When I was 12 years old, there was this scene in I, Robot that changed how I think about everything.
Dr. Lanning, the founder of modern robotics, had just been killed.
An inspector (Will Smith) is exploring his lab and finds a hologram of Lanning’s consciousness.
He turns it on.
“Greetings, inspector. My responses are limited. You must ask the right questions.”
The scene goes on, and at one point the inspector asks something that makes the hologram respond:
“Now that, inspector, is the right question.”
“Program terminated.”
Seventeen years later, that one scene has shaped my entire being.
What are those “right” questions?
What woke me up
Something changed in me 3 weeks ago when I posted my colonialism reading list video on Youtube.
Since then, I’ve grown from 98 to over 1,000 subscribers which is insane to me!
But more importantly,
I’ve seen people hungry for real education,
sharing book recommendations,
supporting each other’s awakening journeys,
and choosing curiosity over comfort in these crazy times we’re in..
To everyone leaving thoughtful comments and walking this path with me, thank you.
This work is lonely and difficult, but your comments remind me I’m not figuring this out alone.
We live in a world where 72% of the world is under authoritarian rule, where misinformation floods our feeds, where rapid-fire executive orders create confusion about what to pay attention to.
Authoritarian regimes attack education first, journalists, teachers, educators, curriculum so nobody can think critically anymore.
I’m a third-generation Filipino-American who, until recently, lived in blissful ignorance.
I was an marketing agency owner and consultant focused on growing my business, never questioning the systems I operated within.
Then current events with the Trump Administration in 2025 forced me to ask,
What the f*ck is going on?
That question led to Franz Fanon, Paulo Freire, Jason Hickel, Eduardo Galeano;
thinkers whose books were banned in other countries,
whose ideas were so “dangerous” people went to jail for having them.
Education Is Self-Defense
The quality of our answers is directly proportional to the quality of our questions.
If we don’t ask better questions, our solutions are just superficial aesthetic temporary band-aids.
Knowledge becomes resistance, when authoritarian regimes attack critical thinking.
When fascist politics uses propaganda to create unreality, learning becomes survival.
Surface-Level Revolutions
I’ve been on the ground here in Las Vegas, interviewing people at protests, witnessing police fire rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds of peaceful protesters without warning.
I saw citizens arrested simply for saying “remember your oath” to officers.
I watched people get pulled from crowds, put into vans, and taken to who knows where.
I livestreamed these events to nearly a thousand people from around the world on TikTok,
documenting what was really happening versus what was being reported.
I also had some deeper convos with organizers, activists, and protestors.
I noticed these are everyday people; teachers, nurses, parents working 9-to-5 jobs,
Who felt called to organize because the urgency of the moment demanded it.
They’re doing important work, showing up when it matters, creating community in the face of authoritarianism.
But I kept asking them:
“Okay, but let’s say there’s a revolution, then what? What’s your actual plan?”
The silence is telling.
Most people fighting for change can’t articulate what comes after victory.
They’re focused on what they’re against, not what they’re building toward.
If we don’t know what we’re building, our “solutions” become aesthetic temporary band-aids rather than real transformation.
These convos convinced me that we need people thinking beyond
resistance toward actual construction of alternatives beyond the capitalist system.
This is exactly why the right questions matter. Without them, even our most passionate efforts become directionless.
The Questions I’m Asking During US Descent into Fascism
Here are some of the questions I’m asking right now to find deeper solutions.
The immediate and personal:
- What the fuck is going on?
- Why do people who look like me get detained and deported?
- Why is there still racism? Am I unconsciously racist towards others? Towards myself?
- Why do Filipinos and Filipino-Americans vote for Trump and authoritarian leaders?
- Why are no Filipinos talking about what’s going on? Why are there barely any Asians speaking out?
- How do I become a better steward of awareness without sounding like a nut or fear-mongering?
- Why can’t I just stay “in the middle”? (I dismantled this one – to be neutral in times of tyranny is to be complicit)
About my identity and heritage:
- What the heck is a Filipino-American during this time? Who are we?
- How can I use my voice for humanity when I don’t even know the origins of my own humanity?
- Who am I to speak on these things when I don’t have language to articulate my own unconscious oppression as a brown person in America?
- How can I speak for human rights when I don’t even know my own rights and how they might’ve been taken from me without knowing?
- Why don’t I feel any pride in my cultural background? (Not as victim, but for context of the power of my voice)
- Why is the Philippines the way it is today? How did it become a lab rat nation of the West with pseudo-Western culture?
- Why is it so hard to find history about my people before colonization?
- Why do Filipinos have the most cultural and historical amnesia out of all Austronesian civilizations?
