I’ve been taking things apart since I can remember.

Toys first, as a kid. Into pieces, then back together. That was the only way to see what was going on inside. Then I slowly became the person people brought broken things to fix.

I still have my first hammer, from when I was seven, and a multimeter from around the same age. I still use both.

The curiosity never stopped. It evolved and spread into everything. If something doesn’t make sense to me, I reverse-engineer it until it does. I need to see the mechanism underneath, and I can’t accept anything until that part makes sense. Which turns out to be a bit of a problem, because a great deal of what we are handed doesn’t hold up.

The sun, the source of all life, which we were told to hide from. Dopamine, which everybody still calls the pleasure chemical, and which is the thing that got us out of the caves. The assumption that every brain runs the same way, and that the ones that don’t just need more discipline. Every one of those gets its own Experiment. The sun goes first.

None of that started as a lie. Somebody makes the best call they can with what they know at the time, and it becomes the standard. Then the science moves, and it moves fast now. The standard doesn’t. Your doctor has to practice what he was trained on, and stepping outside it puts his license at risk. Same in every classroom, from grade school to university. And by the time a correction shows up, there is an industry sitting on top of the old answer, and no industry pays for the study that kills its own product. The correction is out there somewhere. It just never reaches you.

So you try to do everything by the book. It doesn’t work. Nobody tells you why.

That is what this place is for. Usually one subject a week, taken apart properly. What you were told, what turns out to be true, and what to do about it.

Why alchemy. Alchemy was the first chemistry. No instruments, no periodic table, no idea what an atom was, chasing a transformation nobody could explain yet. Raw material, the right knowledge, the right instruments, real testing, and what comes out is worth more than what went in. Modern, because we have what they would have killed for: real working tools, the whole library of human knowledge in our pocket, and now AI on top of it.

Who’s writing. Born in Beirut in the mid-seventies, during the war. We left for Canada just before I turned fourteen.

I had one real job in my life. McDonald’s, during high school, and before it was over I had already started my first business, selling cellphones, back when they were new and about to change everything, and I never stopped since. I opened my first cafe at twenty-five, while I was still at university, and thirteen companies followed across three continents: cafes, bars, nightclubs, a burger franchise that sold over two million burgers, a catering company, an event company, a footwear brand, product development, and a handful of other cool projects along the way. I have never had a nine-to-five and never wanted one. All of it came with a lot of airports, as much of it chasing curiosity as business, because you don’t get to understand the world by reading about it. And I’m not done.

I started playing around in the kitchen at ten and I still cook every day. Food is the thing I love most. I am not a chef, I never went to culinary school, and I don’t like being called one. What I do is closer to food engineering: ingredients, spices, herbs, how a flavor gets built and what belongs with what. I have hundreds of spices and ingredients from all over the world. I never use recipes. Give me a protein and some vegetables and I will build you something you will ask me for the recipe. There isn’t one. That’s alchemy in the kitchen.

I started working out at fifteen. Back then we all had fake IDs for the clubs. I needed mine for the gym, because you had to be sixteen to get in. I have been at it ever since, obsessing over anatomy and physiology, like everything I get into. At fifty I still have my six-pack, I maintain eleven percent body fat, and I am in better shape than I was at thirty.

The other thing I could never leave alone is the brain, and why people behave the way they do. My favorite classes at university were consumer behavior and social psychology, and it grew from there into the universe of neuroscience.

I also have what they call ADHD. I always knew I was wired differently, and anyone who ever knew me will confirm it in a blink. I just didn’t know what it was, nor had a word for it, until about fifteen years ago. I self-diagnosed years before a doctor made it official. I have spent over ten years studying everything I can find on it, and I am not done, because the research is still coming.

I don’t follow instructions and I don’t follow rules, and I never had a box to think outside of. A brain that cannot accept an instruction it does not understand is a problem at school and an advantage in a lab.

Everything here is spoken by me and written down by an AI I built and named Noa. My stories, my opinions, my arguments, and my approval on every word.

I’m building something that will outlast me. This is where it goes.

Georges

Usually one Experiment on Sunday. Lab Notes in between. Free.