Like Streams To The Ocean: Jedidiah Jenkins

Today we get esoteric on the things that matter most—ego, family, friendship, love, work, death, and the soul. The value of living an examined life. And how sharing our uniqueness gives glimpse into the universal. Returning for his third appearance on the podcast, our cipher for said exploration is one of my very favorite humans—a former social entrepreneur, human rights activist, and lawyer turned world adventurer, magazine publisher & mystic memoirist. Meet Jedidiah Jenkins. Several years ago, I stumbled across Jedidiah’s Instagram feed. His photos are always great, but it was his prose that altered my state. Enamored by his unique lens on the human condition, he quickly become my favorite follow. Determined to learn more, I invited Jedidiah on the show (RRP #186), wherein he shared insights gleaned from an epic sixteen-month, 10,000-mile bike journey pedaling from Oregon to Patagonia. This conversation remains one of my favorites to date. I then made him promise to return (RRP #395) upon completion of his first book, To Shake The Sleeping Self. A coming-of-age memoir set against the technicolor backdrop of his bicycle adventure, the book went on to become a New York Times bestseller, crowning Jedidiah as a new and compelling literary voice. An exquisite storyteller with an elegant gift for exploring the interior landscape, Jedidiah has continued to mature as a writer. His latest New York Times bestselling flex, Like Streams To The Ocean, is a touching and immersive deconstruction of the things that make us who we are and the decisions that shape our one and only life. His best work to date, it’s a masterclass on leveraging the specifics of one’s experience as a vehicle to better connect with the universal the resides within us all. So here we are again. Me wanting to know more. This conversation isn’t about any one thing. It’s kind of about everything. We discuss the writing process. How to find a voice. And what it means to be an observer of both nature and people. We talk Enneagrams, the commodification of ‘authenticity’, and how to cultivate focus in a distracted world. It’s also about identity. Belonging. Finding meaning in work. And what it means to live a creative life. It’s about the empathy required to find common ground with people of divergent world views. And why cultivating community is critical. But more than anything, this is a meditation on who we are. Why we’re here. And the struggle to glean truth from the intangible. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll582 YouTube: bit.ly/jedidiahjenkins582 As brilliant in conversation as he is on the page, I relish our conversations. And this one does not disappoint. Let your love affair with Jedidiah begin! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It's not everyone's duty to change the world. Changing someone's life right in front of you is so cosmically significant. And if you overlook that, then you damage and disrespect the impact you've already had, or are having. Finding words for things that are bothering me helps me. And I just believe that if something helps you, it probably helps someone else. And so, tell people about it. The interesting, fascinating moment in time we're living in is that every human being, if you have a smartphone and internet access, can create a window into their life that is highly curated or just is what it is.

• 1:48Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And just me being myself, being an outdoorsy, gay, irreverent, but also culturally Christian, southern boy who spends most of his time in Los Angeles, like, this combination of traits, whatever that cocktail mix, me just existing in that way, I get messages and emails all the time of somebody that's like, "Just watching you live makes me think I can live." Like, watching the way you talk to your friends makes me realize, "My friends don't talk to me like that. And maybe I should try to find people who are more similar to me," or whatever it is. There's so many unintended consequences.

• 2:29Jedidiah Jenkins?

  To just living out loud.

• 2:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:33Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And I mean, for me, they've been enormously positive. I'm Jedidiah Jenkins and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:51Jedidiah Jenkins?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:54Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. What's happening? How you doing? What's the word? I'm Rich Roll, so if you're looking for my podcast, you are in the right place. Pull up a chair. Good to have you. My guest today is Jedidiah Jenkins, back for his third turn on the RRP merry-go-round. What a beautiful and extraordinary human, writer and storyteller this man is. Jed's books, To Shake the Sleeping Self, a coming-of-age memoir set against the backdrop of his 10,000-mile bike journey from Oregon to Patagonia. And his newest, which is called Like Streams to the Ocean, examines the things that make us who we are

• 3:40Rich Roll?

  and the decisions that shape our lives. I think it's his best work to date. In any event, both of his books are New York Times bestsellers, which is not surprising because they are, in my opinion, masterworks, each of them. In addition to being my favorite, follow on Instagram, @jedediahjenkins. Check it out. Jed is also the executive editor of Wilderness Magazine. His work has appeared in The Paris Review and Playboy. He's been covered by National Geographic. And our two previous conversations, Episodes 186 and 395, really live and breathe among some of my very favorites, as does this one. And I think that's because...

• 4:21Rich Roll?

  Jed has a very curious and idiosyncratic lens on the human condition, as well as a distinctive, elegant and purposeful way of exploring and sharing the specifics of his internal landscape in a way that really elucidates the universal, that which we all share, in a way that can't help but make you laugh, ponder your own life a little bit more deeply, and perhaps leaving you feeling just a little bit less alone in the world, which is a good thing. I adore this man. This one is small talk free, and it's all coming up in a few. But first...

• 5:11Rich Roll?

  So, this is a conversation about kinda everything. We talk about the writing process, finding a voice, being an observer of life, leveraging the specific to connect with the universal. We discuss identity, friendship, family, love, work, specifically how to find meaning in our respective occupations. And what else? Death, authenticity, community, finding common ground with people who see the world differently. You know, just the small stuff. Jedidiah is one of my very favorite people. He's a brilliant conversationalist. I relish our talks,

• 5:53Rich Roll?

  and this one, not unsurprisingly, does not disappoint. So, here we go.

• 6:04Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's awesome to see you. And I was realizing that the full extent of our entire relationship is based on this.

• 6:10Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I know. And yet, we go so deep together.

• 6:14Rich Roll?

  I know. And then we always depart with grand, you know, designs on like hanging out all the time, and then that never happens, and you accuse me of living in Dubai.

• 6:22Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, that's true.

• 6:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I mean...

• 6:26Rich Roll?

  As an East sider, making the hike...

• 6:27Jedidiah Jenkins?

  East siders, it's just a lifestyle over there. I mean, when you live this far out, is it more of an understood burden that you're the one that goes? Or to your friends?

• 6:38Rich Roll?

  100%. I mean...

• 6:41Rich Roll?

  The consensus is you essentially live in Santa Barbara.

• 6:45Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Right.

• 6:45Rich Roll?

  If you want to see your friends, like you're the one who's gonna have to make the effort more than them because it's such a schlep.

• 6:51Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Or you plan out a dinner party way in advance.

• 6:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 6:54Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And like, hope there's not a pandemic.

• 6:56Rich Roll?

  Right, but yeah, exactly. Like, good luck with that right now. So the sole extent of my social interaction, like everybody, is either on Zoom or in the few rare and beautiful instances that I can cajole people like yourself to come here.

• 7:11Jedidiah Jenkins?

  To have even distanced, real human interaction is a treasure.

• 7:16Rich Roll?

  So how's it been for you?

• 7:18Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, I'm a double extrovert, as you know.

• 7:20Rich Roll?

  Right, Enneagram 7.

• 7:22Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Enneagram 7, full-on, like, not built for a isolated pandemic.

• 7:29Jedidiah Jenkins?

  But, living in Los Angeles, to the degree that I do, I feel very lucky that we live in a place with, you can be outside. And there's so many places to hike and walk. And I've been able to go on neighborhood walks with friends and things like that. Go to the beach and whatever it is, even go camping way out in the desert. And that's been a lifesaver, just to have something on the horizon.

• 7:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Like a camping trip in a month. For an Enneagram 7, we're always looking to, we just need the next adventure in the calendar to like, be able to exist today. Which is probably a petulant problem.

• 8:04Rich Roll?

  You still live with roommates?

• 8:06Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Rich Roll?

  You do, so you have a bubble of friends and stuff like that.

• 8:09Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Totally. I've never lived alone. I'm a full-on grown adult man, never lived alone. And I'm curious, I think if I am uncoupled when I enter my 40s, I have decided that that's something I want to do, try living alone. Even though I, it just feels like a performative gesture of experiment because I don't want to. And I love my roommates. And I love coming home to, they're watching some show I've never heard of, or they're making some new cocktail that they saw on TikTok. And I'm like, ooh, what's that? And then there's something happening, which I enjoy the energy of that, as opposed to coming home, and then I'm home. And then I'm like, hmm, I wonder what my friends are doing.

• 8:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:54Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I guess I should reach out. And then if they're busy, then I'm like, well, I guess no one wants to hang out with me. Like, I just can see myself going through a spiral.

• 9:02Rich Roll?

  Well, there's a weird sort of cultural negative, you know, pejorative veneer over the idea of an adult living by himself or herself. And if you have roommates after a certain age, that's frowned upon, but we're genetically engineered to, you know, live as a village in a community of people. And my favorite, you know, some of my most favorite memories are being in a dorm or living in a group house. And why can't we do that for our whole lives? Why is that? Why is, why would that be considered, you know, going awry as opposed to the preferred state of existence?

• 9:42Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I think, and we've talked about this ad nauseam on this podcast, but I think.

• 9:47Rich Roll?

  I forget it. I don't even remember what we talked about.

• 9:49Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, but just in this sense where growing up evangelical Christian and then having my homosexuality like uproot or like cause the deconstruction of an entire worldview that I was raised in and taught, this is how the world works. And then this one factor of my identity sort of like pulled the thread of the sweater and started to unravel the the sturdiness of that worldview. That has like given me this like comfort in not doing what I'm supposed to do.

• 10:23Rich Roll?

  Right, like, like being outside the paradigm.

• 10:26Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah, like you should be married by this age. You shouldn't live or should live with roommates. You should do this. Like, I just have exercise, I've exercised that identity muscle of being like, well, that's not what I want to do. So I'm not going to do it.

• 10:38Rich Roll?

  Right. So as in Enneagram seven, I'm a, I'm a four with a wing of five. I'm still not sure what exactly that means. But, but you seem like somebody who understands the Enneagram pretty well. Like, how does a four slash five interact with a seven?

• 10:55Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, we tend to like each other because as far as I understand. Um, when a seven, so my wing is a six, which is loyalty and following the rules, which would make sense because I'm fun, but I also wanted to be such a good Christian boy that I had my first kiss at 28. It's like, I'm, I'm crazy, but at the same time, I didn't lose my virginity till I was 30. So it's like, there's, there's like aspects to my major number. So a four being the individualist doesn't want to be put in a box, like you find yourself to be profoundly unique. And so any like categorization of you in a generality

• 11:39Jedidiah Jenkins?

  is offensive. And then a five is like insatiably curious about like the way things work. So you being a successful podcaster where you dive into very complex nuanced issues with people in an intimate conversation feels very four wing five.

• 11:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I, I like the one-on-one. Like I'm, I'm, I get nervous and anxious around, you know, group settings and things like that. And, you know, I, I think I'm fundamentally an optimistic, somewhat joyful, but maybe traumatized individual. But I like my alone time. Like I would have no problem being alone. I just spent essentially a month in Hawaii by myself and it was the greatest, which is not a, which is not an Enneagram seven trait at all.

• 12:25Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, when I say I like my alone time, I mean three hours.

• 12:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:29Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Like, oh my God, I was alone. I went on a walk. I just thought about some things and I'm recharged. Let's party.

• 12:35Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. It is interesting. I would suspect most writers though are not sevens.

• 12:41Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I think you're right.

• 12:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I don't, and my writing practices when I'm working on a book is I can really only focus for two to three hours a day, like on one thing. So I write, I'm freshest in the morning. I wake up and I wrote this book. I finished this book in February of 2020. So that's right when I turned it in and it was done, done, done. And I was like free, the world shut down. But I mean, luckily it's not like I lost my job. I was like, I was meant to be doing nothing that time.

• 13:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:15Jedidiah Jenkins?

  So that's interesting. But in, in my normal world.

• 13:21Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Behavior. I wake up, I go to the coffee shop. I have to find a coffee shop that serves food, a full menu, because I'm gonna sit there for two meals. I have breakfast and then I sit there all the way through lunch.

• 13:33Rich Roll?

  But you have to be around other people in your solitary moment.

• 13:37Jedidiah Jenkins?

  The buzz of others. And well, and also as a writer, I don't have like an office. And to separate work from home is like somehow psychologically, symbolically important to me to like go to work and then come home.

• 13:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And so, A, leaving my house is important to me. And also the hum of others, because I also don't have coworkers, which I really miss from my days at Invisible Children in, in school, just having other people in common endeavor. I have my editor and my publicist and the people at the publisher, but they're all in New York and they're just an email relationship, really. And so I miss that. So, so going to a coffee shop, the barista knows what my order and knows me, knows where I sit. It's very like, it's as close as I can get. And it's just a lovely lifestyle. I love it.

• 14:34Rich Roll?

  It's pretty good. Well, this new book is fantastic. I loved it so much. And all the praise that you're getting. I know it just made the New York Times Bestseller List. It's unbelievable. And it's just, there's something so specific about your style. I can't quite put my finger on it, but when I'm reading your writing, I always know that it's you. Like, do you have a sense of, of what that is? Like, could you define that? Or is that just, it's just such a natural extrapolation of who you are as a person that it's one and the same?

