Can you believe it’s the end of the year?

Well, whether you believe it is or not doesn’t matter, cause it is 😀

Here we are, tail end of 2025 and leading into the new horizon that is 2026.

Did you have a fun time?

I did. 🙂

I don’t think a single photo album will capture the totality of everything that took place, but here’s a small sample of them.

In these pictures, a few themes emerge – new experiences, daring, travels, friends from near and far, and friendships from long ago revisited, reconciliation, hope, and a new attitude towards people, life, and those who surround me; there are so many more things that came along the way that haven’t found expression in the pictures and so many other fond memories that I could yap the content of a full book, which incidentally I actually wrote, in bringing out this overflowing chalice of memories.

2025, you were good to me in many unexpected ways; they weren’t always ways that I had expected you to be good; you were a year of striving, challenge, tribulation, but also growth as a human being.

I came into you as a fool, and in a way, I leave a fool as well with slightly more experience of the world, and hopefully just a little bit wiser.

What will 2026 bring? Well, maybe that’s just for later.

Thank you for the memories, and for the greater things to come. 😀

Once upon a time, Descartes articulated a simple and famous philosophy: I think, therefore I am.

His idea was simple: Life is ambiguous, thoughts can be interpreted in wildly different ways; the entirety of the senses can be fooled, turned into illusions, and at the end of the day there is so little that actually can be known in this world that really, all you can say with certainty about who you are and where you come from is nothing, really – but as you think, therefore you exist.

I’ve pondered this insight for a while, and it makes sense to me – but in my life, I feel that a small and slightly less abstract addition applies:

I create, therefore I am.

It’s no secret to a lot of people that I do create, and quite a bit – it shapes my identity, who I am seen as to the world, and a whole range of other things that are inextricably linked to a public persona.

In slightly more practical terms though, creating takes up the time that life is made of, and that time in turn shapes the person you are and who you may become.

Spending hours creating a single video unquestionably shapes your day, for example; how could it not, if it structures how you choose to experience your hours?

Thinking about the content of what you’d like to say unquestionably makes a little part of your brain rewire, reset, refresh, and think about new possibilities; how could it not, if it reshapes the way you think about the world and how you look at it?

People measure life a little differently, even as biology and the archetypes (weird phrasing maybe, but I like that stuff haha) bind us to the common experiences and the life tasks; I create, therefore I am – I define myself by that act of creation, I think of life as a succession of creative experiences, and I create often for hours, always a little faster, a little more meaningfully, and hopefully a little more engagingly.

I create, therefore I am: That seems to be the seed that life has handed me – my nature, my personality, who I am and who I was put to be in this universe. There are so many things that revolve around that central seed, that have evolved around it as it’s geminated – not always in the best possible of ways, and sometimes with some distractions – but it’s continued to go on, moving to that nature.

Different things make us feel alive and in the moment – for me, this is one of them.

It feels like an era since I last came back here, and it has been. I’m sorry I haven’t been present, but a lot of stuff happened: I went to Japan, I got so much more serious about YouTube, I got a lot faster, and I guess I got caught up in a whole lot of different ways. Which in retrospect maybe I should have integrated a little better with my schedule, but well it is what it is, and here we are today.

Tomorrow I’m going to be talking a little bit about why I got into podcasting, and here I am, writing this little post to think about what the reasons really are.

Let me list them.

1. Understanding the world around me.
   
   Making podcasts and videos isn’t just about creating a video and sharing it to the world. It’s also about trying to understand the world around you on a level that’s deeper than what people around you would normally accomplish – which means learning and reading. That’s always come naturally to me. So for me, this is really just a way that my routine kind of plays out as my nature brings itself out into the world.
   
2. Having some control over my environment and the people who listen to me.
   
   When I talk about things, it helps me renew my thoughts, and it gives me the sense that I’m constantly talking to real people with their own thoughts, their own feelings, their own dreams, their own desires. Somehow podcasting just makes it feel a little bit like I’m able to shape the way that the people around me think and change a little bit about how the world around me operates or is run. Whether it’s by the chance view from a politician, a policymaker, the masses on the street, or the dozens who end up commenting on Facebook, it gives me pleasure to just feel that somehow they’ll listen to me and end up going in the direction that I believe is correct or right.
   
3. Receiving validation from the people around me.
   
   It’s nice to feel like the people around you care about what you think, who you are as a person, what your preferences are. It’s also nice if they’re not strangers but actually real people around you. Content creation does that to some degree, even if it’s imperfect.
   
4. Expressing my voice.
   
   Talking out loud is basically just using your instrument in a way that you know that other people are going to hear you, regardless of the way you express yourself. It means also that you’re constantly on a stage and that you’re learning how to come up with the things that make sense in the moment and bringing them out into the world, casting broadly your net upon the world.
   
5. Getting better.
   
   Learning how to express yourself is a skill – there’s no two ways about it. The way that you think, the way that you express yourself, all of those are things that you can actually get better at, whether it’s how you structure your thoughts or how you take in knowledge and information to create something that you can share with the world. For me, I think that’s meaningful and I think it’s beautiful to think about how to better connect with people, to appreciate the mind, psychology, and so many other things on that journey of learning to show yourself to the world.
   
6. Building a career.
   
   Creating content allows you to meet lots of people and it also allows you to make a living through the person that you are, the way you think, how you grow with and confront the world. For me, I think that’s the very best thing that you could possibly do because you’re just constantly learning how to make your personality come out in that day-to-day experience of just talking to a camera, improving and doing things along the way – I also really enjoy this constant feeling that I’m getting better at speaking and thinking, so for me, I think that’s really cool and something that I want to keep on doing until I learn how to master it.
   
7. Becoming me.
   
   It’s always felt like learning to express myself and to understand different parts of my consciousness has been part of this journey of becoming me.
   
   I’m sure that a lot of people find themselves in quiet spaces in the deeper contemplations. But for me, somehow or another, becoming me has always been tied to learning how to express different parts of myself, to learn how to play this vocal instrument, to use this brain that God gave me to bring down the realizations that somehow I had gotten from the deeper parts of myself, delivering them into the world and transmuting them into my very core and being.
   
   Somehow it feels like whenever I speak, think, and talk, I am becoming a little more of me, even if I know that this is all temporary and it will all fade away.
   
   Somehow, there is a sense in my mind that through bringing all of this out, I mattered, it mattered, and it will go on into eternity as an echo and imprint of who I was, who I am, and who I will be in the future.

All right, all that was probably a little prosaic, but it was helpful for me to get that out and to think about things. I promise to write a little more soon and catch you all later.