In Experiment 001, Sun Powered, I wrote that nitric oxide does an enormous amount of work in your body, and that I would come back to it. This is me coming back.

Nitric oxide is a gas: one atom of nitrogen, one of oxygen. Its main job is to tell your blood vessels to relax and open. Wider vessels mean lower blood pressure and more blood and oxygen reaching your muscles, your brain and everything else.

Your body makes it two ways. The first is built in. The cells lining your blood vessels make it on their own, and they make more every time blood rushes past them, which is a big part of why exercise works. The second runs through your food and your mouth, and it is the one you can feed directly.

An explosive story.

Alfred Nobel made his fortune from dynamite, which is built on nitroglycerin. Late in his life, sick with heart disease, his doctor prescribed him nitroglycerin. He wrote: "It is ironical that I am now ordered by my physician to eat nitroglycerin."

It took a hundred years to find out why it helped. Nitroglycerin releases nitric oxide. In 1998 three American scientists, Robert Furchgott, Louis Ignarro and Ferid Murad, won the Nobel Prize, the prize Nobel's own fortune pays for, for showing that nitric oxide is a signal in the heart and blood vessels. That same year, the FDA approved Viagra, which works by keeping the nitric oxide signal switched on longer.

Beets and greens.

Beets, arugula, spinach and other leafy greens are full of nitrate. Nitrate needs help. Bacteria living on your tongue turn it into nitrite. You swallow that, and your body turns it into nitric oxide. No bacteria, no nitric oxide from your food.

Arugula carries the most nitrate by weight: German food safety testing found about 4,700 milligrams per kilo, more than beets. But you would need a big bowl of it. Beets are the easy way to a real dose, which is why most of the research uses beet juice. I eat a lot of beets. Nitrate dissolves in water. When you boil them, part of it ends up in the red cooking water, so I always drink it.

The evidence for beets is some of the best in nutrition. In a 2015 trial, people with high blood pressure who drank 250 milliliters of beet juice a day for four weeks lowered their blood pressure by about 8 points, and their arteries became more flexible. At the University of Exeter in 2009, cyclists who drank beet juice for six days lasted 16 percent longer before exhaustion. notes that an international sports medicine consensus lists nitrate among the few supplements with strong evidence. The effect is real. Nathan Bryan, a nitric oxide researcher, believes in beets so much that he wrote a whole book about them and called it Beet the Odds.

Protect the bacteria.

Strong antiseptic mouthwash wipes out the good bacteria with the bad. It does not pick sides. In a 2013 study in London, a week of it cut the nitrite coming from people's mouths by about 90 percent, and their blood pressure went up. In a study in San Juan, Puerto Rico, adults who used mouthwash twice a day or more had a 55 percent higher risk of developing prediabetes or diabetes over three years. That study shows a link, not proof, but the pathway behind it is real.

I stopped using mouthwash a few years ago, and started using a tongue scraper around the same time. A scraper cleans your tongue without wiping out the good bacteria you need. A small 2019 study found that people who cleaned their tongue every day carried more of the nitrate-turning bacteria, not fewer. Tongue scrapers have other benefits too, and I will write about them soon.

The rest of the list.

1. Breathe through your nose.

Your sinuses make nitric oxide all day, in very high concentrations. Breathe through your nose and every breath carries it down into your lungs, where it opens the vessels that pick up oxygen. Breathe through your mouth and you skip it. Plenty of people who breathe through their nose all day breathe through their mouth at night, and miss it for hours. I wrote about mouth taping in Experiment 002, Take a Breath.

2. Hum.

In that Experiment, I also wrote that humming raises nasal nitric oxide about 15 fold, and I promised to explain the vibration. Humming makes the air in your nose shake, and that pumps air in and out of your sinuses, where the nitric oxide is made. Quiet breathing barely moves the air in there at all.

3. Practice your breathing.

A few minutes of slow breathing through the nose each day trains you to breathe that way without thinking, and every one of those breaths carries nitric oxide down with it. Experiment 002, Take a Breath walks through the practices.

4. Get sun on your skin.

Your skin holds its own store of nitric oxide. The UVA in sunlight releases it straight into your blood, with no eating, digesting or converting. I wrote more about it in Experiment 001, Sun Powered.

5. Sweat.

In Finland, one 30 minute sauna session lowered people's blood pressure from 137 over 82 to 130 over 75, and their arteries were less stiff afterward. I never skip the chance for a sauna session. Sauna has many other benefits, which I will cover in the Experiment on heat and cold.

6. Train hard.

This is the built-in route. When your heart pumps harder, blood rushes along your vessel walls, and the cells lining them answer by making more nitric oxide. Regular exercise is the main thing shown to protect that system as you age. My go-to is high intensity interval training, which is known to switch on nitric oxide. A review of seven trials found that interval training improved how well arteries widen about twice as much as steady cardio did.

7. Eat the other helpers.

A review of 42 trials found that cocoa flavanols, the compounds in dark chocolate, helped arteries widen and lowered blood pressure. In a review of 20 trials, garlic lowered blood pressure by about 9 points in people with high blood pressure. Across 14 trials, pomegranate juice lowered it by about 5. I always have fresh garlic in my pantry, a big collection of dark chocolate, and pomegranate molasses, which I wrote about in Experiment 006, Well Preserved.

8. Citrulline and arginine.

Arginine is the raw material your vessels use to make nitric oxide, and citrulline is an amino acid your body turns into arginine. Watermelon is the richest food source of citrulline, and pumpkin seeds are among the richest in arginine. Get them from food, and skip arginine pills: your body breaks most of them down before they reach your blood.

A bonus for men.

An erection is a blood flow event, and it runs on nitric oxide. That is how Viagra works. Every habit in this Lab Note raises nitric oxide, so they all feed the same system.

Here is what you can do this week. Skip the antiseptic mouthwash, unless your dentist prescribed it, and start using a tongue scraper. Eat a beet or a big bowl of arugula every day. Breathe through your nose, day and night. Get some sun, without burning. Get your heart rate up. Your body already knows how to make this molecule. Feed it, and get out of its way.

Georges

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

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I AM.

I have a symbol tattooed on my wrist that spells I AM. For me it carries more than one meaning, some of them mystical. The one I want to talk about today is the one this Experiment is about.

Those two words are also the start of one of the most famous ideas in self help. Say "I am," and whatever follows starts to become true. Think it, feel it, and it shows up. In 2024 the Cambridge Dictionary picked "manifest" as its word of the year, because so many people were looking up its new meaning: picturing what you want, saying it out loud, and believing that makes it more likely to happen.

Scroll any social feed and you will find manifestation quotes everywhere. Most of them say the same thing in different words. The universe answers your frequency. What you focus on grows. Feel it as if it were already yours.

For a long time that was the mystics' territory. It is not anymore. Neuroscientists, doctors and psychologists now study what a thought does inside your head and your body, and they keep finding that the old teachers were describing something real, in the language they had.

This piece walks through the best known of those teachers, one by one, and puts each one next to what the science found. By the end you will know how your brain answers your thoughts, why the teachers kept saying the same thing for more than two thousand years, and one practice the research backs.

The oldest idea.

The idea is older than any book on your shelf.

The Dhammapada, a collection of the Buddha's sayings, opens with this line: "All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind." In 1908 a small book called The Kybalion put it as a law: "The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental." It claims to pass on the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary figure the alchemists called their founder.

Almost every religion carries a version of it. In Christianity, the Bible opens with God speaking the world into being, and Jesus tells his followers: "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find." In Islam, God says in a well known hadith: "I am as My servant thinks of Me," which Muslims read as a call to expect good. And Judaism is full of it. In Exodus, when Moses asks God for his name at the burning bush, the answer is "Ehyeh asher ehyeh": I AM THAT I AM. The Talmud teaches that the way a person wants to go is the way they are led. One of the earliest books of Jewish mysticism, the Sefer Yetzirah, describes the world being built out of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. And a Hasidic saying puts it in one line: "Tracht gut, vet zein gut." Think good, and it will be good. Traditionally, Jewish children start studying Scripture at five and the Talmud at fifteen.

Then the self-help writers turned it into a method. In 1903 James Allen wrote As a Man Thinketh: "A man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild." In 1937 Napoleon Hill, who spent twenty years studying the most successful people of his time, published Think and Grow Rich, one of the best selling self help books ever written, and opened it with four words: "Truly, thoughts are things." His method was concrete. Decide exactly what you want, write it down with a date, make a plan, and surround yourself with people who push you toward it. He called that group a master mind. In the 1940s Neville Goddard, a lecturer in New York, taught people to "assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled." His 1952 book The Power of Awareness opens with a chapter called "I AM."

Start with Hill, because his method is the easiest to test. The psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent decades studying goals, and specific, hard goals beat "do your best" goals, again and again. What psychologists call "if-then plans," deciding in advance exactly what you will do and when, made people more likely to reach their goals across 94 studies with more than 8,000 people. For example: if it is 7 in the morning, then I put on my running shoes. And in a study at Dominican University in California, the people who wrote their goals down and sent a weekly progress report to a friend got the furthest. Hill's master mind has a modern name: accountability.

Now back to the Buddha's line: made by mind. Neuroscience now describes the brain as a prediction machine. It does not simply record the world. It guesses what is out there from what it expects, and uses your senses to check the guess. , a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, puts it plainly: "the brain actually operates by prediction all the time." What you see, and even what you feel in your body, is built in part from what you expect. In a 2023 study at University College London, people who imagined something vividly were more likely to believe they had actually seen it. The lead researcher, Nadine Dijkstra, said the gap between imagining and seeing "is a difference in degree, not in kind."

Made by mind turns out to be close to how the brain actually works.

The Secret.

Most people met this idea through The Secret.

It had a forerunner. In 2004 a small film called What the Bleep Do We Know!? mixed interviews with scientists and spiritual teachers and argued that your thoughts shape your reality. It became a cult hit. Two years later, Rhonda Byrne, an Australian television producer, released The Secret, first as a film in March 2006 and then as a book that November. In February 2007 Oprah Winfrey gave it a full episode. The Secret and its sequels have more than 30 million copies in print.

The Secret calls it the law of attraction, and the method has three steps: ask, believe, receive. Know exactly what you want. Believe it is already on its way. Feel the gratitude of having it. One teacher in the film, Jack Canfield, the co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul, tells how he drew a 100,000 dollar bill and taped it to his ceiling. The film's shortest line is the one people remember: "Energy flows where attention goes."

Science agrees with that line, in its own words. Your brain cannot take in everything, so it filters, and it lets through what you have told it matters. In a famous Harvard experiment, about half the people counting basketball passes in a video never noticed a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the game.

, a psychologist in England, turned this into a test about luck. He gave people who called themselves lucky or unlucky a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs. On page two, in large letters, an ad said: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." The people who called themselves lucky were more likely to see it. The unlucky ones kept counting. Luck, in Wiseman's work, is partly a way of paying attention.

Gratitude has its own evidence. In a study by the psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, people who wrote down a few things they were grateful for each week, for nine weeks, rated their lives higher and exercised about an hour and a half more per week than people who wrote about their hassles.

The teachers in the film knew belief was only half of it. On Larry King in 2007, John Assaraf, one of them, said: "You've got to actually take action." Lisa Nichols, another: "You can't just believe it, you can't just sit back and think it's going to happen."

Joe Dispenza.

If one teacher bridged the mystics and the lab, it is . He appeared in What the Bleep, trained as a chiropractor, and went on to write Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, You Are the Placebo and Becoming Supernatural. In the film he says: "I wake up in the morning and I consciously create my day the way I want it to happen."

His core idea is that the brain can be rewired by repeated thought, and that you can rehearse the person you want to become until your brain treats that person as real. He often uses a phrase from neuroscience: neurons that fire together, wire together. It comes from the work of the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb in 1949, and it holds up. Connections you use get stronger. Scientists call this neuroplasticity, and it gets its own Experiment.

Mental rehearsal has some of the best evidence in the field. In a 1995 study led by the neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, one group of volunteers practiced a five finger piano exercise for two hours a day, and another group only imagined playing it. After five days, the part of the brain that controls the fingers had changed in both groups, in a similar way. Playing still made people better than imagining. But imagining alone changed how the brain responded.

Then the placebo, which Dispenza turned into a book title. In 2010 at Harvard, Ted Kaptchuk gave people with irritable bowel syndrome pills in a bottle labeled "placebo" and told them the pills had no active ingredient. After three weeks, 59 percent reported real relief, against 35 percent of people who got no pills. They knew it was a sugar pill, and it still worked. In a 2001 study published in Science, people with Parkinson's disease were given a saline injection they believed was medicine, and their brains released dopamine, the chemical their disease runs short of.

It works the other way too. In the SAMSON trial in London, published in 2020, sixty people who had stopped taking statins, the common cholesterol pills, because of side effects, took statins, sugar pills and nothing, a month at a time. The sugar pill months produced 90 percent of the symptoms the statins did. Doctors call this the nocebo effect. Expect harm, and your body can produce it.

Dispenza also teaches heart coherence: slow breathing while holding a feeling like gratitude. Breathing at about six breaths a minute brings your heart rate, blood pressure and breath into rhythm and raises heart rate variability, a marker of a calm, flexible nervous system. A review of 223 studies found the effect reliably. In 2025 a team at the University of California, San Diego, working with Dispenza, measured twenty people before and after one of his week-long meditation retreats and found changes in their brain activity and their blood within seven days.

He goes further, into what he calls the quantum field, a field of possibility that answers your thoughts and feelings. That part is his own language, and I leave it in his words. What the lab can measure is the part inside you, and that part is real.

Huberman and the Stanford labs.

, the Stanford neuroscientist behind Huberman Lab, has given this subject several episodes. His own position fits in six words: "I'm a believer in belief effects."

His guest Alia Crum runs the Mind and Body Lab at Stanford. Her best known study used a milkshake. People drank the same 380 calorie shake on two different days. Once the label said it was an indulgent 620 calorie treat. Once it said it was a sensible 140 calorie diet shake. When they believed it was the rich one, their ghrelin, the hunger hormone, dropped much more steeply. Same shake, different belief, different body. Crum told Huberman: "we have more evidence on placebo effects than we have for any other drug."

Her stress work is just as practical. Employees at a large bank watched short videos, about nine minutes in total over a week, that framed stress either as harmful or as something that sharpens you. The group told stress could sharpen them reported fewer stress symptoms afterward.

, a neurosurgeon at Stanford, wrote a whole book about this in 2024, Mind Magic. As a poor twelve year old in California, he walked into a magic shop where a woman named Ruth taught him to relax his body, quiet the voice in his head and picture what he wanted. He explained it with three brain networks: one that plans and drives, one that chatters and criticizes, and one he calls "a bloodhound," the salience network, which picks out what matters to you from everything around you. Set the intention, and the bloodhound goes looking.

Then hypnosis, which sounds like the most mystical tool of all. Huberman's guest David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who has studied it for decades, describes it as "a state of highly focused attention." About two thirds of adults can be hypnotized. Huberman says he uses self hypnosis to fall back asleep at night. Focused attention is one way a thought reaches the body.

The long game.

The biggest numbers in this field come from studies that followed people for years.

Across 15 studies and more than 229,000 people, optimists had about 35 percent fewer heart attacks, strokes and other heart events than pessimists. In the Harvard Nurses' Health Study, which followed about 70,000 women, the most optimistic had a lower risk of dying from major diseases over eight years. And Becca Levy, now at Yale, found that people with positive beliefs about getting older lived about seven and a half years longer than people with negative ones. More on that in the longevity Experiment.

These studies show a link, not proof that the belief caused the longer life. Optimists may also sleep better, move more and see a doctor sooner. But that is the point the teachers kept making. A belief does not stay in your head. It shows up in what you do every day.

Carl Jung.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, gave manifestation two of its favorite ideas.

The first comes from his book Aion, in 1951: "The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate." What you do not see in yourself, you meet in your life.

Science has a mechanism for the first step of that. At UCLA, Matthew Lieberman found that simply putting a feeling into words, naming it as anger or fear, calms the amygdala, the brain's alarm. Make the inner situation conscious, and it loses some of its hold.

The second idea is synchronicity: a meaningful coincidence. You think of an old friend, and that afternoon they call. Jung's own example happened in his office. A patient was telling him about a dream of a golden scarab when an insect tapped at the window. Jung opened it, caught a beetle that looked like a scarab, and handed it to her.

Psychology sees the same moment from the inside. Your brain is built to find meaning, and the meaning you find shapes what you do next. A sign is a sign because you were ready to notice it.

The power of the will.

Here is where the teachers and the science meet, with one warning.

Goddard taught people to feel the wish already fulfilled. The Secret says to feel it as if it were already yours. Done right, that feeling is fuel. Done wrong, it replaces the work.

, host of the famous podcast The School of Greatness, says it bluntly: "Manifestation is not about wishing for something." For him, what holds most people back is worthiness: "You will never outgrow the level of worthiness you believe you deserve."

Gabriele Oettingen, a psychologist at New York University, has spent more than twenty years on this. In one set of experiments, people who pictured an ideal outcome, everything going well, ended up with lower blood pressure, a sign that their body had relaxed as if the goal were already reached. In a study that followed people for a week, the ones asked to imagine an ideal week got less done than people who imagined an ordinary one. The dream felt like the reward, so the body stopped pushing. Huberman, on his goals episode, goes even further: "it's not about visualizing success, it's about visualizing failure."

Harry Potter has a scene about exactly this. In the first book, Harry finds the Mirror of Erised, which shows the deepest desire of whoever looks into it. Harry sees the family he lost, and he goes back night after night to sit in front of it. Dumbledore moves the mirror and tells him: "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that."

A century ago Florence Scovel Shinn made the same point. In The Game of Life and How to Play It, she retells the Bible story of three kings in a desert who were told to dig ditches for water with no rain in sight. Her lesson: "Man must prepare for the thing he has asked for, when there isn't the slightest sign of it in sight."

Jim Carrey tells the version with a happy ending. As he told Oprah in 1997, years before he was famous he wrote himself a check for 10 million dollars "for acting services rendered," dated it Thanksgiving 1995 and kept it in his wallet. Just before that Thanksgiving, he learned he would be paid 10 million dollars for Dumb and Dumber. He tells the second half too: you cannot just visualize and then go eat a sandwich.

I know this one from my own life. Ask my friends and they will tell you one thing about me: when I say I will do something, I get it done. Not only in business. A project, a trip, spending months in the Caribbean in winter. Once I decide I want to do something, I do it. I convince myself enough, and I end up doing it.

I do not picture it and wait. I decide, and then I do the work. A belief is not the wish. It is the decision that sends you to work.

I AM, in practice.

Here is the formula I built for myself, and what the science says about each step.

Recognize the old belief that holds you back. Naming it is the first step, close to what Lieberman measured: a feeling with a name loses some of its grip.

Reframe it. Talk to yourself the way a coach would. at the University of Michigan found that people who coached themselves by their own name, or as "you," before a stressful speech felt less anxious and performed better.

Take the actions. This is Hill's plan, and the "if-then plan" from earlier. Write down the moment and the action together. For example: if I pour my first coffee, then I send the email I have been avoiding.

Feel it before you have it. This step stays, with Oettingen's twist: feel the person doing the work, not only the finish line.

Repeat every day. Habits form through repetition. In a study at University College London, a new daily habit took a median of 66 days to become automatic.

End the day in the theta state, the quiet stretch between awake and asleep, or with self hypnosis. This one is my own practice. Sleep tends to hold on to what you went over just before it, and Spiegel's work shows how open the mind is when attention narrows. Brain states, from beta to alpha to theta, get their own Lab Note.

