The Trip That Changed Everything. Still.

I have produced television shows that aired to millions of people. I wrote a book that hit the bestseller list. I have built businesses, spoken on stages around the world, and spent the better part of two decades doing things in Hollywood that most people would call a career worth having.

None of it has generated the attention, the discussion, the fascination, or the volume of questions that one around-the-world trip has. Nothing is even close. 52 countries in 52 weeks is quickly becoming the thing I am most known for, the thing people most want to talk about, and the thing that has most defined what Reject Average is and what it stands for.

I did not plan that. I did not expect it. I am still a little stunned by it. And if I'm being honest, I've certainly leaned into it.

When I meet someone new in a business meeting, somehow I magically work it into the conversation: "last year I traveled the world, 52 countries, in 52 weeks, with my family."

The tone of the meeting changes instantly. I can feel the energy shift. Just like that, I'm more interesting. I've noticed it enough that I now use it like a metaphorical Hollywood name drop.

Completing that trip says something about what I value and what I've built in life, and it taps into the aspirations of most people.

Most of us carry around a version of a life we have not yet lived. A trip we say we will take. A thing we keep telling ourselves we will do when the timing is better or the money is right or the kids are older or the job settles down. For most people, 52 in 52 sounds implausible.

For me it was never a dream or a fantasy. It was a random idea and one very clear decision.

It Started With a Whiteboard

My two youngest kids were approaching a rare overlap. My son Braden was finishing high school. My daughter Briana was about to transfer to a real university. There was a window closing, the kind that only opens once, and I could feel it. So I called them into the conference room in my house, pulled out a whiteboard, and said "let's figure out one last big adventure before everything changes."

We ran a tournament. An RV trip in reverse. The Great Loop by boat. Europe for the summer.

Every idea went up and got debated. Briana said "we already did America, what if we just did the world?" I told her that's not really possible because we'd need a year, and I can't leave for a year.

Then Braden walked in. He looked at the board, heard the options, and said he wasn't doing any of it. He had girls to see, college to prepare for, a summer to protect. He was out. Unless, he said, "you're actually talking about 52 countries in 52 weeks going around the world."

That he couldn't say no to. The second it came out of his mouth, I knew.

By November we had the idea. By March I bought the first plane tickets. On July 1st we left Los Angeles and spent the next year traveling to a new country every week.

What the Year Actually Looked Like

We traveled east, and just kept going. We broke the world into regions and let seasons do the planning. Europe in summer. Africa in the fall. Middle East in winter. Then India, Nepal, and Hong Kong heading into Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and South America to close it out.

We packed a carry-on roller bag and one backpack each. Nothing more. We booked regions months ahead, specific countries about three months out, flights six to eight weeks in advance, and housing about a month before arrival. We basically had the whole year on a rolling map. We kept building the plan, always one country locked, one being finalized, one being researched.

We traveled every Wednesday. That was the only routine we had. Wednesday meant the same sequence every week: pack the same bags in the same order, call an Uber, get to the airport, land somewhere new, do a walk-through of the new Airbnb, set up my laptop and dual screens, and go figure out what was worth doing here. Then we did it again the following Wednesday.

Over 52 weeks we took 86 flights, covered more than 110,000 miles, slept in 84 different places and did more than 200 different activities.

We grabbed four bonus countries because the Vatican counts, Cambodia was close enough to Vietnam not to skip, Zambia was right there at Victoria Falls, and Mexico became the ending nobody planned.

We played golf at St. Andrews. Rode Icelandic horses. Climbed a via ferrata in Switzerland. Floated over Cappadocia in a hot air balloon. Walked with gorillas in Rwanda. Went on safari in Tanzania. Entered the Great Pyramid. Explored Petra. Walked the Great Wall. Crossed the DMZ. Dove with bull sharks in Fiji. Rafted a waterfall in New Zealand. Hiked Machu Picchu.

The Moments That Stayed

People always ask what the favorite country was. The answer is Rwanda. Nothing else was close. The people, the landscape, the culture, the food, the gorilla trekking. Rwanda was the most surprising country on earth, and if I could take every person I know there, I would. But the moments I find myself telling most often are not the obvious ones.

In France, our family name Pinvidic comes from Brittany. Braden and I woke up at five-thirty in the morning, took a train three hours from Paris and started walking through a small town cemetery looking for the name. We found thirty-eight ancestors. Neither of us expected that to hit us the way it did.

In Rwanda, our guide mentioned a school he helped support for teenage mothers. We asked if we could see it. The girls were learning to sew so they could support themselves and be accepted back into their communities. He had been slowly buying sewing machines with his own tip money. I asked how many they still needed and offered to buy the rest.

Weeks later the machines were ready, but we were already far away. Going back meant flying roughly nine hours in the wrong direction, delivering them, then turning around toward India. Logistically it made no sense. I asked the family. Everyone wanted to go. So we did. That became one of the most meaningful days of the year, and it was never on any itinerary when we left Los Angeles.

In Japan I lost my passport the day before we were flying to Taiwan. The consulate told me the trip was over. I was sitting in an Osaka police station thinking about how to tell my kids that 52 countries in 52 weeks was ending at thirty-six, when Japan did what Japan does. Someone had found it and turned it in. They handed it back like it was a ceremony. I was nearly in tears. That is the entire crime report from a year on the road.

In country 52, Costa Rica, we realized we had visited every wonder of the world except Chichen Itza. Mexico wasn't on the list because we go there enough that it felt like cheating. The kids refused to add a day over 365. So we rerouted the homebound flight, landed in Mexico, rented a car, drove to the site, got the pictures, and caught our connection.

We landed in Los Angeles on July 1st, precisely 52 weeks after we left.

What the World Actually Is

The number one thing I came home understanding is that the world is dramatically better than what you see on any screen. People were curious, kind, and welcoming almost everywhere we went. Americans are more respected globally than any news cycle would suggest. In fifty-two countries we had zero crime, zero problems with safety.

We also noticed that countries with a unified culture, where people share values and a sense of direction, were visibly thriving. We saw it in Denmark, in Rwanda, in South Korea, in Colombia, in Singapore. It showed up in the airports, in how people treated strangers, in the energy on the street.

The food will also destroy every assumption you arrived with. The best sushi we had all year was in Poland. The best burger was in Scotland. Our favorite food of the entire trip was in India. Colombia was the only country where we went back to the same restaurant twice, out of a year of going somewhere new every single day.

And through all of it I watched my children change. They became remarkably comfortable being uncomfortable. They learned how to walk into unfamiliar places, speak to adults, navigate problems, and trust themselves. Traveling this way gave them a confidence that would have been almost impossible to teach any other way.

What Came After

Coming home was harder than I expected. It was the end of our mission. For fifty-two weeks we woke up every morning with a clear purpose: find the best of wherever we were. When that ended, the absence was real. That gap is what became Reject Average Magazine.

People didn't just want to hear about what we had done. They wanted to know how to build their own version of a life organized around experience. They wanted the invitation. Which turned out to be the most important thing I learned from the entire year. Invitation creates motivation. If you wait for someone to invite you to do something great, you will wait a very long time.

But if you create the invitation, put it out into the world and make it real, you will be shocked how many people say yes immediately. 52 countries in 52 weeks started on a whiteboard as an impossible idea. My son said he couldn't say no to it. Neither could I. That's still the whole story.