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How should one spend a life? I've carried this question since high school, trying on answers like costumes each year on career day. Titles, later on, revealed little. Lei noticed that what moves me is remaining a 'gardener' to the people and practices worth learning from. Alea put another name to this as 'discernment' in my willingness to deviate when something stops being worth the cost of staying.
I think if we want downstream impact, says my good friend Lenz, we would need upstream positioning. I've gathered enough evidence to know where my own contributions might be taken most seriously, and these continue to take shape with peers whose questions mirror my own.
Last updated: April 2026
Pursuits In Progress
01How Might We Maximize Resources?
First, maximizing the pool assumes size is what matters. I'm not convinced because habitual giving seems behaviorally harder to change. Second, I also question whether funding and talent are separate constraints, or one relationship-building problem "wearing two names." Third, I question whether scale is even the right objective, or whether resilience deserves equal weight. What would it take to optimize for both deliberately, rather than treating one as a by-product of the other? Taken together, I am developing the aptitudes and methods that will enable me to evaluate interventions rigorously when advising philanthropic decisions in the future.
02 What Drives Abundance?
What causes some societies to become prosperous and civilizationally resilient, while others stagnate? Standard narratives feel incomplete. What I want to understand are the causal mechanisms beneath these correlations, and whether the Philippines faces binding constraints that are different from what worked for South Korea or Singapore. How do we know if interventions work when economic development operates on longer timelines and involves countless confounding variables?
03 How Might We Design Institutions that Produce Scientific Breakthroughs?
Despite computers and the Internet, we haven't seen improvements at the scale of 1870-1970's electric grids, modern medicine, or agricultural revolution. It appears that we've come to believe progress "just happens" instead of recognizing it as a deliberate choice, the way the Greatest Generation, I read, understood when they poured 1.86% of GDP into R&D and created NASA, DARPA, and the NSF.
Why progress stopped being a policy choice
I'm trying to understand what happened between the Endless Frontier era in the US and now, particularly how cultural revolts against technology in the 1960s-70s, combined with the Cold War's end, dismantled the very idea that science deserved prioritization. Recent revival in ARPA-H, Schmidt Futures, and Arc Institute suggests we may be rekindling that agency, and I'm curious whether new institutions found wisdom from history.
What actually accelerates discovery
I'm drawn to the core question of metascience on how we might improve the scientific process itself. I've learned that beyond funding, we need further attunement on which mechanisms accelerate breakthroughs vs which are bureaucratic red tape we've mistaken for progress.
04 Where Can I Add Value to Tech Governance in Asia?
While frontier AI safety within Western centers of innovation remains critical, I've been engaged with field-building in my region since 2022, where far less path dependency bring opportunities to improve institutional foresight and resilience on risks.
Where my thinking is
On talent development. Insisting people stay in the Philippines might invite stagnation. Progress accelerates when we both funnel the best talents toward opportunities overseas where they build real capacity, as we nurture the epistemic environment here so those who remain develop sharper heuristics to see latent concerns more clearly.
On policy windows. Building trust with public officials has taken us years, and I still weigh whether slow progress reflects necessary relationship-building or fundamental misalignment between how catastrophic risks are framed and what decision-makers presently conceive as problems.
On regional dynamics. Asian countries outside Sino-US relations face questions whether to align with Western AI safety frameworks, develop indigenous approaches, or broker middle-ground positions. I'm exploring where the Philippines and similar nations can add unique value that neither major power can easily provide.
Projects In Play
01 Unjournal
Exposure as an assistant to professors early in undergrad immersed me in the workings of the academe, revealing its norms and limitations. In 2025, I began to reimagine what research can become beyond the well-behaved paper. I privilege rigor, but would like to transcend the sterility of traditional scholarship, having spent basic education in arts and design.
I have gone through rabbit holes experimenting with form, allowing the work itself to carry its arguments where stories, maps, audio, data, and speculative fragments exist alongside one another as epistemic tools beyond just ornament.
Where I am with this
Grants from the Sigla Research Center, BlueDot Impact, and the Hatchery Fund, along with Tandemic's data science accelerator, have made this possible this year.
02 A Life Board
Since 2024, I have been thinking about what it means to design a life with others, beyond mere check-ins and milestones, and through sustained reflection.
I formalized a small circle of people in 2025 whom I could meet with regularly to talk through the big arcs across career shifts, creative risks, and long-term dreams.
These are not just my mentors, but also broader co-conspirators who amplify one anotherβs ambitions, speak truthfully, and remain curious about who we are becoming.
What I want this to hold
I want to curate this space with care, where accountability, imagination, and emotional safety create the conditions for self-belief to grow, and where people are seen clearly and encouraged to stretch.
03Gatherings
As I prepare for graduate studies and an early career in management consulting and tech, I keep circling back to a quiet desire to gather people in the in-between.
Since freshman year, I have been hosting informal and intentional spaces where we map out our edges and trace contours of our T-shaped profiles oriented toward moral ambition and further flourishing.