I built startups and shot documentaries for twenty years, on four hours of sleep and a pot of coffee a day. At forty-one a doctor in an ICU told me I had seventy-two hours to live. An exotic microbe, officially. Unofficially, two decades of running a body the way I ran a company, with every warning light taped over.

I lived. The people who saved me treated the microbe, which was their job and they were good at it. Nobody in that building was being paid to ask why a healthy man in his thirties had been so easy to knock over. I spent the next twenty years asking it myself, mostly by sitting with people who knew more than I did — nutritionists, fasting clinicians, bodyworkers, breath trainers, and a few plain-spoken types whose entire gift is getting somebody to do the thing they already know they should be doing. They disagreed with each other about almost everything, which turned out to be the useful part.

What survived my own testing was dull. Morning light. Real food. Sleep. Moving heavy things. Having something worth getting up for.

The habit did not stay in my body. I had watched a whole field treat the symptom and never go looking for what caused it, and afterwards I kept finding that shape in other places. In how a drug trial gets written up. In who profits from a surveillance rollout. In the story a government tells about a war it started.

So this publication runs health next to pharma audits next to geopolitics. One question underneath all of it, and it is the only thing I have ever been devout about. What is actually driving this, and who would rather I did not ask.

I am not a clinician and none of this is medicine. What one body taught a man who was slow to ask.