe around that yeah when you if you want to write memoirs and you write about your real life it's really hard because you don't live probably you don't live alone on an island you live around people that you love who maybe there aren't maybe they aren't even villains or evil maybe they love you and through their love of you they hurt you do you know I'm saying like this is my relationship with my family they all we love each other so much and by very nature of doing your best and the circumstance of my identity and figuring it out there there was pain mm-hmm and everyone is doing their best and just outpouring love and there's incredible pain and it wasn't intentional the infliction of that pain ever and none of them signed up to be written about in a book exactly and so one thing that was really influential for me was I was I bought Jack Kerouac book Big Sur I think it was this book there's one of his books and III always read the introduction because these like literary professors write such great like overviews of what's going on and one of the things this intro said was Jack Kerouac his books are full of colorful inappropriate wild people and you'll never hear him say a bad word about any of them and what it is is he's able to paint these people but you can tell he likes them even though they're doing the craziest and they're being horrible to him or whatever he likes them and you can read you can feel that in the page and in on the page and in the way he talks about them and I am that way I don't have any enemies in this world I couldn't love my family more I I love them the most I couldn't love my friend Weston who went on the trip with me his real name is Philip and he is the well if you're gonna say it here why didn't you just write Philip in the book well no the thing is it's the same reason SIA covers her face with a wig you can google her face at any moment uh-huh but it's just just one level it's one one step removed just gives like I don't know a little bit more privacy and he is very wild in the book I mean compared to me who's like recovering goody two-shoes so I was just like I'm gonna give you one step removed he didn't want me to do that I just wanted to uh-huh and that's probably a little bit of being triggered by kony2012 and you never know when you put something out into the world how people are gonna take it and so I was like I'm just gonna give you one one click but I wanted to write honestly about people from the position of I love you but what you do is interesting and that kind of like disconnection and disassociation I hope is conveyed in the book did you have that conversation with certain people beforehand no I did it afterwards well with Philip I did he said he gave me permission to write whatever I wanted with my parents I didn't I actually thought I was extra loving and generous and trying to write about them but also truthfully and it was hard my mom read the book and was really hurt by the way I spoke about her and that's you know if I'm just like rich you're like one of the best guys were like best friends and just like you know you're kind of like he's kind of cheap but he's like the best guy like all you'll hear is you think I'm cheap you know you you your brain the if someone speaks about you in anything but a overflowing league congratulatory or celebratory way that's what you latch on to especially when they have somewhat of a it's gonna be in public and you don't have a way to defend yourself or give your own perspective I learned so much about my mom from her reaction to my book and my misunderstanding of my own childhood I now such as such as I thought she was this like just Jesus loving I mean she is person who forced us to go to church all the time because we just had to love Jesus little did I really comprehend how hard it is to raise three kids alone and when your dad is off somewhere writing books and not in the picture enough and it's on you and you have no money the only real safe place to go in in that time was for her to take us to all these church events and take us on retreats and make us go anything because it's like I can't handle all these kids at once I mean I have friends who are married raising lunch kid right now and they can hardly brush their teeth so I'm like how on earth did my mother do this I have no idea and so that's something of course I never perceived that my mom was a human until I was about 22 I thought she was this like force of nature as a lot of us do and there are those moments that land on you like bricks where you realize the your your mom is a 16 year old girl who got older you know your mom is you who got a little older and that I mean that's just things I can't see and when you look back on your own childhood your truth is is your truth so I don't I didn't change it in the book of how I perceived it cuz that is exactly how it is but she gave me some perspectives of her experience that I was like wow I and I included some of that in there and is she okay now she's nervous about the book coming out listen she's a she is a wise woman who's been through a lot and walked across America and had a very public brutal divorce with a famous author and her and she's lived and so she is not a fragile woman and she's got got on her side and yes she does yes she does so I'm not worried about her I mean our relationship is complicated you know and it's I mean I'm in that flux as we record this podcast I don't know when I talk to her next what it'll be like you know so but we we both even when we have really intense email exchanges we're