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.