Here is what you can do tonight, in five minutes. Oettingen calls it WOOP, for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. First the wish: write it in one line. Then the outcome: picture the best result for a minute, and feel it. Then the obstacle: name the thing inside you most likely to stop you. Then the plan: if that obstacle shows up, then I will do this. A review of 21 studies with nearly 16,000 people found that this practice helps people reach their goals.

The problem is, we forget. Life happens, we get busy and distracted, and things stop going the way we want. The trick is to remember. That is one of the reasons I put I AM on my wrist. The teachers were right that those two words matter. The science adds the part that comes after them. I am is the decision. The rest is the work.

Experiment 009 is complete. You just read it.

Georges

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

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I am a professional walker. I try to walk almost every afternoon, often with friends. I live on a canal, and there is a path along the water where I can walk for kilometers. When I am in Europe, I walk everywhere for hours, and somehow I never get tired. My father has walked all his life. He never played a sport and never went to a gym. Walking is his only workout. He is 89 now, in good shape for his age, and his mind is still sharp.

Most people do not count walking as exercise. The research says they should.

The number.

The 10,000 steps goal did not come from a lab. It came from a Japanese pedometer sold in 1965 called manpo-kei, which means "10,000 steps meter."

The real numbers are friendlier. In 2025 The Lancet Public Health pooled 57 studies. People who walked 7,000 steps a day had a 47 percent lower risk of dying during the studies than people who walked 2,000. Their risk of dementia was 38 percent lower, death from cancer 37 percent lower, and symptoms of depression 22 percent lower. In a Harvard study of women in their seventies, about 4,400 steps a day already went with about 41 percent lower mortality.

How you take the steps matters too. In a 2025 study of more than 33,000 people who walked less than 8,000 steps a day, the ones who walked in stretches of 15 minutes or more had a much lower risk of dying than the ones who only walked in bursts of five minutes or less. One real walk beats a day of shuffling.

What it does to your brain.

At Stanford in 2014, people came up with 60 percent more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. "We're not saying walking can turn you into Michelangelo," the lead researcher, Marily Oppezzo, said. "But it could help you at the beginning stages of creativity."

In a trial with 120 older adults, a year of walking three days a week grew the hippocampus, the brain's memory center, by 2 percent. The researchers wrote that this effectively reversed one to two years of age-related shrinking. The people who only stretched lost volume.

For mood, a 2024 review in the BMJ pooled 218 trials on exercise and depression. Walking or jogging had the biggest effect of any type of exercise.

points to something else that happens on a walk. As you move forward, the world streams past your eyes. He calls it optic flow and says it "has this incredible property of lowering activity in the amygdala," the brain's alarm. The study behind it tested eye movements in a scanner, not walks, so take it as a lead, not a law.

Where you walk counts. At Stanford, people who walked for 90 minutes through nature dwelled less on their worries afterward, and the part of the brain tied to brooding quieted down. People who walked the same time along a busy road saw no change. The neuroscientist , who wrote a whole book on walking, puts it this way: "Our sensory systems work at their best when they're moving about the world."

We were built to walk.

Mark Sisson, the founder of and one of the best known voices of the primal movement, puts it plainly: "Humans are the best walkers on the planet." His rule is to move often at a slow pace, with your heart rate around 180 minus your age. At 50, that is about 130 beats a minute.

The Hadza, hunter gatherers in Tanzania, still live much as hunter gatherers have for thousands of years. Measured by GPS, the men walk about 11 kilometers a day and the women about 6.

The thinkers knew it. Charles Darwin walked a sand path behind his house every day until the last weeks of his life, and called it his thinking path. Nietzsche wrote: "Only thoughts reached by walking have value." Steve Jobs held his serious conversations on long walks. And in 1847 the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in a letter: "Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it."

How to make it count.

Walk after you eat. When your muscles work, they pull sugar out of the blood without needing insulin. In a study in New Zealand, in people with type 2 diabetes, a ten minute walk after each meal lowered blood sugar more than one thirty minute walk a day. I went deeper on this in Experiment 008, Sugar Rush.

Walking also heals. In a 2024 trial in The Lancet, 701 people who had recovered from low back pain were put on a walking program. They went a median of 208 days before the pain came back, against 112 days for people who did nothing.

To make a walk work harder, the Japanese have a method. Researchers at Shinshu University had people in their sixties walk three minutes slow, then three minutes fast, five rounds, four days a week. After five months their leg strength was up 13 to 17 percent and their blood pressure down 9 points, more than people who walked 8,000 steps at a steady pace.

, the longevity doctor, adds weight. He walks hills with a 60 pound pack and says walking downhill trains "the brakes," because "most people fall because they lose the brakes." He suggests starting at about a tenth of your body weight.

Walking is not the lesser version of running, and it could be considered the better one. You get much of the same benefit with far less wear. Moderate running is good for you, and recreational runners even have healthier knees than people who sit. The trouble starts with long, hard mileage, year after year. Sisson knows this from the inside. He ran marathons at the national level and finished fourth at the Ironman World Championship in 1982. Today he calls himself an "anti-chronic cardio" guy: walk every day, lift a few times a week, and sprint now and then.

Here is what you can do today. One walk of at least 15 minutes without stopping, outside if you can. Three minutes easy, three minutes fast. And ten minutes after dinner.

Kierkegaard had it right. There is no thought so heavy that you cannot walk away from it.

Georges

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The flat line.

In Canada, a continuous glucose monitor, a CGM for short, is hard to get if you do not have diabetes. Insurance covers it for people who do. It is a small sensor that sticks to the back of your arm, reads your blood sugar every five minutes, day and night, and sends it to your phone. The ones I bought were good for ten days, and they talk to Dexcom's own free app.

I found someone on Marketplace selling five of these sensors. I bought all five. They come with an expiration date, about three months out. A friend took three, and I kept two. I did not need one. I had no reason to think I had an issue with sugar. But the curious alchemist in me wanted to see how my body actually handles it, and to test it against different kinds of food.

I wore the first one in November and kept eating normally. My line did not budge at all. So I saved the second one for the holidays, when most of us indulge. I put it on in Montreal the day before Christmas, knowing I would finish it in Sint Maarten, where I spend New Year's and a chunk of every winter.

I call myself a professional foodie. I live to eat, I do not eat to live, and my friends know my obsession with food. A party I hosted just before Christmas left me with the leftovers of two big cakes, and I worked my way through them all week. Christmas family dinner was a lamb roast, potatoes, a bunch of other sides and wine, with carrot cake, tiramisu and fruit for dessert. New Year's Eve in Sint Maarten was also a feast. It started at a Brazilian churrascaria I had helped a friend open there: beef, chicken, lamb and every other meat they carry around on skewers, side dishes covering the table, dessert and wine. For the midnight countdown, I went to another friend's house, with a lot more drinking. I was on holiday and I indulged. I know exactly what I ate because back then I logged every meal in a fasting app.

The line stayed flat. My average over both sensors was 5.0 mmol/L, which is 90 mg/dL in American units, and I never came close to the high line on the screen. Two sensors, twenty days, including ten days of holiday indulgence, and not one spike.

This piece is what I found when I went looking for why. By the end you will know what a spike actually is, what it does to the fat on your body, how a run of them can lead to diabetes, why my line stayed flat, and the three habits that research shows move the line. No pills, no powders.

The spike goes viral.

Ten years ago almost nobody outside a diabetes clinic talked about glucose. Now people post about their blood sugar.

Many people know about glucose spikes because of the longevity trend and two viral accounts in particular. The first is , a creator from Toronto with about two million followers on Instagram, who goes by Insulin Resistant 1. His videos are short: he tests foods known to spike blood sugar on camera, then shows you what his monitor did. The second is Jessie Inchauspé, a French biochemist known as the Glucose Goddess. She got interested while working at a genetics company that was testing these sensors, and wrote a bestseller called Glucose Revolution. Her best known advice comes down to four habits: a savory breakfast, a tablespoon of vinegar in a glass of water before you eat, eating your food in the right order, vegetables first, and moving after you eat.

, the Stanford neuroscientist behind Huberman Lab, one of the most popular health podcasts in the world, talks about glucose too. His rules: no food in the first hour after you wake up and none in the two to three hours before bed, a squeeze of lemon or a spoon of vinegar with your meal, and a walk after eating. His advice about not eating late shows up in the research too: in one study, the same dinner eaten at 10 pm spiked about 18 percent higher than at 6 pm. , the longevity doctor who wrote Outlive, wears a sensor to see how his own body responds, and argues it catches what a standard blood test can miss. His own line peaks at about 102 mg/dL.

In the United States, companies started selling these sensors through subscription apps aimed at the longevity crowd, usually 200 to 400 dollars a month. I paid about 50 dollars per sensor on Marketplace, for the same Dexcom sensor that most insurance covers for people with diabetes, and it comes with its own free app. Glucose went from a diabetes word to a wellness word.

Some of what these people say holds up very well, and some of it does not. A rise after a meal is not a disease. It is your body doing its job. The question is how high, how often and for how long. So first, what a spike actually is.

What a spike does.

When you eat bread, rice, fruit or sugar, your gut breaks it down into glucose and sends it into your blood. Your pancreas answers with insulin, the hormone that moves glucose out of the blood and into your muscles, your liver and your fat. In a healthy person that keeps blood sugar between about 70 and 140 mg/dL most of the day. A spike is the climb after a meal. What matters is how high it goes, how long it stays there and how hard it falls. Scientists rank foods by how fast they raise blood sugar, on a scale called the glycemic index. White bread, white rice and potatoes sit high. Lentils, nuts and most fruit sit low.

Insulin is also the brake on fat burning. It does not take much. A small rise in insulin is enough to cut the release of fat from your fat cells by half, and after a meal that brake stays on for a few hours. While insulin is up, your body burns the sugar you just ate and leaves your stored fat alone. So every time you spike, fat burning drops sharply until the sugar is used up. Your body turns surprisingly little sugar directly into fat, unless you eat more than you burn.

The exception is fructose. Table sugar is half glucose and half fructose. Glucose feeds your whole body. Fructose is handled mostly by your liver. A piece of fruit carries a little of it, wrapped in fiber and water. A soda delivers a flood with nothing to slow it down. In a ten week study at the University of California, people who got a quarter of their daily calories from fructose drinks, far more than you get from fruit, built more fat in their liver and around their organs. That is visceral fat, the dangerous kind. People who drank the same amount of glucose did not. Fructose is also the sugar that raises uric acid, which causes gout. Added sugar is the first thing I would cut. It is one of the best health moves you can make, and one of the hardest. The industry does not make it easier.

Think about the breakfast most of us grew up on. A bowl of cereal, pancakes with syrup, toast with jam, a glass of orange juice. That is a large dose of fast sugar on an empty stomach, and your blood sugar shoots up. Insulin comes in hard, and two or three hours later your blood sugar drops, often below where it started. In a study of more than a thousand people wearing these sensors, the people with the biggest drop felt hungrier, ate their next meal sooner, and ate about 312 calories more over the day. The dip after the spike is often what sends you looking for a snack at ten in the morning.

And the rush? When researchers pooled 31 studies of sugar and other carbs, the energy boost never showed up. Within an hour, people who had sugar felt more tired and less alert than people who had a placebo. By contrast, I train fasted, usually a heavy high intensity interval session 16 hours into my fast, with full energy.

The craving loop. What sugar does do is teach your brain to want more. Your gut can tell real sugar from an artificial sweetener, and it reports to your brain. In a German study, people who ate a sweet, fatty pudding every day for eight weeks ended up with a reward system, the dopamine circuit, that responded more strongly to that kind of food. It is a cheap hit, and the brain learns it fast. I notice it in my own body: after a day heavy in carbs and sugar, I crave more for the rest of that day and the next. What dopamine does to your choices, far beyond sugar, gets its own Experiment.

Swapping sugar for artificial sweeteners is not free either. In Experiment 005, Trust Your Gut, I wrote about a study of 120 people where two common sweeteners, saccharin and sucralose, changed how their bodies handled sugar within two weeks.

Even healthy people can spike hard. At Stanford, researchers gave healthy volunteers a bowl of cornflakes with milk, and 80 percent of them went past 140. One spike does not hurt you. Big spikes, again and again, can be a sign your body is losing its grip on sugar.

Sleep matters too. In one small study, a single night of four hours' sleep made healthy people respond to insulin about 20 percent worse the next day.

The road to diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes does not start with high blood sugar. It starts with cells that stop listening to insulin.

Here is how it goes. Your muscles and liver start answering insulin more slowly. Your pancreas makes up for it by making more. For years that works: your blood sugar tests come back normal because your pancreas is working overtime to keep them normal. Then one day it cannot keep up, and the sugar starts to stay in the blood. First that is prediabetes: an HbA1c, the test that shows your average blood sugar over about three months, between 5.7 and 6.4 percent. At 6.5 percent it is type 2 diabetes.

A British study followed thousands of civil servants for years before some of them were diagnosed. Their blood sugar crept up slowly for a long time, then climbed steeply in the last three years or so. By the time the number moves, the problem is years old.

My grandmother got diabetes late in life, after she moved full time to the village. She lived alone in a house with a garden full of fruit trees, eating a lot of that fruit. Her doctor blamed the fruit and told her to stop eating grapes.

It is not rare. In the United States, about 115 million adults have prediabetes, more than two in five, and eight in ten of them do not know it. In Canada, three in ten people have diabetes or prediabetes. Around the world, 589 million adults have diabetes. It is the leading cause of kidney failure, of lower leg amputations and of blindness in adults in the United States. Each daily serving of a sugary drink is linked to about a 13 to 18 percent higher risk of type 2 diabetes.

The good news is that it can go backward. In a British trial called DiRECT, almost half the people with type 2 diabetes who went through a weight loss program were in remission a year later, with normal blood sugar and no diabetes medication. The more weight they kept off, the better their odds.

Why mine stayed flat.

My guess is the fasting and what I eat.

I eat what I call hybrid keto: high protein, eggs, meat, lots of nuts, cheese, vegetables and olive oil, with no bread, pasta or rice, except the occasional croissant or pastry cheat. I do not believe in a hundred percent keto. It cuts out foods full of nutrients, like most fruit, beans and many vegetables, foods a lot of people enjoy that are actually good for you. All the restrictions make it very hard to keep up in a normal life, and a diet that is hard to maintain is not a good diet. Even , who wrote The Keto Reset Diet and founded Primal Kitchen, the brand of keto friendly sauces and dressings, now talks about a more flexible version.

After about 12 hours without food, depending on how much sugar your liver has stored and how much you move, your body starts shifting from burning sugar to burning fat. When your body runs low on stored sugar, your liver starts turning fat into ketones, a fuel your brain and muscles can run on, and research suggests a more efficient one than sugar. That state is called ketosis. Ketones start rising around then. I fast 18 hours every day and eat low sugar, so every day I spend hours past that point. The longer the fast, the more of your day your body spends burning fat for energy. Fasting gets its own Experiment, including my longest fast so far, 75 hours.

Refeeding is as important as the fast itself. I usually break my fast with a glass of water and apple cider vinegar, then eggs and cheese, chickpeas or beans, kefir or kimchi, and lots of olive oil. The mix changes, but it is always high in protein, with vegetables and fat first. There is always a bowl of boiled eggs in my fridge. When I travel and stay somewhere with a kitchen, the first thing I buy is a dozen eggs to boil and some cheese. On flights where I will break my fast in the air, I sometimes carry a few boiled eggs, a piece of cheese, nuts and dried fruit, because we all know how bad plane food is. That is how I eat, and it lines up with all three habits in the last part of this piece.

I eat dates almost every day. I love them, and luckily they are good for you: fiber, potassium and a low glycemic index. When researchers tested five varieties of dates, all of them came out low, in healthy people and in people with diabetes.

And the drinking? While your liver is busy clearing alcohol, it slows down the sugar it releases into your blood, which can push blood sugar down, sometimes too low. I saw it on my own monitor. I drank a lot on New Year's Eve, and the next morning it kept sending me low alerts until noon. That drop is not a trick for better blood sugar. Alcohol is classified as a carcinogen, and it has plenty of other problems. It gets its own piece. With my busy social life, I have still brought my drinking down to a glass or two of wine a month, sometimes less. For someone who used to own clubs and restaurants, that is a big change.

Two things to know. First, if you eat low carb for days and then have a big plate of pasta, you can spike harder than someone who eats pasta every day, because your body has turned down its sugar handling for a while. It returns to normal within days of eating carbs again. Second, my results are mine. The same food can spike one person and not another. At the Weizmann Institute, one woman spiked on tomatoes. At King's College London, researchers gave twins the same meal and saw very different spikes, in people with almost the same genes. That is exactly why I wanted to test food on myself. My line is my line, not necessarily yours, but the general rules apply to everyone.

How we got here.

Sugar was not always cheap. In 1704 the average person in Britain ate about four pounds of it a year. By 1900 it was about ninety. That growth was built on plantations worked by enslaved people. Today the average American eats about 17 teaspoons of added sugar a day. The irony is not lost on me: I live in a loft in what used to be a sugar refinery.

The cereal breakfast is newer than it feels. The Kellogg brothers developed their flaked cereals in the 1890s, and the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day was pushed hard by cereal companies in the decades that followed.

In 1965, an industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation paid three Harvard scientists to write a review of what causes heart disease. It came out in 1967 in one of the most respected medical journals in the world, and it pointed at fat and played down sugar. It helped start fifty years in which fat was the enemy and sugar mostly got a pass. When the United States drew its first food pyramid in 1992, bread, cereal, rice and pasta sat at the base, six to eleven servings a day.

In January 2026, under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States put out new dietary guidelines with the pyramid turned upside down, and for the first time they said no amount of added sugar is recommended.

Built to want more.

Your body has a signal that tells you when you have had enough. A lot of modern food is designed to get past it.

Food companies test combinations of sugar, fat and salt to find the exact point where you crave the most, and they have a name for it: the bliss point. When researchers at the University of Kansas looked at almost 8,000 foods in the official US food database, 62 percent met their definition of hyperpalatable: combinations of sugar, fat and salt that make food hard to stop eating. Food brands that tobacco companies owned in the 1980s and 1990s, when Philip Morris owned Kraft and RJ Reynolds owned Nabisco, were even more likely to be built that way.

Look at what hides in plain sight. A can of Coke holds about 39 grams of sugar, nearly ten teaspoons. Ketchup is about a quarter sugar, with a good dose of salt. Nutella's ads talked about hazelnuts and skim milk, but the first two ingredients on the label are sugar and palm oil, and more than half the jar is sugar. In 2012 its maker paid 3 million dollars to settle a lawsuit over calling it part of a balanced breakfast.

Calories still count. What changes is how many of them you eat. At the US National Institutes of Health, 20 people lived in a clinic for a month and ate two diets, two weeks each, matched for sugar, fat, fiber and salt. On the ultraprocessed diet they ate about 500 calories a day more, without trying, and gained weight. On the whole food diet they lost it. The math is real. The food decides how much of it you do.

The three levers.

Out of everything I read, three habits have the strongest research behind them for a flatter line. Three of the Glucose Goddess's four are on this list, and they are the three with the most studies.

Vinegar before you eat. One tablespoon of vinegar in a glass of water before a meal lowers the rise afterward. Across many trials the effect is modest, not magic, but it is real. Lemon juice works too: in one small study, people ate about two slices of white bread with lemon juice instead of water, and their peak came out 30 percent lower and about half an hour later. I take apple cider vinegar every morning with my first glass of water, and before meals whenever I can. I even travel with a small bottle. My go-to is apple cider vinegar with the mother, the cloudy layer of live bacteria, which I wrote about in Experiment 006, Well Preserved. Always dilute it. Vinegar is known to soften tooth enamel, so if you take it daily, using a straw helps, and do not brush your teeth right after.

