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 with out of about 2,500. Not bad for a beginner who's been learning photography on my own.

I dive into this idea I've been chewing on about self-reliance and the pleasure of finding things out for yourself, inspired by Schopenhauer's writings. There's something about learning photography without leaning on my photographer friend Josh this time - just figuring it out myself, making my own mistakes, developing my own style. It's slower, less efficient, but it sticks. I also share about going up on stage at a local pub's open mic night (thanks, Mom), and how that turned into a surprisingly good time with the full band joining in for Johnny Cash and Robbie Williams covers.

But the real theme running through this episode is this realization that focusing entirely on myself for these past months has been necessary, but something's missing. I'm feeling this pull back toward contribution, toward doing work that matters for something bigger than just me. I talk about my university thesis building a robot for a kid who couldn't carry his own ventilator, past projects with social impact, and this emerging plan to create a website as a hub for everything I'm working on. It's not the most cohesive episode - I'm tired, rambling a bit, comparing it to brain fog - but that's kind of the point of this podcast anyway.

Recorded November 3rd, 2025