• 15:14Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, thank you for being so kind to me.

• 15:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I do have so many things I want to say about it, but go ahead.

• 15:21Jedidiah Jenkins?

  The only thing I know is that I write the way that I speak. And I don't labor over the crafting of a sentence. I don't, I'm not very precious. I labor over the crafting of my understanding of an idea. And so I try to write something out to the point where it makes sense to me. And so however my brain uses metaphor and whatever that is, once I've laid it out and I'm like, there it is, that's what I was trying to think about. And that makes me feel like I'm at least getting some sort of touch on the idea. Like I can finally, this gray fog in my mind, I can now touch it. There's something physical there.

• 16:04Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And so I've just been, it's one of those things. I've been told that I have a writing voice. I don't know it, but it's funny. When my editor, or if I write something for a magazine or for my editor for the publisher, sometimes they'll reword something or send me back like some changes. And the slightest change in the sentence, I'll be like, I would never say that. You know it right away. You're like, that is not, I don't know if you've ever been like driving with someone in the passenger seat and you hand them your phone and you go, hey, can you text Sarah that it'll be like, I can't come right now, but I'll come tomorrow, whatever. And then they type it out and then I say, let me see what you wrote.

• 16:45Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And it's like, I would never, I would use an exclamation point, not a period. And my smiley faces do not have a nose. That's insane. It's like, you can immediately see that that's not how you type.

• 16:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So it's more that, it's not that you can define what it is other than what it's not, right? Like you can immediately identify what it's not. And I would say that it is true that it's about the idea that you're trying to present. And you don't get overly caught up in the prose. The prose is uniquely yours, but it's not about the trappings of language. Because the way that you write is very. In a good way, like plain spoken. You know, it's not about big words or anything like that. It's about conveying an emotion or a feeling or an experience that is specifically yours. And I think, you know, the two things when I think about this book are, first of all,

• 17:43Rich Roll?

  it's a masterclass in this precept of writing, which is you find the universal in the specific. And these are your experiences, your memories. You know, they're stories from your life and they're so specific to your experience. And yet, within that, there's something about the way that you convey these ideas that makes them unbelievably like universal and such that the audience can really emotionally connect with them. Like, our life experiences are very different, but when I read your writing, I feel less alone, you know, because you have such a, you're so in touch with your interior landscape

• 18:25Rich Roll?

  and there's more, there's more that we share with that than what differentiates us. Does that make sense?

• 18:33Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah, I mean, what you're describing is exactly the reason why I wanted to be a writer, because I loved nothing more than the feeling that writers gave me when I would read their books. And I read mostly, whether it was straight dead men or black women or these people that I would read who obviously have a different life experience than me to some degree. And I would just ache with being seen. And even where their lives diverged from mine, they had a way of pulling me into their experience where it was as if I was them.

• 19:13Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Because that's maybe the most important evolved characteristic of the human mind is the concept of other self, of empathy, of the idea that I can picture what it is like to be you. And that is what creates community and charity and morality and everything is this idea of the concept of self. And that's really like the humming truth behind the concept of consciousness.

• 19:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 19:44Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It's the like, what would it be like to be you? And if you can answer that question, then the thing might be conscious. Is that, is that, am I remembering that right? Because it's like, I would never say, what is it like to be a table? You would be like, it's like, nothing. You're a table. That doesn't mean anything. But if I said, what's it like to be a dog? You could kind of feel something there. You'd be like, I can kind of feel like, I know what my dog is thinking a little bit, like squirrel, food, lick me, I want to lick you.

• 20:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:14Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I got it, you know? And then as it goes up from there. But I feel like the best writers can make me feel what it is like to be them. And so for me, I learned it's if I just tell a very specific story about my life and how it made me feel, a reader, their like act of empathizing with me pulls them in and they feel very much like they know me.

• 20:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Which is an interesting side effect of being a memoirist. I mean, you know this, you've written extensively about your life. It's inviting someone into your story is such a unique, it's such a unique job because when people walk up to you and they say, I feel like I know you, they kind of do.

• 20:58Rich Roll?

  They kind of do, yeah. A hundred percent they do. And that's a, there's a vulnerability with that, but it also, it's nice.

• 21:07Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I love it.

• 21:07Rich Roll?

  It's such a shortcut to being able to connect with people. You know what I mean?

• 21:12Jedidiah Jenkins?

  If you read my books and then you still want to talk to me, then we probably would get along.

• 21:16Rich Roll?

  But the downside of that is that if someone is to write a critical review of your books, it's, they're criticizing you, you know?

• 21:26Jedidiah Jenkins?

  So I asked.

• 21:27Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 21:28Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I asked Anne Patchett.

• 21:29Rich Roll?

  Because there's no arms length.

• 21:30Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I forget if I told you this story before, forgive me if I did, edit it out. But Anne Patchett is a very famous, fantastic novelist from, she lives in Nashville. And I've met her a few times, we've had some great hangs. She's just radiant. And I asked her, would you ever consider blurbing my book? This was for To Shake the Sleep Himself. And she said,

• 21:53Jedidiah Jenkins?

  No, I will not. She goes, I do not blurb memoirs because, she goes, if I don't like it, then if I don't like a fictional story that you write, I can say why. I can say this story didn't land for me. Oh, I don't really connect with Somali pirates. I don't really know. But if she says, your life story doesn't connect with me, or bores me, or that is such an indictment of my ideas. Like, so she goes, I just learned I do not blurb memoirs. And I was like, that's a good rule.

• 22:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that is. Well, the other thing is that, and then I'll get to my second big observation of your book. But the other thing is that there's this idea that, and you see this in movies and in screenplays, that the protagonist or the character has to be somebody that we can all relate to. And my relationship with books and why I love reading memoirs is at odds with that. Like, I want to inhabit the interior experience of somebody who's lived a life nothing like me. And within that, I can find something to grab onto or identify with. But I'm not interested in somebody dumbing down their story so that it can be widely appealable.

• 23:15Rich Roll?

  Like, it is that fidelity to being super specific to your own experience that makes the book work or not.

• 23:26Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, you're a type of person, because you've spent so much time examining your interior life and your own influences and desires, I think you're curious about expanding that self-knowledge through the human experience mapped onto other life experiences. A lot of people...

• 23:46Jedidiah Jenkins?

  They haven't, they don't have the bandwidth to worry about someone else's lessons. They're still trying to figure out, why am I sad? Why am I unhappy? And so the closer the story is to them, that's like a step in the direction towards expanding those neurons of

• 24:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Jedidiah Jenkins?

  human understanding. For me, I'm like tired of thinking about myself. I wanna know something, I wanna know an experience so different than mine. And I think about, do you ever watch a movie that you feel like no one else saw? And it, and you didn't even know you liked it at the time, but it like haunts your mind for years. There is a movie, I forget which book I mentioned it in, but it's called Away From Her. And it is this movie about this old couple. And the wife gets dementia. Alzheimer's, I don't know the difference. And she, she began, and they're in love. They're like, love story, married for 30 years, blah, blah, blah. She begins to forget him. And it's his experience losing the love of his life, but she's right there.

• 24:47Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And then she loses the ability to live at the house, cause he has to go to work or whatever. So that she has to go into a home. And then he visits her and then over the course of the movie, he'll visit her and she's scared of him, cause she doesn't know who he is. And I mean, it's this heart wrenching story of loss and like aging. And all of these things I know nothing about. Except that movie sits in my heart. It's weird because, because of the power of storytelling, I feel like that could happen to me. And there's like some, I have some immune response to it now. It's almost like storytelling is the vaccine of the mind.

• 25:29Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It like primes your brain to be prepared for scenarios that haven't happened to you.

• 25:35Rich Roll?

  Right, or you experienced that in a past life.

• 25:38Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Do you believe in past lives? Do I need to believe in that? I'm ready.

• 25:43Rich Roll?

  I'm not against believing in that.

• 25:44Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Me neither.

• 25:45Rich Roll?

  I'll say that.

• 25:46Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I have friends who are V into that, very, very, very. And I'm not, I mean, energy cannot be created or destroyed, so it's like.

• 25:56Rich Roll?

  Right. But I'm sure you've had those experiences where you've encountered something and it has, I mean, the story you just told is an example of that, like where it has an outsized impact on you, given, you know, what you would anticipate it would.

• 26:12Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah, like I could have just seen that movie and forgotten about it.

• 26:15Rich Roll?

  Right, and so why is that so resonant for you? Well, maybe there's something there, Jeff.

• 26:20Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I like that.

• 26:21Rich Roll?

  But on that subject of you talking about, you know, the reader asking themselves the question, like, why am I sad? Your first book, Just Shake the Sleeping Self, in many ways, and tell me if I'm mischaracterizing this, but it's like a coming of age story set against this bike trip where you ride your bike from Oregon to Patagonia. And I knew, you know, before reading your book, like, oh, I know this next book, it's kind of going to be lifted from his blog posts and his Instagram posts. And, you know, by the way, you're my favorite storyteller on Instagram. I just, I love everything that you share there. You and Josh Brolin are my two favorites.

• 26:59Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Oh, my God.

• 26:59Rich Roll?

  He's amazing, right?

• 27:00Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Oh, my God, he's the best follow.

• 27:01Rich Roll?

  When is he gonna write a book?

• 27:02Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I know.

• 27:03Rich Roll?

  It's incredible.

• 27:04Jedidiah Jenkins?

  When he shares a story, I read everything. He is wild on there. He surprises me constantly. I love.

• 27:11Rich Roll?

  It's completely not what you think it's gonna be every time, right? And I'm like, where is this? The profundity of his thought process is unbelievable.

• 27:22Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Mixed with the playfulness of it.

• 27:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 27:24Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Rich Roll?

  And there's something, you know, what you share is different, but there's a specific sensibility to it, I think. And kind of having that understanding going into your next book, I'm like, I wonder, you know, is this just gonna be a hodgepodge of like Instagram posts? But what it really is, and I'm interested if anybody else has had this observation, this book is a Trojan horse because it's really a disguised.

• 27:52Rich Roll?

  Self-help book shrouded in your personal stories and experiences. And it's kind of amazing because the other idea I thought I had thinking about what's Jed's second book going to be about is like, how much life has this guy lived since his first book? Like, has he tapped out yet? Like, is there more in the well? And, you know, I was delighted to find out there's a lot more in the well. And as a, you know, it's, it's not a self-help book, but it really is. And even the, the architecture and the way that you've laid it out, you know, categorically by going through, you know, ego and friendship and family and work and all these different categories, it lays out this framework for, you know, a young person

• 28:35Rich Roll?

  or anybody who's asking themselves these questions about who am I? How, you know, how do I fit in? Where do I belong? What is it that I'm here to express? Like, you speak to all of these things and, you know, in, in, with a, with a confidence and a kind of, um, uh, you know, effervescence that is, you know, really connective. Like, I just loved it. So, yeah, it's great, man.

• 29:03Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Thank you. That's, I mean, the, the funny thing is, and the whole premise of my first book was I want to be a memoirist. My like heroes, like whether it's Henry Miller or Donald, Donald Miller, when I was younger, these people who were writing these books from their own personal experience. I was like, this is my dream to be able to do this, like Joan Didion, Fran Lebowitz, these people. And yet I, I'm, I was in my twenties when I had this realization. I was like, how embarrassing? Like, why would anyone listen to me? I just got here.

• 29:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:33Jedidiah Jenkins?

  So then it was the idea of the Benjamin Franklin quote, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. So that was the like major impetus for going on a trip. And then, so then when my publisher was like, okay, let's, let's do another book. And I was like, well, I don't have a gimmick. Like, why are people going to read this? And, but at the same time, I felt very affirmed. Well, okay, this is just an interesting journey of my life. So. I gathered a readership of my live experience writing about my bike trip. Like, tens of thousands of people started to care about what I was doing on my bike trip. When I finished the bike trip, I was completely prepared for them all to leave, because it's over.

• 30:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:17Jedidiah Jenkins?

  So, the reason you're paying attention is now over, so leave, great. And not only did they not leave, but the following like doubled and tripled. And I, I didn't, sometimes I would write about, what does it mean? What does Michael Jackson's musical legacy mean? Hmm, I can't stop thinking about this, I'm just gonna write about it, because I have a captive audience, like, maybe they'll hate me, maybe.

• 30:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:42Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And, things like that would, you know, be spread all over the internet. And so, what I slowly realized was, oh, okay, my imposter syndrome was telling me that the only reason they're here is the gimmick of an adventure, but actually, the reason people are subscribing to the magazine of my Instagram and the things I write, is they're just interested in the angle with which I see the world.

• 31:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Like, the framing of an idea, not that I know what's, what the truth is, it's not that I have answers, it's just I have reflections and responses to things. And for some reason, because it helps me to like, finding words for things that are bothering me, helps me. And, I just believe that if something helps you, it probably helps someone else, and so, tell people about it.