not very confrontational in person but we can get we're both writers so we get real deep in the emails and there they begin it's almost like we took conflict resolution courses they beat off they always begin and end with utter adoration and love and I will never leave you will never stop loving you and then you say the really hard and then you land it with I will never stop loving you I will never leave you I will be there and that like so it's safe it just it allows you to like express this thing and no you're not about to lose a relationship there might be boundaries there might be things we never see eye to eye on but the relate that the foundation of the relationship will never leave right barb right yeah yeah dream the best is what do you do these Instagram stories and you're with barb and she's getting loose with her friends pay unbelievable no they're they're I mean they're like this is the thing she's very easy to love I mean she's the most incredible woman my dad is an amazing man my family is amazing but that's that's the big complicated I mean I guess what I'm not I'm not like the first person to write about I'm not the first gay boy to write about their mother and a memoir do you know I'm saying is is like Warren territory right but it's not running with scissors no it's different and that's like what's so interesting is every time you hear someone tell a true story no matter how extreme it is you're able to transpose that over your life and glean some truth about your own experience one of my one of my best friends out here has raised this beautiful woman she's raised Orthodox Jewish and never met a Gentile until she was 19 mm-hmm like then lived on like Pico Robertson like right in the middle of LA and incredibly Jewish family incredible Jewish family and she is in her 30s now and unmarried and that's really hard for her family and she feels like a failure and yet she she also is like the dopest girl I've ever met and the coolest and lives the most amazing life and everyone loves her and is so successful and she has this so similar to me experience of shame and the influence of the culture and tradition in which she was raised her love of God and wanted to do right by God her love of family I wanted to do right by family and so when I was telling her about my book and and how it breaks down she started like crying and she was like that's my story well I'm like no it's not I'm a gay Christian boy and she's like no that is my exact story and so it's just interesting how that's that's because it's the truth supersedes all right and if you're speaking from a place of truth you're gonna you're gonna tap into some vein of humanity that we all share and that's what great writing is well and that's where I remember reading I think it's the Paris Review they do these amazing collections of author interviews and one of the guy the guy interviewed this woman and said what when you're writing this novel did you know what it would mean did you did you like intentionally put in your message in the story and she's like I don't believe in doing that she's like I just believe in telling true stories because the truth is the teacher not me and so if I just tell the truth then it'll have a message whatever message is meant to be conveyed will percolate out right and the moment you try to be the teacher then you're probably getting it a little wrong right and so that's with this book I they tried and you can tell I'm very open about everything and I'm very much so like that in the book because I'm like it doesn't serve me to hold a secret it's it's inside my core and like burns and rots I might as well puke it up in this book and then it's out there and then I saw this with I've seen this happen time and time again especially in the Christian world hidden secrets that destroy someone's reputation and identity when they come out later destroy and so I'm like well if I have no secrets then guess what you can't destroy my reputation because it you if you know me you know I can get anything on you yeah because you're out about it but that doesn't mean that it isn't difficult to be that vulnerable on the page it takes a lot of courage you know to to be like okay am I really gonna say this about myself or this thing that I'm not proud of or this this you know event that occurred around which I still Harbor some shame right it's it's terrifying you know a lot of that terror is mitigated when you have a really tight-knit community of friends that you respect and that respect you if you let them read pages I let one I let my best friend Lauren read it first but I didn't let people read it as I was going because I didn't want I didn't want like the ship to keep turning over and over again at night I wanted to like get it all out and then figure out what it was and so once it was all out and my editors went at it because I also my editors didn't know me and so I really respected their notes because most readers of a book don't know you hopefully and so if they're like this doesn't make sense their notes are important and um so once they had gone through and we done all those edits then I gave it to my friends to read just because they're my true my goal is actually to make them like it mm-hmm if they respect my work then I'm done because I respect them the most and so and what's so special about it is that the ones that have read it are really touched by it and they're proud of me and they've underlined things which is my dream and so you've already won hasn't even come out yet I feel 100% I feel people ask me am i