Talking Myself to Sleep

I'm in Hanoi at a hostel called Wanderlust Station, two months into my Vietnam trip, and I've finally sat down to start telling the story from the beginning. I pick up where I left off last episode - touching down in Ho Chi Minh City with zero plans - and walk through my first real destination: a little coastal fishing village called Mui Ne where I ended up staying for two weeks through Te...

I'm back. It's been months since I've recorded one of these, and I'm lying in bed at Ba Be Lake in northern Vietnam with a fan blasting and karaoke going off in the background - which, honestly, is kind of perfect. I've spent the first part of this year going through some real lows, questioning what I actually want, and eventually just booking a one-way ticket to Asia with a 23...

After the chaos of prison gigs and recording studios, today was a reset day. It's a few days before Christmas, parked in Peppermint Grove (one of Perth's most expensive suburbs), eating the world's most wholesome Woolies shop - activated almonds, spirulina powder, seaweed sheets, and tofu. The kind of shopping cart that makes checkout workers question your sanity. But this episode goes deeper than...

After a month of being AWOL, I'm back - and I've got stories. This week alone I played piano at a prison (surrounded by a merry band of sex offenders), sat in on a professional recording session watching how it all works, and accidentally upset a woman I went on a walk with because she thought my TikTok post was about her. Welcome to my life. The prison gig was something else. I had 48 hou...

Tell you what, it's good to be back. I've been completely offline for two weeks—and I mean properly offline, like 12-hour days heads-down in my laptop building this AI system I've been thinking about for two years. It's basically my version of JARVIS from Iron Man, starting with a knowledge graph that's consuming all my audio recordings, journals, chat logs, and constructing this interconnected we...

Well, this isn't exactly talking myself to sleep—I'm out walking a dog that looks like a cross between a dingo and a rat, the sun is shining, and I just came off a weekend where I learned to shear alpacas, built a massive AI-powered second brain, and had a weirdly significant milestone: I told my mom I didn't want to go to church. I know that sounds ridiculous—I'm almost 35 and it...

After spending the day in my dressing gown building out my AI transcription pipeline, I'm feeling pretty good about this whole hermit-at-a-laptop lifestyle. I've just processed 35 gigabytes of audio from this year—conversations at chicken farms, numerology talks with energy healers, voice notes to myself I'd completely forgotten about—and watching it all get transcribed has been this w...

This one's a bit different. I'm out in the van at my mom's place, a few days between recordings, and I'm feeling this shift happening. After six months of just capturing everything - photos, video, audio, experiences - I'm finally getting to the curation phase. I spent all day going through my photos in Lightroom for the first time, and actually found 30-40 shots I'm happy...

I'm gonna level with you here—the last couple days I've been in a weird headspace. I've been struggling with vulnerability and a bit of overwhelm, which sounds ridiculous to say, but that's the nature of getting stuck in your head, right? It becomes so much bigger than it actually is. Here's what's happening: I posted a video on TikTok about cold approaching a woman at the beach, and for the first...

Today was one of those days that makes you believe in synchronicity. I woke up in Denmark to write my morning pages by the river, and what started as a quiet morning turned into a cascade of meaningful encounters—an ultra-marathon runner turned board game shop owner, a woman who lost her mind on a hike and found her soul (then disappeared like Yoda), and a meadery owner who left me with the perfec...

I'm in Denmark tonight, which is apparently where all the barefoot, star-sign-tattoo people congregate on the south coast. It's beautiful but a touch cold. Here's the thing though: I deleted all my dating apps months ago, but I also challenge myself to always approach someone if I'm interested in talking to them. So what happens when those two things collide? Also, I've been lo...

Tonight I'm recording from Bremer Bay, wrapping up my time in this beautiful little coastal town where I've met some incredible locals. I spent the morning learning how to build a rock wall with Leo (yes, that's the SAS/hippie commune/energy worker guy I've been staying with), had tea with Jody in her mum's incredible hand-built stone house, and met two travelers from England w...

So I accidentally became a minor celebrity in Bremer Bay today by finishing a puzzle that had been stumping the entire town for two months. What started as a quick bathroom stop at the community center turned into four and a half hours of hyperfocus on a thousand-piece orca puzzle that was basically fifty shades of blue. Now my photo's going in the local newsletter and apparently I've earn...

I woke up before dawn in Bremer Bay to write my morning pages by the beach, and what started as a quiet morning turned into one of those days that makes you believe in synchronicity. Within hours of sitting at the only dry table in town, I'd met a dozen locals who felt like kindred spirits—artists, former teachers, ex-SAS soldiers turned energy healers, and people who'd accidentally ended...

Tonight I'm processing an hour and a half conversation I just had with my brother, and it's got me thinking about how much we've both changed since we were kids. He's two years younger than me, and I used to give him hell for being the sensitive one. Now we're both in our thirties, navigating manhood together, and I'm realizing what a gift it is to have someone who shares t...

So this is it—my first official episode. I've been recording audio logs and voice notes for months now, just capturing this whole journey of leaving my tech job in the city and figuring out what comes next. But tonight, lying here (very tired) in my van near the jetty in Esperance, I got too excited about an idea to sleep: what if I just did what I've been doing anyway—crawling into bed wi...