It started with curiosity.
WALKABOUT ROJO
Walkabout Rojo began as a way of exploring the world more deliberately.
At first, the focus was travel. Roads, cities, food, landscapes, unfamiliar places, and the small moments that make a place feel real. But as the project developed through years of life in the United States, China and Vietnam, the stories gradually became less about destinations and more about the people and cultures behind them.
The camera became a reason to slow down, pay attention, ask questions, and notice details that are easy to miss when moving too quickly through a place.
That instinct became the foundation of Walkabout Rojo: go somewhere unfamiliar, stay curious, listen closely, and allow the experience to change the way the world is understood.
Over time, the journey would grow far beyond travel.
Travel opened the door, but the questions went further.
THE JOURNEY EXPANDED
As Walkabout Rojo grew, the experiences behind the videos began to find their way into other forms.
Years of living and working across cultures shaped writing, teaching, public speaking, research, and a growing interest in how people communicate, build trust, adapt, and understand one another.
Some of those experiences eventually became Lens on the Dragon, a book drawn from years in China and the complicated process of seeing a place differently after living inside it. The book explored culture, ambition, identity, adjustment, and the distance between expectations and lived experience.
At the same time, the ideas behind Walkabout Rojo were moving into classrooms, conferences, and professional environments. The questions were changing.
What helps people communicate clearly across cultures? Why do capable people sometimes struggle to express what they know? How are trust, confidence, hierarchy, and identity shaped by the environments people work in?
Walkabout Rojo had started by documenting the world. Increasingly, it was becoming a way of thinking about it.
One idea became several expressions.
THE WALKABOUT STORY EVOLVED
As the work expanded, Walkabout grew into more than one project.
Walkabout Rojo remained rooted in travel, culture, documentary storytelling, and the original spirit of exploration.
Walkabout Elevations emerged from a growing interest in conversation. Long-form interviews created space for entrepreneurs, educators, leaders, creators, and people from very different walks of life to talk about the experiences, decisions, setbacks, and ideas that shaped them.
Walkabout Studio gave those conversations a physical home in Da Nang, creating a professional space for podcasts, interviews, video, and other forms of media production.
Then came Walkabout Pathways.
Pathways brought together many of the ideas that had been developing quietly behind the scenes for years: communication, leadership, teaching, research, public speaking, cross-cultural experience, and professional development.
The projects serve different purposes, but they share the same starting point: curiosity about people and the belief that better conversations can lead to better understanding.
Walkabout became part of a life, not just a project.
THE STORY CONTINUES
The journey eventually led to Da Nang, where the different strands of Walkabout began to come together.
What started as a travel channel now sits alongside a podcast, a studio, a book, speaking and teaching work, research, and a growing communication and leadership practice. The surroundings changed, the work became broader, and the questions became more focused.
The original instinct behind Walkabout Rojo remains recognizable: go somewhere unfamiliar, pay attention, talk to people, question assumptions, and stay open to being surprised.
Today, Rojo continues to tell stories. Walkabout Elevations creates space for longer conversations. Walkabout Studio gives those conversations a home. Walkabout Pathways carries many of the lessons gathered along the way into classrooms, organizations, conferences, and professional communities.
The next chapter is different from the first.
But it grew from the same journey.
