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...

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, WeC...

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...

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...

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-cu...

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...

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. D...

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 logi...

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-l...

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...

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 st...

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 pr...

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 cre...

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...

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 accel...

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 tr...