Vegetables and protein first, starch last. Same plate, different order. In a study at Weill Cornell in New York, in people with type 2 diabetes, eating vegetables and protein first and the bread last cut the blood sugar rise by 37 percent at the one hour mark. Eating the carbs last also raises GLP-1, a hormone your gut makes that slows your stomach and tells your brain you are full. Ozempic is a peptide that mimics GLP-1, and peptides are what everyone is talking about right now. They get their own Experiment.

You see this habit in old cultures. The Romans started a meal with eggs and lettuce, and their saying for start to finish was "from the egg to the apples." A Lebanese table starts with mezze, plates of vegetables, olives and dips, long before the grilled meat arrives. The French open with crudités, raw vegetables. If you do one thing, start with the salad and veggies.

A few more tricks work the same way. Fat slows the spike. Better to skip the bread basket, but if you do eat it, butter, olive oil and balsamic vinegar help. And rice or potatoes that are cooked, cooled in the fridge and reheated end up with more resistant starch, a kind of starch your body digests slowly. That one gets its own piece.

Move after you eat. The Chinese have a saying for it: walk a hundred steps after a meal and you will live to ninety nine. Your muscles take in most of the sugar from a meal, and when they work, they pull glucose out of the blood without needing insulin at all. In a study in New Zealand, in people with type 2 diabetes, a ten minute walk after each meal lowered blood sugar more than one thirty minute walk a day. The biggest gain came after dinner. Even two to five minutes beats sitting. The benefits of walking get their own Lab Note.

Another hack: if you cannot get up, trick your body into thinking you are moving. Sit on the couch and do calf raises: heels up, heels down, again and again. For sugar, the muscle that matters is the soleus, deep in the calf. The calf is sometimes called your second heart, because it pumps blood back up from your legs. The soleus is built to work for hours without tiring. A small study at the University of Houston found this movement lowered the rise from a sugary drink by about half. That study ran for hours. A few minutes is likely to help. A working muscle is a sugar sponge.

The sweet spot.

Here is what I do. I fast 18 hours every day. Before I eat, a glass of water with apple cider vinegar. Then eggs and vegetables usually come first, with olive oil.

Here is what you can do tonight. Have a tablespoon of vinegar in a glass of water before you sit down. Start with the salad, and eat the bread or the rice last, or better yet skip it. Then take a ten minute walk.

A rise after a meal is normal. Living on a roller coaster of spikes and crashes is not. Scientists have a name for what you want instead: metabolic flexibility. It is your body's ability to switch fuels. When you eat carbs, it burns them and stores the rest. When the food stops, it moves smoothly to burning fat. A flexible body does not crash between meals or need a snack every three hours. Fasting and moving help train that switch. Living on sugar all day can wear it down. I will go much deeper into it in the fasting Experiment.

The goal is not a flat line. The goal is the sweet spot: a body that handles sugar well when you have it, and burns fat when you do not.

Experiment 008 is complete. You just read it.

Georges

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

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That's your story.

When I tell friends stories about my life, one of them always stops me: "Have you read The Alchemist? That's your story." I heard it for years, from different people, in different countries. I have a hard time starting books, so I prefer listening to them, and I finally listened to that one in 2021, in the middle of COVID.

My friends were right. Every chapter of my life has been a hero's journey, and anyone who knows me knows I keep starting new ones. Once you know the shape, you see it everywhere: in the lives of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and the Buddha, in the film you watched last week, and in your own life. That's not a coincidence, and it isn't mysticism either.

In Experiment 003, It Was Never the Gold, I wrote that what the book is really about is the hero's journey, and that it would get its own piece. This is that piece. By the end of it you will know the shape step by step, what the alchemists and the scientists each saw in it, why it works on your brain, how business uses it on you, and where you are on it right now.

One story, told everywhere.

The hero's journey is the pattern behind stories where someone leaves the life they know, goes through something hard, and comes home changed. The man who made it famous was Joseph Campbell, an American professor who spent his life reading myths from every culture he could find. In 1949 he published The Hero with a Thousand Faces and said, in effect, that humanity keeps telling one story.

Four of the world's great religions carry that shape at their center. Moses grows up in Pharaoh's palace, flees into the desert, hears a voice from a burning bush, answers "Who am I?", and goes back anyway to lead his people out of Egypt. Jesus goes alone into the desert for forty days, is tempted, refuses, and comes back to begin his ministry. Muhammad receives his first revelation alone in a cave outside Mecca and comes home shaken. Years later he leaves Mecca for Medina, and years after that he returns. The Buddha is born a prince and kept inside a palace. When he finally sees old age, sickness and death outside its walls, he leaves everything, finds his answer under a tree, and comes back to teach.

The newest versions are on your screens. George Lucas read Campbell while he was writing Star Wars and credited the book with its structure. You will find the same shape in The Wizard of Oz, The Lion King, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. I will follow the two almost everyone has seen.

Star Wars. Luke Skywalker is a bored farm boy on a desert planet. A message hidden in a robot pulls him into a war, an old hermit named Obi-Wan teaches him about the Force, and he ends up destroying the Empire's giant battle station, the Death Star.

The Matrix. Thomas Anderson, who goes by Neo, is an office worker by day and a hacker by night. A stranger called Morpheus tells him the world he lives in is a computer simulation, offers him a red pill to wake up, and trains him to fight the machines that built it.

Later writers turned Campbell's long list into twelve steps in three acts: leaving, the cave, and coming home. Here they are.

Act one: leaving.

The ordinary world. Luke on the farm. Neo at his desk. Life is fine, or at least familiar. In your life it is the job, the city, the body, the routine you have stopped noticing.

The call. For Luke it is a hologram of a princess asking for help. For Neo it is a message on his screen: follow the white rabbit. In real life it is rarely that loud. It is the restlessness that keeps coming back. The idea you cannot shake. The test result you did not like. Sometimes it is a loss that makes the decision for you.

The refusal. Luke tells Obi-Wan he cannot go, he has work on the farm. Neo is told to climb out of his office window to escape, looks down, refuses, and gets arrested. This is the step people leave out when they tell their own story, and it is the most human one. Not now. Not yet. When things calm down. Every hero refuses first.

The mentor. Obi-Wan. Morpheus. In life the mentor is a coach, a teacher, a friend who says the thing nobody else will, sometimes a book. The mentor does not make the journey for you. They hand you something and point.

The threshold. Luke goes home to find his aunt and uncle killed, and leaves the planet. Neo swallows the red pill and wakes up in the real world. There is a before and an after, and there is no going back. In life it is the day you sign, quit, move, book the flight, or show up to the first session.

What every spiritual tradition says about this act is that the journey starts with leaving something behind. The point was never geography. You cannot become someone new while you are still standing where the old one lives.

Act two: the cave.

Tests, allies and enemies. The new world has new rules, and you learn them by failing. Neo loses his first fight and falls off his first jump. Luke finds Han Solo and Leia. You find out who shows up for you, and who does not.

The approach to the inmost cave. Every story has a place the hero has been avoiding. For Luke it is the Death Star itself. In your life it is the conversation, the number, the diagnosis, the habit, the fear you have organized your whole week around not looking at. One of the people closest to Campbell wrote down his version of it: "The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for."

The ordeal. The lowest point. Luke nearly drowns in a garbage crusher and then watches Obi-Wan cut down. Neo is shot by an agent and dies. Then he gets up.

This is the heart of the whole pattern. In the great traditions, the ordeal is a death and a rebirth. Jesus dies on the cross and rises on the third day. In our own lives, the death is not literal. It is the old version of you that does not survive. The mystics called that stretch the dark night of the soul, and it was not a warning. It was a stage.

The science behind it is older than the movies. In 1909 a French anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep, studied the ceremonies cultures use to mark the big changes in a life: a boy becoming a man, a person being baptized, a thirteen year old at a bar mitzvah, a pilgrim leaving home for the Hajj and coming back changed. He found the same three steps everywhere. You are taken out, you are held in between, and you come back as someone new. Baptism acts it out in a few seconds: you go under the water as one person and come up as another. The in between is the hard part. You are no longer who you were and not yet who you will be. That is why change feels like chaos in the middle. It is supposed to.

The reward. The hero comes out holding something. Luke escapes with the princess and the stolen plans. In life it is usually quieter than that. A skill. A clear head. A number that finally moved. Knowing what you actually want.

The alchemists' version.

The alchemists had their own map of this, and they called it the Great Work. It was the process that was supposed to turn an ordinary metal into gold, and they described it in colors, because the colors were what they could see changing in the flask.

Black came first. You burn or rot the material down until it turns dark and loses its old form. Then white. You wash what is left until it is clean. Then yellow, the first sign of light, like dawn. Then red, the finished stone, the thing they were after the whole time. Their motto for it was two Latin words, solve et coagula: dissolve, then put back together.

Now read that again as a person instead of a metal. Something breaks you down. You clear out what does not belong. Something starts to make sense. You come out whole. That is act two, written by people in a lab.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, saw exactly that. In 1944 he published a book called Psychology and Alchemy, arguing that the alchemists were describing their own inner change without knowing it, and projecting it onto what was in the flask. Much of the book was built on the dreams of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who won the Nobel Prize the next year.

They went looking for gold and found something worth more, which is the whole story of Experiment 003, It Was Never the Gold. Raw material, plus the right knowledge, plus the right tools, plus real experimentation, becomes something far more valuable than what you started with. That's the whole idea, and it's the hero's journey again in different clothes.

Act three: coming home.

The road back. Nobody talks about this part, and it is where most people lose what they found. The retreat ends and Monday comes. The diet works for twelve weeks and then there is a wedding. You come back from the trip that changed you and the office has not changed at all. Campbell warned about exactly this: "The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world." In The Lord of the Rings, once the ring is destroyed, Frodo goes home to the Shire, his quiet village, and finds he no longer fits there.

The resurrection. One last test, back in the ordinary world, to prove the change was real. Luke switches off his targeting computer and trusts what Obi-Wan taught him. Neo stands up, looks at the bullets flying at him, and stops them. In life it is the first time the old situation comes back and you do not react the old way.

The return with the elixir. The hero brings something back for other people. This step is what separates a hero from a tourist.

Plato said the same thing about 2,400 years ago. In his story of the cave, prisoners are chained facing a wall and think the shadows on it are the whole world. One is freed, climbs out, and sees the sun. Plato's point is what comes next. He has to go back down and tell the others, even though they will not believe him. If you keep what you found to yourself, the journey is not finished.

And there is Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who crosses a whole magic country looking for a way home and is told at the end that she had the power to go back all along. In the original book, the good witch tells her she could have gone home the very first day. The Scarecrow answers that then he would never have gotten his brains. The treasure is usually where you started. The journey is what lets you see it.

Why it works on your brain.

Start with what drives the search in the first place. The restlessness at the call is chemistry. Novelty lights up the brain's dopamine system, which drives seeking, not pleasure, as most of us were told. There is an Experiment coming on that.

Everyone tells you how important it is to find meaning in your life. In 2023 a team of psychologists found a way to measure one route to it, and published it in one of the most demanding journals in their field with a title that says it all: Seeing Your Life Story as a Hero's Journey Increases Meaning in Life. They boiled the journey down to seven parts that fit an ordinary life: you are the main character, something shifted, you had a goal, people helped, it was hard, you changed, and you leave something behind.

People whose life stories had more of those parts reported more meaning, more satisfaction and less depression. When the researchers asked people to rewrite their own story through the seven parts, meaning went up, and people got better at seeing their problems as challenges instead of dead ends. The two parts that mattered most were the hard part and the change. And a 2026 study found that simply giving an important life experience an ending that says who it made you raised people's self esteem the same day.

Stories are unusually good at holding attention and memory. When someone tells a good story, the listener's brain activity starts to follow the speaker's, and the closer it follows, the better the listener understands. In a classic memory experiment from 1969, people who linked a list of words into a story remembered six to seven times more of them.

The hard part is not a flaw in the story. It is the story. A study that followed more than two thousand Americans for several years found that people who had faced some adversity had better mental health than people who had faced none at all. In the right dose, the hard part builds you.

Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, the company he started. He founded NeXT, built a small graphics studio into Pixar, and came back to Apple twelve years later to save it. He later called getting fired the best thing that could have happened to him. Jobs put it best in a speech at Stanford in 2005: you can't connect the dots looking forward, only looking back.

In The Alchemist there is an Arabic word for it: maktub, it is written. I have always said that everything happens for a reason. You rarely see the reason while you are in it. You see it when you look back.

The story that sells.

People have gathered around stories for as long as there have been people, and marketing knows it. A researcher at Johns Hopkins studied 108 Super Bowl ads over two years and found that the ones built as a full story, with a setup, a turn and a payoff, were rated higher than the rest, whether or not they had humor, sex or animals in them.

The hero's journey is the most famous story shape of all, and the industry turned it into a manual. In the middle of the 1980s Christopher Vogler, a story consultant at Disney, wrote a seven page memo summarizing Campbell. It spread through Hollywood, and studios have outlined films with it ever since.

In 2017 Donald Miller wrote a book called Building a StoryBrand and flipped the roles for business. The customer is the hero. The brand is the wise guide, the Obi-Wan, who hands them a plan and a push. I studied StoryBrand closely and applied it in my own businesses. Even AI has learned it. I came across a prompt that writes any brand's story in seven labeled steps, from Call to Adventure to New Normal.

So next time an ad makes you feel like the hero, check who is playing the guide, and what they want you to buy. And use it the other way too. If you pitch, lead or sell, stop being the hero of your own pitch. Make the other person the hero and be the guide.

Where are you on the map.

Take ten minutes and answer three questions.

Which act are you in? Hearing a call you keep refusing is act one. Being in the middle of something hard with no clear end is act two. Trying to hold on to a change back in normal life is act three. Most people are in more than one at once, in different parts of their life.

What is your cave? The one thing you keep avoiding. You do not have to fix it today. Naming it is the approach.

What is your elixir? If you have come through something, who else needs what you learned?

Then write the seven parts of your life as it is right now: the main character, what shifted, the goal, who is helping, what is hard, how you are changing, and what you want to leave behind. Then join them into one short story. The researchers found it works best when you do both.

The treasure was at home.

In The Alchemist, a shepherd boy named Santiago dreams of treasure at the pyramids. He sells his sheep and crosses to Africa. He is robbed of everything he has the day he lands, works a year for a crystal merchant to earn it back, crosses the desert, falls in love at an oasis, meets the alchemist who teaches him to listen to his heart, and is beaten by thieves at the pyramids, where he learns the treasure is buried back where he first had the dream.

Paulo Coelho did not invent that ending. One Thousand and One Nights tells it centuries earlier. A man in Baghdad loses his fortune and dreams that a new one is waiting for him in Cairo. He travels there, gets caught up in a robbery, and is beaten and thrown in jail. The chief of police laughs at him for trusting a dream, and says he once dreamed of treasure buried under a fountain in a house in Baghdad, and never went. The man recognizes the house. It is his own. He goes home and digs it up. Rumi told the same story in the thirteenth century, in his long poem, the Masnavi, and his point is the whole point: the treasure was buried under his own house the whole time, and he had lived poor on top of it.

And then there is The Little Prince. I have my father's copy, in English. It is a 1962 edition, and he got it in 1963, long before I was born.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a French pilot, wrote it in exile in New York in 1942. He dedicated it to his best friend, who was back in France, hungry and cold under the occupation. In the dedication itself he apologizes to the children for giving their book to a grown up, and then corrects it: to his friend, when he was a little boy. That is the whole book in one line. Just over a year after it came out, Saint-Exupéry flew out on a mission and never came back.

The book is a hero's journey too. A little prince lives alone on a tiny planet with a single rose. She is vain and demanding, and he does not understand her, so he leaves her behind on his planet. He visits six small planets, each with one grown up living alone on it: a king who needs someone to obey him, a vain man who only wants to be admired, a drunk who drinks to forget his shame, a businessman counting stars to own them, a lamplighter following orders that make no sense, and a geographer who has never left his desk. Each one is stuck in his own small loop, and none of them remembers why.

The geographer sends him to Earth. There he finds a garden of five thousand roses and is crushed, because he thought his was the only one in the universe. Then he meets a fox, who asks the prince to tame him. The fox explains what that means: spending time together, a little more each day, until you matter to each other. When they part, the fox tells him his secret: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." His rose is not ordinary. She is his, because of the time he gave her. So he goes home to her.

I have been giving this book to friends when they have a baby for over twenty years, and I always tell them the same thing: this is for you to read first. Then hand it to the kid when they grow.

One has seen.

René Daumal was a French poet writing a novel about climbing a mountain when he died of tuberculosis in 1944. The book stops in the middle of a sentence, just as the climbers reach the foot of the mountain. He never wrote the climb. But in a short essay printed with it, he left this:

"One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up."

You have already left home more times than you can count. Every time, the treasure was waiting where you started. You just had to leave to see it.

Experiment 007 is complete. You just read it.

Georges

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The cup in your hand.

Your morning coffee was fermented. Not the drink. The bean, long before it got anywhere near you.

A coffee bean is a seed inside a small red fruit. To get the seed out, the sticky fruit has to come off, and the way that happens is that yeasts and bacteria eat it away. The beans dry in the sun, sometimes for weeks, and then they are roasted, and the roast kills every living thing that did the work.

So the cup in your hand is fermented, and nothing in it is alive. Both things are true at once, and that is the whole idea of this piece. Fermented and alive are two different claims. By the end you will know which jars in your kitchen are alive, which ones never were, and why that only matters some of the time.

Before the fridge.

Fermenting is letting microbes eat your food a little before you do. Bacteria or yeasts eat the sugars in a vegetable, a milk or a fruit, and they leave behind acid, or alcohol, or gas. In a jar of vegetables the acid is the point, because most of the microbes that spoil food and make you sick cannot live in acid. Salt decides who wins: at about two percent, the acid makers thrive and the ones that would spoil it cannot. Salt, water, time. That is the whole method.

They trusted their gut for nine thousand years before anyone knew what was in it. The oldest chemically confirmed ferment is a drink from Jiahu in China, about that old. The oldest evidence of cheese is seven thousand year old pottery sieves from Poland, made by people who could not digest milk, and the oldest cheese anyone has read DNA from was buried with mummies in western China thirty six hundred years ago and turned out to be kefir. Nobody did any of it for their health. They did it so food would last through a winter.

My father grew up in a village in Lebanon, and in the village he made his own olives. Olives need a much saltier brine than vegetables do, and he never measured it. The trick was an egg. You drop one in. When the egg floats, there is enough salt. He is an agricultural engineer, so he knew the chemistry underneath it. He used the egg anyway, because it had worked for everyone before him.

The pickled turnips he made at home, and he still makes them. Water, salt, and a piece of bread dropped into the jar. Turnips ferment perfectly well without the bread. What the bread does is feed them. The bacteria were already on the turnip, and bread is starch and sugar. He was not adding bacteria. He was growing a bigger crop of them. And when a jar was finished he would make us drink the brine, by then water full of the bacteria he had spent weeks growing. He was making medicine, and nobody in the house ever called it that.

Somewhere between my grandparents and my parents the fridge arrived, and nobody needed a jar of anything to get through a winter. Which raises the obvious question. If fermenting was invented to preserve food without cold, why does a live jar have to live in the fridge now?

It does not. A jar that was made properly, and has gone sour with everything sitting under the brine, is alive and keeps for months on a counter. The acid protects it, not the cold. What the cold changes is speed. Refrigeration is a pause button. Left warm, the jar keeps working. It slowly gets more sour and the vegetables go softer, until the sugars run out and it settles. Cold slows that almost to a stop, so it holds the sourness and the crunch you liked. A cold cellar did the same job. The fridge replaced the cellar. It never replaced the jar. My father's turnips were alive the whole time they sat in that pantry.

A shop is a different matter, and the reason is processing, not biology. A jar built to sit warm on a supermarket shelf has almost always been heated until nothing inside survives. Live ferments get sold cold. A jar at a farmers market from the person who made it can be perfectly alive.