nervous no I the thing is like I've written a thing that is now a tool that I hope it gets in the hands of a lot of people struggling with identity and I'm proud of it my friends are proud of me that's you live in a blessed life I know and that's a thing is if you can if you are lucky enough to find a community of friends that you respect that respect to you you a lot of things that people call courage just become natural like being open and honest about your life I don't fear abandonment at all because my this community of friends that I have know everything about me and already won't leave me I was gonna say you're somebody who's amazing with friends and then I realize like well I haven't seen you in three years and I'm basing that entirely on on this this like projected relationship that I have with you based on me following your social media but all in dish' is there that you surround yourself with a lot of good people that you trust and rely on and you're very much a part of a community yeah and that is I'm a hyper social person I'm a double extrovert I get energy by being around other people and I think by speaking so if I'm alone I'm asleep and or meditating now right yeah that's my breathe so I just am very fortunate to have tracked these people down and forced them to be my friends against their will and it's just I don't know I really feel like when a human being is in community they are most alive at least for me and then in the fullness of a purpose and I didn't a lot of those things come through when you feel part of and maybe this is our evolved DNA to be in a tribe and when the tribe is united and feeling really close-knit you feel safe you feel like you can take on any bad guys you feel like you're gonna make it and with that foundation of a sense of safety you can start moving up Maslow's hierarchy of needs you know you can start right pursuing self-actualization you can start cultivating respect and character because the safety net is there yeah that's a big for me that's the biggest thing and I always when people are not ready if you're 46 and if in the closet if you don't feel safe I don't blame you for staying in that closet if you're in any kind of situation and you don't feel safe that's courage when you step out and you do not feel safe but something and you demands that you take that step I have rarely done that I mean I was scared to do this bike trip for sure that's like the most courageous thing I've ever done but most of the things I do are because I feel unconditional love and therefore can really pursue the truth of Who I am with gusto right it's a powerful man it's really powerful in the in the writing of this book the original idea was that you were gonna do this as a self-published thing right and then a certain wise person talked to you out of it so I mean originally of course I wanted to it to be published by a publisher but I tried and no one was biting and my item amazing this amazing agent and she was like I'm sorry I've sent it to so many people and they're just not biting maybe we need to rework it I don't know what was the feedback just this is a travelogue the feedback was oh great another gay guy like mad at his mom wow you like are on a bicycle they're just like and really it was really it was oh you're like instant I'm famous that's not legitimate literature so no and and I was like well you know and this Invisible Children trained me to be like a raucous Punk so I was like we're in a new time and polishing is dying and I'm gonna self publish and you're I'm gonna show you and so I started and that is a way 100 percent it's a way and people have had a huge success doing and it's an incredible thing I do not mean to deny that as I but one thing that I know that I am is really scatterbrained and bad at a lot of things that involve any level of organization and so I was at a conference up in Northern California and Cheryl Strayed was there and I had met her once before in telly right at a film festival and so we kind of knew each other hi hi hi you know and then I had given a talk that morning so she had heard me give my talk which like gives you a little bit of legitimacy of like they know a little bit about you he's been vetted a little bit yeah so we're we're sitting at lunch and she i probably sat next to her just like he this seat taken and sat there and she goes tell me about this book you're working on like what's it would tell me about it and she's just like such a good listener and there's she has this magic Jinna say quoi that makes you just want to tell her everything which is why she's such a great advice columnist and vise giver and I told her that I tried to publish and know what he would buy it and it's a new world and I'm just gonna self publish and do it myself and she said to me I mean I don't even know her and she said to me okay do you want me to encourage you or do you want my advice mmm which I loved I was like whoa badass yes I want your advice I can take it and she said if you're anything like me you don't want to be a publicist a marketer a copy editor and editor a shipping company and a graphic designer Agra fan develop relationships with 6000 bookstores across the u.s. if you're anything like me you want to be a writer you want to focus on writing and she was like you can self publish if you want but all of those other pieces are very important to success and so what's great about traditional publishing is that they are professional they have hired actual individuals who do all of those jobs exceptionally well and so you get to write and