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In this episode, I dive into a deeply personal experience triggered by my parents' impending move abroad, and how it cracked open a deeper reflection on nostalgia. Starting from a surprising connection I made with a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, I explore what it really means to miss not just a place or a person, but an entire world that once gave our lives shape.

Drawing from philosophers like Edward Casey and Paul Ricoeur, along with psychological studies on the emotional functions of nostalgia, I ask: how can we live with this aching for the past without being consumed by it? I argue that nostalgia doesn’t have to paralyze us. It can be transformed into a creative force that shapes how we live, love, and remember.

This one's personal, but I think you’ll find something universal in it too.

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In this episode, I talk about something that’s been bothering me for a while: the word optimization. You hear it everywhere: on marketing decks, in self-help advice, even now in biotech, where parents are being offered tools to “optimize” their embryos. But what does it mean to live under an optimization ethos? What are we really optimizing, and for whom? I explore how this logic seeps into our work, our bodies, our identities, and even our ethics. I also ask what it might mean to stop optimizing, to choose failure, friction, even invisibility, and whether that’s the only real freedom we have left.

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In this episode, I dive into the looming question: Is there still room for humans in SEO?

Mike King just dropped a brilliant and alarming piece about how Google's new AI-driven search is reshaping everything we know about optimization. We're not just talking about keywords and backlinks anymore. We're talking about semantic embeddings, vector comparisons, and passage-level scoring — tactics that feel less like SEO and more like machine-to-machine negotiation.

I unpack King’s insights and reflect on what it all means for content creators like us. Because if the future of search is built for bots, where does that leave the rest of us who still write for people?

Let’s talk about the web we want — before it becomes one no human can participate in.