Somewhere in that same century the industry kept the pickle and cooked the life out of it. Canning heats a jar to kill everything inside. Fermenting grows something inside on purpose. Two opposite operations, one word on the label.

It brings live bacteria.

Fermented food does four jobs for you. It brings live bacteria. It takes apart what you could not digest. It builds things the raw food never had. And some of what you eat is not fermented at all until it reaches your gut. Only the first needs anything to be alive, and it is the only one anyone advertises.

Some fermented food still has the bacteria in it, alive, when you eat it. That is all live means: the same organisms that made the acid are still there, still working. It is also the job with the clearest result in people. In the Stanford trial I wrote about in Experiment 005, Trust Your Gut, six servings a day of live fermented food widened the gut community and lowered inflammation in seventeen weeks.

So the question is how you tell, holding a jar in a shop. Four checks.

The ingredients. A live jar says salt. A dead one says vinegar. They look identical. In a salt pickle, bacteria made the acid over weeks and they are still in there. In a vinegar pickle, the acid was poured in from a bottle. That does not make it worse food: it is still a vegetable, still fiber, and it often tastes better than the ferment. It simply has nothing alive in it and never did. It is the first thing I check, and I have said it to my friends enough times that they can recite it back to me. Rule number one: salt, not vinegar.

Where it is sitting. A warm shelf in a supermarket almost certainly means it was heated. The brine. Cloudy is a good sign, because the cloud is them. The words. Raw, unpasteurized and naturally fermented mean something. Pickled on its own tells you nothing.

Olives are worth stopping on. Real black olives exist: an olive left on the tree ripens from green to purple to black, and a Kalamata is picked that way. The sliced black olives on a takeaway pizza are not those. They are green olives soaked in a strong alkaline solution and blown with air until they turn black, with an iron salt to hold the color, then canned and heated. They were never fermented. Those black olives are a lie. Olives from the refrigerated olive bar, in their own brine, are the real thing.

Vegetables you can do at home, and the method is one method. Chop or shred, weigh, and add two percent of that weight in salt, which is twenty grams for a kilo. Cover with water at the same strength. Cabbage needs no water: squeeze it with your hands until it makes its own brine, and that is sauerkraut, the easiest thing here to make and the one that has been on my list too long. Pack it in a jar and push everything under the liquid, because what stays wet stays safe. Lid loose, since the bacteria make gas and it needs somewhere to go. Cloudy is right. Sour smelling is right. Taste it after a week, and when it is as sour as you want, move it to the fridge, which holds it there. Leave it out instead and it will not go bad, it will just keep going. Carrots, green beans, cauliflower, turnip, beets and cucumber all work exactly this way.

Vinegar is the bottle people get most wrong. Every vinegar is fermented twice: yeast turns the sugar in apples or grapes or grain into alcohol, then a second set of bacteria turn the alcohol into acid. That is all vinegar is, a fermentation one step past wine. A bottle that says raw and unfiltered may carry a cloudy layer called the mother, and the mother is those bacteria, alive, bound into a layer they made themselves. Nobody has published a study comparing a raw vinegar against a filtered one in people, so the mother is still an open question. The acid is measured well: a spoonful before a meal blunts the rise in blood sugar afterward, across a lot of trials. It is one of the three things that actually work on a glucose spike, with eating your vegetables before your starch and walking after you eat, and that gets its own Experiment. This is the one exception to rule number one: a vinegar you bought as vinegar can be alive, and a vinegar pickle never is. I take apple cider vinegar first thing every morning in my glass of water, and before meals when I can. I do not need a laboratory to tell me that a living thing in the bottle is doing something.

It takes apart what you could not.

The second job is the oldest one, and nobody puts it on a label. The bacteria do part of your digestion before you eat. For this job it makes no difference whether anything is still alive in the jar. The work is already done.

Milk is the plainest example. Most adults in the world cannot fully digest lactose, the sugar in milk, and fermenting solves it. The bacteria in yogurt and kefir eat the lactose, and in an aged cheese almost none is left. In a small trial of people who cannot handle lactose, kefir roughly halved the gas compared with milk.

In the dairy aisle it is simple. Yogurt is milk fermented by two bacteria. Greek yogurt is the same thing with more of the liquid strained off, so more protein and less lactose per spoon, and nothing more magic than that. Kefir is milk fermented by dozens of bacteria and yeasts together, which is why it is thinner, fizzier, and carries far more kinds of both. All three are alive unless they were treated after culturing to kill the cultures, and in the United States a yogurt that was has to print does not contain live and active cultures on the front. That is the sentence to look for.

Then cheese, where Europe and North America went opposite ways. Here, raw milk is a risk to be managed: in the United States and in Canada a raw milk cheese has to be aged sixty days before it can be sold, and Quebec is the only exception. In Europe the great names are not merely allowed to be raw, they are required to be: Parmigiano Reggiano, Comté and Roquefort, among others. It is written into their own rules. That is why I buy European cheese whenever I have the choice, and I eat cheese every day.

Bread is the one people feel in their body. I do not really eat bread. Not because I am gluten intolerant, but because of how bloated it makes me feel afterward. Croissant is my weakness, and everyone who knows me knows it. And I feel nothing at all from a baguette in Paris or a plate of pasta in Italy. I have been saying that for years, and almost every time, the person I say it to nods and tells me the same thing happens to them.

The explanation people reach for is glyphosate, the weedkiller sprayed on wheat shortly before harvest to dry the crop. Europe does not allow that spray. North America does. The argument against it goes well past bread and well past the gut, and it gets its own piece.

The better answer is time.

All bread is fermented. Yeast eats the sugars in the flour and blows the gas that raises the loaf, and the oven kills every yeast and bacterium in it, so no bread is alive. What separates one loaf from another is how long the living part ran first. A sourdough starter is flour and water left out until wild yeasts and bacteria move in, and a real loaf gives that starter anywhere from several hours to a full day. The word sourdough comes from what those hours do: the bacteria make acid, and the acid is the sour you taste. In the same hours they also eat a family of carbohydrates in wheat called fructans, which is exactly what a lot of people's guts struggle with. In a blinded trial of fifty nine people who believed they were sensitive to gluten, it was the fructans, not the gluten, that produced the symptoms.

Industrial bread buys the volume without the time. In 1961 a British process invented at Chorleywood, in England, replaced the long fermentation with three minutes of violent mixing, roughly double the yeast, and a fast oxidant. The mixing does mechanically what the hours used to do. Flour to a sliced loaf in three and a half hours instead of a day.

You get the gas. Far more of the fructans are still in there. And here the word sourdough has no legal meaning, so a loaf can carry the name, and the flavor, and be made in an afternoon. The word describes the marketing. The time describes the food. Note that sourdough is not gluten free and is not safe for celiac disease.

Which brings us back to olives, the purest example of this job there is. A raw olive off the tree is inedible, and the bitterness is a compound called oleuropein. Over several months in salt brine the bacteria take it apart, and one of the things they build out of it is a polyphenol called hydroxytyrosol. The bitterness leaves, and a polyphenol takes its place. Everyone around the Mediterranean has been eating a fermented superfood their whole life and calling it a snack.

People there still mostly cure olives the slow way: salt water, several months, nothing else, which is how my father learned it. Industry does not have months, so the commercial route strips the bitterness in hours with the same kind of alkaline bath as the pizza olives, then ferments them briefly in brine. Spain built an industry on that, and it is most of what fills supermarket jars. In one comparison the slow way kept about five times more of the good compounds. The cheapest and fastest route skips the bacteria completely. You pour vinegar over them, and nothing in that jar was ever alive.

It makes what was never there.

The bacteria do not only take things apart. They build things the raw food never had.

The clearest is a taste. You know sweet, salty, sour and bitter. There is a fifth, and most people have been eating it their whole lives without a word for it. It is called umami. It is what Parmesan and soy sauce have in common: savory, the one that makes you want the next bite. In 1908 a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda extracted the compound responsible from a seaweed broth, named the taste, and patented a way to make it. And then he sold it. A businessman named Saburosuke Suzuki took a share of the patent, and the product they launched the next year is the reason MSG exists. The man who named the fifth taste is the man who put it in a packet.

What he had isolated was glutamate, an amino acid, one of the building blocks every protein is made of. Locked inside a protein it has no taste. Set free, it is the savory itself. Some foods carry it free already, which is part of why a ripe tomato, a mushroom or a piece of seaweed tastes the way it does. Fermenting is how you make far more of it: as a cheese ages or a paste ferments, the bacteria and their enzymes cut the proteins apart and free glutamate builds up. That is why aged cheese, soy sauce, miso and anchovy all taste like relatives. MSG is that same molecule made on purpose, sugar fermented by a bacterium in a tank and dried. The glutamate in the packet is the glutamate in the cheese. Umami is getting its own Lab Note.

The same work builds texture. The white rind on a brie cheese is a mold, growing, and it is the reason the inside goes soft and creamy instead of staying firm. The blue veins in a Roquefort are another mold, spread through the curd on purpose. The holes in a Swiss Emmental are bubbles of gas, blown by a bacterium that eats the acid other bacteria made, and that same bacterium makes the nutty taste. Nobody drills the holes. They are exhaust.

Some of it was never for you.

The last job is the one nobody thinks of as fermenting at all, because the food is not fermented when you buy it. It gets fermented inside you.

That is what fiber is, as I explained in Experiment 005, Trust Your Gut: the part of a plant you cannot digest, so your bacteria get it instead. Mushrooms are their own case, because a mushroom is not a plant and its fiber is not plant fiber. It is beta glucan and chitin, and your bacteria work on it in their own way. Mushrooms do a great deal more than this, and they have a Lab Note coming.

Then the polyphenols. Polyphenols are compounds plants make to defend themselves, and they are what give coffee, cocoa, olives, olive oil and pomegranate their bitterness and their color. You absorb very little of them as they are. Your gut bacteria break them into smaller compounds you can absorb, and that is what people mean when they call these foods good for the gut. It is the one health claim Europe allows on olive oil: that olive oil polyphenols protect blood lipids from oxidative stress, on about twenty grams of oil a day.

Pomegranate molasses is permanently in my kitchen. It is pomegranate juice boiled down to a syrup, so nothing in it is alive, but the polyphenols survive the boiling. Your bacteria turn those into urolithin A, the compound behind most of the recent longevity headlines. Whether you make much of it depends on the bacteria you carry.

My pomegranate molasses comes from the garden of our village house in Lebanon. There are eighteen trees there, and a man named George picks them and presses the molasses. The deal is that he takes half and I keep half, and I buy his half from him as well. Whoever I know is coming back from Lebanon brings me a couple of liters. You can buy it in most Middle Eastern shops: the label should say pomegranate juice and nothing else. The fruit is a superfood in its own right and everybody should eat more of it, but it is seasonal and nobody enjoys the pitting. The molasses sits in the cupboard all year.

Olive oil is where I get most of those polyphenols, and it is one of my most used pantry items. I go through at least a liter a week, and I rarely buy it in a grocery store. I import it privately from people I know, sometimes Greece, sometimes Italy, mostly Lebanon, and this season for the first time I have arranged for someone at home to press mine from our own trees and ship it to me.

And this is where the coffee comes back. In a study of nearly twenty three thousand people, coffee drinkers carried several times more of one particular gut bacterium than people who never drink it. Nobody knows yet what it does. Your coffee is fermented twice. Once in a pile of fruit before you ever saw it, and once inside you.

The word on the can.

Four jobs, and only the first one needs anything to be alive. Once you start reading labels, the pattern is hard to unsee. The things that are genuinely fermented mostly do not need to tell you they are. The health claims come from the ones that barely are.

Kombucha earned its place. Plenty of cultures have a fermented drink, and kombucha is the one that got popular here: sweet tea fermented by a community of bacteria and yeast, and genuinely alive when it is raw. Some commercial kombucha is pasteurized so it can sit on a warm shelf, which kills the one thing people buy it for. It opened the shelf, and every brand that followed wanted the same halo.

Poppi is what came next. It started in 2018 as an apple cider vinegar drink called Mother Beverage, named after the living mother in raw vinegar. Then it became a soda. There is still a little vinegar in the can, but what the can sold was gut health, on about two grams of fiber, which is little enough that you would need more than four cans a day for it to mean anything. Poppi paid 8.9 million dollars in 2025 to settle a class action over those claims. PepsiCo bought the company the same year.

In Europe the word probiotic on a package counts as a health claim, and no such claim has ever been approved.

The list.

I promised you a longer list last week. Here it is.

Alive, if you buy them right. In a shop nearly all of them are in the cold, and the exception is a jar bought straight from whoever made it. Sauerkraut and kimchi, salt on the label and no vinegar. Pickled cucumbers, carrots, beets and green beans, same rule. Olives from the refrigerated olive bar, not a can. Preserved lemons, which are lemons, salt and time. Yogurt, Greek yogurt and kefir, unless the package says it does not contain live and active cultures. Raw milk cheese. Raw kombucha. Miso, if it says unpasteurized, stirred in at the end because boiling kills it. Raw unfiltered vinegar, the kind with the mother.

Fermented, nothing alive left, and still worth eating. Sourdough, given real hours. Coffee, organic if you can, because what you drink is a concentrate of whatever was on the crop. Chocolate. Soy sauce. Tempeh. Cultured butter, churned from cream soured with bacteria first, which is most European butter and very little North American. Every other vinegar.

The first list is job one. The second is jobs two and three, both of them finished before you bought the thing. And the fourth job needs no list at all: fiber, mushrooms and polyphenols get fermented by your own bacteria, after you eat them.

The alchemists had it.

I said in Experiment 003, It Was Never the Gold, that fermentation sits on the same list of operations as distillation. Its neighbor on that list was putrefaction, which is rot. Fermentation was the rot you steered, and they understood the difference three hundred years before anyone knew there were microbes to steer.

Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and alchemist of the early 1500s, taught that an inner alchemist lived in the stomach, sorting nourishment from poison. He got the mechanism wrong and the address exactly right. A century later a Flemish physician, Jan Baptist van Helmont, said digestion is a fermentation, and invented the word gas for what came off a fermenting barrel. Louis Pasteur proved that fermentation is the work of living organisms, and gave his name to the process we use to kill them. And in 1897 a German chemist named Eduard Buchner pressed a juice out of yeast with no living cell left in it, and the juice fermented sugar anyway. He won a Nobel Prize for it. He had shown that the tools the cell built keep working after the cell is gone, which is this entire piece, settled in a laboratory a hundred and thirty years ago.

Fermenting is not only a kitchen trade. Only microbes can make vitamin B12, so the B12 in a steak got there from bacteria inside the animal, and the B12 in your supplement was grown in a tank. Almost all of the world's citric acid is made by a mold fed sugar in a tank, not squeezed from lemons. Insulin came out of pig pancreas until 1982, when bacteria started making it instead. And leather is softened with microbial enzymes, in a step that used to be done with animal manure.

Fermentation is almost literally alchemy. You take something ordinary that will not last, you add time and a little knowledge, and you get something that lasts, and often tastes better than what you started with. That is the transformation the alchemists were looking for, and it was sitting in the kitchen the entire time.

What to do with any of this.

Next time you have a jar of pickles in your hand, read it. Ingredients: salt, not vinegar. Brine: cloudy, not clear. Notice where it was sitting. Three seconds, and you know.

When you finish the jar, do not pour the brine away. It is the same live bacteria you paid for, and it makes a better base for a dressing than anything you would buy.

My father knew to drink the brine long before anyone could have explained why, and he did it because he could feel it worked. I think I inherited that from him. If a thing makes sense and it works, I will run it in my own life while the papers catch up. They usually do.

Experiment 006 is complete. You just read it.

Georges

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

If you enjoyed it, leave me a like or a comment.

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Reading time: 16 minutes

You have said it to someone. Maybe you have said it to yourself. Somebody laid out a perfectly reasonable case, and something in your middle disagreed before you had a single reason to give them. Trust your gut.

The phrase is older than the microscope. It is older than germ theory, older than anyone knowing that there was anything alive down there at all. And for most of the time people have been saying it, they did not mean it as a figure of speech.

It turns out to be two different claims wearing one coat, and almost nobody separates them.

There really is a sense behind it.

It has a name. Interoception. Your body reports its own condition upward, constantly, and your brain reads the report: heart rate, breathing, temperature, pressure, the tightness or the ease in your middle. Almost none of it reaches your attention. Some of it arrives as a feeling with no argument attached, which is a big part of what a gut feeling actually is.

So the feeling is real and it is worth listening to. Here is where the modern version quietly cheats.

That feeling is not your bacteria talking.

The connection people mean is the gut-brain axis. The two ends are wired together by the vagus nerve, which runs from your brainstem down into your gut, and I spent a whole section on it in Experiment 002, Take a Breath. Ninety percent of your serotonin is made down there, and it is not for your brain. It makes the wall of your gut contract, which is what moves food through you. The connection is real and it is starting to be measured, and more researchers find more of it every year, even though nobody has shown yet that the bacteria in your colon are producing your hunches.

One meaning of the phrase is about a sense. The other is about an organ.

One thing before we start.

This started as one piece. Then it got long, and the section on fermented food became an Experiment of its own. So I split it. This one is the organ: what it does, what wrecks it, what rebuilds it, and where yours came from. Next week is about fermentation and fermented food.

And one thing worth setting straight, because almost nobody does.

The word gut gets used for four different things: the tube food travels through, the wall that lines it, the nervous system that runs it, and the bacteria living inside. They affect each other constantly, which is why they get blurred together. But a finding about the bacteria is not a finding about the wall, and something that changes the wall has not been shown to change how you feel. Keep those four apart and most of what you read about gut health sorts itself out.

Here is the organ, plainly.

It breaks food into pieces small enough to enter you, and it absorbs them. That is the job everything else exists to serve. It carries the largest immune surface in your body, which is not a slogan, it is architecture: the inside of your gut is the biggest border you have with the outside world. It runs its own nervous system, a few hundred million neurons, which is why people call it your second brain. It keeps running while you sleep. It argues with your brain while you are awake.

And it decides. Every hour of every day, something in your intestine is deciding what gets into your blood and what goes straight through you and out. That single wall is the whole difference between food and poison.

Here is something you may not have known, and it changed how I think about all of this: the lining you have right now is not the one you had last week.

The cells lining your gut replace themselves every four to five days. Whatever you are worried you did to it, it is already rebuilding while you read this. Not everything can be undone. But the thing is not a museum piece. It is under construction, permanently, and what it is built out of is what you eat.

While we are here, two things you have probably been told about it are wrong. The gut lining is not the size of a tennis court. It is closer to a studio apartment, which is impressive enough without the exaggeration. And all the bacteria you are carrying weigh about as much as a large orange, not the two kilos people repeat.

Who else lives there.

Very little thrives in your stomach. It runs at about the acidity of battery acid, and that is deliberate: it is a gate. Past it, the further down you go the more crowded it gets, until you reach the colon, which is where essentially all of your bacteria live.

There are trillions of them and they are yours. Not a passing population like the bacteria on a door handle, but a community you have been carrying for decades, most of it assembled before you were three years old. It shifts with what you eat and it takes hits from things we will get to, but the core of it is as much yours as your fingerprints.

They are not there as tenants. They are working.

What fiber actually is, because nobody explains it.

Fiber is the part of a plant you cannot digest. That is the whole definition. Your own enzymes cannot break it down, so it arrives in your colon intact, which is where they live.

That is exactly the point. Fiber is not food for you. It is food for them.

Your bacteria ferment it, and one of the things they make out of it is a short chain fatty acid called butyrate, and butyrate is the main fuel the cells of your colon run on.

Read that again, because everything else in this piece depends on it. The wall that decides what enters your bloodstream is largely powered by bacteria eating your vegetables. You do not feed that wall directly. You feed them, and they feed it.

The part everybody wants to be true.