• 31:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you're working it out in real, real time, not from a position of authority, but as somebody who's struggling just like everybody else, and doing it in a very authentic way that, you know, engenders that kind of like kinship with the people that are following you. And I think, there was a timing aspect of it as well, because, if memory serves me, initially on Instagram, they would cap out, like, how many words you could make your caption, like, you couldn't write, like, you know, a full blog post, and at some point, they broadened that, and you were one of the first people who kind of used it as your personal blog, like, it was more just, you know, a one-line caption.

• 32:15Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, and I used to roast people for doing that. When they first started it, and they would post this long thing, I'm like, I'm not on Instagram to read, get this out of here. I mean, and before the like- The algorithm, your friend would go to Paris and come back and post forty-two pictures of the same cathedral.

• 32:33Rich Roll?

  Bleed the feed.

• 32:34Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And so you're scrolling down and you're like, I'm furious that I am now inside this person's camera roll and they're just like in Paris. Like, get out of here. I'm here for a different experience. But what I found was, as I was on my trip, the longer the thing I would write, the more response. People were like wanting to be on the trip with me. And it was, I mean, I think, at least my life has very rarely been a strong decision against the current. It's always been like, is it called tacking when you say, I'll wear you zigzag? It's like responding to the movement of the wind and the current and just kind of trying to make headway towards a life that I want to lead, but really responding

• 33:18Jedidiah Jenkins?

  to the environment. And so, oh, hmm, people seem to like it if I write more, I'll write more. Oh, cool. Okay. They like it if I write a lot more. Okay. And then, oh, wow, they're still here. So I would just keep thinking.

• 33:31Rich Roll?

  And, you know, I would say, just as a, as a fan, that, you know, whether you're, you know, sharing, you know, you're doing an Instagram story of you and your mom Barb, you know, traveling through Europe, or talking about, you know, whatever frivolous thing, like the Brittany documentary or something like, I'm just as interested in that as you, you know, riding to Patagonia, because it is your, it is your frame. That's what I'm dialing, that's what I'm tuning in for.

• 33:56Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, and I think the interesting, fascinating moment in time we're living in is that every human being, if you have a smartphone and internet access, can create a window into their life that is moderate, or is highly curated, or just is what it is. And that also is interesting. Like, I, I know that just me being myself, being an outdoorsy, gay, irreverent, but also like culturally Christian.

• 34:29Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Southern boy who spends most of his time in Los Angeles. Like, this combination of traits for whatever, whatever that cocktail mix. Me just existing in that way, I get messages and emails all the time of somebody that's like, "Just watching you live makes me think I can live."

• 34:46Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 34:47Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Watching you laugh, like, watching the way you talk to your friends makes me realize, "My friends don't talk to me like that." And I, maybe I should try to like, find people who are more similar to me, or whatever it is. It's, there's so many unintended consequences to just living out loud.

• 35:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:10Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And I'm a, I mean, for me, they've been enormously positive.

• 35:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:25Rich Roll?

  When I think of your, your work, I think, and you mentioned Joan Didion, Fran Lebowitz. Did you watch the Fran Lebowitz documentary?

• 35:32Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Of course. And I'm devastated that they took, did you see the original one called Public Speaking?

• 35:37Rich Roll?

  No. I went, but I did, I did go on to like a YouTube deep dive after watching the documentary and just watched a ton of her stuff.

• 35:44Jedidiah Jenkins?

  So I don't understand why this is happening, but in 2010, Martin Scorsese made a documentary just like Pretend It's a City, but it was two hours long. And it was for HBO and it's called Public Speaking. And back then, I saw that and became Fran's, like, the one person in the world, I saw her walking down the street in New York five years ago and I about self-immolated. I was so overwhelmed by the sight of her. And of course, I would never talk to her, but, and I went to see her speak when I was in Austin. I'm just love. And then they took the documentary away, which- I don't know why, and then pretend it's a city. Maybe it's because of that, because they're very similar. The structure's identical.

• 36:27Jedidiah Jenkins?

  But a lot of the things she says in public speaking have shaped so much of the way that I see the world. Like, she really brings the heat in that one. And I wish it would return. So if I ever find it, I'm gonna send you the link.

• 36:41Rich Roll?

  It's cool. I loved it. And I was delighted with just how in love Martin Scorsese is with her. You know, like, he just can't stop laughing throughout the whole thing. And it's kind of flawed. It's like, how many times do we need to see her walking into the, you know, the club? And, you know, it's a little bit weirdly repetitive with her meandering through the mini New York City and all of that.

• 37:01Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, it's when Netflix asks for six episodes, and he's like, "Well, I have four episodes of content." And he's like, "Film more walking."

• 37:07Rich Roll?

  And he just tees her up to do her thing and say the things that she says. I mean, the difference, if I was to draw a distinction between how I perceive you and her, I mean, she's, you know, there's a relish in her being contrarian that isn't really kind of what you're about.

• 37:24Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Right.

• 37:26Rich Roll?

  But she's so convicted in her opinions and her, like, her hand mannerisms and just her, just everything about her, you know, is kind of, it's just amazing that she exists in the world and the world is better for it.

• 37:41Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, it's one of the, it's one of the things around comedy as a structure is so often flawed, and a lot of comedians don't age well, or their comedy doesn't age well, because you realize they were punching down, not punching up. And she has just been really good about punching up her whole life. Like, when she makes fun of something, it's either a structure or a person in power and not the easy jokes of people who can't defend themselves. And so I think that's why she's making political statements and...

• 38:13Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Punching in the direction that you should punch if you're gonna swing.

• 38:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, the other influences on you, clearly Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert. I know you, didn't you do like a panel with them? Maybe we talked about that last time.

• 38:26Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, I mean, I've, I spoke at a conference with, with Cheryl and she is just, there's just, it's like, I was just as impacted by her book Tiny Beautiful Things as I was with Wild, which is so interesting because this is similar in that structure of one is an adventure. And well, Tiny Beautiful Things, I don't know if you've ever read it, but it's.

• 38:48Rich Roll?

  I haven't read that one.

• 38:50Jedidiah Jenkins?

  She has an advice blog, she used to, called Dear Sugar, and people would write in.

• 38:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, now it's a podcast.

• 38:56Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah, fantastic. And, but she, for years, they didn't know who she was, but she, they would write in and say,

• 39:04Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I mean, you know, I was abused, I had an abortion, I have guilt, I have shame, all these things. And then she would just write her responses and they became very popular. And so she took those and put them in a book. And that was an inspiration for this book in a sense where it was small stories, but like, they landed on me so hard and it was such a, it was an enjoyable reading experience because you could just sit down with your coffee and have a moment, like a encapsulated moment that morning, that you had done something, like reading a New Yorker article or Atlantic. It's like, I, I completed this moment and I feel good about my day, which I wanted with this book to, you were able to have like small meals.

• 39:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I liked how you, you talk about Liz Gilbert as like this idol and how you, you fantasize or imagine her, you know, in this perfect life where she's, she's just sort of effortlessly, you know, gliding through her house and dropping, you know, amazing advice on people and without a care in the world and it's all coming very easy. And of course, she's a human being, but that is not, you know, that is not how you, you know, imagined her to be when you're kind of trying to channel that influence on your own work. And then turning, like flipping the script and understanding that perhaps there's people that are looking at you in that, in that same way.

• 40:28Jedidiah Jenkins?

  My friend Jackie Tone just had wore this shirt the other day that I immediately had to have. And it just says, remember when you wanted what you currently have. And it just landed on me like, wow, what an amazing thing to write on your mirror or think about every day.

• 40:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Is remember when you wanted what you currently have. Or I remember hearing this pastor say that there's someone in a hospital bed right now begging and praying God to just be doing what you're doing right now. The mundane thing you're doing right now is their ultimate dream. And just like framing things like that are very powerful to me.

• 41:11Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And yeah, I I remember so clearly, wow, I want to write a book. I want to see it in a bookstore, wow, on a shelf. I want and like for it to say New York Times bestseller on it wasn't even a thing. I don't even because I still don't really understand how that happens or what that is. So it's not a I almost have no visceral response to that. It just was so beyond I was just like, I want to hold a thing that I wrote because my I love a book in my backpack. Like and flipping through it and the reverence with which I would like hold my first books and just I would just flip the pages and like watch them fall. And I just amazed that that's all my brain in there.

• 41:54Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And it now had my agent was saying this yesterday. He was like, books have this effervescence of of permanence. Different than like if you write an article on Medium, great. But if you have a book that just feels like it's been placed in this longevity. It sunk its roots into the earth and will be here for a while. And that has weight and and that that is so true. And so even though I can logically understand that the difference between Elizabeth Gilbert and me is I think she's a better writer and a better speaker.

• 42:36Jedidiah Jenkins?

  But I know that she's just a normal person and probably a great hang. But there is really, I mean, anybody, I mean, literally anybody, no matter if you're Barack Obama.

• 42:49Jedidiah Jenkins?

  They're just people that have been put in these situations.

• 42:54Jedidiah Jenkins?

  That are extraordinary.

• 42:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 42:56Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And I find idolatry and idolizing people to be a very young trait. And I think we're probably evolved to be that way. You look up to a role model, to a mentor.

• 43:10Rich Roll?

  It's important.

• 43:12Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Because it gives direction to your life.

• 43:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can latch on to an aspiration and it's embodied in somebody that allows you to visualize it and perhaps like map your own path forward. Those people are super important.

• 43:26Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah, and that does, for me, it has faded as I've gotten older, just understanding more about the human experience and also achieving dreams and being like, I mean, let me be very clear. I am a writer and I have the best life. I love it. I am so happy. I'm obsessed. I can't believe I get to do this as a career. It is everything I dreamed. I get to speak on stages. I have strangers writing me letters. I have strangers coming up to me and telling me that they came out of the closet because of my book, or they understand their daughter or son better, or they quit their job and booked a trip to Angola. I don't know, like incredible stories.

• 44:08Jedidiah Jenkins?

  What a privilege, what an honor, what a dream. And yet I'm still me and sometimes I sprain my ankle and I'm like, why? And whatever it is, you never stop being a human, no matter what you achieve.

• 44:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but on the subject of the T-shirt and remember when, how does it go exactly? Like remember when you wanted what you currently have. I've heard you speak about the idea of pursuing your passion and this sense that you have, like when you were working with invisible children, maybe it wasn't your dream, but that you loved it and you were making an impact with the work that you were doing. And placing this idea of work and passion and all this pressure, I think that particularly young people feel like if they don't know what their passion is, that they feel somehow inadequate, like to have a broader lens on what that means and how you think about work.

• 45:07Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I really think that the idolatry around passion and feeling like your work completes you is really strange and problematic. I mean, I'm such a sucker for biology and anthropology and like the concept that we lived in tribes for a million years and then we discovered cities 10,000 years ago and it's like the way we live now is so weird, strange to what our body is. And for a million years of our existence, you either caught an animal to eat it or

• 45:51Jedidiah Jenkins?

  grew, you didn't even grow anything, maybe you foraged some mushrooms and some berries, I don't know, and then you had babies and you like hid from animals and you like tried not to eat something that was poisonous. And so it wasn't like hunting fulfilled your spiritual soul. It was that these things were very cause and effect. There was clarity in the cause and effect. If you ran faster and longer than the gazelle, you got to eat it and now you're full. So the effort you put in had a reward. If you raise this child, then that child can not only love you and you love it, but then it can also help you hunt and it can help you farm and it can help you raise the other children.

• 46:36Jedidiah Jenkins?

  There was such a clarity. And I think as we stratified and expanded and built the concept of an economy and industrialized the world and this and that, and that linear relationship between cause and effect and reward was removed, of course, that creates a crisis in mental health.

• 46:59Rich Roll?

  Right. It's a crisis of meaning. The more comfort and luxury and free time that we have, the more we're allowed to kind of indulge with. You know, the interior life and there's something about that that is aspirational. Like you, you want to be engaged in that. You want to be asking the big questions and wrestling with your place in the world and what does it all mean? And that's great, but at the same time, it creates, you know, it, it creates this sense of disengagement with the world or what's really important. Like it's not in its proper context, right? Like if you're not pursuing a career that, you know, you're waking up every morning, like, you know,

• 47:40Rich Roll?

  doing jumping jacks because you're so excited that somehow you're a failure or you're not doing it correctly.

• 47:46Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah.

• 47:47Rich Roll?

  We have social media and algorithms and, you know, what we're fed on our devices every day that just foment that sense of less than.

• 47:57Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, and you have a lot of like podcasters and books and like, here's how you go chase that dream and whatever. I mean, even me and to shake the sleeping self, it's like, quit your job and go bicycle to, hello, that's it. I mean, at the same time, the wrinkle in all of that is that's what I did. I felt a calling in my heart that I wanted to be a writer. And so I took a risk, quit my job and became one. And I really am that fulfilled, happy person doing their dream job. I, I am the thing that I'm critiquing right now. And I'm saying that me, by, by me doing it, it worked and I'm the happiest person I've

• 48:35Jedidiah Jenkins?

  ever met. So take everything I say with a grain of salt, but, but I do believe that sort of when you were saying about my experience in all of my twenties, working at invisible children or going to law school, not knowing what I was supposed to be doing.

