Life & Work with Jason Szeftel

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jason Szeftel.

Jason, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, but back when I was a kid I wasn’t a big fan of the city. All the good weather and easy living people come here to enjoy? I wanted to get away from it! I still have this drawing from when I was five or six. A teacher had asked me to draw a picture of what I was most excited to learn. I eagerly sketched what I thought were some pretty impressive looking skyscrapers. Beneath them, I scribbled that I wanted to learn ‘how the city was built’. Answering that question is kind of what I’ve been up to ever since. This childhood fascination grew while I was in college and graduate school. To me the cities, farms, ports, factories, roads, and people in the world all seemed mysteriously linked together. In some parts of the world, they meshed together well. But in most places, they didn’t. It was a puzzle. Nothing I heard in class or in the news really seemed able to explain it.

To figure out what was going on, I spent time in Northern California and on the East Coast, with stints in Europe, Asia, and South America in between. I worked in development and got the opportunity to see how things were built from the ground floor. But while it was definitely eye-opening work, it was also pretty uninspiring. I soon left to work on some cool projects I couldn’t get out of my head. Now I have a media company and the two major announced projects are a podcast and a book. Both are about China, a place where I’ve lived, studied, traveled, and focused a lot of my attention over the years. After over 15 years, I’ve pieced together some very interesting things about the country that I’m really excited to share with people. Some of it is pretty unbelievable but that’s just because our world is more amazing than we realize!

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
Life is a struggle! There’s no escaping it. We live in a really complex world where there is more to learn than there is time to understand. Our bodies, hearts, and brains are also wired to want it all but we’ve been given limited bandwidth and resources. It’s a real bind. Balancing time and desire means tough choices and major sacrifices. As corny as it sounds, my biggest challenge has been staying true to myself. We’re always being nudged and prodded by social forces. Our friends and family have ideas about who we are or who we should be. Even acquaintances at work or in school exert a subtle but powerful influence. It may be slow, like water eroding a cliff, but it is still there. Left unchecked, it can grind us into someone we don’t recognize. For me the academic and professional worlds were dangerous siren songs. They teased and tempted but never really provided the opportunity to be creative.

And the whole time there was always a relentless pressure to do exactly what everyone else was doing. It was easy, even natural, to get pulled off track. It took me a while to realize that in our current world being on a very recognizable track was a sure sign I was off track! Our media-saturated lives also make being honest with ourselves even harder. We live in an attention economy designed to drown us in alluring people, symbols, videos, messages, and objects. If we follow these artificial curiosities too far, we can easily lose sight of where our natural curiosity is trying to take us. Now more than ever, the part of us that helps us grow by opening us up to new ideas, experiences, stories, and people, is also what causes us to lose ourselves. So the struggle is eternal!

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
The main thing I’m doing right now is telling China’s story. Not some overhyped tale about how China is going to take over the world, or some farce about how it is a model for dealing with climate change, or any of the other misguided rantings we often hear about the country. Instead I’m trying to lay out what has really happened and is still happening inside that enormous country. I cover it warts, horror, triumphs, and all. The full story is in a book I’ve spent the last two years writing. I’m knee-deep into revising it and it looks on track to be published this year (fingers crossed!). While books can seem old-fashioned, they remain one of the best ways to get a complete picture of a complex topic. I’m really excited about this one because it is both in-depth and accessible. I think anyone who reads it will be able to walk away confident about why China is the way it is and where it is headed. My personal goal is to write the China book I wish I had found when I first went looking for one as a kid.

I’m also trying to tell China’s story in a new and compelling way. Alongside the book, I have a podcast called China Unraveled that tells some of the more unusual, relevant, and remarkable parts of China’s story. Each episode is short and digestible. Some explain current events. Some connect the deep past to the present. All of them try to provide context for why our world is the way it is. Both the podcast and the book – and China! – are just the start of some very cool projects. I’m combining a background in law and development and a focus on economics, politics, and history to illuminate some key truths that don’t ever seem to see the light of day. New digital tools finally make it possible to show what is going on in a way that anyone can understand. As the dust from the pandemic starts to settle, we are going to need new and better ways of making sense of our world. Unbelievable changes are on the way!

How do you think about happiness?
I thrive on a mix of the brainy, the physical, and the creative. I love learning, seeing, and making new things. Diving into new arts or sciences, exploring new ideas, interacting with new people, anything like that is very invigorating for me. Collaborating with others is also key. There are more interesting people to talk to and work with than ever before. I just wish the pandemic would end so we could do it more in the real world rather than just online! Also, after disliking LA as a kid, I’ve now changed my tune on this beautiful temperate coastal region. A Mediterranean climate just lets you do so much all year round. Here I get to surf, bike, or hike all the time. If I didn’t have physical outlets like these, I’d probably go crazy from spending so much time in front of a screen. Recently I’ve also gotten into something called rope rolling. It is super fun. It is like jump roping without jumping. Check it out on YouTube!

Contact Info:

• Email: j.szeftel@gmail.com
• Website: www.jasonszeftel.com
• Twitter: @jasonszeftel
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtb8GOVj9FIJCaX-2ZyYW1A
• Other: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/china-unraveled/id1511865654

Image Credits:
Johnny Garcia