like a good neighbor, state farm is there. "roadtrip nation" would also like to thank the college board for supporting this series. inspiring minds and connecting students to college success. "roadtrip nation" would also like to thank tourism new zealand for bringing the roadtrip experience to the other side of the road in new zealand. cheers to our kiwi mates! ♪ (female #4) people who just do day in, day out without questioning anything, where's the fun in that? you've got to get up every morning and love to do what you do. you've got to love it. (female #1) i think it's so amazing to meet someone who's completely original in thought. (female #2) i want to be consciously making decisions about my life. (su-yin) i never sat down and thought, "what do i really want to do?" (mariana) i need to discover myself. (male #2) it's not a horse race. this is a marathon. it's the journey that's really going to count. embrace it. ♪ oh! hula-hoops! can you just grab one? (mariana) we're entering the last week of the trip, 9 days till this trip is over. i'm not ready. i don't know, i just don't have the confidence in myself to go get 'em tiger, not yet. (su-yin) i feel like it's going really quickly and that there's just so much more to learn. for me, the roadtrip is about learning more about who i am and what is really important to me and what success means to me so that i can figure out how stable i want my life to be and how much risk i'm willing to take. (camilla) i really like being inspired, but i need like to know the practicality of, the how did you do that? i'm still using the same criteria that my family and friends are using for a successful job, but their focus is a lot more on the money, whereas i don't want to go down that route so that's why i wanted to meet people outside of it who have a different set of criteria for what is a good and successful life. ♪ ♪ last week, i almost walked away ♪ ♪ walked away, ooh, walked away ♪ (su-yin) we're currently in rosedale, queens and we're about to meet roger thomas, the founder of naturally 7. naturally 7 is like an a cappella male vocal group. hi. how you doing? (mariana) ever since i was little i've been creative, that's always been my passion so, for me, this trip is about i just need to find people who have somehow been able to find their passion and live it every day and not ever let it become just another job. where did you find yourself at our age, in your early twenties? okay. ♪ at around 21, i was in school, in college studying to be a math teacher and an english teacher. and i just couldn't stay focused studying, so it became clearer and clearer to me that that wasn't at least at that moment, at that time of my life what i needed to be doing. i remember working at a law firm and people say, "thank god it's friday" every single week. thank god it's friday meaning that "i really don't like what i do and wow, the weekend is here." so i came to the conclusion very early that whatever it is that i do, it should be something that i would do for free. and slightly just before that i started the group that i'm in now. just as a serious hobby, we decided that we were gonna just do a cappella music. there's really no money in that and there's no nothing in that, but it was what i loved and it was what the other six guys loved. and we got involved in an a cappella competition in san francisco called the harmony sweepstakes and we won that with like only two songs on our repertoire and that was the time when the sponsor of that event said, "you guys don't have a cd?" we're like no, no. "all the people that you competed against, "they're all recording artists or they're out on, you know, on tours and doing, you know, all sorts of stuff." that was the first time we realized that there are people doing a cappella and actually making a living. we, from that point on, we did--we recorded our first album and an agent said, "i want you guys to do a showcase." we did a showcase and from that showcase, we had like 57 engagements to do, but all of us had jobs. and there's really that time when you really, really have to follow your heart. if you realize that, you know, 5 years from now, if i don't go for this, will i always be regretful? so we just went for it. ♪ i built this wall all around me ♪ ♪ i built this wall to surround me ♪ ♪ i built this wall-- i've been doing music now, been full time and what i guess most people would consider successful with it for about 7 years now. ♪ (su-yin) how do you switch off the questioning? 'cause i know that i have trouble sleeping at night when it gets to big decisions, and so does mariana. do you ever find it hard to sleep and just to turn it off? they say whatever you really-- if like if a person plays a lot of chess, they'll start dreaming about chess moves and, you know, in their sleep. everything's about that thing and that's how i was and i couldn't turn that off. and i would always remember how that feels to be so passionate about something so that when i'm in that time when i'm questioning something that that can override 'cause i think that the questioning actually doesn't ever stop. you're most likely gonna come across a whole lot of people that go, "you know that's good, but what do you do for real?" you're not a child. put away, you know, put away the, you know, the childish things whatever, but it's amazing how everything just turns around and now