In this essay, I look back on a terrifying night when I began bleeding internally, lost consciousness, and was forced into an immediate confrontation with my own mortality. What began as months of work anxiety, AI dread, algorithmic fear, and abstract theorizing suddenly collapsed into something brutally physical: the body, blood, pain, fear, and the desperate wish for more time with the people I love.

In this episode, I’m unpacking an 8-day family trip to Shanghai, and the unease that follows me there as a Filipino, with the West Philippine Sea dispute always humming in the background between the Philippines and China. I talk about the city’s calm, clean sprawl; the quiet magic of The Bund with Oriental Pearl TV Tower across the river; and the strange ease of living through QR codes—Alipay, WeChat, DiDi—powered by an eSIM from Klook and navigation on Amap (plus Bing when I needed search). And yes: I tell the story of the Peking duck on Nanjing Road at Shanghai Guniang, then end on the harder question of what a city’s warmth can (and can’t) mean when governments still collide.

This episode is about the little crack in rational life we all carry: the part of us that still knocks on wood, buys the long-shot ticket, and refuses to believe reality is fully settled.

Using UFOs as the sharpest example—something seen, not easily explained—I trace how uncertainty becomes story, how certainty curdles into cynicism, and why a small openness to the absurd might be less a weakness than a way to stay free.

This episode looks at how quickly AI moved from playful experimentation to something far more unsettling. What began as clumsy, multi-step tools for harmless self-inserts has become a one-prompt machine for convincing fakes, collapsing the distance between truth and fabrication, and quietly reshaping how we trust what we see online.

I also argue we’re nearing a backlash. As the digital well fills with half-truths, people are getting tired—and more discerning. Next year, I predict a renewed demand for authenticity: verifiable authorship, real expertise, and meaningful consequences when AI is used to deceive.

I reflect on my first trip to the United States—not as a tourist checklist, but as a reckoning with a place that shaped my worldview long before I ever set foot on it. I talk through what it felt like to finally see a place I thought I already knew. From quiet Midwestern towns to the noise and density of New York City, this episode reflects on land, scale, everyday life, and the gap between pop-culture America and lived reality.

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What if the reason time feels like it’s flying isn’t just about busyness, but because we can’t narrate what’s happening to us? In this episode, I dive into why our workdays often feel blank or unspeakable, and how this isn’t just about stress or memory, it’s about how modern labor severs us from narrative itself.

Drawing from Severance and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, I explore how time only becomes real when we can shape it into stories, and what it means that so much of our work life can’t be shaped that way. If you’ve ever looked in the mirror and felt like decades slipped by, this conversation is for you.

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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.