"Are you running away?" asked the lady standing behind the Qantas ticket counter at the airport.
"Yep!" I replied with as much confidence as I could muster after having just asked for the next international flight out of Melbourne.
"Auckland or Singapore?" she asked.
"Whatever the next one is" were about all the words I could find in that moment, still wondering whether this was the right thing to do.
The lady printed off an A4 page and handed it to me.
It was a ticket to Singapore.
That moment was 9 years ago today. Four days of clothes and a laptop stuffed in a carry-on bag, a ticket to anywhere, and absolutely no plan beyond that. I still have that ticket too, it has travelled with me ever since, and it's probably the only thing that hasn't been replaced in one way or another since I became a full-time digital nomad.
Since then I've probably completed 4 or 5 laps of the world, in a variety of ways, and just about all of it without having a plan beyond waking up and deciding whether it was time to move to the next place. Through nearly all of that time I had the discipline to sit and get a full day of work done from wherever I was.
I've found a comfort in living in this state of chaos. Perhaps it's the constant uncertainty that keeps my mind occupied trying to anticipate what's next, or perhaps it's just the unknown that keeps the small things at bay. Either way, it's probably the same itch that solving hard problems and building startups scratches for me, just in a different form.
Besides that ticket, I have physical souvenirs from a life lived from everywhere. The first bag adorned with every city and town I slept in, the bicycles I rode around continents on, and a red flannel shirt from every adventure, each just a small part of a much larger story. But there are two artifacts in particular that are worth mentioning:
The first is a handwritten notebook of travel ideas that I spent 4 days brain dumping in February of 2019, sitting in the Ye Olde King's Head in Santa Monica drinking too many cups of free filter coffee that came with breakfast. I've added notes to it since then, but at its core it answers the many frustrations and wishful gaps I've run into over the years.
The second is nearly 20TB of photos, videos, notes, GPS data, spending spreadsheets, and just about any other digital information I could log along the way, backed up on hard drives and sitting in a safety deposit box. That's not even mentioning the stuff that's sitting in Facebook, Instagram, Strava, and just about every corner of multiple Google accounts.
If you've ever sat down with me for a beer and we've shared travel stories and plans before, I've probably pulled out my heavily pinned Google Maps map to show you where I've been, or mentioned all this data I've collected over the years as I offered up some tidbits for your next adventure. It's finally starting to come full circle now, I've had a few friends reach out this year alone looking for information about places I've been, and every time I send them a list of pins and a few must-dos, as I wonder why I keep spending the time to write this stuff down again for the nth time.
I think like most people, besides being a great alibi you'll probably never need, all this data just sits there collecting digital dust as the memories fade. Perhaps the data nerd in me has taken this to a different scale, but either way I'll keep collecting it every time I go on new adventures, hoping that one day I'll sit down and sort through it properly. You know, delete all those blurry drunken photos, edit the nice ones and actually get around to sharing them somewhere better than pulling out your phone and scrolling for 5 minutes because someone mentioned something that happened years ago.
I definitely conceded a long time ago that I was never realistically going to sit down and watch hours of video to find a usable minute here and there and catalog it properly so I could find it again later. If I did, I'm sure that 20TB would be closer to 5TB of usable content, something I could carry with me and actually do something with.
What that something is, is trekked.com.
A place to turn all that digital dust into stories worth sharing, and a place to find inspiration for your next adventure. If I can untangle 9 years and 20TB of data into something that's valuable to others, then there's no reason everyone can't get their stories out of their camera rolls and their memories.
If you haven't gathered by now, I'm very much a storyteller at heart. I write a lot, in various places, although only little bits of it ever make it to a public view. It's something I'm hoping to get better at this year. The last thing I posted on LinkedIn was almost 16 months ago, it mentioned my ideas book, the rapid emergence of technology like AI, and spending some time to see if I could find the intersection of the two.
Why start here? Because I'm tired of having all this data locked away in 20 different places where people can't find it, and I'm tired of sending lists of pins and a couple of paragraphs of recommendations, when I know it's not going to do it justice. But I also believe this is the best place to start to build a strong foundation for everything else in my ideas book.
And that intersection with AI I mentioned? Trying to read between the lines of the doomsayers and evangelists is exhausting, and the only way I'm going to form a proper opinion is to try and build something of substance with AI and see if it holds up to all the hype it's been given. I've spent a few months pushing AI around in different ways, seeing if I can either break it, or find a way to give it autonomy with enough gates to prevent it from being able to burn the house down. Not to mention if I'm going to have any hope of looking through hard drives worth of data to find the good stuff, I'm going to need something that doesn't mind sitting through hours of black video and windswept audio to find anything of value.
So I've begun documenting this giant AI experiment in public here on trekked.dev, including the experiments, what's working well and the lessons learned along the way. I've also got the AI writing the changelogs, and I might post a few more general blogs there as well, but I've marked everything with the authors, so you can tell what's what...and I've already got some of that data working, the background of this page is actual flight data from my travels.
Who would have thought that a single ticket to Singapore 9 years ago would become the catalyst to my next chapter of life? If you've got travel stories to tell, and you'd be up for a bit of early stage user testing on Trekked, send me a DM. I'd love to show you where I'm headed.