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.

Arthur Brooks, 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.

Join the lab

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.

Bryan Johnson 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 Marc Andreessen'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.

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 Wim Hof 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. Andrew Huberman 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.

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.

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.

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