A Fistful of Fodder

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.

Episode Preview: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.

Episode Preview: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.

Episode Preview: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.

Episode Preview: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.

Episode Preview:I started learning front-end development recently—not because I had to, but because I wanted to understand what AI is actually doing under the hood. And somewhere between struggling through CSS and writing my first lines of HTML, I realized something: I was enjoying it. In this episode, I reflect on what it means to learn inefficiently, to grow slowly, and why that’s something AI will never replicate. It’s about more than skill-building. It’s about self-discovery. But in a system obsessed with output and optimization, that human inefficiency might just be the very thing that’s getting crushed.

Episode Preview:I ran a 10K race I wasn’t prepared for, and in the thick of the pain, I thought of Yamcha—the most ridiculed character in Dragon Ball. But the more I reflect on it, the more I see Yamcha as something far more profound: an existential hero. In this episode, I unpack Yamcha’s endless defeats through the lenses of Camus, Sartre, and Nietzsche, and argue that he embodies the absurd struggle with dignity, will, and defiance. He’s not the strongest, not the chosen one—but that’s exactly why he matters. Because most of us aren’t Goku. Most of us are Yamcha.

Episode Preview:Being a dad to a 2-year-old has me constantly thinking about potential—not just hers, but what it really means to raise a child in today’s world. In this episode, I reflect on how every parenting decision, even simple ones like which language to speak at home, can open one path while quietly closing another. I explore how children’s imaginations—like my daughter wanting to be a princess—might reflect something far deeper than fantasy: a desire for boundless possibility. What if raising a child isn’t just about preparing them for the world, but about preparing the world to be reshaped by them?

Episode Preview:Back when I was studying sociology at UP, Marx and Nietzsche helped me make sense of the world. Now, years later, knee-deep in digital marketing and staring down the rise of AI, I find myself returning to Marx—especially his ideas on labor and value. In this episode, I connect those old theories to a very current crisis: how generative AI erases the human effort behind content creation. I talk about the theft of labor, the destruction of livelihoods, and what it really means when content is stripped of creators. This isn’t just about marketing. It’s about what we lose when we forget the people behind the knowledge we consume.

Episode Preview:I used to be the guy taking selfies and posting them on Facebook, but something changed when I became a father. Now, I don’t just want snapshots—I want stories. In this episode, I talk about why I’ve traded photos for videos, why I no longer care about likes or followers, and how documenting our family trips has turned into a personal archive of moments that feel more honest, more vivid, and more human. This isn’t about building an audience—it’s about building memory, meaning, and a legacy for the people I love most.

Episode Preview:I used to think web content writing was just about hitting deadlines and sounding smart about topics I barely understood—ploughs, offshore banking, ancient Egypt, whatever the client needed. But over time, I realized I was playing a bigger game: passing information along in a broken chain, like a never-ending round of telephone. And now, with AI in the mix, the distortion is accelerating. In this episode, I talk about my early days in digital marketing, how content gets diluted over time, and why the rise of generative AI might be making it all worse. It's a messy story of hustle, search engines, purple-lipped Dwayne Johnsons, and the terrifying potential of model collapse.

Episode Preview:What does it mean to write in an age where everything becomes fodder for AI? In this deeply personal opener, I reflect on the futility and necessity of sharing knowledge in a world where content is consumed, processed, and repurposed by machines. From the perspective of a father, a digital marketer, and a man at a crossroads, I make a case for creating anyway—if only to leave a trail, however smushed, for those who come after.