100,000 Miles
My eternal 100.000 miles road to wisdom
It probably is a clear manifestation of a solid midlife crisis. Or the desperate cry of an ego trying to break out. Or an honest try to order a gazillion of my thoughts in a mostly structured way. It’s certain that I miss playing with words, sentences and magic dust. The pandemic stole my favorite brain candy: intellectual interaction. I hear a million thoughts screaming to break free. So, I’m starting writing again. I have to. I'll restart my lifelong journey to gather information, streamline my thoughts, distribute them... and discuss all about everything with wonderful minds. I will populate this place with a collection of words and thoughts and vision on societal trends, technology, science and the old ancient art of communication and influencing.
I will collect, assess, question, write, kill, rewrite and build.
I’ll happily burn through another 100.000 miles to meet people, interview friends I admire, authors I like, business people walking the talk daily. A perpetual and gargantuan journey to wisdom. A treasure of views, experiences, debates, talks, interviews and musings. I’ll write from trains, planes, my kitchen table or on the roof of Nessie, the new Heliade Mobile Office.
The Non Book Author
I ate 103 non-fiction books over the last two years. Every single one of those had some precious thoughts, some interesting angle that can be summarized on a two-pager, or a well-thought slide. The rest of the book is mostly fill and vanity. Most of the chapters start reeking of wet socks quickly, they age badly. I decided that in this age of never-normality, I do not want to end as decomposing unsold stock in a moistly cellar. I have no ambition left to burden friends, colleagues, business partners and noble strangers to open their wallet to be graced with a hand-signed copy of what’s called a book, but would be a giant phallic print of some out of proportion need for acknowledgement. The people I care about found the way to this online place a long time ago. And you, noble stranger are most welcome. Together we saved a precious lot of trees…
Paraphrasing Romesh Gunesekera: “A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a journey is in the hands of a narrator.”
Let me be both…
IT’S A HELL OF A RIDE!
IT’S A HELL OF A RIDE!
IT’S A HELL OF A RIDE!
Eight years is long enough for a manifesto to either age badly or age into something more interesting. This one aged into a project. What started in 2018 as a half-serious midlife declaration has since produced roughly 130 posts, 10 letters to my daughter, two decades of SXSW attendance running in parallel, a collection of specific people met in specific hotel bars, and a number that crossed 100,000 at some point over the Texas hill country in August 2025. The chapters below are what happened after the manifesto.
The chapters so far
There are the Austin chapters, which by now constitute a small novel on their own. Year after year, the convention center filled up, spilled over, and in 2026 the building itself was a $1.6 billion hole in the ground while the festival spread across the city and somehow became more interesting without a mothership. There is the year I sat in a hotel ballroom and watched Brian Solis name the Work Chart, which I have not stopped quoting since. There is Charmageddon, a piece I filed from Austin in March 2026 about cognitive Darwinism and what it means to come home from a place that has spent a week aggressively reorganizing your assumptions. And there is the year Amy Webb buried her trend report under an audience that had stopped believing in smooth futures: I covered that moment in the Amy Webb and Scott Galloway dispatch from SXSW 2025, a session that felt, for about forty minutes, like two adults refusing to perform optimism for the cameras.
Then there are the Belgian-French commute chapters (quieter, less brisket). Most people who fly to Austin once a year do not spend the intervening months shuttling between Ghent and Paris on trains that may or may not be on strike. That commute, with its particular friction between two cultures that share a border and almost nothing else, sharpens certain observations about how Europeans approach leadership, hierarchy, and the performance of being reasonable. Get off that Freudian couch is one of those pieces: an argument against the culture of endless explanation and for the uncomfortable work of actual change, written after one too many meetings where understanding had become an alibi. Never miss Brain Day came from the same place, with a different target: the slow leak of curiosity that remote work accelerates when nobody is paying attention.
There are the people-met chapters. Jessica Meir at SXSW 2017, an astronaut with a very precise view of what diversity actually requires versus what conferences say it requires. John Havens in New York in 2018, on killer robots, the generation that needs to save the planet, and why tech ethics is not a philosophical exercise. Jane Goodall, who taught me something I had not expected to learn from a primatologist: that listening is a method, not a disposition. Each of these encounters produced a post, and each post produced something that changed how I framed the next conversation.