• 48:50Rich Roll?

  By the way, as an aside, the, the whole thing that you did on law school was so great. Like here's what happens when you go to law school and you kind of, as you know, you know, I went to law school too. Like here's how it unfolds. I mean, that's exactly the way that it happens. And you know, I was on the precipice of, you know, becoming that person and got out of it. I've seen so many people walk that path and become that person to the extent that at one point I thought, I want to put together like a keynote, like a, like a speech and just tour law schools, you know, and just get up there and go, here's, here's what's really going to happen when you graduate from here.

• 49:27Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Right. You get on this assembly line and it's, it's this like,

• 49:32Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It's an entrapment that you've constantly told yourself you will not be entrapped by. And yet they just lead you down further and further.

• 49:40Rich Roll?

  You just keep moving the goalposts and making excuses for yourself. And to sort of fill the gaps in your lack of fulfillment in what you're doing. You gird your life with all of these material possessions and you become indebted to them. And your life becomes more and more complicated. And you ratchet up keeping up with the Joneses. And then you're 50 years old and you're a senior partner at a firm. And you're like, well, I guess in the next life.

• 50:04Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Right. And you don't know your kids or what they're into because you work all the time. And then they're mad at you and you're like, what I, look what I bought you. And they're like, we hate you. And you're like, what?

• 50:16Jedidiah Jenkins?

  But so, all that to say, I didn't know I had this like passionate calling to be a writer until I was close to 30. I thought I was burned by this idea because when I was a little kid, I saw Jurassic Park when I was 10 years old. And I was like, this is the best movie that's ever been made. And I am going to dedicate my life to dinosaurs. And then I realized I have to become Steven Spielberg. I have to, I'm so obsessed. That was my first like true idol. And then I was obsessed with all his movies and James Cameron and George Lucas and that generation, obsessed.

• 50:59Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And I started telling people, oh, well, I'm going to become the next Steven Spielberg. So buckle up. And so all of middle school, high school, everyone knew this. They were like, everyone was like, oh, Jed's going to go off and make movies. He's going to move to Hollywood. And I'm like, that's right, I am. And to the degree where when I graduated high school, teachers asked for my autograph.

• 51:26Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Because they were like, wow, here he goes. He got into USC.

• 51:30Rich Roll?

  But, you know, props for the conviction. And I think it speaks to how powerful it is when you, when you kind of declare, this is who I am. And the world kind of coalesces around that idea. And they're like, yeah, I guess he is gonna be there.

• 51:43Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I mean, there's also the, there's also the tall poppy syndrome where people want to cut you down for having a big dream. But for whatever reason, I was encouraged. So I moved to LA and I go to my phone classes and I realize.

• 51:55Rich Roll?

  You're, you go to, you go to Spielberg's Film School.

• 51:58Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah.

• 51:58Rich Roll?

  Right? And you made that happen.

• 52:00Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yes. But it was all rooted in this idea that I thought I knew that I was supposed to do that. And then I actually started doing it. And I realized, not only is this horrible, that I will be horrible at this, and I hate this. And, and I, I had this major in college, this major identity crisis of, I promised everyone I would do this thing. And now I'm doing it or trying to do it. And now I don't want to do it.

• 52:27Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 52:27Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And so, what do I do? And I, I mean, ultimately, I just had to give up because I, I just knew I'd be terrible. But then I was this rudderless boat. My whole developing brain and adolescence had had this very bright north star that was just now wiped blank. And so then I spent college undeclared, not knowing, finally declaring English. Then I went to law school because I was like, well, now I have no skills, except I know how to read a book. So I'm gonna go to law school so I have like some tangible skill. And then I discover my friends have started this nonprofit and they need a lawyer. And I'm so like exhausted from working in the like legal jobs that I had in law school.

• 53:11Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I was like, I just need to be around a community of people doing something inspiring. So what, what it was, I was just kind of walking through any door that was open that felt right at the moment.

• 53:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:22Jedidiah Jenkins?

  From 19 to 27, I would have said, I don't know why I'm on this planet. I have no idea. You know, and then.

• 53:34Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It was really the slow, what do you love and what loves you back? This idea that I started at Invisible Children, writing a lot of the campaigns and then being encouraged by them like, "Ooh, we like the way you said that. Will you, you come into this meeting and help us write this." I'm like, "Oh, okay." And then that flowed into them like, "We need you to be our head writer." And I'm like, "Really?" They're like, "We like the way you articulate." And so, and I loved that so much. It was sort of this ebb and flow of actually paying attention to the winds in the sails of my life, of where the wind is moving and like, use that to go forward. And so it was almost like uncovering the writer inside me. And then, once I started doing that and it bore fruit,

• 54:17Jedidiah Jenkins?

  it made me feel very accomplished and it made me feel very worthy to be alive. And so, if I really extrapolate what that means, it's not like I think everyone has some specific dream career. I think everybody wants to do something that feels useful. And I found that for myself.

• 54:39Rich Roll?

  But it's in the doing that you have that discovery. And attacking, like making little adjustments along the way that are based on external feedback that you're getting from others. Like, "Hey, you're pretty good at this." And, and realizing, "Oh, I actually like that." And let me just maneuver, you know, what I'm doing a little bit in this direction. Until one day, you're like, "I guess I'm a writer." It kind of happened to you in the process of you just moving forward with your life as opposed to declaring in middle school, like, "I'm gonna be X," before you even know what that means, right?

• 55:10Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:11Rich Roll?

  But not for nothing, I actually think you would be a very good filmmaker, good director.

• 55:15Jedidiah Jenkins?

  What if I come back and I do that? Like, what if I knew?

• 55:17Rich Roll?

  Maybe not like a Jurassic Park, like, I see you more as like a Mike Nichols. Like, you're somebody who I am certain would work very well with actors in emotional setting and could make like a wonderful movie like that.

• 55:31Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Wow, well, see? I mean, God knows, I love the idea, so.

• 55:36Rich Roll?

  But back on this idea of, of, you know, like, the pressure to find your passion or to have this career that's gonna... You know, be sort of, you know, big in the scheme of how culture perceives these things. You talk about your friendship with Tom, right? And I can only assume this is Tom Shadyak.

• 55:56Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It is.

• 55:57Rich Roll?

  It is, right? Of course it is. It's like, this is definitely Tom Shadyak. And he has this great line where he tells you, "Your generation has an idolatry of magnitude." And it's probably one of my favorite lines in the whole book. So let's spend a few minutes talking about what that means.

• 56:15Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, he, I remember he originally said that, talking about Invisible Children. And he was, because we were at Invisible Children, not only were we trying to arrest Joseph Kony and end the longest-running war in Central East Africa, but we also wanted to change the world. We wanted to bolster international human rights. We wanted war crimes against children to be something that everyone on the planet cares about and rallies around. It was such this like giant thing. And pinning it all on arresting Joseph Kony and seeing him tried before the ICC was such this like, "If we haven't done that, we have failed." And he would always say, he's such a mentor in our life, he's like,

• 56:58Jedidiah Jenkins?

  "You have put thousands of kids through schools. You have built schools. You have awakened hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Western teenagers to international human rights, to caring about something outside their building and their small world. You have gotten bills passed through the Obama administration to help with the pursuit of these war criminals. You've done, you've done so much and you can't see it because you've decided if you do not turn the world upside down and change it, then you have failed. And that robs you of both the stamina provided by incremental success and also just the reality of understanding that it's not everyone's duty to change the world.

• 57:41Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Changing someone's life right in front of you, or one child's life, or five children's lives, whatever, is so cosmically significant. And if you overlook that, then you damage and disrespect the impact you've already had or are having. And I think a lot of people, whether it's, I talk with my agent and my editor about this a lot because I get asked by people, "How do I get published? How do I get noticed? How do I get an agent?" And the question is...

• 58:15Jedidiah Jenkins?

  That my agent calls it the hidden desire behind the question. It's like, what is the spirit of your question? Because is it actually, how do I get validated for my writing? And I need validation, he says. It's also the hidden desire in the question when someone says, how do you handle the critics? And that, the hidden nature of that question is, how do I, I really care what people think about my products, so much so that I'm so afraid of putting it out there, because what if someone doesn't like it? And I need validation for my work. And so there's just this like idea that if I'm not published and on a bookshelf,

• 59:01Jedidiah Jenkins?

  if I'm not this or that, if I haven't achieved A, B, C, D, or any, then I'm not a real blank.

• 59:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:07Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And I think in the journey of figuring out what you're good at and what you love and what loves you and what you're supposed to be doing and how you can be useful and helpful in this life, is if you feel a pull towards something, no matter how big or small, then like in some way, try it. And that was my entire intention with writing to shake the sleeping self was, I don't know if I can write a book. I actually might be bad and I might embarrass myself. But I'm willing to try and put it out there. And I'm so happy to self-publish because I just want to hold it in my hands and know I did a thing. And then I can move on with my life and find some other job.

• 59:51Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Or if the wind doesn't tack in that direction, I'll tack the other way. Great. I can do that.

• 59:55Rich Roll?

  But the writing was a compulsion. It was something that had to be birthed. You had to express it. There was a call to the doing of it. It wasn't about can I get an agent or a book deal? It was about basically the process of giving voice to this thing that was inside of you.

• 1:00:14Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Totally. The writing in and of itself is the thing I wanted to do because I had learned that.

• 1:00:22Jedidiah Jenkins?

  When I would write something, originally I had a blog on Blogspot, which then became Tumblr, and it was called "The Water Is Black", which I loved that title,

• 1:00:34Jedidiah Jenkins?

  which came from a poem about being gay and God hating me. And so I would write my thoughts about my sexuality and Christianity on this blog, just so that, because when something would really bother me, this happens to me now, like something will really eat up my mind, but I can feel the war of ideas in my head, and then it's like, I just need to go sit down and write about this, and do some research, and figure out what I think.

• 1:01:02Rich Roll?

  Right, so it's the writing that gives you clarity on what you actually believe about a specific thing.

• 1:01:09Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, I don't know, if you go for a number of days without working out, my body starts to ache, hurt. It's like, I don't know if that's atrophy or just stiffness, but it's like, if I don't exercise, then my body bothers me. And so then I go sweat, and I get the endorphins, and I feel limber and great. In the same way, if I don't like, if I'm absorbing the world, and something's happening, something complex like,

• 1:01:36Jedidiah Jenkins?

  like right now, I'm fascinated by the concept of multiculturalism and assimilation into a nation. Right now, with the whole conversation around France, and what they're doing with so many Muslim immigrants, and how, unlike America, which is famed for being a melting pot, France is like, a really old country with like, a very established, multi-thousand-year-old, traditional indigenous identity. And so, them processing that is so short-circuiting to my mind, because I see both sides of the argument, and I mean, it's obviously short-circuiting lots of people's minds. But it like, so for example, I'm gonna eventually have to write this out, even if it's just for me, because it's really,

• 1:02:21Jedidiah Jenkins?

  it's something I can't get a hold of, and it's like, bothering me. So originally, I would do that with my sexuality and my faith, and I would do it on this blog. And one time, and I don't know why, but I just felt really fired up, and I posted it on my Facebook. Just like... I don't know why I felt ready to do that, and I did. And it was that where people, a lot of my friends read it, and then they sent it to their friends, and their friends' friends, and strangers were messaging me, saying, "This was so helpful." And that was like some moment in my life.

• 1:03:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:03:02Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Where that felt really, where I did something that was good for me, and I discovered it was useful for someone else. And that like, really pulled me forward in loving that.

• 1:03:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's amazing how powerful a small, seemingly small thing like that can be in giving you the courage, the gumption, to push forward on something, and kind of broaden the spectrum of what's possible for yourself. Because in the moment, it's not a big deal. Like, a couple other people read your thing and thought it was cool, but how meaningful that was. And even now, you look, you know, New York Times bestseller, but it's, I'm sure for you, it's the handwritten letters that you get in the mail from some kid in the South who feels alone.

• 1:03:55Jedidiah Jenkins?

  That's exactly how I feel. I remember, I forget if I write about this in like streams, but I remember realizing, even before I had a book out, that I already had the very thing I dreamed. Like, remember when you wanted what you currently have? I had it, which was, I get to write things that make me feel like I understand my own mind, that then strangers respond to and say, "Me too." And they take time out of their day to tell me what it means to them. This was such a, that lands on me so tenderly,

• 1:04:38Jedidiah Jenkins?

  and means so much to me, because I'll never forget, when, and we talked about this on another podcast, but when we made Coney 2012, and it was like, everyone was loving it, and then there was the backlash, and everyone was hating it.