you're the hero. and those exact same people go, "wow, i want you to talk to my children and just show 'em how you reached your goal." you know, the exact same people saying the same thing, so and then you look at yourself and go "what am i doing differently?" and it's nothing. best choice in life is what you would do. ♪ (mariana) is this massachusetts? i haven't seen much except the highway. they've got nice, smooth roads and they're not very angry on the roads. (su-yin) ray kurzweil is like an inventor, futurist. he's published quite a few books about technology and the future. we're just outside of boston and we're at his offices, kurzweil technologies. [piano music playing] do i get to sit on this couch also? yeah, you just squeeze in right here. (su-yin) camilla, mariana and myself, we just see the future ahead of us which is, you know, it's bright and there's so many possibilities but because there's so many options, i think we feel a bit overwhelmed with the choices so, yeah. (ray) i can tell you exactly what to do. there's no need to talk to all these other people. ♪ when i'm not really sure what i'm doing, i find it really hard to justify to other people what i'm doing, particularly when their head spaces is very chronological career path. did you ever have a similar kind of conflict? no. i remember when i was 7 and 8, i created a puppet theater. it was kind of a virtual reality world and i had a command station. at this command station, i could control the world. i could move the sun and moon and stars on and off the stage and characters and people and props and i had this conceived. well, i know what i'm gonna be, an inventor, and i really haven't swayed. i can remember when i was 5, that sort of transcendent feeling. i didn't have that vocabulary at 5, but if you put things together in just the right way, it can create magical effects that go beyond the stuff you put together and could solve problems and change people's lives. i kind of had that sense. so when did you, like when was your first, like how did you have this company? i think you have maybe ten or more that you-- something like that, yeah. well, when i was a sophomore in college i started a company that matched up high school students to colleges by computer. we rented a computer. we printed up a questionnaire with 300 questions, we collected 3 million items of information on 3,000 colleges, and we processed a lot of students and then we sold it to a new york publisher for $100,000 plus royalties which i used then to actually help support my parents because my father was already ill with heart disease and to put myself through college. and then after college i started my first reading machine company. so this is an early kurzweil reading machine. this is from 1979 and this is the card reading machine. it's 5,000 times smaller. (female computer voice) taking picture. so here it's reading what it saw. (male computer voice) you don't really understand it at all. this is because if something goes wrong, you get stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go. (ray) the thing that's exciting about being an inventor is actually creating some new ideas, some new technology that has an impact, a positive impact on people's lives. if you can be out in the world and interacting and confronting problems, i mean that's what life is all about. i mean i have confidence that actually any problem you encounter in life, there's an answer that you can find to overcome that problem and that each day at the end, i kind of think what challenges did i have today? how did i do in solving them and tomorrow's another day. it kind of starts over again and regardless of whether today went well or not, it's a whole new world tomorrow. (camilla) it's been difficult for me to make a decision about what to do with my life because there's no one area that i seem to have a particular aptitude for and because of that, i've never really pursued any one thing. you don't necessary need a path, you just need the next project. like this roadtrip is an exciting project so you got excited about it and you did it so find your next project. then when you've done a couple of projects, you know two points makes a straight line. you might see that you've actually have arrived in a field. the future will be different and bigger. (su-yin) thank you so much for your time. (camilla) ray said, "i think the best way for someone like you "to look at your career is not look at it as this narrow career path but just look for your next project" and i think that fits with my personality a lot better. i had an idea that it was very murky out there and i didn't know how to approach it. i definitely feel a lot more relaxed about it, about not knowing exactly what it is i want to do. ♪ (mariana) today is our last big drive to portland, maine, the finishing line, we're crossing it today. (su-yin) (camilla) right here? yeah. one, two, three. do the ones on the way count? yeah, we drove through them i guess. so we drove through pennsylvania so that's 13. was i on 13? i lost count. i think it's like 13 or 14. start again mariana. vacation land, yea! whoo! we need some party poppers. ♪ save the world from the human beings ♪ ♪ i can hear the silent sun ♪ (su-yin) we're in portland, maine and it's our last day of interviews, and we're about to interview bruce schwab. no, that sounds good. yay, come for a ride. this is