And then there are the airport-philosophy chapters, which are exactly what they sound like. Airports are, in my experience, the most honest public spaces on earth (the architecture is hostile, the food is overpriced, the seating punishes you for staying too long, and yet people keep showing up). 42 lessons from 100,000 miles is partly an airport book: a collection of things that become obvious only when you have spent enough hours in departure halls watching strangers negotiate their carry-on luggage with the quiet fury of the chronically sleep-deprived. Notes from inside the American pressure cooker, filed from Austin in March 2026, is another: an observation about what it feels like to be a European watching America from inside, when the inside is very loud and not entirely sure where it is going. 2026: the year friction shows its teeth belongs here too, written from the altitude where airport transit and geopolitical reality start to look like the same thing.
Why I keep going to Austin
I have been going to SXSW for over two decades, which means I have watched it absorb Twitter (2007), survive the years when everyone decided it had lost its soul (roughly 2015 through 2017), become briefly political (2018, when the panels started arguing about democracy), and arrive at its current incarnation as a festival large enough to hold an entire argument about the future without resolving it. The year Spielberg showed up to talk about Ready Player One, the convention center smelled like a film set and a tech conference had a minor identity crisis on stage. The year Amy Webb delivered her tech supercycle keynote with the precision of someone who had been right about too many things and was tired of being polite about it, I took three pages of notes and rewrote my entire speaker deck on the flight home. The year the convention center was demolished and the festival spilled across downtown Austin in a decentralized experiment that nobody had voted for and most people found more interesting than the original format: that was 2026, and it felt like the city had accidentally designed a better conference.
What keeps me coming back has nothing to do with nostalgia, and everything to do with the longitudinal data. Each March I carry the memory of the last twenty, which means I can tell when a room is performing optimism versus actually believing it. SXSW 2026’s central question was whether humans still need to matter in a world that is rapidly automating the appearance of mattering. That is not a question you can answer in one year. You need the baseline of 2013, when the question was whether smartphones were making us dumb, and 2017, when it was whether social media was making us political, and 2023, when ChatGPT arrived in Austin like a gate-crasher who turned out to own the building. The Davy Crockett line I keep returning to is not ironic. Austin is where I go when I need to think in public.
SXSW 2025 was a battleground, and its conclusion turned out to be surprisingly warm: the ultimate gadget that year was each other. The 2022 return after COVID was something else: ten thousand badge-wearing optimists who had spent two years on Zoom converging on Sixth Street with the slightly manic energy of people who had forgotten what rooms smelled like. I was one of them (the manic energy part; I had not forgotten what rooms smelled like, I kept traveling).
Letters from Lake Travis
There are now 10 Dear Tara letters in the archive, all filed from somewhere on the road, most of them from the same spot overlooking Lake Travis where the moon does its best work on a clear March night. The ninth letter, written in March 2026, opens with that moon dragging a silver line across the water, which is either a cliche or an accurate description depending on whether you have sat there at midnight after a week of SXSW panels about artificial intelligence and the future of human relevance. The letters were never meant to be a series; they started as a single note to a small person who would not read it for years. Tara is old enough now to have opinions about most things, including, increasingly, the things I write, which changes the calculus of the project in ways I did not anticipate when I started.
Frequently asked questions
What is 100,000 Miles?
100,000 Miles is a sourcing project I started in 2018: going to meet people, get inspired, collect raw material for a book that writes itself as I travel. Think of it as a rolling book, a table of contents that keeps expanding. Every flight, every hotel lobby conversation, every late night at Lake Travis adds a chapter.
Why is travel a research method for thought leadership?
Because the friction of being somewhere unfamiliar sharpens observation in ways that reading reports never does. When you sit in a convention center in Austin surrounded by 70,000 people who all believe something about the future, you get data that no survey captures. The body language, the standing-room crowds, the sessions nobody attends: all of that is signal. You have to be in the room.
How does an executive justify travel in a remote-first world?
The same way you justify reading. Travel is input: it refills the thinking tank that remote work quietly drains. The executives I respect most show up places. They sit in awkward panels, eat bad conference food, get stuck in conversations they did not plan. That is where the actual calibration happens. A Zoom call tells you what someone decided. Being in the room tells you why.
