EIGHTH POST

July 10, 2026 · 9:05 PM

This blog was mentioned in real life today. That makes it real now. One should be very careful: I very much so consider words to be spells. You say certain things in certain ways, and then stuff happens. That's virtually indistinguishable from spellcasting.

I should write a whole report. I'm not going to. I'm not going to because I have been greenlit on writing a piece, maybe multiple pieces, for a PUBLICATION! That's pretty exciting!

I sent their editor in chief an email containing a list of things I've wanted to/been considering writing/would be a fit for. One of these was their favorite. I hope you are excited to read the whole thing. I know that I am excited both to write and therefore meet whatever piece comes out of me. I do not really know what the actual piece will look like yet.

I have this thing where the words come first and then I have to figure out what they mean. It's really goddamn annoying. Do you know what it's like to repeat "unicorn vending machine" to yourself for nine months? Do you know what it's like to walk around mumbling "random worm generator"? I do, it's weird and I alienate people.

Anyway. Here's the pitches for pieces I sent. You'll recognize some of these as things that already loosely exist in the extended me-universe:

"Which Parts of the Future Are Real?
Part of my job is taking calls with founders across totally unrelated frontiers with zero mandate to say yes to any of them. In a single week I talked to a guy selling dog collars that translate barking via an "associative learning chip", a guy who wants to use worm as a precognitive trading signal, and a guy engineering biophilic enzymes for agricultural improvements. A monthly column where I bring back three or four of these and try to sort the genuinely-arriving future from the beautifully-packaged nonsense, with the appropriate amount of "I might be getting played."

I Sequenced My Own Genome Off the Internet (and It Actually Fixed Me)
For a few hundred bucks and a spit tube you can now get your whole genome sequenced and run it through clinical-grade variant tools that were locked in labs five years ago. I did it, went down the rabbit hole, and found a connective-tissue variant that reframed a decade of weird symptoms my doctors kept treating as unrelated. The human version of "the future is here". This isn't about gene editing in a headline, but about a normal person becoming the lead researcher on her own body, and what that does to your relationship with the entire medical system, and the tools, safeguards, and potential of giving this data to an LLM.

Notes From the Gray Market
There's an entire population (mostly women) self-administering peptides and GLP-1s sourced outside the pharmacy system, comparing notes in group chats like a distributed clinical trial nobody's officially running. I'm embedded in some of it. The dispatch would be more like who these people are, why they do it, what they've actually learned, and what it means that the most aggressive biotech adoption in America is happening in DMs instead of clinics. Not a "is this safe" scare piece, but a "this is already happening and here's what it feels like from inside" piece.

Pop-Ups Are the New Startup
I do "spectacle as a service", like we talked about. IRL stunts that use memetics to get frontier tech outsized attention (the Chinese peptide rave that made the NYT was, technically, my birthday party). The thesis here is: in an era where digital attention is saturated and fake, the physical event is the last real distribution channel, and the pop-up has quietly replaced the startup as the unit of cultural experimentation. The on-the-ground practitioner examination of the IRL-is-the-new-URL idea.

The Infrastructure of Serendipity
At a secret dinner I ran in Buenos Aires I seated 45 strangers using a system borrowed from the early Royal Society. I deliberately engineered who sat next to whom to force the right collisions. That's the thread under most of what I build: Can you actually engineer serendipity? Not networking or matchmaking apps, but the older, stranger question of whether design can raise the odds that two people who should meet actually do. An essay on the people trying to build infrastructure for chance, using my own hits and failures as the material.

The Human API
People increasingly treat themselves like programmable systems. Sleep scores, nutrition stacks, AI therapists, genome analysis, productivity protocols, personality models. The language of software has become the language people use to describe themselves. What happens when "optimizing yourself" becomes the default way to think about being human?"

I started doing this blog as practice in longform -- I needed to get my brain to think in more than just tweets -- and it's been really helpful so far. I also started it so that I could get practice in just doing the thing, even when I don't want to, as prep for this kind of thing.

It turns out I'm gonna get a heck of a lot less practice than I thought before it's go time!!