focus on writing and she was like what I'm gonna tell you is that if no one's biting I would say it's probably not good enough yet you need to keep working on it and that's a hard pill to swallow but is the best advice anyone ever gave me I said thank you I'm gonna do that I'm gonna think about it and then I'm gonna do that and right at that moment I had this other agent reach out to me and he said I can get your book sold give me a chance and my other my agent at the time who was a dream she was like listen it's my job to get you a book deal if I can do that for you go for it like if someone thinks they can like all I want is for you to get this book done so she released me I went with this new guy we reworked it retooled it went out a couple months later and sold it - did you go back to houses you had already submitted - yes because that's like that's not coming from zero that's coming from behind yeah they already are coming in saying didn't I say no to this already yeah the thing is we went to this new agent was older and had real cred with certain imprints at these agents or at these publishers and so he was like we've reworked this I want you to look at it again hmm and they get so many submissions they probably barely remembered what I had submitted before and a few of them really liked it and specifically penguin Random House his imprint convergent really liked it and they courted me and I mean it was a really special experience and a dream come true and I think wow if Cheryl Strayed hadn't hadn't spoken her truth to me in a way that in which to bring it back to what we were saying before I was in a position to hear her mmm I wasn't defense so it came your millennial snowflake ISM yeah I hear let the snowflake melt and just became water and absorbed her and I heard her and it changed my life and now I have this book and she gave us this amazing blurb yeah which we know oh my gosh she's so special and such an incredible influence on so many people's lives and as I step into this world where I speak openly about myself my problems my mistakes my shames she has walked that road really successfully if she's the standard-bearer I mean for the three people that are listening who don't know who she is she wrote while this incredible memoirs many beautiful ways yeah yeah with her spoon she writes dear sugars I guess it's also a podcast amazing on she's an incredible human being yeah so and for her to read the book that was my biggest fear was for her to be like oh proud of you you did it you know like a very general look what you did which is a code for I was so bored and she really liked the book and gave me this beautiful quote that we're gonna print on the second pass and just I mean that it's one thing to have my best friends who know me to my core get what I'm trying to say but to have someone who like knows me tangentially not really and really through a professional context who is like the peak of their career to look down at me at the bottom of the mountain and say you're doing a good job is really a powerful thing to urge it's huge and continuing in that vein of like mentors and like for some reason you being this magnet for hanging out with cool people how did I know Tom Shadyac has been like this mentor to you and has I've just impact on you I mean how did that come about and and you know what is it that he injected into the jet equation he has injected more into the equation than anyone in my life I would venture to say in terms of giving me language to restructure my entire thinking and sometimes he did it in ways that I wasn't able to hear like he told me things that I didn't like that I liked three years later and it's so funny they like about storytelling or about about my worldview I mean he he told me early on when I was telling him that I don't act on my sexuality because the Bible says so he goes you got to let the Bible go and I was not ready to hear that I was like aha you're a heretic mm-hmm I can't trust you anymore and and what he meant by that is you can't worship the Bible you need to worship God and another thing he told me once when I'm processing all this with him he's so generous with his time to even talk to me back then was you know I was talking about dealing with sexuality and faith and all these things and I was so deep in it and he said Jed let me ask you a question where does your allegiance lie all right is your allegiance with your tradition with is your allegiance with Christianity or is your allegiance with the truth and I was like well I think that's a trick question because Christianity is the truth but I would say the truth and he goes okay that's all I ask is that you keep it there and that was like somebody with a hammer and a nail and a marble statue ding ding ding ding and making that one little crack to break my whole worship of certainty apart where if my allegiance is with the truth then I do not fear new evidence from experience from the outside world from my heart because the truth is the truth is the truth it is unshakable so God is not scared by someone challenging him or her it the Bible is not scared not the truth is not scared and yet there was so much anxiety in defending this tiny little bit of certain truth that my worldview had and it was so anxious of being perverted and changed and somebody ruining it that when he said that those words and when he said it then it didn't land on me the way it lands on me now he's just really good at telling you things you're not ready to hear and then you thank him years later and so how does that manifest