What's the value of going to SXSW for 20 years?
Longitudinal data. I have watched the festival absorb Twitter in 2007, survive the years when everyone declared it dead, pivot from tech to politics to AI without missing a beat. Each year I carry the memory of the last twenty. I can tell you when the energy in a room resembles 2015 or 2019, and why that matters for what comes next. That pattern recognition is worth every Ryanair connection and every overpriced brisket.
Where does the rolling book idea come from?
From the observation that most business books are written after the fact, when the author has already decided what the lesson is. I wanted to write while the road was still moving under me, before the conclusions hardened. The rolling book is a live document: posts, letters to Tara, interviews, airport notes. The shape emerges from the accumulation, not from a pre-planned argument.
How do you stay grounded with constant movement?
By writing. Every trip produces at least one piece of text, even a short one. The writing is the anchor. It forces you to say what you actually think instead of letting impressions blur together into a vague sense of having been somewhere important. Also: the same lake, the same view from the same spot on Lake Travis, March after March. Some coordinates do not move.
What's the role of the Dear Tara letters in the project?
They are the human thread. Tara is my daughter, and the letters are written to her directly, one per year or so, filed from wherever I happen to be. They serve as a check on pomposity: it is hard to write grandiose claims about the future when you are addressing a small person who will actually live in it. Ten letters in, they have become the most personal part of the archive.
What are the 42 lessons from 100,000 miles?
A distillation I published in August 2025 after crossing the 100,000-mile mark: 42 things travel has taught me, from the mechanics of surviving airports with dignity to the deeper observation that movement is a form of attention. The number 42 was deliberate (Douglas Adams fans will nod). The list runs from practical to philosophical, and several of the lessons surprised me when I wrote them down.
Why Lake Travis specifically?
Because it is the one place I keep coming back to that does not feel like a conference. The Hill Country at night, the moon on the water, the particular quality of silence that Austin does not offer anywhere inside the city limits: Lake Travis resets something that ten days of panels and badge-wearing tends to scramble. I have written more clearly at that lake than anywhere else on the route.
How is travel different from tourism in your work?
Tourism is consumption. Travel, in the sense I mean it, is production: you go somewhere to generate material, to test an idea against a different context, to meet people whose perspective differs from the one you arrived with. A tourist sees a city. A traveler gets changed by it, or at least argues with it on the way home. Most of the best posts on this site started as arguments I was having with myself on a plane.
What makes Belgium and France different work cultures?
The Belgian-French commute gave me a front-row seat to two versions of European executive culture sitting 200 kilometers apart and barely acknowledging each other. Belgium runs on consensus and elaborate politeness; France runs on hierarchy and the theater of disagreement. Both are sophisticated. Both frustrate each other. Understanding the gap between them is useful preparation for understanding any cross-cultural leadership challenge.
What's the next leg of the rolling book?
Austin will always be March. Beyond that: wherever the people I want to talk to happen to be. The book does not have a predetermined itinerary, which is the point. What I can tell you is that the questions are getting more interesting, the conversations more specific, and Tara is getting old enough to have her own opinions about where I should be going. That changes the calculus.
A closing thought
The rolling book has no final chapter. That is structural, not evasive. Real sourcing projects do not end when the counter hits a number; they end when the writer stops being curious, or stops getting on planes, or runs out of people worth talking to. None of those things have happened yet. The counter crossed 100,000 somewhere over Texas, which is fitting for a project that has returned to Texas more reliably than any other coordinate on the route, and the counter kept moving because the flight home has never been the end of the story, only the place where the next chapter starts taking notes.
You have a choice about what to do with this archive. You can read it as a travel log, which it partly is. You can read it as an ongoing argument about technology and leadership and what European executives should be thinking about when the Americans are all arguing about the future at the top of their lungs: it is that too. Or you can use it the way I use it, which is as a record of what was interesting in a given room, at a given moment, before the room agreed on what the lesson was supposed to be. That version is the most useful one for anyone who is trying to do original thinking rather than consume it.
Pick a chapter. Read the post it links to. If it makes you want to disagree with me, email me. That is how most of the best conversations in this project started.