Something real is being found here. Nobody has agreed on how to measure it yet. So I am going to go in the order the evidence goes, strongest first.

Depression is the furthest along. In over a thousand people, two specific bacteria were consistently lower in the depressed group, and it held up in a second thousand.

And one of the best known trials in the whole field is not about bacteria at all. Sixty seven people with depression, split at random between dietary coaching and social support, and the diet group improved substantially on a proper clinical scale. The intervention was a Mediterranean diet. Not a strain, not a supplement. Dinner.

I have a saying I bring out at the table, that if people ate the way we eat there would be a lot more happy people in the world. That trial is the closest thing to evidence I have found for it.

Then there is ADHD, and I have a stake in this one, so I am going to be careful with it. This is where the feed lives and this is where the money is. Study after study finds differences in the guts of people who have it, but the specific findings rarely line up, and there is still no agreed signature, which is what research this early looks like before somebody works out what to measure. The most striking result in the whole area came out of a trial that was originally about allergies. Thirteen years later, six of the thirty five children in the placebo group had been diagnosed with ADHD or Asperger’s. None of the children who had been given a probiotic had. It was a small trial and that was not the question it was built to answer. It is still very hard to look away from.

And autism is the one place somebody went looking for the direction, and it ran the opposite way to how it gets sold. Autistic children in the study ate a narrower range of foods, often far narrower, because many autistic people are sensitive to texture and taste and end up eating the same few safe things. A narrower diet feeds a narrower set of bacteria. The difference in their gut was mostly explained by the food, not by the autism.

Where else it keeps turning up.

A lot of what we still cannot cure keeps leading back to this organ. Parkinson’s, where a leading theory has the damage starting in the gut and traveling up the vagus nerve years before the first tremor. Alzheimer’s, where the links are real but much earlier. IBS and celiac do not just connect to the gut, they live in it. There is not enough room in this one to go into them properly. What matters is that the link keeps turning out to be real.

Which brings up leaky gut, the phrase everybody has heard. The wall is real and it does become more permeable, and that part is not in question. What no gastroenterology body recognizes is leaky gut as a disease of its own. And two separate labs checked the blood test being sold to diagnose it, and neither found it measuring what the label says.

Now the part that wrecks it.

When I had the nightclubs, I had a system. After a heavy night of drinking, if I remembered to take an Advil before bed, there was no headache in the morning. If I forgot, the day was ruined.

The problem is that remembering is not a skill you have at four in the morning after a night out. I forgot a bunch of times. And when I did remember, halfway through the night, I have woken up girlfriends to hand them one and told them they would thank me in the morning. They always did.

I do not do that any more. I almost never drink now, so the morning after mostly does not happen. Which is its own small mercy, because alcohol damages the gut lining directly, and it does it from one heavy night rather than from years of them. The full cost of alcohol comes up in a future experiment.

I used to take Naproxen sometimes too, an anti inflammatory, after a strain or a gym injury. Two or three days of it, enough to take the swelling down so the thing could heal. And it worked. That is what makes this a real decision and not an easy one.

What an anti inflammatory actually does.

When something in you is damaged, your body makes prostaglandins, the chemicals that produce the swelling, the heat and the pain. That is inflammation, and it is your body calling for repairs. Ibuprofen and naproxen, which is Advil and Aleve, work by stopping your body making it, which is why the swelling goes down and the pain goes with it.

The catch is that the same chemical has a second job. It is also what keeps the lining of your stomach and intestine maintained. Block it for the pain and you block it there too, which switches off the maintenance on the wall that keeps your gut contents out of your blood.

Forty healthy volunteers took a prescription strength anti inflammatory for two weeks. Twenty seven of them came out with new damage in the small intestine, visible on a camera. Two weeks, in people with no gut problems at all.

That tells me nothing about what an occasional tablet does. It tells me enough to take the headache instead, and to tough out the strain. That is my call, not advice about your back pain.

Antibiotics, which I have never had to take.

Not as an adult, and not as a kid that I can remember. I have been lucky. I have never been in a position where I had no choice. There is a cost to a course of antibiotics, and nobody mentions it when they hand it to you.

A study published this year followed nearly fifteen thousand people and found differences linked to antibiotic use still showing up four to eight years afterward. And a smaller one shows you what that looks like up close. Twelve healthy men took four days of three antibiotics at once, the kind you get in a hospital. Six weeks later the overall count looked normal again, which is where most studies stop. But several species that every one of them had carried beforehand were still missing six months later. The population came back. The residents did not.

I am not telling you not to take them. Sometimes they are the only answer, and people used to die of things we now clear up in a week. But think about it the way an athlete thinks about an injury. You do not stop when the injury is fixed. You rebuild the muscle. It is the same after antibiotics. The prescription tells you how to kill the infection. Nobody tells you how to build it back.

Three words that get sold as one thing.

A probiotic is live bacteria. A prebiotic is the food they eat, which is mostly fiber. A postbiotic is a preparation of bacteria that have been killed, or the compounds they made while alive, sold on the idea that you get the effect without needing anything to move in. Three different things, and the words get used as if they were one. The postbiotic idea is the newest and the least settled, and the one name worth watching is Akkermansia.

Now the study that changed my mind about the first one. Twenty one volunteers took a week of antibiotics. Some of them had their own gut bacteria collected and frozen beforehand. Afterward they were split three ways: do nothing, take a standard probiotic, or have their own frozen bacteria put back.

The group who did nothing recovered slowly. The group who got their own bacteria back recovered in days. And the group who took the probiotic did worst of all, their own native bacteria taking months longer to come back than in the group who did nothing. The probiotic did not speed their own bacteria back. It delayed them.

And yet a probiotic taken during antibiotics does cut the odds of diarrhea, and that part is solid across a lot of trials. So there is a protocol here and it is not the one on the label. During the course, it helps with the symptom. Afterward, there is little evidence that anything off a shelf puts your own community back, and the study that looked found the opposite. Same bottle, and the label only tells you about the good half.

And then there is what you eat.

Medicines are not the only thing on the list. Ultra processed food does it, and the clearest evidence is about emulsifiers, the ingredients that keep things smooth and stop them separating. Healthy people were fed two identical diets, one with a common emulsifier added and one without. The emulsifier group came out with less bacterial variety, and the compounds their bacteria were making changed with it.

Then there are the artificial sweeteners. A hundred and twenty people were given one of four of them for two weeks. Aspartame, saccharin, stevia, sucralose. All four changed their gut bacteria, and saccharin and sucralose also changed how those people handled sugar in their blood. Those are the things sitting in diet drinks, sweetener sachets and chewing gum, and plenty of people have them every day.

And stress, which runs the same wiring in reverse.

The gut-brain axis from the opening is not a one way road. Chronic stress damages the gut barrier and shifts the community living behind it. The direction is well established even where the numbers are not, and it is the part of this subject everybody has already felt. You know what a bad week does to your stomach. That is not in your head. Or rather, it starts there and does not stay there.

Which brings me to the most useful sentence in this section, and it is free: the best supported way to fix a damaged gut lining is to stop doing the thing that is damaging it. Not a supplement. Removal.

Now the part that rebuilds it.

Thirty six adults, seventeen weeks, split into two groups. One worked up to about six servings a day of live fermented food: yogurt, kefir, kimchi, fermented vegetables, brine. The other tripled their fiber.

The fermented group’s bacterial variety went up and stayed up, and nineteen of the inflammation markers a blood test uses went down. The fiber group saw neither, in ten weeks.

It is not an argument against fiber. Fiber is food for bacteria. If the right bacteria are thin on the ground, adding more of their food does not do much, not quickly anyway. One possible explanation is that fermented food brings the organisms and the food in the same mouthful. Over a longer run enough fiber is still the foundation. It is just not the quick lever.

Six servings a day is the number in the trial. Not two, not a capsule. Six.

Why the pills mostly do not do it.

Four things have to go right for a probiotic capsule, and a lot of products miss one. It has to still be alive when you buy it, which is why some of them tell you to refrigerate them and why they carry an expiry date. It has to survive your stomach acid, which is the whole point of your stomach acid. It has to find space in a community that is already fully occupied. And it has to stay, which most of them do not. Even the strains that survive the trip vanish once you stop taking them. Surviving is not colonizing. Passing through is not moving in.

I did try Seed, the one that is all over your feed and the one with the most advanced delivery system. It builds a capsule inside a capsule so the bacteria survive the stomach, and I was curious about the mechanism. The subscription did not last, because I get mine from food and I do not feel I need to supplement it. I still have some sitting in my fridge. I even used to recommend it to friends. Now I just tell them to eat kimchi, sauerkraut and kefir instead, and next week I will hand you a much longer list.

What actually seems to matter.

Variety of plants. Vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices. That is also where your fiber comes from, and most adults eat about half of what is recommended. The number that gets quoted is thirty different ones a week, and it comes from a very large study. I think it is the most useful eating instruction in this whole field, because you cannot follow it without improving everything else about your diet by accident.

Exercise, which is free. Six weeks of it shifted the gut community in the same people, and the shift partly went back when they stopped. Even a walk after dinner counts.

And leave gaps between meals, because your gut runs a cleaning wave between them that eating switches off.

What gas and bloating actually mean.

Bloating and gas are the first thing anybody notices, and gas on its own is not a fault, it is bacteria eating. One common reason for the bloating and the cramping is something reaching the colon that was supposed to be absorbed further up. Milk is the clearest case: the enzyme that digests milk sugar sits in the wall of your small intestine, plenty of adults stop making much of it, and your bacteria ferment it instead.

Where yours came from.

You were born with essentially none. The first ones come from your mother, and most of them come from her gut. Birth is the handoff. Feeding and skin contact add the rest.

That is why the way you are born matters. Babies born by C-section pick up fewer of their mother’s own strains and more from whatever else is around them. All three of us, my brother, my sister and me, were born that way, so I am not pointing at anybody. It is one influence among several, not a line drawn under a life.

And antibiotics during pregnancy or around the birth change what she has to give you, because they change her own community first.

The thing about breast milk.

Breast milk contains around two hundred different sugar structures that a baby cannot digest at all. Cannot. They pass through the stomach and the small intestine untouched, on purpose. They are there to feed a specific family of bacteria in the baby’s colon, and to keep the wrong ones from getting a grip on the wall. And her milk carries some of her own bacteria too, so she is sending more workers along with their food.

Sit with that. A significant fraction of the milk a mother makes is not food for her child. It is food for her child’s bacteria. Evolution built a feeding system for something that is not even human, inside the first thing any of us ever eats, long before anyone knew bacteria existed.

That is the strongest argument for breastfeeding there is, and nobody puts it on the poster.

Then you go outside.

When we were kids at my grandmother’s, in the village, we would play in the garden all day. If our hands got sticky from eating pomegranate, grapes or oranges straight off the trees, and there was no soap around, she would have us wash with dirt under the garden hose. Rub the soil between your palms and rinse it off, she would say.

There is something real underneath that, and it is not what people repeat. The hygiene hypothesis does not say dirty is better. The claim is narrower: we evolved alongside a set of specific organisms, from soil, plants, animals and other people, and most of us have stopped meeting them, because most of us now live in a concrete jungle.

The cleanest evidence anyone has comes from two farming communities in America who were studied side by side. They share almost the same ancestry. The Amish farm the old way, with the animals close to the house. The Hutterites, a closed community just like them, farm with machinery and keep the animals at a distance. Childhood asthma runs at about five percent in the first and twenty one percent in the second, and the researchers could tell the two apart by how much farm dust was in the house. Similar lives. Different air.

What you own.

You own an organ that rebuilds its own lining every four or five days, decides what enters your blood, and does all of it across a surface the size of a studio apartment. Nobody sat you down and told you that. What you were sold instead was a shelf of capsules whose passengers mostly never move in, riding in a coffin.

Here is what actually held up, and notice how little of it comes in a bottle.

Six servings a day of real fermented food did something measurable in seventeen weeks. Thirty different plants a week is the best eating instruction in the field. The most reliable way to repair a gut lining is to stop doing the thing that is damaging it. And your lining is already rebuilding, right now, out of whatever you last ate.

So before you put this down, do one thing.

Start adding real fermented food to your day. There are far more of them than you think, and next week we will cover a lot of them.

Experiment 005 is complete. You just read it.

Georges

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

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Reading time: 15 minutes

Tick. Tock. Tick.

I do not live in the suburbs. I do not have a commute. I never book a hotel outside a city center. I do not sit in meetings that could have been a message.

There is a long list of things I do not do. It is the reason there is a much longer list of things I have done.

Memento mori.

If I died today, I think I would have lived more than most people hope to fit into a whole life. Not more work. More places, more people, more of the different things a life turns out to be able to hold. And not because I found more hours. Because I gave fewer of mine away.

Here is the argument, up front. Money comes back. Careers get rebuilt. Mistakes get corrected. Time does none of that. And almost nobody spends it like something that runs out.

The friends who won the other way.

I have friends who have made more money than they will ever be able to spend. And when we sit down together, they are the ones asking me about my life. Where I was last month. Where I spend the winter, which is the part that gets them, because they take a week in February and I take the season.

And it is not just them. Everybody asks how I find the time to stay fit and to eat the way I do, as though it were a scheduling trick and not a decision.

They made a trade, and I think most of them knew exactly what they were trading. Work now, live later. Later is a real place and they fully intend to go there. The problem with later is that it keeps its own schedule, and by the time you arrive the knees are gone, the parents are gone, and the children you were building it for grew up while you were building it.

And I should be honest about the other direction. Money does buy time, and I buy it. Living in the center of a city costs more than living outside it, and what the difference buys is the commute I do not have. The Uber instead of the parking. The direct flight instead of the cheaper one with a stop.

Warren Buffett once showed Bill Gates his calendar. Paper, and almost empty. Whole weeks with nothing written in them. Buffett's line about it was this. "I better be careful with it. There is no way I will be able to buy more time."

And the successful people I know have worked this out. Longevity is the trend now, and it is not vanity. They spent thirty years trading time for money, and somewhere in the last few years it landed that the one asset they cannot buy more of is years. So they are trying to buy those back with sleep and training and bloodwork and a great deal of money. It has become an industry, and it gets its own Experiment.

Nobody keeps the time they save.

Start with the hour, because somebody had to invent it. The Egyptians divided daylight into twelve parts and darkness into twelve, and those parts are what we still call hours. But they were not the same length as one another. A daylight hour in summer was long and a daylight hour in winter was short, because there is more daylight in summer and they cut it into twelve either way. That is how time worked for more than two thousand five hundred years. The minutes and the seconds came later, out of Babylonian arithmetic, which is why we still count time in sixties.

Then the monks got involved. In twelve eighty three, in Dunstable in England, somebody built a mechanical clock. It was not built to organize a working day. It was built because a monastery has to pray at fixed hours. Then the cathedrals wanted one, and then the towns, and a bell that had called men to prayer was calling them to work. A machine cannot tell June from December, so it made every hour exactly as long as every other hour, and that is the moment the hour stopped being a piece of the day and became a thing you could count, and spend, and run out of.

And once an hour was a unit, it could be priced. Somewhere between the first farmers and the first factories, an hour became something you could sell to somebody else, which is where most hours still go.

Ever since, we have been building machines to win some of them back. The washing machine. The car. The calculator, then the computer, then the phone in your pocket. The internet. Google Maps, which tells you when you will arrive, so you stop leaving early and waiting. And now an LLM that writes the email you were dreading. Every one of them worked. Every one of them did precisely what it promised. And somehow nobody ended up with a free afternoon.

Yuval Noah Harari, the historian who wrote Sapiens, put the whole thing in one sentence. "We thought we were saving time. Instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed."

And we are only halfway through this one. Artificial intelligence is already giving hours back, and that is the half everybody is watching. The other half is being built quietly behind it, and it is robotics. I am keeping a close eye on that one. Elon Musk predicts the two together will make work itself optional. Between them they will hand back more time than every machine and tool we have ever built, combined.

Which changes nothing on its own. A machine cannot give you time. It can only free it. What happens after that is decided by you, or it gets decided for you.

And the first thing that decides for you is other people.

The lost hours that make me angry are the ones somebody else spends for me, without asking. Thirty minutes late. A meeting that could have been three lines. A cancellation the day of, when I have already cleared the evening for it. They spent something of mine that does not come back, and they will never once think of it as such. My friends know this about me, and they know they will hear about it. I respect other people's time and I expect the same, because I know exactly what it is worth.

I am efficient, and I was efficient long before there was anything to automate. For thirty years I have run multiple businesses in different industries at once, and I have always had an office at home. Most of them have offices too. I just barely use them. The paperwork and the things that need my signature are done in the first two days of the week. The rest of it is the work I actually chose. There is a system for everything in my life, because my time is the most valuable thing I own. Every space I use is built for flow: no clutter, everything with a purpose, from my kitchen to the line behind a restaurant counter. And I have always been first to adopt the tools that save time, from the pager to the Palm Pilot to the BlackBerry, and every tool since that promised me back an hour.

The latest one is a complex AI agent I built. It reads my emails and my newsletters, summarizes them, hands me the things I actually need to act on, and takes back the ones I want it to handle itself. It used to take me at least two hours a day. It takes twenty to thirty minutes now. That is ninety minutes back, every single day.

And if you ask me honestly where those ninety minutes went, I filled them. A longer list with more things to check off it, and time spent optimizing the agent so that one day it gives me even more back. I am spending the hours it saved me on making it save me more.

Speed was never the answer. Nor efficiency, nor better tools. If every hour you win is absorbed by something else, then getting faster cannot save you. Speed does not empty the day. It feeds it. You are not fighting a shortage of hours. You are fighting the thing that eats them, and it will eat whatever you put in front of it.

Saying no is the whole method.

You cannot make more time, and the time you free does not stay free on its own. So the only hour you will ever get back is one you take off something that has it now. That is it.

So why does almost nobody do it? Because saying no costs you in the moment, saying yes costs you later. And because a new commitment feels like progress while dropping one feels like losing something, so the list only ever grows.

Steve Jobs was asked at WWDC in nineteen ninety seven about focus, and he answered. "Focusing is about saying no. And you've got to say no, no, no. And when you say no, you piss off people."

That last part is the whole difficulty. Everybody agrees with the principle. Nobody wants the conversation.

The no is not for the people you love. Helping family and friends is what the time is for. What I refuse is work I do not want, plans I do not want, and above all committing in advance. I keep my calendar open because I do not know yet where I will be. Weddings are the worst of it, because they want an answer six months out, and I do not know if I will even be in the country that week. It looks like flakiness and it is the opposite. I will not promise, because I will not cancel.

What I do not spend it on.

When we were younger my friends talked about the Ferrari they were going to own one day. I always wanted the back of a Rolls Royce, with a driver. Until then an Uber will do. Not because I dislike driving. What I refuse is the traffic. In the back of a car I can catch up on reading, take a call, or answer a few things I owe people. I am looking forward to the self driving car.

I have always lived in the center of a city, and I refuse to spend my days driving in traffic. I own a car and I use it once or twice a week, for a Costco run and errands. When I go out to dinner in town I take an Uber and never have to think about parking. I still drive for a barbecue in the suburbs, or a weekend out of town. I live downtown, so most things are a walk or a bike ride.

None of that is a moral achievement and I want to be clear about it. These are choices I have been lucky enough to be able to make. If you have young children and a school run and a job that needs you at an office or on the road, the choices available to you are different ones, and the refusing is the part that still applies. You may not be able to drop the commute, but the hour that goes to scrolling after dinner is still yours to take back.

I used to tell everybody I was busy. Busy day, busy week. Then I started looking at the people around me, and a single mother with two kids is busier than I have ever been, in her own way, and nobody hands her a medal for it. So I stopped saying it.

Everybody is busy. The only thing we differ on is where the busy goes.

And I waste time too.

I know I do it, and I choose what I waste it on. That is the only part I claim.