• 1:04:51Rich Roll?

  There was a whole lot of weirdness.

• 1:04:52Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And just getting like, just getting so much hate mail, but then understanding that more people liked it that didn't like it, but the people that didn't like it were so loud and so hurting our feelings. And I remember thinking...

• 1:05:05Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Why aren't more people encouraging us? And then, at the time, my favorite thing in the world was Ira Glass and Jada Bumrod and Robert Kralwich, so like Radiolab and This American Life, where all I did all day was listen to every episode and love them, and it never crossed my mind to write them an email and say, "Thank you." I never would have done that. And they're, literally, I'm a superfan.

• 1:05:26Rich Roll?

  A little on a handwritten letter.

• 1:05:27Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah. Like, I'm a superfan, and they have no idea. Granted, they can see that someone listened, like, one tick on a number in some spreadsheet, but like, they have no idea. And so now, when someone writes me to tell me, and this happens all the time, I always respond with, "Thank you for being the type of person that would take the time to tell me this, because you could have just not said that. How easy. You could have just liked that and been like, "Oh, mm, that was good." I've like never left a Yelp review. I've never left, I don't review anything.

• 1:06:03Rich Roll?

  But when you were 10, you did write a letter to an animator.

• 1:06:07Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Eric Goldberg.

• 1:06:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:09Jedidiah Jenkins?

  That was one of those nudge moments, those little moments in your life that change your trajectory.

• 1:06:18Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Miles Adcox, who runs Onsite, the most incredible, like, I don't even know what to call it, like, retreat center for like self-expansion and learning. He always says, he uses the boat analogy, sort of like tacking, where he's like, "If you, if you're crossing the Atlantic Ocean and you turn the boat one degree early on, or whenever, like, over the course of time is the difference between South Africa and Ireland."

• 1:06:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:45Jedidiah Jenkins?

  You know, like, you just go, "Eh." And then it's, and for me, I really do believe that was such a moment where, I'll tell the story really quick. I was, this is, okay, the year before Jurassic Park, I was obsessed with Aladdin, okay? This was a great time to be a kid, these movies. And I was obsessed with the genie and Robin Williams. And my mom...

• 1:07:11Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I mean, and I loved drawing, so I would draw the genie all the time. And my mom goes, "You should write the animator a letter." And of course, I knew the animator, everything about him, because I would go back then in the malls. Maybe they still have these, the Disney Store, where it was like fully vertically-integrated consumer world, where you could just give all your money to Disney, which I'm sure you still can.

• 1:07:33Rich Roll?

  Now more than ever.

• 1:07:34Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Now more than ever, exactly. Star Wars, they actually take all my money, still.

• 1:07:38Rich Roll?

  They own more now.

• 1:07:39Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would get these behind-the-scenes books of how they made Disney movies, and I would learn all about these animators and how they draw, and then I would watch these on the Disney Channel, I would watch them work. So I just, I thought Eric Goldberg was God, because he could, he created the genie. He drew this genie. And this is book 92, so

• 1:08:01Jedidiah Jenkins?

  we didn't have the internet. If we did, it was the most rudimentary, but I don't think we got the internet until 94 or 95.

• 1:08:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And so somehow, my mother said, "Draw him a picture, and I will find out where he is, and we will mail it to him." And I was like, "Mother, you are so naive." You know, me at nine years old. "You can't just talk to these people." "They are in Burbank, California." Whatever that was. And

• 1:08:28Rich Roll?

  This magical wonderland, Burbank.

• 1:08:31Jedidiah Jenkins?

  So somehow, she got on the phone and figured out, I don't know, I don't know what she did.

• 1:08:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:36Jedidiah Jenkins?

  But she got an address, and put it in the envelope and mailed it away, and I just it wasn't even like waiting and checking the mail every day. I just thought it was like burning it, like, "Okay, bye." And then, however much time passed, I got the letter back, and he drew me a picture, an original picture of the genie that said, "Yo Jed, I ain't never had a friend like you." And wrote me this letter encouraging me to keep drawing and like chasing my dreams. And it just like whatever neural pathway that did in my brain to be like, there is no one you can't talk to. And there's like, no one is beyond reach. Like it's fine. Everyone's a person like the,

• 1:09:21Jedidiah Jenkins?

  it just did something to my nine-year-old brain that I still have with me now where I am completely unafraid. And of talking to anybody and I feel very natural in any space.

• 1:09:32Rich Roll?

  But you know, of course, like this guy's not a household. This is not writing Steven Spielberg like he,

• 1:09:36Jedidiah Jenkins?

  But to me it was.

• 1:09:37Rich Roll?

  It was probably very meaningful to him. I'm sure that guy, you know, as talented as he is, is toiling behind the scenes. He's not getting handwritten letters from anybody, right? So it was probably you should have you, you should look him up. Is he still alive?

• 1:09:52Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yes.

• 1:09:53Rich Roll?

  To try to find him.

• 1:09:53Jedidiah Jenkins?

  No, I, I, I, someone I think got me his email. I have to go back. It was like in a very busy time, but I, I posted about this story. And someone goes, you know, he still works at Disney or something. It's like,

• 1:10:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:07Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And here's his email. And I mean, even at 37 years old, I was like, Oh, Eric Goldberg, I can't email him. I can't email him. But I really do want to send him a copy of the book.

• 1:10:16Rich Roll?

  You, you have to do that. You have to.

• 1:10:18Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It changed my life.

• 1:10:19Rich Roll?

  And I love how your mom took it upon herself to like, figure it out. Like what a beautiful thing. And you know, Barb is wonderful and complicated. And can we talk about her a little bit? I listened to the podcast that you did with her, which I thought was really,

• 1:10:35Jedidiah Jenkins?

  A neat little addendum for the book.

• 1:10:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I, I think that I did a podcast with my dad. I think everybody should do a podcast with at least one of their parents. There's something about the formality and the structure of it that lends itself to a kind of conversation that a child and a parent just ordinarily are unlikely to have. And it, not to even share it with anybody, but just to like have it for posterity. I think it's a cool thing.

• 1:11:02Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I think about my beloved Mimi, who I write about in this book. My grandmother, my mom's mom was such an incredible person. And

• 1:11:14Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I don't have really her voice recorded almost anywhere. There's one, I have one video on an old Vimeo account where we were playing cards and I just like had gotten a digital camera somehow and like uploaded it. And just to hear her say three words like rockets me to this like nostalgic warmth and also melancholy of missing her.

• 1:11:36Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:38Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And if I had like a full-on interview with her, I would just melt. I would listen to it all the time, but of course I don't.

• 1:11:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And so I think that's such a great idea and so easy. You can do it on your phone.

• 1:11:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:11:51Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I recorded that entire podcast with my mom on my phone.

• 1:11:53Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did?

• 1:11:54Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Rich Roll?

  Sounded great.

• 1:11:55Jedidiah Jenkins?

  We both, we got, we laid on her bed and I put pillows in between us and I just set it right here and we like talked like this, really close.

• 1:12:03Rich Roll?

  Well, what I got out of it and what I think is instructive about it is that it was a beautiful example of how to dance with somebody who sees the world differently and do it with respect. Like clearly, you know, there's, you guys have gone through a lot and you have different worldviews, but there's, you know, there's a deep love there. And how you try to find a way to establish that common ground is almost like a test case for this moment that we're in right now where we're seeing this breakdown in our ability to effectively communicate and we're become, you know, every issue is partisan and we're unable to kind of remember that we're all humans, you know, spinning around

• 1:12:48Rich Roll?

  on this planet, you know, in, in equal time. And I didn't know what to expect when I was listening to it, having some sense of, of the background and, you know, and everything that you've kind of endured with her and what happened when the first book came out and her reaction to, you know, reading early drafts of that. But I came away from that experience with, with an understanding that like, A, you've done a lot of work to be able to, you know, bridge that gap and, and, you know, kind of be there for her in a way that maybe without that growth, you wouldn't be able to. And just her deep love for you, like that was the more surprising thing because I'd never heard her perspective on any of this before.

• 1:13:32Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Mm-hmm. That's- That was also when I decided to do that. I wanted to give her the chance to really speak because her ultimate critique with the book, even though she came to love it, she, when she was reading the manuscript before anyone else had, she thought that I was mocking her or making fun of her. Whereas my editor was so genius, he goes, "Ask her to go into all of your conversations where, where you, where she feels like you're misrepresenting her words and have her write what she would really say." Which was such a genius thing because not only did it make it truer, it made it better because her perspective is real.

• 1:14:15Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And it's like, and like my, the way it made me feel doesn't change because her putting her true words in there are just more accurate to the way it makes me feel. But I just really wanted her to feel like she had her say. There's sort of the idea of memorializing a relationship by recording a podcast with a parent or a grandparent. I haven't landed on this idea, but I eventually want to do it in some form, whether it's my next book or not, but to go on a road trip across America with my mom and record the whole thing. And we interact with people of different faiths and political ideologies and we both process it together.

• 1:14:57Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Because, like you're saying, I think we are in this moment of like conversation crisis that, I mean, I'm very progressive, lefty, I mean, I'm centrist left, but like, I see the way the left dunks on the right constantly and just dehumanizes them and like basically because they've, they believe that their ideas are dangerous and dehumanizing, that they just dehumanize them to a degree that is hilarious because any psychologist, any person who understands human behavior knows, the only thing you're doing is making them dig their heels in more and making them love someone like Donald Trump. That's the only, you are creating this.

• 1:15:42Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And I, I remember I saw this with my aunt.

• 1:15:46Jedidiah Jenkins?

  My aunt lives in rural Missouri and we've always like loved each other. She's an artist, she's like creative, gardening. And then I started, when the rise of our last president started happening and I started posting just like, oh, this is not good. I don't, this person is not good for America, I don't think. And she came at me with such rage, which we had only ever loved each other our whole life, and to the point where I had to like block her on Facebook. Because I was like, what is hap- it was very strange to me where I'd never had someone that I liked, out of nowhere, attack me and call me a liberal elite and a snowflake and a blinded this and whatever. And I was like, what are these terms?

• 1:16:31Jedidiah Jenkins?

  What is happening? And it was this idea-

• 1:16:33Rich Roll?

  You're blind to it Jed, because you live in Hollywood now.

• 1:16:36Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Exactly. And I'm in, I am in a siloed media stream and, and so is she and so are so many people. And it's like, she was responding to a feeling that the left was just making fun of everyone else in America and the coasts or whatever. And that is enraging. And so you just double down and you, you like, I'm just like, we cannot survive this as a culture or a country. I'm right now reading Jill Lepore's fantastic book, These Truths, and it's this incredibly sweeping overview of American history. And you realize that like, this is exactly what we've been doing the whole time, is like figuring out how opposing ideas, like the Federalist Papers, they're all arguing

• 1:17:19Jedidiah Jenkins?

  the same things of like, big government, small government, does it, does giving people money help them or does it make them lazy? Like, everything we argue about, we've been arguing about. And-

• 1:17:32Rich Roll?

  But now everybody has a megaphone and we're in a, a culture where for whatever reason, like it's, it's become more difficult to hear or listen to each other. It's all about, you know, it's all about amplifying one's voice and being heard, but without the hearing.

• 1:17:52Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, there's, and it's also the structures of the, the way that these megaphones are built.

• 1:18:02Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It actually doesn't help for me to give some long nuanced perspective in a post.

• 1:18:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:10Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Especially in certain algorithmic social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook where people that are not part of my community are able to see that. So if I tweet something and somebody strangers can now see that and respond to it. Whereas if I post something on Instagram, if you don't follow me, you're not going to see it. And so it's just a different energetic conversation, which is why I found myself writing on Instagram and trying to have more nuanced conversations on there because I was like, I'm super down to be challenged, but there is a there's cachet in Twitter or Facebook where I can write something really complex and nuanced.

• 1:18:53Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And then on Twitter, someone can pull one sentence out of that and like then dunk on me and like make some really hyperbolic statement about whatever. And then there, because they are so black and white and starkly

• 1:19:10Jedidiah Jenkins?

  bright in their language, that gets the attention and then like taints the entire conversation above it. It's just a different energy. That's why I don't, I don't really have conversations on the other platforms because I don't like the way it feels.

• 1:19:31Rich Roll?

  I mean, you spend your time either in Los Angeles, but you spend a lot of time in Tennessee.

• 1:19:36Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah, a lot.

• 1:19:36Rich Roll?

  So you have your foot relatively firmly planted into very different cultures. So you have a sense of this divide that is more boots on the ground than the average person. So you know, as somebody who, who you know, spends a lot of time thinking and writing about their perspective on things, like what is the path forward here? I mean, we can Throw out perfunctory terms like, you know, we need to lead with curiosity and we need to, you know, be patient and it's about nuance and all of that, but like practicing that, or, you know, like, how do you transcend the bubble and, you know, live in the experience

• 1:20:19Rich Roll?

  of others so that, you know, we can heal some of these wounds? Because I do despair about the future. Like, where is this headed if we don't course correct in some real fundamental ways?