the biggest vehicle i've been in all day. you drove this across the country? (su-yin) yeah, we did. (bruce) oh, my gosh. that's almost as nutty as sailing around the world. yeah, i've met people and i was telling them i sailed around the world. "oh, i've always dreamed of doing that." and i was like, no you haven't. racing around the world solo is not a walk in the park. ♪ (bruce) i have definitely had an unusual upbringing. my parents divorced when i was 9 and i joined my dad when i was 13 and i wound up on this big adventure and it turned into a big sailing trip. we were 3 years the whole adventure. i finished the trip and wound up back in seattle living on my dad's boat. i lived on the boat when i went to high school so i always felt a little bit of an outsider anyway and i was always, you know, the boat kid. when i went to college at the university of washington, i didn't last very long. i was very distracted and my dad was sort of getting into solo sailing adventures at the time being this, you know, this smart aleck kid, i was always making suggestions to my dad about how he ought to rig this and how i ought to do that. and he said, "well, okay, smarty, "why don't you go get a boat and come do these races and we'll see how you do?" a big race in san francisco bay called the three-bridge fiasco and it was the first solo race i did and i won the whole thing. this was all working out great. my boss cut me a lot of slack. i had a good job running the rig shop. i was well known in the san francisco bay area, but i just started getting really tired of the daily grind, the 9 to 5. i'm not really sure what it was, i just started losing traction and i needed some big goal to motivate me to get something to happen and i started thinking about the vendee globe which is the non-stop around the world race that no american had finished. even though i grew up sailing, did all the sailing, there's an element of fear in dealing with the ocean, but perhaps the fact that i was afraid of it and it was a way to prove a lot to myself and prove a lot to other people, it became more and more compelling and a couple of clients that i had, guys that were customers of mine said, "you know if you "want to do that, i'd put in some money to help get the thing started." you know and we started on a boat and a design and the designer said, "i'll pitch in my time "and if you get the money, then you can pay me. if you don't get the money--" and these are boats that cost like a million dollars to build. you know, i took some money out of my house that i had in california. i loaned that to the foundation, use my credit to support these bills. i mean i stuck my neck way out there. and bit by bit through borrowing money and all of this, constantly begging, constantly begging for money all the time. and i wound up coming up here to maine, i'm spending more than a year in this little shed, leaky, old building in this boat yard here. and i ran into fin sprague, the owner of this boat. and he said, "look, just get over to france and get to the start and we'll sort it out later, you know." so we went to france and took off and i was doing pretty good in the early stages of the races with the leaders but in the rush to-- even after all these years, it was still a rush. we still had stuff that wasn't ready. i had to slow down. i had to fix some stuff and then i was sort of in the middle of the pack. and so i just stuck it out and was real careful, i made it to the finish and had this great welcome in france. the governor declared a bruce schwab day in the state of maine, and it was all the stuff, i had a big reception. it was all great. but in spite of doing this thing that-- they had this enormous challenge. i think part of the reason when i left my job that i had for years was that it would create new opportunities for me. financially, it just like squashed me. but in spite of all that i would never, you know, turn back, you know, say it wasn't worth doing. i fall into that mental trap that i'm a failure because i went bankrupt doing this thing and i didn't achieve what i wanted to financially so i failed. well, no, i mean i became the first american to do something that was an incredible challenge for me, ly. it was an incredibly fulfilling, gratifying thing to do. (mariana) how did you deal with the fact that you had been preparing for this race for 5 years? did you have to re-establish what you were gonna focus on? (bruce) yeah, yeah, it is hard. i guess there's a certain risk in achieving something that is so colossal. they say, "what do you do after that, to top that?" to be honest, there's a whole bunch of guitar tunes i'd like to learn and some of them i've been wanting to learn for years. [guitar music playing] and it may seem like little things compared to the big goal that i had before but if achieving the big goal taught me anything, it's that these little things are the most important. and so one important factor for me to handle all this is to come to a conclusion, not so much about what you want to do, but how you want to do it. and i'm not sure the what even matters really. the questions you're asking yourself, they may not ever stop. in my case, they haven't stopd yet. i'm 48 years old and i'm where you guys are right, yingo fireut whis ianto d y g s.reams. biggest thing i'veotn t a change. o of sothg. mave o of sothg. arna yowiwain d waou th fhe tssheows