This page lists what I’m focusing on these days. Last updated August 2026.
Most of my attention is here. The question I keep turning over is what happens to comparison marketplaces when people stop searching and start asking an AI instead. The old model — win the search result, pass the visitor along, collect a referral fee — is quietly eroding, and I’d rather be early to whatever replaces it than defend it.
So: what optimising for answer engines actually means as opposed to search engines, and how much of the operation I can hand to AI automations without losing the part that makes it worth using.
The Teen Builder Studio — giving young people real projects, real mentors and a real audience, rather than another credential to collect.
Underneath that, I’m trying to build a proper theoretical backbone for adaptive capacity: what it actually is, and what conditions grow it. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s work on emotion as the brain’s way of deciding what matters keeps turning out to be load-bearing.
The newsletter is monthly rather than fortnightly, deliberately. I’d rather write fewer things I mean than keep a schedule. And what I most want next is to work directly with one school, in person, over a term — writing about school transformation from outside a school is starting to feel thin.
I’m in the middle of a year-long training in Somatic Dialogue with Berrak Yedek and Beliz Demircioğlu. Around 145 hours — intensive workshops plus weekly sessions online.
Transitions. Carrying my weight to wherever I am. Settling into a move, giving it the attention and time it deserves, seeing it through to completion before the next one begins. Transitions are where I lose myself, and they’re where most of the learning is.
Permission to find my good enough. Not being good enough, being insufficient, lacking — I keep noticing these aren’t stable properties of a person. They’re subjective states, tied to a particular situation at a particular moment, and they move. Staying alert to how transient they are, and watching how my body changes with them, is a skill rather than a mood. It’s taken me a while to see it as something I can choose.
Audience versus witness. The difference between wanting to be watched and wanting to be seen. Performing to a room is not the same as being in dialogue with someone who is present with you, and I’m still working out which one I’m reaching for.
A slow project of illustrated speculative fragments, under my own name rather than LearnButWhy’s. Three seeds so far: merging with AI, the fiction of a single unified self once you take the microbiome seriously, and a thirst for connection that keeps getting displaced into artificial networks.
I want three or four pieces I actually believe in before I put any of it anywhere.
Martin Picard on mitochondria — the idea that they do something closer to sensing and signalling than to running a power plant, and that this reaches all the way up into how we experience stress. It has been rearranging things for me.
Otherwise: Anne Carson, W.G. Sebald, Calvino. Bion and the field theorists, slowly and with difficulty. Science fiction whenever I want to enjoy myself rather than improve.
Three children. A farm in Mersin that I think about more than I visit. An apartment renovation that has taught me things about patience I did not ask to learn.
Write to me if any of this overlaps with what you’re doing.