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 web of my entire van life experience. And it's working. I can ask it "what are the top three things I learned on this journey?" and it just delivers on connecting the dots.

But eventually you have to come up for air. I've been in full recluse mode on mum's farm, and now the pendulum is swinging hard the other way because I've got a wedding on Rottnest Island (my best mate Ben is getting married), I'm getting Margot the Mercedes registered, and somehow in the space of two phone calls yesterday I ended up with work from two completely different friends—one wants me to do embedded systems programming for defence consulting, the other wants me to host a live game night event. Because I don't fit in a box, and that's fine.

This episode is about embracing the pendulum swing between deep work and showing up for people, the anxiety of returning to your home town as a different version of yourself, practicing conversations in your head that might never happen, and what it means to just follow your intuition even when it makes zero logical sense. Also: I rehearse conversations with myself so much I basically have an entire internal cast, and wedding anxiety when you're the single guy on an island full of couples.

Recorded: November 18, 2025