• 1:20:34Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I actually thought that something like a pandemic would help. I remember when this first-

• 1:20:38Rich Roll?

  It's made it worse.

• 1:20:39Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I remember when this happened, I go, "Oh, my gosh. Well, we're all gonna go through something together."

• 1:20:43Rich Roll?

  We're gonna rally, yeah.

• 1:20:44Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And this, like, because I remember one of my heroes, Jonathan Haidt, he's built his whole life studying like the left-right divide. And he, his theory was, unless aliens from another solar system invade us, we are not gonna get along anytime soon. And I was just like, "Oh, God." And-

• 1:21:05Rich Roll?

  Now, I think if aliens came, we would turn it into some kind of weird partisan thing.

• 1:21:09Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Oh, totally. It would be like, "They're not really here." And then, until you get zapped, then you're like, "Well, that was actually paid actors." You know, it's like, there's no, there's no hope. But, so, to be honest, to answer your question, the only thing that made me remotely balanced and understanding is personal relationships and immersion with people that believe things different than me. Like, I went to my stepmom's neighborhood in middle Tennessee, and there was a full-on Trump parade this past fall. And it was the time of their lives. These people were so kind. It was not, it was not

• 1:21:54Jedidiah Jenkins?

  racially homogeneous. There was like different, I mean, it was mostly white people, but it was, it was a very strange, jovial-

• 1:22:06Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Non redneck moment. And I was just, I was like, wow, these people are fired up. And if you are in that, it's so interesting. If you are in that world and at these parades, you do kind of think, and you've, you never go to Los Angeles or Berkeley or whatever. You really do think everyone around you is voting for Trump. How could he not win by a landslide? Everyone you know voted for Trump. So how could he not win? And then when he says, I won by a landslide, and they're trying to steal it from you, you're like, well, maybe he's not lying. And then Rudy Giuliani is up there sweating his face off, saying, there, we got all the proof. It's a, because we're, if you don't have access to the other side

• 1:22:49Jedidiah Jenkins?

  and you don't engage with them personally, I don't know the way forward.

• 1:22:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I truly, the thing, the thing is, I feel to some degree, I am an observational human, not a doctor. And so, and this has a lot to do with the fact that I think because of, because of realizing I was gay in my adolescence, my defense mechanism for that was disassociation.

• 1:23:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:23:20Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I was floating above my own life and just watching it curiously rather than feeling hurt by being called words and whatever. And so I think that defense mechanism has influenced my entire life and become my career as a writer and observer. And I do feel like I observe humanity in the sense where humanity is an experiment of evolution that might not work. Like, we, we might not be able to do this. And that's, in my mind, fine.

• 1:23:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:23:55Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Okay. Like, we had quite the run.

• 1:23:58Rich Roll?

  This experiment may come to an end. Or we'll just invent some AI to be the next evolution of what we were meant to be.

• 1:24:05Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah, I just, I love humanity. I'm so glad we're here. I'm so, I think it's very cool to be alive. But also, I was not alive for a few billion years before I was, and I didn't seem to mind, so.

• 1:24:20Jedidiah Jenkins?

  If we go away and this is a failure, I was just like, I really hope we don't. But, but there's just, when you mix things, when you throw things into the mix, like, humans are, the human brain is pretty wired to sway conservative or progressive, just the way that it is. I mean, you look at almost every family and within a same cluster of children who grew up in the same house with the same parents, they can be politically divergent and oftentimes there's one or more that are. And you're like, they're eating the same food, they're in the same place, how does this happen? And it's just because we've evolved to do that. One is scarcity and one is curiosity

• 1:25:06Jedidiah Jenkins?

  and one is openness to experience and one is preserving what the gains that we've made in the past. And these all have varying benefits. I mean, you think about the American ethos of individualism and liberty is something that we are so proud of, but it made us incredibly bad at responding to a pandemic. Right. Whereas China, which squashes dissent and potentially commits genocide on ethnic minorities, is completely homogeneous in their messaging and whatever, and they lock that shit up. Right. And so if this pathogen was actually worse, let's say, let's say it was more like AIDS,

• 1:25:49Jedidiah Jenkins?

  where it actually lays dormant in you for six months or something, and then kills 30% of the population, or if it like AIDS was 100%, every American would be dead. Because if there was that incubation period, no one would believe it's real. And like, Dr. Fauci would be like, we can detect it, we know it's real. And they'd be like, It wouldn't matter. Ain't nobody dead, this is fake, they're trying to control us. Yeah. And it's just like, and so you see how this experiment of humanity, you put moral judgments on the way people behave, which I think you should. It's like the pursuit of thriving, but. There are different ways of existing and in the experiment of we don't know what the future holds, the fact that everyone does things a little differently and cultures

• 1:26:30Jedidiah Jenkins?

  are expressions of like that, sometimes one culture works better than another one at responding to a specific problem.

• 1:26:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, the individualism that is, you know, part and parcel of our DNA as Americans is certainly aspirational, this idea that we can all, you know, kind of create our lives in the in the vision that we would like in a perfect world, but it's also, you know, it's shrouded in this patriotism, right? But that patriotism doesn't mean anything if we can't cohere as a nation when we're faced with a crisis. So we're seeing this fracture. And I think, you know, to speak to the solution, as long as the wealth gap continues to increase, it's it seems hopeless in my mind. Like, the more the haves get

• 1:27:21Rich Roll?

  and the less that the have-nots are, you know, have access to, it's only going to ratchet this whole thing up. And that doesn't bode well.

• 1:27:29Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I mean, that's the French Revolution, yeah.

• 1:27:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. It will end in it will end in some kind of similar cataclysm. And maybe we need that.

• 1:27:37Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I mean, that's the like brutality of human history. You look at it's just blood baths. I'm curious if there's certain aspects to our political culture that are encouraging to me. Obviously, a capital insurrection is not encouraging, but a super divided government is interesting to me in terms of like the evolution of society, because if 50, like our senate is 50 50.

• 1:28:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:28:08Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Right? And that's like, if you are debating over really complex problems that

• 1:28:16Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Literally, one out of every two people can disagree on. Then the problem is, then you're probably living in a pretty advanced society. If we can live in the same world and two people in the same room can believe opposite about something. If it was, if the, if the room was literally on fire and your skin is burning, you're not going to argue over the fire department. They're coming. That's a very clear, that is such a cause and effect problem with no gray area. But if you're talking about what makes the economy work, what rises people out of poverty? Is it this or is it that? What is actually going to change climate, the climate crisis? If there is one, or is this just the natural?

• 1:28:58Jedidiah Jenkins?

  You know, like, those things are so complex and they're very serious and may cause the downfall of our society. But in terms of, it's pretty remarkable that you can have, like, the leaders of the country divided down the middle.

• 1:29:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:12Jedidiah Jenkins?

  That just means that society is now so complex that we, we solved a lot of the most obvious problems.

• 1:29:18Rich Roll?

  But that complexity leads to a certain paralysis when

• 1:29:23Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Totally.

• 1:29:23Rich Roll?

  Government is divided to that extent.

• 1:29:25Jedidiah Jenkins?

  But then if, is paralysis, if, okay, if, if it is divided to that extent, hopefully in a democracy, even though ours is a little screwy, it doesn't necessarily represent that half the country believes this, but, but a large amount of them believe one way and a larger amount believe another. But if, if it was less divided and yet there were that same division of beliefs in the country and they just like forced the other half of the country to be doing something they didn't want to do, that would lead to, I think, more insurrections and more.

• 1:30:04Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that's a function of the, the caliber and quality of those beliefs. Are those beliefs deeply held values? Or are they surface level beliefs about, you know, things more trivial? And when you get into a real differentiation of value systems, I think that's where it becomes, you know, very difficult to reproach.

• 1:30:25Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, I mean, and that's the genius behind lobbyists and marketing, is if you make something like gay marriage, which The evangelicals in this country, it's like, if I get gay married over here, that doesn't affect your straight marriage and your family. But then they, they sell it as this like cancer that will erode all marriage. And it will not only that, but it will erode the sanctity of scripture, which you've built your whole life on. Like, they give it the power to destroy everything else. And so they make it a symbol, this like seemingly small thing. And so any, that's what lobbyists do is they try to make it where, oh, if you take away the soybean subsidy,

• 1:31:08Jedidiah Jenkins?

  you actually destroy A, B, C, D, and E of every, in every direction.

• 1:31:12Rich Roll?

  Well, on the gay marriage thing, I mean, yeah, then, you know, culture shifts and people's perceptions. I mean, that, that, you know, it was interesting to hear Fran Lebowitz talk about that because she was like, that's never, you know, it's never going to happen.

• 1:31:25Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Right.

• 1:31:25Rich Roll?

  And she was as surprised as anybody that that actually like took place.

• 1:31:31Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I even think about, I mean, to bring it back to Britney Spears, watching.

• 1:31:36Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:31:37Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, watching that documentary was really.

• 1:31:39Rich Roll?

  I watched it last night.

• 1:31:41Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Was really interesting to me because 2007, 2008 was not that long ago. And it was just open season to make fun of these women and to make fun of substance abuse and rehab and mental health. Like dunking on them, slam dunking. And what's even interesting now is that made me think about Coney 2012 and my best friend, Jason Russell, having a mental health crisis in public. And then having everyone make fun of him and South Park make a whole episode about him. And like, even now, I feel like 10 years later,

• 1:32:23Jedidiah Jenkins?

  that would be so unacceptable to like mock somebody having a mental health crisis like that. We even just have a different language around it that feels, to look at the way that people spoke about that. And I remember because it happened to me and my community, I felt. The claustrophobic trauma of wow, people do not understand the gravity and realness of this and it's a joke to them, which is certainly what Brittany felt, being like hunted and then mocked on national television.

• 1:32:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's so sad watching that and seeing what that young girl, you know, had to endure. It's heartbreaking to watch it and to see, like, the one thing I didn't realize is like how deeply strange her Instagram is and is clearly like somebody who's not as mentally fit as they could be and I don't know whether they need a conservator. I mean, that's a whole other subject, but you know, this woman has endured a lot and it is interesting that it wasn't that long ago and when you see those interviews, it's just they don't age well. And now that's brought up a broader issue about this. We're seeing like the Lindsay Lohan, you know, interviews and kind of how she, you know, was treated by the public

• 1:33:38Rich Roll?

  and the whole, you know, those, those events coincided with the explosion of the paparazzi media and all of those tabloid magazines that were profiting off of all of the schadenfreude. And it's, you know, it's, I'm glad that these documentaries exist now and that there is a kind of cultural agreement that that was not handled well and we should have a more meaningful conversation about mental health and a recognition that these people are human beings with feelings just like everybody else.

• 1:34:10Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I really hope so. I feel like, one of my favorite things about any documentary is when it expands my understanding and empathy for a situation. I just also watched the Tiger Woods documentary.

• 1:34:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I saw that too.

• 1:34:24Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And.

• 1:34:25Rich Roll?

  It's a similar story in many ways.

• 1:34:27Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And it's like, it's so funny, like Fran Lebowitz being surprised about gay marriage and the Me Too movement. I, I hadn't realized until I watched the Tiger Woods documentary. I was sitting there with my roommate and he goes, he goes, okay, so he cheated on his wife. Isn't that private? Like, why do we care? And I hadn't even thought of that. I was like, you're right. It feels really invasive and violating to, for like, me to have an opinion about his marriage. He's a golfer. He's not a marriage therapist. If my marriage therapist is cheating on their spouse, well, that's the whole point of why I'm paying them. So that's relevant.

• 1:35:07Jedidiah Jenkins?

  But why? And I was raised in the South in Christianity. And I remember as a kid, when Bill Clinton was being impeached, the progressive media being like, why do we care what he, what's going on in his marriage? And if he's being faithful to his wife? And my family was like, well, that impugns everything. If he's actually not honest in this way, then he's not honest in another thing. And so he must be impeached, which is hilarious that they voted for Donald Trump. But it's just the way things change. Where I'm watching this Tiger documentary and I'm like, I don't think that we should be involved in that at all.

• 1:35:49Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And yet they're like selling these stories and he's losing endorsement deals. Who cares?

• 1:35:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And the kind of disturbing glee with which that National Enquirer, right? The guy with the bow tie?

• 1:36:03Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Oh, my gosh. He's such a cartoon.

• 1:36:05Rich Roll?

  How like sort of excited he was about being able to like uncover this?

• 1:36:10Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It was like big game hunting for him.

• 1:36:12Rich Roll?

  It's really, yeah, disturbing.

• 1:36:14Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I understand like humanizing gods, you know, like trying to find them. I get that inclination, but it's just like.

• 1:36:26Rich Roll?

  But to draw a parallel between Tiger and Brittany, these are people who were foisted into the public eye at a very early age. And were, you know, subject to image crafting, where a lot of interested parties who had a lot to gain financially through their success, were heavily invested in kind of controlling their lives and the narrative around their lives. And part of that was this wholesome image, right?