in your life and in your awareness and in your writing and how you carry yourself well that I mean fully it manifests in I am eternally teachable there is nothing there is nothing that I believe that I could not change my belief about because I'm like I don't actually care what the truth is I just believe that it exists I have no allegiance to what I think it is it could change mm-hmm and now of course the more evidence really it's like it's such a relief it is such a relief I have nothing to defend and it just the truth is God is so much bigger that it doesn't need defense and and that is such a exhale of life that I try to embody every day so when you're mining your psyche and your experience to find that truth and make its way onto the page what are the devices that you use like what is the litmus test of truth for you great question I think I pursue truth not because it's important but because it feels good it just when I learn something new that feels true and I recognize it as true it feels it is a rush blaze of your feelings of course I mean I don't actually leave in anything but feelings I mean I mean there's obviously math and physics but humans are feelings and and our limbic system is way older than the rest of our frontal cortex so it's like there's a lot of truth in there and when I learn something new like my phone the notes on section on my phone is full of moments that where that electricity of recognition shocked me and I'm like can I write it down and then that often become something I write about on Instagram and I feel no compulsion to write regularly I feel no compulsion like oh I haven't the moment I have an electric thought I've write it down and then I process it and then I put it out there and maybe it's a dumb thought but it felt like something true and I'm just gonna test it and what's fun about put testing those thoughts with the world is that if you get pushback or someone says you're thinking wrongly or that's not my experience then I'm like ooh good point you know like let's let's roll with this and so yeah my litmus test is really as I observe and absorb living as a human being in my brain the pattern recognition software in my brain recognizes things work like this things don't work like this so when some when I see something new that lights up and matches other patterns that interests me yeah and that is my second ding ding learnt you've you've like conditioned yourself to recognize it yeah you know it and and then I try to find language for it and oftentimes the language comes in just a few words and then I'll unpack it which is I mean is it's the best feeling it's so it's my favorite thing when I read these these posts on Instagram they're so naturalistic but it feels like on some level a stream of consciousness mm-hmm but it's also so well crafted and composed and I'm like god damn it it looks like he wrote that in ten seconds please tell me took him like three hours to go I mean sometimes usually it takes me just I don't know 15 minutes there's not huh where I like and I generally do it where I type it out in the note section so that I can like read it and reread it yeah you don't just natively put it into Instagram it depends on what it is I used to do that a lot but then I would Instagram would freeze or something and I would lose it so a the composition window is so narrow right and I need to see it yeah so I do it in the notes section and I'm normally like sitting on my couch or at a coffee shop and it'll just cut like I'll be reading a book or doing some other work working on emails and some electric thought will hit me and I have to get it out or I can't work and that's like we're posts come from like they bother me that's a lie so that's why you're a real writer I have to yeah they I cannot think about anything else until I figure out how to word this and then once I've like exhaled it then I can go about my business mm-hmm so what is it that you want people to take from this book hmm my hope is and now that it's done I hadn't actually read it until I recorded the audiobook because in the past I had read it over and over again during edits and so I would keep catching things and then like rewind rewrite it so it wasn't this I'd never from below let me ask you let me interrupt you to ask you one question yeah did you have that experience you were speaking about the benefits of that Chelse trade was telling you about like going with a publisher and they handle all these their expert and all these various specialties with regard to publishing did you have that experience where you turned in the manuscript and you're like this thing is tight like you're like mm-hmm every word is exactly the way that I want it I've read it a million times the punctuation is perfect and then they have the copy editor go through it and it comes back just you just keep there's literally red marks on every row yeah bloodbath it's like graphic write all the amount of blood there's a censored bar over it I definitely had that except I turned it in without having labored over every word I am a external processor a lot of my writing I never read again I just this is first draft I wrote it now I really hate you and then it's out and I send it to them because I like wow I get so caught up in thinking new thoughts when I'm reading something that I'm like I must have thought it best that time because I'm just gonna go off on another direction if I go back in there and it and then once they in their clarity and lucidity we're like this doesn't make sense you jump from here to here I know you