I take the hours off the commute and I go out to the pool, sit in the sun with a podcast or some good music, take a swim. I go for a walk. I go to the gym. I read, and now I write. And I see my friends, and I call the ones I cannot see, out of the blue, just to catch up, and those turn into the best conversations I have. My friends are always surprised I keep in touch with so many people. I just pick up the phone.

From the outside that looks like waste. It is not lost time, it is the recharge, and it is the first thing most people cut when they get busy, which is exactly backwards. And your list will not look like mine. The exhibition you keep meaning to see before it closes. A book still on the shelf. The hobby you put down. The side project you keep saying you will begin. An evening with nothing in it. The point is not what goes in the hour. The point is that you chose.

What I removed this year.

I do not make New Year's resolutions. I made one this year, and it was not to add anything. It was to remove. One of the things on the list was a fasting app I had started using a few months earlier, called Simple, which wanted me to log every fast and every meal, and turned something simple into a daily admin job. Gone.

Another was muting group chats. Another was my inbox. I unsubscribed from everything that had stopped earning its place. I now get three emails in a morning, and what is left is handed to the agent for sorting.

The bigger one was the Apple Watch rings. I still wear the watch sometimes. What I turned off was the rings.

If you have never worn one, it gives you three rings to close every day. Move, Exercise and Stand. You set your own daily goals, and mine were set high. Your friends can see whether you closed yours, so it quietly becomes a competition, and the watch hands you a badge when you hit a milestone. I had closed all three every single day for nine hundred and seventy days in a row. The badge for a thousand was thirty days away.

I stopped it there. Not because I stopped moving. Because I was done with a machine on my wrist telling me when to stand up.

The biggest one is older than this year's resolution, and it happened by accident, in two thousand nineteen. I flicked my phone to silent on a flight from Beirut to Riyadh, then decided not to switch it back for the rest of the trip, to see what it was like. I have never switched it back. It is the best thing that has ever happened to my attention. In the restaurant years I would not have dared. Something goes wrong at one in the morning and somebody needs an answer.

, who teaches happiness at Harvard, calls it a quiet addiction running your life. A survey this year puts the average American at one hundred and eighty six looks a day. Brooks also has a test that takes an hour. Put the phone away and count how many times you think about it. More than once every five minutes and you have your answer.

And I am guilty of this as well. I do not use TikTok and I do not doom scroll reels. But I have an interesting feed on Instagram: research, studies, ideas, things worth saving and sharing. So every time I open the phone I learn something, which is exactly what makes it hard to put down. It is still a big distraction and I know it.

And it is not an accident. Sean Parker, who co-founded Napster and then became the first president of Facebook, said so in public in 2017: the thought behind these apps was how to consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible, by giving you a dopamine hit every time somebody reacts to what you posted. He called it exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. Then he said the people who built it, himself included, understood it and did it anyway.

And this is the part that actually costs you. You can own the hour and still hand it away in pieces, thirty seconds at a time, until the hour is gone and nothing in it stayed.

Time off is not the same as time back.

Employees were tracked through their holidays, and what predicted coming back better was not just how long they went for. It was how much control they had over their own time while they were away. There is a second finding beside it. Put something you enjoy in the calendar at a set time and people enjoy it less.

I know people who take one holiday a year and run it like a project. Multiple cities, a different hotel every few nights, a restaurant booked for every evening, and a fear of missing something running underneath all of it. They come home tired and they say so, and then they wait eleven months and do it again.

Mine has always been different. I pick a destination, I book the flight and a hotel in the city center, and that is where the planning stops. I land, I check in, I step out and start walking, and I work the days out as they come. It is also how I end up doing the best things I have ever done on a trip: an afternoon stroll through Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris while I waited for a girlfriend, and three days at the World Expo in Milan that I did not know was on when I flew in for business.

I am lucky. I have never had a boss, so nobody approves my dates, and I do not have children whose school year decides when I am allowed to leave. So I take a break when it feels like it is time. Sometimes a random day off in the middle of the week. Sometimes out of town for a weekend. Sometimes a week or more somewhere warm.

The real ones for me are the gaps between projects, and those can run to months, not weeks. Stretches where the next big project has not been chosen yet. Ideas do not arrive while every inch of your attention is occupied. They arrive when your head is clear. Artists and writers have always known this and have often been mocked for it, because from the outside a person staring at nothing looks like a person doing nothing.

Every good decision I have made in the last twenty five years was made inside one of those gaps, including the latest one, going all in on artificial intelligence, which I only got to do because I was between things and had the room to sit with it long enough to see what it could already do.

The Greeks made a distinction English mostly does not. Chronos is the clock, the hour gained or the hour lost. Kairos is the right moment, the one you cannot schedule and do not get back. From inside kairos it can look like nothing is happening.

You hear more and more about the importance of mindfulness and meditation, and there is a reason for that. That one gets its own Experiment.

The Japanese have a word for the gap itself. Ma. The older character is a door with the moon showing through the crack. It means the interval, the space between, and it is not treated as nothing. It is treated as the part that carries the meaning. In music, ma is the silence between the notes that turns them into music.

The gap is not the empty part. The gap is where the music is.

You do not need months. A single day that nobody has a claim on does the same job.

The answer was never a bigger holiday. It is a weekend you actually control, and a stretch between two things where nobody is waiting on you.

There are many sentences about time. Here is one of mine.

An hour is never handed to you. It has to come out of your own day, off something that already has it. Sometimes that is a habit. Sometimes a notification. Sometimes a person.

There is one last thing, and you have probably felt it without ever naming it. A year at twenty felt enormous. A year at forty is gone before you have finished describing it. The clock did not change. What changed is how much of it was worth noticing. Routine is what makes a year vanish, because almost nothing in it is worth keeping. New places, new people, new problems leave marks. That is why a full life feels longer than a busy one. Not more hours. More of them that stayed.

This is why every generation talks about the good old days. It is not that life was better then. It is that you were still meeting things for the first time, and a first time is the only kind your head bothers to keep.

La Fontaine wrote a fable about a cicada who sang on a branch all summer, while an ant carried food past him, grain by grain, for a winter that had not arrived yet. Everybody tells it as though the ant won. The ant has a full larder and no summer.

I have been both, and never by accident. I will work around the clock on something for months, and then I will take a season off. The part that matters is choosing for yourself which one you are being, and when.

Yesterday is spent. Tomorrow is not promised. If today were the last one, you already know what you would have done with it. That is what memento mori means to me. It is not about dying. It is that today already counts.

So before you put this down, do one thing.

Look at the last seven days and find an hour you would not pay for if somebody put a price on it. Take it back. Then decide, on purpose, where you want to spend it.

Thank you for giving me the most valuable thing you own. Thank you for giving me your time.

Experiment 004 is complete. You just read it.

Georges

The long version of who is writing this is on the About page. Fifty years of taking things apart, in one place.

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

If you enjoyed it, leave me a like or a comment.

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Reading time: 18 minutes

The first thing anyone thinks of when they hear the word alchemy is a man in a robe trying to turn lead into gold.

Well. It worked.

In May 2025, CERN reported that lead had turned into gold inside the Large Hadron Collider. Four billion Swiss francs of machine, and colder than outer space when it is running. Lead has 82 protons. Gold has 79. Knock three of them off and it is gold, and that is what happened, about eighty nine thousand times a second.

The total, over four years: twenty nine trillionths of a gram. And it did not survive. The gold came out of the collision moving so hard that it hit the wall of the pipe and came apart, a fraction of a second after it existed.

There is about a billion times more gold in your phone.

And here is the part worth stopping on. Nobody at CERN was trying to make gold. They were smashing lead into lead to see what matter looked like a moment after the universe began. The gold was a side effect. It was litter.

Which is the oldest story in this subject. What the alchemists were chasing turned out to be the least of it. What they built in order to chase it turned out to be everything.

The alchemists had two goals, and gold was only one of them. The other was the thing that lets you live forever. Get rich, never die.

The chase never stopped.

Alchemy is a method. You take a thing apart far enough to find out what it actually is, how it works, and what it can be turned into. That is the whole art.

They did not fail. They ran out of tools. You cannot rearrange the nucleus of an atom with a fire, a flask and a pair of hands, and it took eighteen hundred years and the largest machine ever built to make something that could.

And both goals are still on the table.

Nobody says it out loud any more. They say they are building wealth.

Find a problem enough people have, solve it properly, and sell the solution to all of them. Buy a digital coin nobody can explain, and watch it turn into a technology with a market. The logic underneath every one of those is the same sentence: put in something worth little, apply a process, take out something worth more.

That is transmutation. Not as a metaphor. That is the definition of the word.

And the chase was never about one man getting rich. A country that could make gold on demand would own everything, and everybody else's money would be worth nothing by Friday. Which is why England made the attempt itself a felony. Read that again. There was a law against trying, and it stood for two hundred and eighty five years.

And that is not a medieval worry. In July 2026, Elon Musk predicted in an interview with The Economist that money will not matter by 2036, because AI and robots will make so much of everything that there will be nothing left to buy with it. That is the outcome England wrote a law to prevent. He is selling it as good news.

The second goal never went anywhere either. It just got a bigger budget and a bigger following every decade.

spends millions of dollars a year running his own body as an experiment and publishing every measurement he takes, and his slogan is two words: Don't Die. That is the elixir of life with a protocol attached.

And the people building artificial intelligence are selling both promises at once, in the same order the alchemists sold them, to exactly the same instinct.

Ignore the men selling it for a moment, because the work happening underneath them is far more interesting.

We took the body apart, using instruments they never had. We found out that muscle is not just meat that pulls, it is an organ that sends signals to the rest of you. We found out that the bacteria in your gut are not passengers. We found out that light landing in your eye in the morning sets a clock that decides how you sleep fourteen hours later.

And we worked out that there is a molecule sitting under your skin that turns into a hormone the moment sunlight hits it, then learned to make that same hormone in a factory and press it into a tablet. We took the one thing our body needs from the sun and put it in a pill. There is a whole Experiment on that one.

The word itself gives the game away.

Alchemy reached English from the Arabic al-kimiya. In Arabic that word means the chemistry. Not something like chemistry. Chemistry. Ask anyone in Beirut or Casablanca what kimiya is and they will tell you it is the subject their kid is failing at school.

Arabic never split it. English did, around 1720, and within twenty years the old half had been narrowed down to gold making while the new half kept everything that could be proved. Same people. Same benches. Same notebooks. One craft, two names.

And what the old half covered was everything. Chemistry, physics, biology, physiology, medicine, metallurgy, the lot. There is no single word left in the language that covers all of them at once.

The method is not finished. Alexander Fleming found penicillin in 1928, and it took until 1944 to make enough of it to matter. For those sixteen years an infected scratch in the garden could still kill a healthy adult.

Nobody got smarter in between. What changed is what they had to work with. Fleming had a petri dish. By 1944 there were industrial fermentation tanks and a world war paying for them.

A COVID vaccine was designed in a weekend, tested in months, and in arms around the world inside a year.

That is the only thing that ever really changes. Not the ambition. Not the method. The tools, and everything we know by the time we pick them up.

That is what modern means. Same curiosity. Better instruments, and more time.

Two of them you already know.

Isaac Newton wrote and transcribed about a million words on alchemy, and he was doing it in the same years he was working out gravity.

Leonardo da Vinci did not believe you could make gold, and said so plainly. Yet Leonardo spent his entire life running the method: dissecting bodies to find out how they worked, taking birds apart to find out how flight worked, drawing every stage of it. He was never against the method. He was against the promise. I own a stack of his books, and the ones full of those drawings are the ones I keep going back to. The Vitruvian Man is why my latest project has the logo it has.

The promise had a name. The Philosopher's Stone was not an object anybody had. It was something they believed could be made, and whoever managed to make it would get both things at once: cheap metal turned into gold, and the elixir that stopped you dying.

And the people closest to it kept saying the object was not the point.

I own an early edition of a book by Manly P. Hall, published in 1928, called The Secret Teachings of All Ages. It is a believer writing for believers. Big, old and beautiful, and the most precious book I own. I love showing it to people and reading them the chapter titles, because it looks like something a magician left behind. And in the middle of his own chapter on alchemy, Hall stops to warn his own readers: "Woe to that seeker who accepts as literal the rambling allegories of the alchemists." He drew it too, and under his own plate of the Philosopher's Stone he calls it a symbol of the perfected and regenerated man. The stone was never a stone.

The Kybalion, published in 1908, is close to a bible for modern Hermetic teaching. It says the same thing in one word: allegory.

Then there is The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, which is also one of my favorites. For years people kept stopping me mid story to tell me that one was my story. They were right. But the alchemy is the smallest part of it. What that book is really about is the hero's journey, which is its own kind of alchemy, and it gets its own piece.

The pursuit of gold was the headline. The method was the inheritance, and we are still living on it.

Bring a medieval alchemist here and hand him a phone. Let him ask it a question out loud and hear it answer.

He would not call it engineering. He would call it magic. And from where he is standing he would be right, because a trick stays magic only until somebody shows you the mechanism. Then it is a technique, and eventually it is boring.

Taking the trick apart is the entire art. Start with what he already had.

Alchemy had three principles: mercury, sulfur and salt. Every one of them ended up in medicine. Mercury will poison you, and in 1714 Fahrenheit sealed it inside a glass tube, and we used it to take our children's temperature for three hundred years. Sulfur went into the first drugs that ever beat a bacterial infection, nine years before penicillin arrived. And salt is the one thing your body cannot run without, which is why there is a bag of salt water hanging beside almost every hospital bed you have ever visited.

Their three were the starting inventory. The list never stopped growing.

Sand. Melt it and you get glass, the first thing you could seal something inside and still watch what it was doing. Every flask and bottle the alchemist ever worked with was sand, and so is the screen you are reading this on. Then coat the back of a sheet of it and you get a mirror, which is the first time a person could see their own face clearly, and whenever they wanted, instead of leaning over still water. And it is not just for vanity: it is in your car so you can see behind you without turning around. And the same glass is inside every telescope and every camera lens ever made.

Then purify that same sand to 99.9999999 percent and you get the wafer that every computer chip in the world is cut out of.

And the machine that does that last step is built by one company on earth. ASML, in the Netherlands. Two hundred million dollars each, a hundred thousand parts, forty shipping containers to move one, and it makes its light by hitting falling droplets of molten tin with a laser, fifty thousand times a second. The chips running the AI boom all come out of these machines.

Sand becomes the bottle, then the mirror, then the machine that answers you when you speak to it.

Which is why this line, from 's Techno-Optimist Manifesto in 2023, is not poetry. It is a description. "We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone – we are literally making sand think."

And it keeps coming from where nobody is looking. Two of the quiet winners of the entire AI boom are a Japanese toilet company and the company that invented MSG. Toto spent a century perfecting ceramics for bathrooms, and now makes the ceramic plates that hold silicon wafers steady while chips are built on them. That business is now worth more to them than the toilets. A Japanese chemist named Ikeda pulled umami, the fifth taste, out of a kelp broth in 1908, and a company called Ajinomoto was founded to sell it. There is a whole piece coming on that one. Sixty years later Ajinomoto found that a byproduct of making it worked as insulation film for microprocessors. Today they hold about ninety five percent of that market, which means almost every high performance chip on earth has seasoning chemistry inside it.

And then there is plastic. We pull crude oil out of the ground, break it into its parts, and rebuild it into a material that never existed on this planet until we made it. Gold is worth more per gram. Plastic is worth more per day. Look around the room you are in and count what would still work without it. Take it out of a hospital and the hospital stops.

Once you know where to look, you see it everywhere. The gas sealed inside a bulb so the filament will not burn away. The fluid running through the coils of your fridge, taking the heat out of your food and carrying it away. The wifi crossing the room right now to put these words in front of you, which you cannot see, cannot feel, and have never once thought about.

Every one of them is somebody taking a thing apart far enough to find out what it is, and then making it do something else.

Manly P. Hall had a phrase for the half of alchemy that became chemistry. He called it the earthly body, and he meant it as a demotion. To him it was the lesser half, the part left behind when the real work went somewhere we cannot measure.

He drew the line in exactly the right place. He just thought the half we can measure was the shallow one. It is the other way round.

The earthly body is simply the part we have instruments for. That is the whole difference, and things cross that line as the instruments arrive.

Humming does not feel like it is doing anything. It turns out humming raises the nitric oxide in your nose about fifteenfold, and nitric oxide is a signal your blood vessels run on. So the chanting in temples and churches all over the world was doing something measurable to the people doing it, thousands of years before anybody had a way to measure it. Music does the same and it goes further than your heart rate: tempo pulls your breathing along with it, and then your attention, which is why you already know which album gets you working. And the bacteria we spent a century treating as dirt turn out to be involved in most of what happens inside you.

We will go deeper into all of those in future Experiments.

None of it was ever magic. It was mechanism nobody could measure yet.

People chewed willow bark for pain for thousands of years without being able to say why it worked. It just did, so it got passed down. Then chemists went into the bark, pulled out the compound doing the work, rebuilt it into something you could dose and swallow, and that is the Aspirin sitting in your cupboard right now.

They knew it worked. They just could not explain it, and being unable to explain a thing is not the same as being wrong about it.

And that gap is wider than people think, because of how the system is built. Your doctor can only prescribe what has been proven, published and approved. He may privately think something else and still cannot say it, because the guideline is what protects him when a case goes wrong. Then there is the money already sitting on the old answer. A pharmaceutical company that spent a decade and a fortune developing a drug is not going to fund the study that ends it before it has paid for itself. And the correction takes years to reach your doctor's office.

I have been running experiments on myself for years with no research behind them, because they made sense to me and because they worked. Every year a few more of them get proven right. Many of those get their own Experiment.

Every craft is defined by its tools.

Freemasonry makes this literal. Its ritual is built around working tools, and every one of them had a real job on a building site before it was given a meaning. There is a piece coming on that.

The alchemists built their own, and theirs are still here. The furnace. Distillation, which separates a mixture by boiling one part off and catching it as it cools, and is the reason there is anything in your liquor cabinet. And fermentation, which sits on the same list of operations as distillation. Bread, wine, cheese, yogurt, vinegar, soy sauce, every pickle: all of it is a controlled rot somebody learned to steer, and there is an Experiment coming on what it does to your gut. And the bain marie, which is nothing more than a bowl sitting in a pot of hot water, so the heat arrives gently and nothing scorches, and it is still how you melt chocolate without burning it. It is named after Mary, an alchemist in Alexandria who is credited with inventing it about eighteen hundred years ago.

They never got their gold. The equipment outlived them anyway, because a goal dies with the person chasing it. The tools do not, and neither does anything they wrote down.

And the newest one is sitting on your desk. I know enough code to read it and fix a line, but not enough to build anything with it. This year I have been building software anyway, by describing what I want out loud to a machine that writes it. They call it vibe coding. It is a tool doing what tools have always done, which is put a craft in the hands of somebody who never trained for it. That one gets its own Experiment.

The first laboratory I had was a cupboard.

As a kid in Lebanon I had a children's closet in our bedroom, with a folding door that opened out into a desk. I wired it so a light came on by itself when the door opened, put plugs in it, and hung every tool I owned on the wall behind it. I was about eight. There were batteries, wires and motors everywhere, and I spent my time taking electronic toys apart and rebuilding them into something else. My first hammer and the multimeter I still use today both lived in that cupboard. Nobody told me there was a word for what I was doing.

The first real one I ever saw was in our family house in the village.

My grandfather had built a garage at the edge of the garden when he bought one of the first cars in the village, a Chrysler from the nineteen thirties. He was gone before I was born, and so was the car.

My grandmother let a man from the village use it. His name was Joseph. He was the only Armenian there and there were several Josephs, so everybody called him Joseph the Armenian. A modest man, and what he did was fix things. Everybody's things. And in exchange for the room he kept our house and our garden running.