• 1:36:53Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53Rich Roll?

  With Brittany, at least in the early part of her career, and Tiger just being this super clean cut guy. And something's got to crack. Like, humans aren't wired for that. And at some point, you know, it's going to go haywire. And it does like every time. So whether it's shaving your head or escaping to Vegas, you know, people need an outlet and.

• 1:37:13Jedidiah Jenkins?

  What is your? How old are your kids?

• 1:37:17Rich Roll?

  The boys are 25 and 24 and the girls are 17 and 13.

• 1:37:21Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Okay. What is it like? Raising a Gen Z, because my friends who have kids who are like able to talk and like 10 or older, you ask them what a kid wants to be now and they say a YouTube star or a TikTok star. I'm like, whoa, that's what they're like. When it was my age, I wanted to be a marine biologist or or Steven Spielberg. But so what is your, and I don't know your kids at all, but are they like, if they were like, I want to be TikTok famous, would you be like, go for it? Here's a camera or would you be like, not till you're this age? What's your philosophy on that?

• 1:37:57Rich Roll?

  I would be, I would be very circumspect about that. And, you know, my kids aren't necessarily a proxy for the average kid. I mean, my, my older boys are the most analog people that I know. Like, they are rarely, you know, I mean, they're, they're on Reddit and they read stuff online, but they don't have social media presences at all. And they're artists and musicians and they live in Echo Park. They're home for the pandemic, but they're, you know, trying to pursue a music career and are kind of immersed in that culture.

• 1:38:25Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Do you see like a Luddite revolution amongst young people?

• 1:38:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, they're, they're, they're kind of the, I mean, you know, they're, they, they wanted to record their album analog and they listen to, you know, albums and it's like.

• 1:38:37Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It's the ebb and flow of humans. You just respond to what was before you as like, I'm gonna do something different.

• 1:38:41Rich Roll?

  It's a desire for something, you know, that's tactile and real. And they like read books, which is an act of revolution when you're in your twenties, you know, in this age. And then my 17 year old is in, she's, she goes to a visual arts high school downtown and she's all about painting and she's got like a screen printing business and, you know, so she's online, but it's mostly like Snapchat with her friends. She's not trying to build a persona online. And then our youngest had a flirtation with TikTok. And there was a moment where she had like a really, a lot of people who were like watching her and it freaked her out and she deleted her account.

• 1:39:20Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Oh, it freaked her out? It didn't freak necessarily you out?

• 1:39:23Rich Roll?

  It was not, she, she had the self-awareness. To realize that it wasn't good for her. And I think there was some bullying involved in some, you know, kind of weird negative feedback. But she also had a lot of people who were, who were kind of, you know, watching her do her thing. And then, and she got rid of it on her own. And now she's like writing a book and writing poetry and doing other cool stuff. So I don't know that that's a typical experience. And I would agree with you that there is a whole generation that aspires to be a quote, unquote influencer or YouTuber or TikToker. And that's what they're, you know, like, look, you know, my 13 year old doesn't even, I would be surprised if she knew who Brad Pitt was, you know? But she knows who all these YouTubers are.

• 1:40:07Rich Roll?

  And that's what's meaningful and important. So that's a huge cultural shift. So those are the people that they're looking to for, you know, everything from, you know, how to stuff, like, how do you make a cake? Or, you know, all the kind of YouTube stuff where you can learn stuff. You know, how do you take care of a snake? To, you know, the vloggers and, you know, the people that are doing beauty tutorials and the like. Like, that is their culture.

• 1:40:34Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I wonder if, I'm realizing as you're speaking, if they're, if we're going to observe, if you are a kid now, you know that everything you do is documented online. I know some of the kids that I know and the younger people that I know. It is very normal for them to just delete old tweets and delete things and delete everything after a little while, just so it doesn't just live online forever. Where when, and me being Gen X millennial cusp, like an elder millennial, I have a lot of life, especially when we were using early social media where it didn't cross your mind that like, this embarrassing and appropriate picture now lives forever.

• 1:41:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:41:13Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And 15 years can pass and it will resurface or whatever. Like, that's maybe like,

• 1:41:20Jedidiah Jenkins?

  That is just a curse of this specific moment of generation, but the younger people know that that's just what happens.

• 1:41:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I think the distinction is that we're the only, I mean, I'm older than you, but when I went to college, there was no internet, you know, and thank God. And that, you know, started to percolate up, I think, like you said, around 94 with email and the like. But, you know, I am the last generation of knowing, of being kind of adult enough to know what it's like to not live with the internet and then, you know, being in this place now where it's all about that, whereas the, you know, Gen Z has never known anything different. So their relationship to privacy is extremely different. They don't calibrate it in the same way. And, you know, there's a lot of dunking that goes on on younger generations by older people.

• 1:42:11Rich Roll?

  But what I see is, you know, such a greater receptivity and sensitivity to, um, to issues of disenfranchisement and exposure, a global exposure to things that are going on in the world and, you know, counter narratives to traditional notions of, of history and politics that, you know, we just had our textbooks and that was the definitive word on everything. And there was no discussion that expanded outside of that because unless you went to the library and dusted off some weird book by some crazy professor, you weren't going to get any other ideas.

• 1:42:48Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I was 26, working at a miserable children, surrounded by a bunch of activists, and someone gave me A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. And I read, I read the part about dropping atomic bombs on Japan. I had never thought about the fact that we dropped atomic bombs on civilians. Atomic bombs on.

• 1:43:12Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Families as anything but like, wow, World War II, what a time. Like, I, America won World War II. It had never crossed my mind, the like, moral implications of that action until I was 26 years old.

• 1:43:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:43:25Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Because when I was told about World War II, no one gave you a counter narrative at all of like, not that.

• 1:43:31Rich Roll?

  I did read that book in college, though, and I remember it blew my mind because it runs so counter to just what you absorb in high school and you're just, you don't, you're not really raised to question anything. You're like, here's the thing, read this and memorize it and we'll test you on it. But wasn't a discussion.

• 1:43:49Jedidiah Jenkins?

  The, the flip side of that is, without patriotism, without agreement, showing the flip side of every argument is very hard to create any kind of cohesion in society. Which is the very thing we were talking about, is hard for us to move forward. When we all are skeptical about everyone else's ideas and we just don't have much in common, except we like, siphon ourselves into these other, these communities of like-mindedness, where you think everyone must be like you and everyone outside of your community is an alien, which, we're just becoming tribal again, which is how we started.

• 1:44:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but I, I think, you know, that's one of the reasons why I really, I love your reading and I like talking to you, because you do, you know, you, you have such a reverence for your roots and the community that you came from, even though, nobody would disparage you for saying, you know, showing at the hand and saying like, these are the people that bullied me, who didn't understand me, and they're in my rearview. But you go back and you love them and you understand them and you're able to communicate a compassion and an understanding of a culture that's different from your, your own. And I think that that's really powerful, as this observer who can, on some level, like disassociate and, and look at things from 10,000 feet.

• 1:45:07Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, I think every defense and coping mechanism is an experiment in survival. And so, some people, when they feel unsafe, they run away. When some people feel unsafe, they fight back. For me, my, for whatever reason, defense and coping mechanism was to disassociate and engage, like, and figure out, okay.

• 1:45:30Jedidiah Jenkins?

  You're a human. You're in the hallways in 7th grade and people are picking on you, making fun of your voice, making fun of your clothes. Like, you can like rage against the machine, or you can figure out why the machine works the way that it does and survive. And that was just the way that sounded best for me. And then, that percolated. And then I saw the fruit that it bears, which is the older I got. And then, I had all these friends who are conservative Christian jocks and this and that, raised in Tennessee. Then they find out I'm gay, and then by, through a relationship with me, it transforms their understanding of what a gay person is. Because it's not what they were told at church or saw on TV.

• 1:46:11Jedidiah Jenkins?

  So through that personal relationship and friendship, it like, for the rest of their life, they had a different perspective, which they wouldn't have had necessarily without me. And so I think that influenced the way that I see any meaningful change is through screaming at someone that you're wrong, and shaming them. I mean, you just see it. It turns people sour, and it turns people defensive and angry, and I don't know, I would be very curious to see a study on this of, like, how often shaming really works.

• 1:46:53Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I will say, one thing that it sort of worked is growing up with no smoking commercials, like, if you smoke, you will die.

• 1:47:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:03Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I mean, I was like, oh my god.

• 1:47:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:05Jedidiah Jenkins?

  So I mean, but that's...

• 1:47:06Rich Roll?

  I think that there is a place for shame in some regard. I think it can be, like, we're in a shameless society right now. Shame's out the window. And there is something to be said for that kind of like...

• 1:47:18Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Oh, I think we're in a hyper shame shaming society. Online, at least.

• 1:47:22Rich Roll?

  But we have, you know, we have people in leadership positions who are utterly shameless, and people who are living their lives performatively in a shameless way, because that is, that satisfies the algorithms and, you know, becomes a way to enrich oneself.

• 1:47:37Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Hmm. Yeah, I mean, what we have right now is just access to see the complexity of everything. So, sure, we have very shameless politicians and shameless people in power, but then you have...

• 1:47:53Jedidiah Jenkins?

  If you have a minor player that posts a dumb tweet and gets fired from their job and is like

• 1:48:02Rich Roll?

  That's a different thing.

• 1:48:03Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Wiped out and is like, you know, they said something that is like insensitive or stupid, or they did something 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, that, and so then they're piled on and like-

• 1:48:16Rich Roll?

  Weaponization of shame to eradicate people.

• 1:48:20Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And I think the weaponization of shame to eradicate people is part of what gave us such hyper shameful politicians, because they're actually people tired of that social immune response, respond and do the opposite, which is elevate somebody who just says "F you" to everybody.

• 1:48:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40Jedidiah Jenkins?

  They're like, "Yeah, finally someone's saying it."

• 1:48:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:43Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And like, if enough of us are like, "Yeah, let him say it," then maybe they'll shut up and we'll show them who has power.

• 1:48:50Rich Roll?

  Maybe we should all go back and read The Scarlet Letter again.

• 1:48:53Jedidiah Jenkins?

  There's just, it's so funny to me when you read classic literature, or you read American history, you realize how, everything feels so new, but it's just, everything is a remix.

• 1:49:03Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 1:49:04Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Which is a great YouTube series, by the way.

• 1:49:06Rich Roll?

  Back to Barb for a second, when listening to the podcast with her, you know, and talking about the, you know, how do you reconcile, you know, your love with somebody who's living their life in a way that's difficult to understand, what was, what I keyed in on with her is how she's put her faith in this position of intermediary. It's like, she clearly, you know, struggles with you being gay, because it's at odds with her faith, but rather than castigate you or have judgment on that, she puts God in between you and just says, "Well, you know, I believe that God has a plan for Jed," and that gives her comfort, right?

• 1:49:50Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:49:50Rich Roll?

  Which I thought was really interesting.

• 1:49:52Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I mean, you perfectly understand the situation, which is, she loves me and knows that like, God is more powerful than her, and that her job is to love me and not push me away, and not push me away from God, because she also feels like a representative of God's love. And so- It's just such an interesting relationship because also, her biggest fear kind of happened, which wasn't just that I'm gay. It's that the fear that she was sold, which is if you pick and choose what you want from the Bible, then that negates the whole damn thing. Like, if you can just decide that you're not gonna follow God's words here, you do the other thing.

• 1:50:35Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And what's funny is I was sold that, which kept me celibate and in the church for so long. But then, once I started unraveling that sweater, and I was like, well, why is this word? Why did Paul write this? And why is this in Leviticus and Deuteronomy? And like, who wrote the Bible? And then I'm like, whoa, why is this interpolated here and translated here? And what's the Council of Nicaea? And how come these people are deciding what goes in? And what about the Apocrypha and the Gnostic Gospels? All of a sudden, I'm so deep, I'm like, "Well, if I had just been allowed to be gay, I would have never known any of this. And I would have just loved Jesus all my life and never asked all these questions."

• 1:51:16Jedidiah Jenkins?

  But because this deep, interwoven piece of my identity caused me to become hyper-obsessed with knowing what's true, it unraveled the whole damn show. And now I can never go back.

• 1:51:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:51:29Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I don't know, never. I mean, God has a plan, right?

• 1:51:31Rich Roll?

  Right, right. I love how you characterize identity. I think this is a quote from the book, "The braided marriage of circumstance, ego, and soul."

• 1:51:43Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I mean, that is, we are where we came from. We are what we think we are, and then how we feel about what we think we are. And those like, the tension between those things is this dance of... I mean, identity is almost like the Bible, which is if you look at the concept of your soul, or the I, the ego, the who you are, you look at it too closely and it starts to disappear and unravel. Like, what?

• 1:52:13Jedidiah Jenkins?

  What made me want a breakfast burrito this morning? I don't know. But that was me that wants it. But who wants it? Like, what does that even mean? So you can't look too close.

• 1:52:25Rich Roll?