want this to be an emotional moment but you didn't set it up before to knock it down so you got to set it up they were really good at teaching me those things and so there was many many back-and-forth but I'm not I'm not someone who Labor's over my words I just I write like I speak I hope and it's just like whatever I'm thinking yeah but there is structure to it which is interesting I mean when you tell the truth like nature has structure so it kind of comes out it's so interesting the flow of the book and and how it's said of him when I read it I was like wow this really worked you know but I credit my editors with that because I don't know what I was doing yeah I think you know what you're doing I mean some simple guidelines of tell the truth try to if you're gonna if something's gonna happen you need to explain why it matters you know and set it up before like little things like that I knew but outside of that I've never done this before and so we're gonna work our way back to that original question about what you want people to take from the book but but on this subject of you know going through the book for the first time from beginning to end when you do the audiobook what is the you know what did the book teach you like what I'm interested in like your journey through it from this place of what you thought it would be when you began to what it is now and and you know what that what that process was like for you in terms of you know a teachable moment for yourself in the doing right that's Jon Chu yeah as you did well it's funny because in in the in like when scientists research memory and stuff they when you tell a memory the telling of it changes the actual memory like the truest memory you'll ever have is the one that you tell for the first time is actually the one you never tell you know it's like the moment you speak it the neurons rearrange and like there's stories from my childhood that I've told so many times I'm certain none of it's true any right well you have that little profit or a paragraph at the beginning of them yeah yeah we just fine yeah I say at the beginning of the book like receive this book as you would a long story told by a friend over dinner you know and like if they're telling a long story about their past you're not like fact-checking them too hard even though like in truth the book is very true but there are things that I jumped over and things I simplified because well you have to do you have to define truth like sometimes the truth of a story isn't in the specific factual unfoldment about it right totally so what did it teach me well I would say one thing is interesting is as you read a book your brain constructs the narrator and it can you can almost see them you can feel them as a real person and as you get to know them especially a book written the first person which this one is and what is interesting is that narrator isn't exactly me which as I was reading I was like whoa then there it's like me ish it's me with a little more understanding than I had at the time it's me a little bit clearer which is like it's just an interesting thing to like imagine myself as like a character in a movie that looks like me with just like the eyes are a little close together and the beards a little huh but something and and with a little bit armed with a little bit more insight it was a trip somewhere bing-bang to like feel that and yeah I don't know what else I learned I mean I learned that it's really fun to read your own book as I just had the best time and it's fun to read it with a director and an engineer through the glass and they haven't read it and so there or at least the engineer hasn't read it and so they're experiencing like sometimes I would see through the glass he would be laughing or whatever and it is just really cool to experience that live exchange uh-huh I don't know I don't know what I learned well what do you want people to take from it I would hope that people would enjoy the book as an adventure story because it is it really is I mean there is so much magic in Latin America that is put on display in this book and I was so blessed by that entire part of the world I mean oh my god every country Mexico all of Central America I mean Colombia Ecuador Peru Bolivia Argentina Chile like each place is so different and so special and so that alone is like just young but then the journey into the interior of who you are what you believe and why if people aren't taking that journey in their life they're missing a huge part of what it means to be human and as the title suggests I hope that people are willing to watch me do that in a beautiful location in their imagination and it gives them maybe some tools maybe some do's and don'ts of taking that journey themselves do you think that you would have been able to take that journey without going on this bike ride yes I think a lot of people and I know people in my own life who are on that journey now well they have a nine-to-five job not in LA but in other cities no one works not enough you know and but but I do believe that it helps to take yourself out of the of the structure that your life is built on because it does shake you awake it does expose patterns of thinking and other ways of thinking and being when you go and remove yourself from your comfort zone that begin this process for you there's a line in wilde I believe it is where Cheryl straights mother told her to put herself in the way of beauty and I just think about that all the time it's like you need to put yourself in the way because it's not necessarily gonna