What he built in there was a workshop. Soldering irons, tools, flasks, and the stool he sat on, which he had made himself. This was the seventies, so the equipment in that room would be half a century old now. It looked exactly like the thing you are picturing when I say the word alchemist.

He owned a large format view camera, the kind you stand behind with a cloth over your head, and he developed the pictures himself. He became the village photographer.

He passed away when I was very young, so I barely remember him. I remember his lab perfectly. It stayed shut and stayed exactly as he left it, and we would sneak in and play with his tools with no idea what most of them were for. When we moved to Canada a couple of them came with me. Two old metal files with wooden handles, and I still have them and I still use them.

The garage got its second life a long time later. My cousin had gone to New York to study photography, and he came home with an old camera like Joseph's that he found in Brooklyn. He turned the room into a studio and darkroom, and mounted a full exhibition shot on that camera.

My loft in Montreal is the same idea with better light. There is nothing in sight, and you would never guess what is in it, because every tool is put away in a cabinet until the day it is needed: electronics, carpentry, plumbing, scales, training gear, and every tool a proper kitchen needs. Whatever I need, I have it and I know exactly where it is. One of the most precious objects in the place is my professional gas stove, and it is the first thing I show off when I am walking someone through my kitchen setup.

I cook every day and I do not use recipes.

About fifty spice jars sit in the rack above the stove, and there are more everywhere else. Every oil, every salt, every pepper. It looks more like an alchemist's lab than a pantry.

I know what the ingredients do to each other, and that is the entire job. This one needs fat to open up. That one dies if it meets heat too early. Acid at the end lifts the whole plate and acid at the start kills it. I build from there, and I build fast, because I am not deliberating, I am running a reaction I already know the end of. Most of the time I do not even taste the food until it is served, because usually I am still fasting while I cook.

That is alchemy in the kitchen.

Baking is the other half of the same craft, and it is pure chemistry: measurement, time and heat, with no room to improvise, because the reaction is the recipe. I do not bake a lot, because I do not like following recipes and instructions. Baking does not give you that choice.

I know that firsthand. When I was opening the burger restaurants I wanted our own pure butter brioche buns, baked fresh every day, so I put my chef's hat on and worked them out with the bakers. Then we opened in another country and the same recipe came out wrong. Different flour, different water, different yeast, different humidity, a different oven. We spent weeks rebuilding it in every country we opened in, to arrive back at the same bun. There is a reason that when Italian pizza chefs travel to competitions, some of them bring their own water.

I also wanted a charcoal grill sitting directly on top of the condiment fridge, so the cook could turn the burger and dress it without moving his feet.

Impossible, they all said. The grill will destroy the fridge.

Heat goes up, I said.

I had about twenty of them custom built across three continents, and every one of them worked perfectly.

I do not take no for an answer, and it is not stubbornness. It is that something has to make sense to me before I will accept it, and if it does not, I am going to go and find out why. Most of the time the answer turns out to be that nobody ever actually checked.

My father is an agricultural engineer, which is not one of the most known branches. As a kid, my friends used to tease me about it. Does that mean he is a farmer?

Here is one of the hacks he would do. He would cut a T into the bark of a branch, lift the two flaps, slip in a bud taken from a different tree, and bind it with cloth. Grafting. The branch then grows whatever the bud came from, so one tree ends up carrying two different fruits. To us it was just a thing Dad did in the garden. Of course I had to try it myself.

I still joke that the one useful skill he taught me was how to pick a good watermelon by knocking on it and listening to what comes back. Which is acoustic testing, done with a hand and an ear, on a thing you otherwise cannot judge without cracking it open. That skill is less useful nowadays, because we have reverse engineered watermelons and nearly all of them now come out sweet.

The watermelon trick is the joke. What I actually took from him was the way an engineer looks at a thing before deciding anything about it: break it down first, then judge it. That is reverse engineering, and I have been doing it to everything since.

And when we got to university, many of my friends studied engineering. Civil, mechanical, electrical, industrial. Almost none of them ended up working in the field they studied. They run companies, they build things, they solve problems that have nothing to do with what was on the syllabus. Because what they really learned was not bridges or circuits. They learned a way of looking at a thing: take it apart, find out what it actually is, and then build something better out of it.

That is the whole thing.

A fire, a flask, and no idea that atoms existed. Newton at a furnace at two in the morning. Leonardo with the birds. A toilet company holding a silicon wafer steady. A grill on top of a fridge. Software described out loud by a man who cannot write it.

Same move, every time.

Alchemy needs a laboratory. Mine is a loft full of instruments, a brain that will not leave a thing alone, and an AI that never forgets. The most expensive laboratory ever built runs under a mountain on the Swiss border, and the one that taught me what a lab actually is was a garage in a village, run by a man who fixed his neighbors' things in exchange for the room.

And there is one you never get to leave. Your body and your brain. That is the lab I keep running experiments in, and most of what comes next is about what happens in there.

If you take one thing out of this

Pick one thing you have always been told is true, and were never really convinced about.

Then go and find out who said it first, and why, and whether it is still true now.

That is all alchemy ever was. Somebody refusing to accept the answer they were handed, and going to look.

Experiment 003 is complete. You just read it.

Georges

The long version of who is writing this is on the About page. Fifty years of taking things apart, in one place.

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

If you enjoyed it, leave me a like or a comment.

Join the lab

Experiment 002

Reading time: 12 minutes

The first thing you do when you are born is breathe in. The last thing you do, whenever that is, is breathe out. In between you will do it around seven hundred million times and think about it almost never.

Weeks without food. Days without water. Minutes without this.

Your heart does not take instructions. Neither does your digestion, your pupils, your sweat. You cannot tell your heart to slow down.

Breathing is the only thing in your body that actually has a dial.

Every tradition on earth found it. Not a few of them. All of them.

Pranayama in the yoga sutras. Anapanasati in Buddhism, which just means mindfulness of breathing. Orthodox monks timing the Jesus Prayer to the breath, in and out. Sufi orders with breath awareness as a founding principle. None of these people knew each other. None of them had instruments. They all arrived at the same place: if you want to change how you feel, change how you breathe.

And every meditation you have ever heard of is a breathing practice wearing a different name. That is worth a piece of its own and it is coming.

My grandfather used to go under in the pool and I would count out loud until he came back up. I was around five. By eight or nine I was going down myself, diving deep in the Mediterranean, staying under for long stretches and working the sea urchins out from under the rocks. I would bring up a bag full and we would eat them freshly caught, right there. They were his favorite.

I never stopped.

Around 2001 a girlfriend got me into yoga, before yoga was the hype. Sivananda, and I did the whole thing: two yoga programs, two meditation programs, and then pranayama, the breathing one. Full programs, not a class you drop into. And they were all the same thing underneath. The yoga was breathing. The meditation was breathing.

A few years later I was living in the Caribbean, and that is where I started spearfishing. Other people use a rod. I go under and pick the one I want, and sometimes lobster, which is the real prize.

And when I swim, I do not turn my head to breathe like regular swimmers. I cross the pool underwater, come up, take one breath, go back down, and come back.

The dial

The exhale slows you down. The inhale speeds you up.

That is the whole mechanism. Everything else here is a variation on it.

Double in, one out

Two inhales through the nose. A long one, then a short sharp one on top of it. Then a long slow exhale out of the mouth.

One to three of them and you feel it. It has a real name, the physiological sigh, which is a terrible name for something this simple, so I call it double in, one out.

You already do it. You do it in your sleep every few minutes, and you have watched a child do it after crying, when the breath comes in twice in a stutter before it goes back out.

The second inhale is mechanical. Deep in your lungs are millions of tiny sacs where the exchange actually happens, and in ordinary quiet breathing some of them sag shut. The short second inhale pops them open again. Then the long exhale dumps the carbon dioxide.

Researchers at Stanford ran it for a month against box breathing, fast breathing and mindfulness meditation. The double inhale came out on top.

I use it in the car. Traffic that is not moving, or somebody cutting me off, and I can feel it coming up in my chest the way it does in everybody. Double in, one out, twice, and it is gone before I have moved another car length.

And when I am sitting across from a friend who is wound up about something, before anything else, I make them do the double inhale right there, in front of me. It takes five seconds and they always look up surprised.

The square

Inhale for four seconds. Hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold for four. Then go around again.

Box breathing, and the military teaches it, which is where it got its reputation.

It is slow breathing with a shape, and the shape is the point, because under pressure nobody remembers anything more complicated than a square.

There are others built the same way. Four seconds in, hold for seven, eight seconds out, which people call 4-7-8, is the same idea with the exhale stretched long, and that long exhale is why it gets used to fall asleep.

The other direction

Everything above is for coming down. Sometimes you want to go up.

Thirty deep breaths, in through the nose and down into the belly, each one released rather than fully pushed out. Then blow all the air out and hold empty until you feel the urge to breathe. Then one big breath in, hold it fifteen seconds, let it go. That is a round. Do three or four.

That is the method, and the hold at the end of it is the half people get backwards. You do not hold on full lungs. You empty out first and hold on nothing.

Here is why, and it is the most useful thing in this piece. The first urge to breathe is not your body running out of oxygen. It is carbon dioxide building up. That burning panic in your chest is an alarm, not an emergency. You have plenty of air left. Which means a breath hold does not train your lungs. It trains your tolerance for the alarm.

And that is what surprises people the first time they run the rounds properly. The second hold is longer than the first. The third is longer than the second. Nothing about your lungs changed in four minutes. What changed is how loudly your body shouted at you.

It is the same lever as a cold plunge. You walk into the alarm on purpose, at a dose you choose, so your body stops filing it under emergency. Fight or flight and rest and digest are not two switches somebody else is holding. There is an off ramp between them, and the off ramp is the exhale.

It is not new. Tummo, the Tibetan practice, has been doing a version of this for centuries, and a Frenchman called Maurice Daubard was teaching it in the fifties. What Hof did was strip it down to something you can learn in ten minutes, and then walk into a hospital and let them test it on him. They took twelve men he had trained, injected them with bacterial toxin, and watched them hold down their own inflammatory response. That is not supposed to be possible.

I can vouch for a piece of it. I started in 2019 and I still do it. I have not been sick since, and I never got COVID.

Look up a YouTube video for the instructions, or get the Wim Hof app, and follow the safety rules, they exist for a reason.

At the far end of the dial from all of that is yoga nidra. You lie down and a voice, usually a recording, walks you slowly through the body, part by part, while you stay still and awake. Nothing to achieve and nowhere to get to. The point is to reach the depth of rest that sleep gives you without going to sleep, which is why people use it to claw back a bad night. renamed it NSDR, non sleep deep rest, and that is the version that spread. Neither of them invented what they teach. They were the ones who repackaged it and handed it over in a way people can actually follow.

I can hold my breath for close to five minutes. Friends of mine who train far harder than I do, marathon runners, Ironman finishers, give out long before that. It was never about fitness and it was never about VO2max. VO2max is the ceiling on how much oxygen you can take in and use at full effort, and it is worth knowing, but it measures the engine, not your tolerance for the alarm. I jump rope hard and I do not run out of breath, and that is the same thing from the other direction: tolerance, not lungs.

Outside diving, it gets trained on purpose by boxers, swimmers, singers, wind players, and anyone whose work depends on the next breath.

And some people are built for it, by evolution rather than by practice. The Bajau, the sea nomads of Indonesia, carry spleens around fifty percent larger than their neighbors on land. Your spleen holds a reservoir of oxygen rich blood and squeezes it out when you dive. A thousand years of working underwater changed the organ.

Altitude does a smaller version of the same thing in weeks instead of centuries. Live high, breathe thin air, and your blood answers by carrying more, which is why runners train in the mountains and come down to race. You will also see people training in restriction masks, which is a different thing wearing the same story. The mask makes the breathing harder. It does not make the air thinner. What it trains is the muscles doing the pulling.

The route

All of that is rhythm. The other half is the route, and that is the half I had wrong for most of my life.

Your nose warms the air, humidifies it, filters it and slows it down. It also adds nitric oxide, which your sinuses make all day long, and which opens the blood vessels in your lungs. Your mouth does none of it. The mouth is the bigger opening, so it feels like more air, and that is exactly the trap.

I was a mouth breather for over forty five years.

I knew. My parents knew. I knew I had a deviated septum, I knew there was an operation for it, and it never bothered me enough to do anything about it. Then friends who got it fixed started saying the same sentence to me: you do not know what breathing is until you fix it. So I got curious and I started reading.

I went to the doctor for a proper diagnosis. It turned out to be a deviated septum and polyps, both. He started me on two nasal sprays, one a steroid and one saline, which is basically salt water, and kept booking me back a few months at a time. Six months of spraying every morning and I was certain I was being given the runaround.

By then I had watched a Huberman Lab episode on breathing, and it told me something nobody had: you can fix nasal breathing with exercises. So I picked up the protocol. Nasal breathing during training and cardio. Mindfulness about it during the day, catching myself the moment my mouth fell open. Mouth taping at night.

It worked. I am a nose breather now, and I never had the operation.

Mouth taping

A lot of nose breathers are mouth breathers at night and have no idea. You spend the whole day doing it properly and then your jaw drops the second you are unconscious.

And you wake up wrecked. Dry mouth, raw throat, eight hours that bought you nothing. You spent the night breathing the hard way, through more resistance and more noise, surfacing again and again without ever coming up far enough to remember it. The sleep was there. The rest was not.

A small piece of tape across the lips holds the mouth closed and hands the job back to the nose. People who try it say the same thing first: they wake up rested. Less snoring is the bonus that gets all the attention, but rested is the one that changes your day.

One caution, and it is short. Your nose has to be clear. If it is blocked, fix that first.

There are brands all over your feed selling branded mouth tape on subscription at ninety dollars a month, which is three dollars a night for a strip of tape. A roll of medical tape from the pharmacy costs a couple of dollars, lasts months, and does the same job.

The one that goes unchecked

The bigger thing underneath is sleep apnea, and it is a different animal.

Your airway collapses while you are asleep, so your breathing stops, then restarts, then stops again. In the severe cases that is dozens of times an hour, hundreds of times a night. Every one of them drops your blood oxygen and hauls you up out of deep sleep without ever waking you enough to know it happened.

Eight or nine out of every ten people who have it do not know they have it. They spend years exhausted, falling asleep in the afternoon, told it is stress, or age, or weight.

It takes one night with a small device you wear at home to find out, and the treatment is a device you wear at home too. Of everything in this piece, that is the one worth chasing.

Snoring

Snoring is not apnea, though they travel together. Snoring is the sound of air forcing its way past soft tissue in an airway that has narrowed, and it gets louder with alcohol, with a late night, and with every extra pound. It is the one symptom the whole household can hear, and the one everybody has agreed to find funny. It is also how couples end up sleeping in separate bedrooms, which nobody files as a medical outcome and everybody should.

Snoring is not a personality trait. It is a breathing problem, and it is fixable. Fixing it usually starts with the nose, then your sleeping position, then body weight. And if it is apnea underneath, that is a test, not a guess.

The face

Research shows that years of mouth breathing change the shape of a face. It pulls the face longer, sets the jaw further back, and the teeth stop meeting the way they should.

Forty two monkeys had their nasal passages plugged and were made to breathe through their mouths for up to three years. Their faces grew differently: longer, with a steeper jaw angle and a bite that no longer closed properly. When the plugs came out, the soft tissue went back to normal within months.

Research is starting to show something similar in children who are still growing: fix the breathing early enough and the face can find its way back. There is a book about all of this called Jaws, and Huberman talks about it too. In adults the research is not there yet.

Humming

Humans hum. In every religion, in every language, in the car and in the shower. Monks chant, mothers hum to babies, and none of them knew why, it just felt right.

One of the oldest is Om, the syllable Hindu tradition says the universe is built out of, hummed for three thousand years before anybody could measure anything.

Then somebody measured it in a lab, and the nitric oxide in the nose went up fifteen fold. Not fifteen percent, fifteen times. It was published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, which is not where you expect to be told that the noise your grandmother made over the stove was doing something.

That is the same nitric oxide I wrote about in the Sun piece and promised to come back to. It opens the vessels in your lungs and kills bacteria on the way through, and a closed mouth and a low note flood the whole cavity with it. There is far more to this molecule, and to what the vibration itself is doing, than one section can hold. I will come back to both.

Salt

I breathe better at the beach. Everybody does.

Part of it is the salt, and not just the water you swim in. The sea throws salt into the humidity, so the air itself is carrying it and you are breathing it the entire time you stand there. Salt water on the lining of your nose thins the mucus and washes the airway, and it is one of the cheapest things in medicine that reliably works.

That is all a neti pot is, and yogis have been using one for centuries. Then somebody packaged the same idea into little sachets and a squeeze bottle, and is making a killing selling people salt.

A doctor in Poland worked at a salt mine in the eighteen hundreds and noticed the miners were not getting the lung diseases everyone else got. He wrote it up. That mine is a treatment center now, and the state health service pays to send patients down there.

So when you land somewhere salty and your nose opens on its own, that is not in your head. One more reason to go to the sea, next to the sun, which I have already written about, and the grounding, which I will get to. Salt has its own story, and it is not the villain you were told it was.

Fat combustion

One more thing most people do not know.

When you lose fat, you breathe it out. Fat burns the way fuel burns in a car, carbon and hydrogen meeting oxygen, and around eighty four percent of the mass leaves through your lungs.

Your lungs are the door fat leaves by. Carbohydrate takes the same road out.

Which reframes everything. You are doing it right now, slowly, sitting still. The moment you move you burn more, and you breathe harder to carry it out. Running, lifting, hauling shopping up the stairs: when your breathing goes ragged that is not a side effect of the work, that is the combustion leaving. Same as revving an engine hard. More fuel burned, more coming out of the exhaust.

You are the exhaust.

Almost nothing in you takes an order. Your heart, your gut, your pupils. None of them listen to words. They do listen to your breathing.

That is what the dial is for. No tools, no machines, no gimmicks, nothing to buy. Everything in this piece you can run right now, tonight, with what you were issued at birth.

You have been doing it without a thought since the day you were born, and you will until your last breath.

Experiment 002 is complete. You just read it.

Georges

The long version of who is writing this is on the About page. Fifty years of taking things apart, in one place.

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

If you enjoyed it, leave me a like or a comment.

Join the lab

Experiment 001

Reading time: 16 minutes

Turn the sun off and give us a month.

Photosynthesis stops the same day. The plants go first, and everything that eats plants is on a countdown behind them. The water stops moving, because the water cycle is only the sun lifting the ocean into the sky and dropping it back on us as rain. The wind stops, because wind is air the sun heated unevenly. Inside a week the average surface temperature on this planet is below minus 18 Celsius, and the oceans start to freeze from the top down.

A month is generous.

Everything here is stored sunlight

The sun does not only run this planet. It built almost everything on it.

Coal is compressed plant matter, buried before it could rot and pressed into rock over millions of years. Crude oil and natural gas are mostly ancient plankton from the sea floor, put through the same process. The wood in your fireplace is a tree that spent thirty years catching light. And the food on your plate is the shortest version: a plant caught the light, and either you ate the plant or you ate the animal that ate the plant.

Every fuel we have ever burned and every meal anyone has ever eaten began with light hitting a leaf.

Which means we are all solar panels. Plants, animals, you, me, every living thing on this planet pointed at the same star.

The first thing humans ever agreed on

I have said for years that the sun is the closest thing we have to a representation of God, or at least to the power people mean when they say the word. I mean that as an argument, not as worship. I was an altar boy in an Orthodox church as a kid, so I know exactly how much work a symbol does. People cannot hold energy in their hands, so we give it a shape. An icon, a cross, a flame, a book. The sun does not need one. It is the energy itself, and everything alive is running on it right now, including you.