About political systems and history:
- Why is 72% of the world under authoritarian rule today?
- What is fascism? What is authoritarianism?
- How do you turn a third-world country into a first-world country?
- Are there any successful examples of countries fully decolonizing without neocolonial economic dependence?
- What are the antifragile civilizations that stood the test of time against Western colonialism and imperialism?
- Who benefits from this problem continuing?
About socio-economics:
- What is capitalism, Marxism, socialism, communism exactly?
- Why is there so much fear and hate towards the “radical left”? What does that even mean?
- After being an entrepreneur for 5 years, what are the critiques of capitalism?
- Is critiquing capitalism the same as critiquing entrepreneurship? Was the past 5 years a lie?
- Where am I on the political spectrum? What are even my political views?
About mental health:
- How do you decolonize without becoming the same monster that erased, genocided, and tokenized you?
- How do you face oppressive truths but maintain everyday relationships, especially with people who aren’t aware?
- How do you learn these things as a brown person and not develop internalized fear and sacred rage towards white people?
- How do I articulate oppression to random strangers on the internet in a way that’s sustainable, transformational, accessible, and solution-oriented?
- How do I use my voice without just being an angry person yelling at a screen?
About religion and spirituality:
- Why is there so much hate towards Islam, Muslims, and Arabs when Jesus was a brown Arab from Palestine?
- Why is there so much hate towards Jewish people?
- Why is Christianity still being used to justify racism and oppressive government?
- What was Christianity before it was weaponized? Jesus didn’t even want people to make a religion about him.
- Why are all the sacred lands in the Bible being torn apart and the people framed as terrorists?
About the future:
- How do we imagine reality beyond capitalist realism? (It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than a world without capitalism)
- How do we overcome post-modernity where rebellion becomes aestheticized?
- If the Philippines were to fully decolonize, what would that look like?
- What would a pan-Austronesian/pan-Filipino consciousness look like, similar to pan-Africanism or the Islamic Ummah?
- Where does AI fit into all this? What does it mean for human creativity and politics?
- How does climate change fit into everything?
- If I were to design a civilization from scratch, what would that look like?
Who are the authors and books with similar spiritual equations as me who have navigated these questions before?
Each question led to books.
Books led to understanding.
Understanding led to more questions.
How I Learn With ADHD
Having ADHD made reading books nearly impossible.
I barely graduated high school due to health problems and skin diseases.
When I was 17, I tried killing myself because I felt so stupid, like I was a waste of space who would never achieve anything because of my ADHD.
But Even though I passed by a thread in high school, I still loved learning on my own.
When you find tools that work with your brain instead of against it, learning becomes fun. Addictive even. I realized that my ADHD, what I now call “attention directed to higher dimensions” is actually a superpower.
I’ve learned more about political theory, economics, decolonization, and history in the past few weeks than years in our public education system.
Not because I’m smart, but because I finally started asking questions that mattered to me.
And because I found learning systems that work with actually work with my brain.
(Readwise has been transformative for turning books into audiobooks and organizing my notes with ADHD, it literally opened the door to reading for me.)
The Hard Truth
This work isn’t easy.
As Franz Fanon says, decolonization is always a violent process..
not just physically, but mentally, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically.
When you start really questioning everything, you realize how much of what
you believed was designed to control you rather than free you.
Last week I asked my therapist:
“Is this what it means to radicalize?”
It’s scary to think about what I’m becoming as I start seeing how things work more clearly.
But staying ignorant while the world burns feels worse.
Your Questions Matter
I’m sharing this because I believe curiosity is a love language.
Your questions shape my seeking too.
The thoughtful comments and book recommendations you share
inspire me to dig deeper, to ask better questions, to find more nuanced answers.
What are the questions you’ve been afraid to ask? What would change if you started asking them?
I want to hear from you. What questions are alive for you during this time? What are you trying to understand about the world, about yourself, about what’s happening around us?
Share them in the comments below. Sometimes the questions matter more than the answers.
What I’m Building
Through all this questioning, I’m developing frameworks that I’ll share as they crystallize:
- Why Filipinos vote for dictators (6,000-word analysis)
- AI ethics manifesto with concrete frameworks with a decolonial lens
- Speculative design for pan-Austronesian civilizations rooted in our cultural DNA
The quality of our questions determines the quality of our lives.
Maybe it’s time we started asking better ones.
If this resonates, you might enjoy my YouTube channel where I document my learning journey in real-time, or check out my entire reading list for the texts that have been most transformative.
Currently working on: My AI ethics manifesto, frameworks for decolonial consciousness, and speculative design for pan-Austronesian futures. Always learning, always questioning.