come through your front door mm-hmm and yeah you have this beautiful passage in the introduction where you talk about how when we're young and everything's new and everything's an adventure and we have no preconceived ideas about what to expect about what you know is gonna happen when we walk through the next door because everything is shiny and different yeah and then we we get you know inured to our to our lives and even if we live interesting happy dynamic lives we're still habits of creature and there is a dimming switch that occurs with that but when you travel to new places suddenly you're able to connect with that childlike nature because everything is indeed new again right well and of course we're that way if we were shocked by everything that happened every day we would get nothing done you know like of course we get used to things we're like elf yeah everything exactly I mean we don't want that but I will say there cultivating childlike wonder once in a while at different phases and transitions in life is important and does re sensitize you to the beauty of life and also the willful choosing of your own journey and path you know accept and flow down the river but also feel like you chose it that's the beautiful sweet spot and we have lost touch with these rites of passage and these rituals that were part and parcel of growing up in a bygone era and there's something you know there's something sad about that I mean there's just a lot of things I I never grew up in a real liturgical church where you just like go through all these motions and you have these readings and you go to the front and you get the communion but there is some I mean there's a reason why those things have lasted thousands of years there's there is something about when the human when a human performs something ceremony ceremonious ceremony or ammonia yes my words when a human performs something ceremonial it's almost like language it gives them a metaphor a frame around this much bigger thing like a marriage ceremony gives you a before and after a whatever it is you know when someone dies and you take their ashes out on a surfboard and everyone circles around and like that ceremony and reverence gives that feeling that heaviness that weight of before and after and that is helpful in the human brain that likes chapters I think ritual is important even if these ceremonies are as simple as you know the way you prepare tea oh yeah or you know the 10 minutes of meditation I think the more that we can kind of connect with whatever is primordial about that mmm it grows our lives with with with a level of meaning and depth that that we know is true even if it doesn't seem to make logical sense I hope to have kids someday we'll see but if and when I do I will I will like institutionalize a gap year a gap to year a situation where it's like you go from high school to college and you were and it's not going to be in this country and you have to and it is like an every kid knows that the younger ones like oh god that's coming up and the other ones like oh wow I mean something like that I just feel is really powerful and you do feel like removed from the conveyor belt of Education and all of a sudden you feel whoa I have to make my own money whoa life is actually not that easy you have to work hard I don't know so I'm just like thinking like something like that they're like my dad did this thing with us which was really special which is after we graduated college he took us on solo adventures so when I graduated college I went on a seven-week motorcycle trip with my dad across the US and we was all back roads no freeways allowed and it was so special and I felt so seen and loved by him and he had done it with my sister and he did it with my brother and whatever so and that felt like I don't know if it was a rite of passage but it definitely felt like a tradition that I was a part of mm-hmm and that I had earned finally my turn which is a feeling people want to feel yeah but adventure was sort of woven into your your growing up experience you guys want to present camping trips and all kinds of stuff yeah well I mean and both my parents were writers so if you live in that world it's feast or famine or famine and famine you know it's it's rarely you make a lot of money so they were big shots in the early 80s and made some good money and then the coffers dried up and so my childhood is like we don't fly on planes we don't go to fancy things so we go camping because you can drive there and it's cheap and so it's interesting my love of camping and nature was also like a bit of necessity for this is what we can afford to do and still do things as a family and see the world that we love mm-hmm yeah all right we got to wind this down yeah I gotta pick up my daughters so leave us with some parting thoughts about the book about this journey that you're about to embark on a new adventure a new journey of of going out and sharing about the book I already asked you you know what you want people to take away from the book but you know I want to hear like if there's one kind of core message that you want to leave people with about your writing about your life about this book what would that be hmm I would say I would say there's a lot of anxiety stress sadness loneliness in the world and if that is true one would hope that the opposite is also true and listen I don't know how it happened I don't know who I am I've had a lot of struggles in my life but I am living my dream I am writing every day to people who will actually read it and seem to like it