  I wanted to find this. Oh, here it is. I thought this was so interesting because these words, what do they even mean anymore? Authenticity and community.

• 1:52:36Jedidiah Jenkins?

  We love to bankrupt words by overuse.

• 1:52:38Rich Roll?

  Be authentic and, you know, like, find your own community. And they've been so commodified and overused that they've been drained of any kind of weight that they carried at once. And I love this passage, so I'm gonna just read it. "The words authentic and community don't mean anything on their own. Some things are meant to be byproducts, not causes or aims. We are desperate for authenticity and community, and in our haste, we mistake them for goals. But these things are like friendship, like flirting, like humor. If you talk about them, they retreat like a shadow in the light. You cannot discuss pheromones while flirting and expect your knees to keep touching under the table.

• 1:53:19Rich Roll?

  Some things, some beautiful things, are the smoke and not the fire. In the same way, you cannot will community into existence. If you gather people around you and squint and smile and say, 'We're such a community. How amazing are we?' Watch your friends run."

• 1:53:38Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I believe that to be true.

• 1:53:39Rich Roll?

  It's so good, right?

• 1:53:41Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, I mean, there was a season for a minute. I was like going to all these conferences and all these things. And that was just such the buzz of like building, everything was building a community. Every company was building a community. And I was just like, what are you talking about? What is this? And then I realized the best community I ever had was at Invisible Children. But we didn't try to build a community. We tried to end a war. Like, we had a very sharp idea of what to do and how to do it, which was through creative storytelling.

• 1:54:11Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And inspiring the young people of the world. And that pointed in, uh, that pointed desire and intention attracted types of people and like a diverse body of types of people into that mission. And then as we were all facing in the same direction, working towards something, you look to your left and your right and you're like, wow, this is dope. Like this feels really good to lean on each other, to use our skills in pursuit of the same common goal. That's community. But if you just all stand next to each other and talk to it, it's like, that's fine. It's great, but it's not going to make you feel that thing that I felt at Invisible Children.

• 1:54:49Rich Roll?

  Right. The idea that that community is, is a function of an activity or a purpose. Right? You talk about your, your trip down the Colorado River and how that bred community because it was an adventure. Right? It was a collective that, you know, came closer together as a group of people because you were all doing one thing. This, you were, it was mission based.

• 1:55:11Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Yeah. And I mean, there's, one of the reasons I love Fran Lebowitz so much is because she talks about how lazy she is and that one of the jobs of a writer is just to hang out. She's like, it's part of my job to just like smoke a cigarette and hang out and talk about nothing and not do anything. Cause I, it's the aggregate experience of collecting things to process. And so I do think about like, a lot of my best friends that I would call my community are actually, we're just all doing different things. And then in that friendship, we don't have a common purpose. We just like hanging out and like brighten each other's days and, and, and that's fine. But I would also say that's not, that is not nearly the same thing as like a cohesive,

• 1:55:55Jedidiah Jenkins?

  powerful community that changes your life. One is like a restful resource and like.

• 1:56:03Jedidiah Jenkins?

  A respite and amusing and one is just this energetic organism. And that is just a powerful feeling.

• 1:56:15Rich Roll?

  I do think that that those conferences have their place, though. Like I've met, like I met Tom Shadieak.

• 1:56:21Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Oh, me too. I love them.

• 1:56:23Rich Roll?

  And like, I just, I'm so delighted that like, I got to have an experience with him. And the other person that I met as a result of, you know, doing a lot of these kind of events that don't exist anymore because of the pandemic is, uh, is I got to spend time with your friend Ruthie, who's a big part of this book.

• 1:56:42Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Truly. Yeah, I think her name's in there like 25 times.

• 1:56:45Rich Roll?

  Right. And you, you say like, spending time with Ruthie is like a poem or a sermon, right?

• 1:56:52Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, so she, this is sort of what you were saying about experiencing, reading a book or watching a good movie or whatever, you experience someone else's truth and life that is not your own and that is interesting and edifying and valuable. We have enough in common. We think, we like the same music. We like road trips. We laugh. But she has such a different life than me. She is a six foot tall, drink a water woman with nerve damage in her spine that causes her to have incredibly debilitating chronic pain for her whole life. And to the point where she lived in her bed for seven years on the maximum legal dose

• 1:57:35Jedidiah Jenkins?

  of fentanyl every single day. And that didn't even help. And so she weaned herself off and now just lives with it. And there's a, there is an access to truths that she has that I do not have. And through our friendship, I learned so much about so much. And through, and she says that she learns through me, through whatever my life experiences are and.

• 1:58:01Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It just feels like this very healthy, educational, delightful dance that we have.

• 1:58:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a weird alchemy between the two of you.

• 1:58:13Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And I mean, I think the greatest friendships in our lives, at least to me, have that. It's that magical alchemy where the, whatever chemical they are and whatever chemical you are, when you pour those two things in the beaker, like light and smoke happens. And it's just, that's a special combo. Whereas I have other alchemies with other friends where it's a totally different experience, but equally as powerful to me. You know, I think we all have that.

• 1:58:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you talk about how you're at a point in your life now where it's not about like making new friends, but it's about really honoring the friendships that you have and like, you know, tending to that, to that garden and, you know, growing old together and having your lives like be, you know, integrated to such an extent that, you know, you get the richness of life as a result of those experiences.

• 1:59:06Rich Roll?

  We gotta wrap this up in a few minutes. I have so many notes that I didn't get to, but one thing I do want to talk to you about.

• 1:59:11Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I love the way we talk.

• 1:59:12Rich Roll?

  Is, uh, yeah, like where did we even go today? I don't know. But one thing I love is this idea, you talk about this in the death part, like, and I've heard you talk about this, like how we, you know, we scrub and whitewash death out of our experience. We all live in this kind of collective denial that somehow we're gonna sidestep this inevitability.

• 1:59:37Rich Roll?

  And how we just bury people in these boxes. And I've often thought like, I don't want to be buried in a box. Like, I want to be buried in, naturally in an organic garden, and I want like amazing plants to grow out of this. And I want all the people that I love to sit down and have an unbelievable meal and literally take my body into their bodies.

• 1:59:59Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Wow, that's a dope idea.

• 2:00:00Rich Roll?

  Why can't we do this, right? But you had, there is a way to have like a natural burial, right? I heard you talk about this. I didn't know that this was a thing that you could legally do.

• 2:00:09Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, it's becoming, I think it's a movement. So there's like... A friend of mine named John Christian helps run this thing called Larkspur. This is a farm outside of Nashville that this woman, I think, bequeathed to this organization that does natural burial. And you go and you, I think you can like pick out where you want to be buried. And it's basically just a gorgeous farm with hiking trails and wildflowers and a creek and a barn and trails through it. And then they just take your body and put you in the dirt. And then you just decompose. And it's like amazing. And to me, I'm like, that's exactly what I want. And I think a lot of environmentally conscious people, which hopefully that number is growing

• 2:00:54Jedidiah Jenkins?

  every day, they realized, okay, obviously a normal graveyard and a box and all that is very wasteful. Cremation is actually a huge carbon footprint. It takes a lot of energy to turn someone into an ashtray, like a lot. And so that's not actually very helpful either. But just putting your body in the dirt and feeding the soil and letting your nutrients disseminate into the ground is beautiful and fantastic. And I want to feed a tree and an earthworm in the grass. I think that's so cool. And I, so like, let me do that. And so this place called Larkspur is amazing. And I think, I'm very hopeful that it becomes the norm.

• 2:01:34Jedidiah Jenkins?

  And I think it will, even like baby boomers, both of my parents are like not interested in.

• 2:01:40Rich Roll?

  In the typical traditional burial.

• 2:01:42Jedidiah Jenkins?

  No, I want to be cremated.

• 2:01:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, wow. Well, let's, let's close this down. I mean, where do you, like, what is your, when you think about like Streams of the Ocean, I suspect that as a writer, you want, you want the reader to have their own experience and you don't want to taint or color that in any way. But if there is kind of an aspiration for what you want the reader to extract or get out of the experience of reading this book, can you put words to that?

• 2:02:13Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Absolutely. So, to bring it back to my girl Fran. Fran Lebowitz said in an interview this past summer, she was talking about how she's an excellent reader. And she reads more books than anybody and has more books than anybody. And she said-

• 2:02:26Rich Roll?

  That's why she can't move out of her apartment.

• 2:02:28Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Exactly, it's too many. She said that she doesn't read for plot or story, she doesn't care. And, which made me howl, laughing. She goes, "I read for language. I read sentence by sentence. And I love the flow of language and I like the way that it lands on my mind. I don't actually care if Sally slept with Jessica and then, oh no, there's a note under the- like, who cares what happens? I want to know how this language flows into my mind, which to me, is also how I read. Like, the most extravagant plot, I almost don't notice it. It's that if, within this paragraph, did you make me feel some type of way? Or did I learn something with each bite?

• 2:03:13Jedidiah Jenkins?

  You know, it's almost like, I want to read and I want to write the way that I eat. Which is, I want to enjoy the whole process of eating, not just being nutritious and having a full stomach. I want everything that I experience with my mouth, each bite tastes good. And so, what I hoped for this book was to convey what I love about reading, which is, I'm going to pour my brain onto paper with the things that when I was working out ideas that were confusing to me, once I got them in these words, I felt like I got to exhale. And I felt that sense of revelation and joy

• 2:03:57Jedidiah Jenkins?

  that comes with understanding something a little better. And that's my favorite thing to do when I read. And so, my hope is, the way that- I felt writing this book and the way that I feel when I read books that I love is what someone reading it would feel.

• 2:04:13Rich Roll?

  Wow, beautifully put. Well, that was my experience reading it. So.

• 2:04:17Jedidiah Jenkins?

  God, you're good to me.

• 2:04:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've got, I've got like so much love for you as a person, as an artist, as a, as a creative individual. You're a gift to the world. This book is, is really, um, it's special, man. So thank you for writing it and I can't wait to see what you write next. Are you, are you well into the next thing?

• 2:04:37Jedidiah Jenkins?

  No, I'm now, you, I can't really work on a book until I get over the hump of a book's release because I need to like talk about it and think about it. I can't be on to the next. But now I'm really processing what that's gonna be. And I really think it might involve a lot of Barb, which.

• 2:04:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Oh, good.

• 2:04:54Jedidiah Jenkins?

  I hope so.

• 2:04:54Rich Roll?

  Good, good, good. Well, it's gotta be challenging to try to release a book in the pandemic, you know, when you can, and, and as, this is always hilarious to me, like you're, you're couch as a travel writer. Like I, I don't see you as a travel writer. I don't know why that's in your.

• 2:05:09Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Well, because my first book was a travel thing and I'd written for some magazines, but I'm, I, early on in my career, I was trying to figure out what am I? And so it's like, you can, sometimes you kind of have to either call, call it forward or look back at a body of work and say, oh, that's what you are. Like, are you an essayist? Are you a memoirist? Who knows? I just write things down.

• 2:05:31Rich Roll?

  Right. I think you've transcended travel writer, though. Um, cool. And also, uh, I wanted to point out that, that, you know, Ruthie's book came out, it was the beginning of the pandemic. Poor woman.

• 2:05:42Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:05:43Rich Roll?

  Beginning when nobody knew what was going on.

• 2:05:45Jedidiah Jenkins?

  Such an engaged person.

• 2:05:46Rich Roll?

  Wrote this amazing book and, and, uh, I just, I didn't know, like, I wanted to have her on the podcast, but I wanted to do it in person, but it wasn't safe. And then like that moment passed, but like, I really want to have Ruthie come on and, and share her story. I think she's very powerful.

• 2:05:59Jedidiah Jenkins?

  She would love that. It would be great. And her book is fantastic and profound.

• 2:06:05Rich Roll?

  Cool. So like Streams of the Ocean, you can find it at fine booksellers everywhere. I suspect Jed would like you to purchase it at an independent bookseller, if possible. Definitely check him out on Instagram, at Jed Adia Jenkins, and fall in love with his writing like I have. And come back and talk to me whenever you want.

• 2:06:25Jedidiah Jenkins?

  It is my favorite thing. If this podcast was like nine hours long, I would just need like throat coat tea and we'd just go, all-nighters.

• 2:06:33Rich Roll?

  Right. I have no doubt that you would never run out of things to talk about. All right. Love you.

• 2:06:40Jedidiah Jenkins?

  You're the best. Love you too.

• 2:06:41Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 2:06:46Rich Roll?

  Thanks for listening, everybody. For links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course always appreciated. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page on richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast

• 2:07:27Rich Roll?

  was created by Blake Curtis. Portraits by Ali Rogers and Davy Greenberg. Graphic elements courtesy of Jessica Miranda. Copyrighting by Georgia Whaley. And our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. You can find me at richroll.com or on Instagram and Twitter at Rich Roll. I appreciate the love. I love the support. I don't take your attention for granted. Thank you for listening. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.