Every civilization that got here before us worked this out with no instruments at all. Ra in Egypt, Helios in Greece, Kinich Ahau for the Maya, Amaterasu in Japan, and the sun is still on their flag, and on more than a dozen other national flags. Long before anyone had a word for a hormone or a wavelength, the first thing humans called a god was the thing they could feel keeping them alive.

And now we are told to hide from it.

I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice. Skin cancer is real and nothing here is an argument for burning. This is my research, what I found, and what I actually do.

What the sun does to you

Ask what the sun does for you and everybody thinks vitamin D. Here are the ones with the most behind them.

One thing first. The sun reaches you through two separate doors, your eyes and your skin, and they do completely different jobs. Your eyes run your internal clock. Your skin does everything else. Keep those two apart and most of the contradictions you have read about the sun sort themselves out.

Vitamin D, which is not a vitamin

Start with the name, because the name is the problem. Vitamin D is a steroid hormone, and your body builds it out of light. Your skin holds a cholesterol precursor, UVB converts it, your liver and your kidney finish the job, and what comes out binds a receptor inside your cells the way a hormone does. It got called a vitamin in 1922, before anyone understood what they were looking at, and that one word made a century of people treat it as a nutrient you top up.

You can also get it from food, and the list is shorter than people think. Eggs, salmon, sardines, cod liver oil, and a handful of others. And a lot of that is stored sunlight too. The fish got it up the food chain from plankton that made it under UV. The egg depends entirely on the hen: one that gets outside produces far more of it than one that only gets it from feed.

Then there is the pill, which is where almost everybody ends up. And the pill is stored sunlight too, which nobody tells you. Most of the D3 on the shelf is made by shining ultraviolet on lanolin, the grease from sheep’s wool. The vegan version comes from lichen. The same trick your skin does, run in a factory. Note that the pill has never managed to reproduce what the sunlight studies keep showing. The system was built around light, and everything else is a workaround.

This is what vitamin D does, and it is a lot. It pulls calcium and phosphate out of your food and drives them into your bones, which is why a serious shortage shows up as rickets in a child and soft, weakened bone in an adult. It works on muscle strength and on how often older people fall. It regulates your parathyroid gland. It switches on the antimicrobial peptides your immune system uses as a first line against infection, and it tunes the immune response, which is where the most interesting recent trial result turned up, on autoimmune disease, and that one did come from a pill. It is involved in how cells grow and when they stop growing. And receptors for it sit in around thirty different tissues, including your brain, your heart, your gut and your pancreas. Almost nothing your body treats as a nutrient gets that kind of access.

Where I am currently based, the sun stops being an option for a third of the year. From November to early March it never climbs high enough over Montreal to make any vitamin D at all. Not a little. None. It can be a sunny, cloudless winter day, you can stand out in it for an hour, and your skin will produce nothing. The problem is the angle of the sun, not the weather. Montreal is not a special case either. It is latitude: the further north you live the longer that window lasts, and most people living through one every year have no idea it is happening.

So through those months I supplement. Besides the four eggs I eat most days all year round and the fish I eat regularly, I take 10,000 IU a day. I read enough research on the benefits of high doses to convince myself and I am running it as an experiment on my own body. Note that the official ceiling is 4,000. I am telling you what I do, not handing you a protocol to copy.

A few things worth knowing before you copy anybody. It is fat soluble, so take it with your biggest meal. The same dose lands completely differently in different people, because of your genes, your body fat, how well your gut absorbs it and whether you have enough magnesium to activate it. And the K2 everybody tells you to take alongside it does have research behind it, mostly on bone and on arterial stiffness, but none of it tests the thing people actually take it for, which is protecting you from a high dose. The only number that means anything is the one you get back from blood work, not the one on the bottle.

Your circadian clock

There are cells in your retina that are not there for seeing. Their only job is to report how much light is around to a clock in your brain, and that clock sets your cortisol, your body temperature and your hunger, and schedules your melatonin for roughly fourteen hours later. The light that lands in your eyes at seven in the morning is what decides whether you get sleepy at eleven that night.

Those cells measure light accurately. Your conscious brain does not. Your eyes adjust in seconds, so a lit room and the open sky both arrive as simply bright, and that kitchen at seven in the morning feels no different to you than the same kitchen at nine at night. A well lit kitchen is around 500 lux. Outside on a sunny morning it is 25,000. Fifty times the light, and none of it feels fifty times brighter. So you sit indoors believing you have had plenty of light, and your clock has had almost none.

I own a 10,000 lux mood light. I bought it years ago because a friend swore by it, and then it sat on my desk collecting dust, because I make a point of not being here in winter. Now it lives on my bedside with a different job. On gloomy mornings, when I am up before the sun, or when I just cannot get outside, I turn it on for ten minutes before I get out of bed. Not for my mood. To tell my clock the day has started.

Researchers sent people camping for a week with no artificial light at all, nothing but daylight and a campfire, and their whole clock moved, most of it in the first two nights. Melatonin started arriving more than two and a half hours earlier. They were falling asleep at a normal hour instead of at midnight.

The fire is probably part of why it works. A flame has almost no blue in it, so it never tells your brain the day is still going, the way a screen does. Neither does moonlight.

Which is the problem with what we replaced fire and candlelight with. The same blue light that sets your clock in the morning is the thing that wrecks it at eleven at night. There is a fix, and a lot of it comes down to the kind of bulb you screw into your lamp. That one gets its own Lab Note, and it is coming.

Nitric oxide

Three scientists took the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1998 for working out what this one molecule does, and most people have still never heard of it.

It relaxes and widens your blood vessels, which is why Viagra works, and it is a large part of how your blood pressure gets regulated. It keeps blood from clotting where it should not. It drives blood into muscle while you train and helps build new mitochondria there. It carries signals through your immune system. It moves blood to your brain, and it turns up in learning and memory. It even helps wounds heal.

Food raises it. Beets and leafy greens carry nitrate, and bacteria in your mouth and your gut turn that into nitric oxide. Your body also makes some of it from arginine, an amino acid you get from meat, fish, nuts and seeds.

The sun skips all of that. Your skin is already carrying a store of nitric oxide, waiting, and UVA releases it straight into your circulation. No eating, no digesting, no converting. One step.

For a molecule nobody talks about, nitric oxide is doing an enormous amount of work in your body, and I will come back to it.

Red and near-infrared light

I own a red light panel. A fancy one, and I did a lot of research before spending the money. The marketing on these is aggressive and the science underneath it is real, but the quality of the panel matters more than either. Plenty of the cheap LED panels out there are not strong enough to do anything at all, which makes them a waste of money and a daily waste of your time.

The research on the mechanism is solid. Those wavelengths are absorbed inside your mitochondria, the part of the cell that turns food and oxygen into usable energy. There are hundreds to thousands of them in a single cell, and when they start failing, the cell starts failing. How well your mitochondria are still running has become one of the clearest markers we have of how well you are aging.

And this is where nitric oxide comes back. It parks inside those same mitochondria and slows them down. The leading explanation for red light is that it knocks the nitric oxide loose and frees the mitochondria to work. One molecule, two jobs, both switched on by light.

The wavelength decides the job, because it decides the depth. Red, roughly 630 to 700 nanometers, works at the surface, which is why the evidence is strongest for skin and for hair. Near-infrared, up around 800 to 850, goes deeper into tissue, which is where the work on recovery and on pain comes from. It runs on a spectrum, and each band reaches a different layer of you and goes to work on the mitochondria sitting at that layer.

Here is what nobody selling you a panel mentions. Roughly forty percent of the energy in ordinary sunlight is already red and near-infrared, landing on all of you at once, over far more of you than any panel covers. Nobody invented this. The panel isolates one slice of daylight and hands it to you indoors, at a dose you control.

Which is what most treatments are. Isolate the thing, concentrate it, sell it back to the people who cannot reach the source. Same as a vitamin D pill. Worth paying for when the real thing is not available. So I run the panel religiously from November to March, the same way I run the vitamin D protocol. From April it goes surgical: a gloomy week, a faster recovery after a hard week in the gym. The rest of the time I go outside, because the original is out there and it has never sent me a bill.

Mood

Bright light for seasonal depression performs about as well as antidepressants do in clinical trials, and a mood lamp is nothing more than that. There is also a study where ultraviolet drove a real opioid response in mice, with real withdrawal when it was blocked. The researchers used the word addiction as a warning.

Nobody needed the paper. Look at where the first civilizations went up. Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River, and the Andes. Every one of them landed in the same warm band of the planet, roughly between ten degrees south and thirty five north, where the light was reliable and things grew. Everything built further out from that band cost more work: thicker walls, stored fuel, and food that had to be preserved through months when nothing came out of the ground. The ones who can get away still fly back toward it every winter, and the ones who cannot count the days until March. They built temples to it. We build airports to reach it.

Sunlight does one more thing for me. I am fifty, and the only thing about aging that actually bothers me is my reading vision. Distance is perfect. Close up, without glasses, I am done.

Then I found a free hack by accident, and you should test it if you wear reading glasses. A few years ago I got out of the pool, picked up my phone and started reading until I realized I had no glasses on. My optometrist friend explained it best: bright light shrinks your pupil, and a smaller opening gives you a deeper range of focus, exactly like a pinhole. One more reason to be out in the sun. The moment I walk back inside, I cannot read a text message if my life depended on it.

It is not a fix, and finding a real one is a mission I am on. That one gets its own Experiment as well.

The research on the benefits of the sun is still unfinished. New findings keep arriving, because the money went to the risks first.

One rule for everybody

Slip on a shirt. Slop on sunscreen. Slap on a hat.

Australia launched that in 1981. A marketing campaign built on a real problem, in the country with the worst skin cancer rates on earth at the time. It worked, and it got exported to every country that had a summer, where it never changed.

Australia has since rewritten it, and the new version is three sets of advice where there used to be one. The palest are told to stay out of the sun whenever the UV index hits 3, and to get their vitamin D from supplements instead. The darkest are told they do not need sunscreen routinely. Everybody in between is told to wear it any day the UV index hits 3 and to deliberately spend controlled time outdoors most days, for the vitamin D. Their own sentence for it: the balance of risks and benefits is not the same for everybody. So the country that wrote the rule split it in three, and North America is still running the 1981 version.

The real science was never about minutes. How much sun is safe for you is a fraction of your own burn threshold, and your starting point is inherited from people who lived at one latitude for thousands of years. Which makes how much sun is safe a question about your ancestors. Mine were Phoenician, calibrated for the eastern Mediterranean, and I am running that hardware in Montreal, at forty five degrees north with four months of no usable sun attached. A Scottish woman in Dubai has the same problem pointed the other way. One sentence was never going to fit both of us.

And hiding has its own cost. A famous Swedish study followed nearly thirty thousand women for twenty years and found that the ones who avoided the sun died earlier. This alone cannot prove the sun was the reason. But thirty thousand women followed for two decades, with the ones who stayed indoors doing worse and no study since finding the opposite, has to count for something.

Then there is the finding that reorganizes the whole argument. Researchers pooled the studies on melanoma and sun exposure and found two completely different patterns inside the same data. People who are outside every day show no increase in melanoma risk at all. The office worker who spends the year indoors and then takes one intense week somewhere sunny carries a real one, and a pattern of repeated sunburn roughly doubles it.

The reason is that skin adapts. Regular exposure thickens the outer layer and builds pigment, so the dose reaching the cells that matter keeps falling. Skin that has not seen real sun since October has none of that, and a Caribbean afternoon lands on it at full strength.

I know this one firsthand. Even though I try to keep a base tan all year long, three months of a Montreal fall takes most of it back, so I land in Sint Maarten at the end of December with a lot of it faded. My friends have me out on the boat the first day, and then again the next day, and the next. No shade, no protection, and the water throwing the light straight back up at me. This is exactly the pattern the research describes, and it is why I burn on the rare occasions I ever do.

One instruction sits above everything else in this section. Do not burn. It is the only part of the old advice that never expired, and now you know why it was the part that mattered. Everything else is a dial rather than a switch, and where you set it depends on your skin and where your grandparents came from. If you are pale, build up slowly. And stay out of tanning beds, which fire concentrated ultraviolet at unadapted skin on purpose. That is the exact pattern the research warns about, sold to you as a service.

What I do

I am lucky enough to be able to keep a baseline all year. Every winter, and for over twenty years now, I leave for the Caribbean or somewhere else sunny, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, sometimes back and forth. I even started a flip flop company somewhere in the middle of that, which tells you a bit about my lifestyle.

Then I build on it every spring. The moment the sun is out, I am out in it, and from the day the pool opens until the cold arrives in October I am outside for a good part of every day. This is the part most people skip, and it is the whole thing: I never let it go completely, so my skin never has to start over.

Now the part people argue with me about.

I have not worn sunscreen in over twenty years.

That does not mean you should not, and I want to be precise, because this gets heard wrong. I have no problem with protecting yourself from the sun. Shade, a hat, a shirt, and if it comes to it a mineral sunscreen, zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. Protecting your face is a real thing and you are not wrong to want to, because UV breaks down collagen and that part is not in dispute.

My problem is what is in most bottles. The chemical filters in them cross your skin and get into your blood. That is not a theory, it has been measured in people, in the FDA’s own clinical trials. Nobody has established how much harm it does yet, which is not the same as establishing that it does none. And it is not only sunscreen. It is makeup, moisturizer, serum and whatever else gets slapped on. You put a chemical film on the largest organ you own, and then you go and cook it in the sun for six hours. So I put nothing on my face or my body.

For what it is worth, I am fifty. I have almost no wrinkles or loose skin, while out in the sun with no sunscreen. I am in no way giving you skin advice. I eat real food, no junk and nothing processed, and I supplement with collagen. That, and maybe some good genes, must be doing a lot of the work here.

Last winter, for the first time, I did not go south. I was engulfed in a project, I had friends visiting from out of town, life happened. But I did everything I have just told you about: the panel ran all winter, the vitamin D was locked into the protocol, the mood light was on beside the bed. And by February the winter caught up with me anyway. Which tells you the sun is doing more than anything we know how to bottle or reproduce with a lamp.

That same winter my sister made a more permanent move. She was done with Canadian winters and not happy here anymore. Rather than complain about it for another decade, she spent the past couple of years traveling around Europe working out where to go. She chose Nice, in the south of France, sold her place, took her cats and never looked back. A few months in, she is happy and alive again.

So I did not solve that winter with my protocol. I patched it. My sister solved it.

If you take one thing out of this

Go outside in the morning for ten minutes. Not through a window, not through a windshield, and no sunglasses. Do not look directly at the sun. Just be out in it. Not for the vitamin D, because at that hour there is barely any UVB in the sky. Do it for the clock.

Ten minutes outside ends the guessing, and everything downstream of that clock starts running on time.

Do not be scared of your source of life. You are sun powered, and you are allowed to go outside.

Experiment 001 is complete. You just read it.

Georges

The long version of who is writing this is on the About page. Fifty years of taking things apart, in one place.

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

If you enjoyed it, leave me a like or a comment.

Join the lab

Reading time: 5 minutes

I’m the guy you sit next to at dinner who leaves you knowing six things you didn’t know existed that morning.

Because I dig. Every single day, into whatever caught my attention that week. A study everybody misread. A piece of technology that surfaced while nobody was looking. Why one technique works and the version everyone teaches doesn’t. What a molecule is actually doing inside your body. Why a company that looked perfect collapsed. A street most travelers walk straight past. I go until I genuinely understand it, and then I want to hand it over.

But handing it over has always had a ceiling. One person. A few, on a good night. Whoever happened to be sitting across from me, and only if the conversation went that way. If the subject never came up, it stayed in the vault.

And the vault is not a figure of speech. It started when I was a teenager, with magazine cuttings and pages torn out of books. Then the internet arrived and it became screenshots, PDFs, articles saved at two in the morning. Thousands of files, folders inside folders, books, notes, two hundred thousand photos and videos. Half of it read and taken apart properly. Half of it still waiting for its moment. And no memory holds all of that at once. The best of it comes back when a conversation calls for it. The rest waits.

Decades of collecting things that could change how you think, what you eat, how you train, how you recover and how you operate. And decades of my own: routines, techniques, small daily fixes I worked out years before the science caught up and confirmed them. Almost none of it written down. None of it in one place.

A lifetime of gold, handed out one plate at a time.

There had to be a better way to do it than that.

What an Experiment is

Usually one subject a week, pulled all the way down to the mechanism. Where the advice came from, what turns out to be true now, and what I actually do about it.

A Lab Note is the other format. Short, lands any day, something I found that was worth passing on and why it matters.

Reading time is printed at the top of every one, so you know what you are walking into before you start. Most Experiments run around ten minutes. A few times a year one runs longer, because the subject earned it and cutting it in two would have wrecked it. Those are tagged Deep Dive. The first one is one of those.

Never too long, never too thin. Some weeks it’s the brain. Some weeks food, or the body, or a business lesson that cost me real money, or a place worth flying to, or a study that quietly overturned something we all believed. And with every one, a couple of finds worth far more than the minutes they cost you.

I call them Experiments because that is what they are. I am not handing you a theory. I read, I study, and then I run it on myself before I say a word about it in public. If it doesn’t survive contact with my own life, it doesn’t go on the page.

And that is the whole reason this place is called what it is. The Modern Alchemist.

For years people kept stopping me mid-story to ask whether I had read The Alchemist. Different friends, different countries, the same sentence every time. That’s your story. When I finally sat down with it they were right, but not for the reason they meant. It wasn’t the story that got me, it was the shape of it. A man leaves what is comfortable, gets tested, gets lost, learns the lesson he actually needed, and finds the treasure was tied to where he started. That shape has a name, the hero’s journey, and once you know it you find it everywhere.

Then I went digging into the word itself, and what alchemy actually was is nothing like what most people picture. Both of those get their own Experiment. There is more on the About page.

Modern, because they were working with faith and a furnace. I get instruments, hundreds of years of science in my pocket, and an AI that never forgets. That part comes further down this page.

The brain doing the digging

Some background on the brain doing all this.

I always knew mine was different. It ran too fast and in too many directions at once, and I was certain nobody else’s worked like this, because a world full of them would be running at a speed nobody could stand. Nobody had a word for it. Not my parents, not my teachers, not the doctors. Then, about fifteen years ago, I met the word. ADHD.

I am not telling you that as a confession. I am telling you because it is why this exists. A brain that cannot leave anything alone is a strange thing to own and a useful thing to read. There is a great deal more to say about it and it gets its own Experiment.

How this actually gets written

I scribble notes constantly. I have just never been a writer. My brain moves way too fast for my fingers to keep up, so I talk instead. A lot, as anyone who knows me will confirm.

And now my AI writes. I named him Noa. He is my chief of staff, my lab partner, my sidekick.

Everything here starts with an idea and my voice. The stories, the opinions, the arguments are all mine, spoken out loud, usually while I am cooking or walking. He turns the flood into sentences.

I approve every word.

I am telling you this on page one not because it is a disclaimer, but because it is part of the story. And this partner did not come out of a box. We spent the past year building him: my files, my archives, my history, my way of thinking. A second brain, custom built, and the strangest thing I have ever made. More on that another week.

That is the real alchemy here. A mind that cannot stop chasing, finally paired with something that never loses the thread. And never forgets.

The promise

One Experiment a week. One subject I went deep on, and what actually came back.

We start with the sun, because it is the biggest thing we have all been told to hide from. Then the breath. After that, whatever I have taken apart that week.

If one ever feels like a waste of your time, tell me. I will hear about it either way.

And it is for everybody. You don’t need to be into science, or food, or health, or business. You just have to be curious about how things actually work.

However your own brain runs, you’re welcome here. You get the benefit of one that deep-dives everything and cannot leave a question alone.

Welcome to the lab.

Georges

The long version of who is writing this is on the About page. Fifty years of taking things apart, in one place.

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

Join the lab