I am surrounded by a community of friends that I respect and respect me I love my family it's complicated we get in it but we love each other and life is good and so I'm telling you that when something is true the opposite is also true and like a lot of times like well am I just always going to hate my job am I just always going to hate the circumstance am I always going to have not necessarily it can be really good and I am so so grateful and to the circumstances of my life and I don't know how it happened by the way I do not know do you live an amazing life I think it's definitely true you cannot judge your future based on your current circumstances I think that universe rewards those who strive and it is an amazing arc to see you know this person whose experience could have gone sideways you know a gay kid feeling very isolated and a shame in an evangelical home I mean that's a recipe for a lot of things but not necessarily somebody who's literally their best most authentic life surrounded by people that love them and in the fullest expression of your creative voice so that is something to be celebrated and it's icing on the cake that that you are so gifted at writing and so not just eloquent in your prose but in your commitment to the truth and there is true beauty in what you express like I am so touched every time I get to read one of your Instagram posts I'm just I'm delighted by you in every regard I think I think you really do have a gift and this was awkward for me because I didn't I was only able to read the first 10 pages of this book and I wish that I had read the whole thing but I have no doubt that my praise would only be more effusive and I wish you only the best and I'm so excited for this next chapter where you get to share what I already know with meme all over the country who are going to now enjoy your words for the very first time well it's a true true privilege to talk to somebody as thoughtful and big-hearted as you because epiphanies just pour out my brain because I'm just amazed the way that you open someone up is truly unique and why this podcast is so special why you are so special I appreciate that man so you're going out on the road if people want to come and give you a hug and and get a book signed by you how can they learn more about where you're gonna be and how to make that happen yeah so October third I'll be at Parnassus books in Nashville at 6:30 p.m. October 8th I'll be at Barnes & Noble at the Grove in Los Angeles at 7:30 and then the there may be other dates added on I don't have any yet because I'm just kind of like I did a tour this summer that I ended up in the ER from stress because I had stress caused gastritis from overexerting myself loving on people I just like want to hug everybody and talk until midnight and my body was like just talking I do that every day not all mother hugging saying no I am indeed not and so I'm just kind of taking care of myself a little bit mmm and seeing what what comes but yeah I mean if people want to come hang I'll be those two places and more more to come for sure cool and I forgot to ask you about this this thing that you're involved in oh yeah you don't I beat a cop it's betta I was like is it bite as there is no real way it's a Swedish word and they pronounce it like butta which we don't I don't know but it's this travel mug company that I designed and started with my friend just because I was so tired of throwing away so many cups and red cups at parties paper cups of coffee shops I was like I just want to carry one that is pretty that is like me everywhere and then I who knows I'll save a thousand cups a year that's kind of cool and so that's what I did and and so you designed that yeah that's cool because I see these things all over the place and all kinds of people on social media are using them and talking about them and yeah they're cool it's very fun to make stuff I mean that's like another podcast but it's really fun all right so people should buy this thing where do you get that my beta B YT a.com uh-huh and did you bring me a copy of the freaking book I have one in my car but there's one in the mail on its way to you I mean if you just want to be under water with books you're supposed to get in like two days I want your I need your book you mailed it to me that's good enough yeah it's on it it's like in this guy alright cool I release you to your life if you want to connect with Jed probably the best way to do that is Instagram Joe Jenkins where you can read his musings you have a website but that's not really the gig right I mean yeah there's like links of like stuff the rod casts and interviews I've done but right but the most important thing is to pick up the book to shake the sleeping self yeah this is this podcast is going up soon its September I mean by the time this is going up but it's right when the book is coming out I think so pre-order it or just buy it and read the audio it's time to go real bookstore and just pick it up and get the heart cover right yeah awesome thank you my friend thank you much love much much success with this book launch and come back and talk to me again you know I will and and and can we hang out at least once yeah yours piece [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 70,826

Keywords: rich roll, vegan, health, fitness, diet, nutrition, athlete, podcast, inspiration, motivation, plantpower, plant-based, wellness, spirituality, mindfulness, meditation, self-help

Id: DzKITpyxy74

Length: 144min 22sec (8662 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 30 2018