The best Bay Area sushi is not in San Francisco
and the streets are saying ChatGPT is making you dumber
WHAT I’M INTO
Press Play: “RIP KP” by King Princess
A few weeks ago, I played this slutty anthem after a (1) LAX martini served on the rocks (??) on my way to SFO for a friend’s wedding. The perfect cocktail presentation when “If you want it on the floor, you can have it like that” loops in your head, in my opinion. I knew I was in for a treat when Daisy (of Dirt Megaverse fame) asked if I had watched the music video. I swiftly tapped on the Safari app to find this treasure before toggling to airplane mode and sent it out to three friends. It’s still stuck in my head, so I’m making it your problem.
Borrow from your local public library: Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik
Lili Anolik is a bit kooky, which I learned from a 2022 How Long Gone episode where she’s featured discussing her hatred for hydrating and how she always orders the thing at The Odeon (salmon + greens, I think?) even though she doesn’t like it that much. She locks onto certain topics and people like a pitbull. Some of her obsessions include Brett Easton Ellis and Eve Babitz. I love a curious girl, so I listened to her Bennington College podcast, skipped her first Babitz book, and made note of this Didion x Babitz crossover release. I like letting the universe choose my books for me, so I took it as my sign that it was time to indulge when the Agoura Hills Calabasas Barnes & Noble advertised it at a $3 discount. In many ways, this cotton candy read shines a light on the highs and lows of intimate female friendships. Perhaps because she’s a Vanity Fair/AirMail editor/writer, Anolik’s pen brings you along for the ride like she’s dishing gossip. I don’t mind her style, except I hate when a writer calls me “Reader” in prose. At the end of the book, I felt like I broke into someone’s home and pored over their personal belongings—a little dirty and ashamed, but informed. I’ve long considered Babitz an LA writer, but she also lived and worked in NYC. Babitz felt she couldn’t become an adult in LA, something only possible in “a place that demanded exertion, endurance, defiance” like New York. I was born + bred in LA, but also feel that New York raised me. Cheers to that!
Anti-algorithm news: “Peter Thiel and the Antichrist” (New York Times)
I’m giving you a break this time by assigning required “listening” rather than “required reading,” as I usually do. Ross Douthat interviewed Peter Thiel last week and created a safe space for Peter to yap and unravel. Because Ross is who he is, I anticipated religion to come up in their conversation. But Peter spoke so candidly that some of the things he said would qualify him for a 5150 hold in California. Has someone checked on him recently? Anyway, I can’t decide if he’s being so public because we’re at the point of no return or because he thinks he’s God. When asked if the human race should survive, he hesitated before answering yes, as transhumans (but not that kind of trans).
In case you’d still like some on-theme accelerationist assigned reading, here’s Sam Altman’s blog promoting an optimistic AI and humanoid robot future (Altman doesn’t want you to be scared!). Should I be investing in Uranium? How can I buy some? If you read that, you also have to skim this coverage on an Apple paper showing current AI isn’t smarter than a child/can’t handle complexity, nor solve children’s puzzles. Balance! My takeaway, for now, is that we should all get familiar with AI and AI-generated content while strengthening our media literacy. Just don’t use it to outsource critical thinking (more on this below!). I also wouldn’t trust that the information you feed your LLM of choice is private; imagine you’re talking to Altman, Thiel, etc..
PULSE CHECK!
“Pulse Check” curates healthcare updates to complement the longer, more researched “On Health” pieces. See the latest On Health edition below, and the pulse check behind the paywall.
People who rely on ChatGPT may be losing their ability to think critically, per MIT researchers. It’s funny to me that they built in an LLM trap, assuming people would run the study through an LLM to make sense of it. They asked 54 people aged 18-29 to draft SAT essays and split them into three groups using OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o model, Google, or brains only. Based on electroencephalogram (EEG) brain wave measures (electrical activity/neurons firing), they found LLM users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Their essays were also unoriginal. So you’re slower, cringe, AND cheesy. Nightmare. This is still under peer review, but the results make sense. Our brains are muscles. They’re also a little lazy. We build neural pathways that can be reinforced and strengthened or weakened and pruned away, but they’ll take the path of least resistance whenever possible. The cool thing about this is that they showed LLMs to be helpful tools when people used their brains to draft early versions, then refined them using LLMs. LLMs are a useful tool, but outsourcing critical thought is LAME.
Sharing these results with Ringo Starr Biotech startup Bexorg is restarting dead human brains. It’s less Matrix-y than it sounds, I promise. Yale scientists restored brain cell activity in dead pigs, and they’re now trying it on human brains. The brains arrive in their labs with no electrical activity, and they use proprietary BrainEx technology to restore blood flow with fake blood and reboot cellular activity. The goal? Accelerate drug development for central nervous system conditions (think: neuro, psych) by testing directly on human brain cells instead of animal brain cells to get a clearer picture of drug dosing, safety, and efficacy. Neuroscience is still a baby science (<100 years old). Most neuroscience drug trials fail. There’s so much unmet need, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what we know about our brains. I hope this helps us crack the code.
Khosla Ventures is betting on therapeutic plasma exchange for longevity. Circulate Health showed its technology lowered biological age, then raised $12 million in seed funding to scale its tech to 24+ additional longevity clinics by end of year. Each session runs patients a smooth $10k. I’d still like to add myself to the waitlist for
’s mom’s plasma should she ever be interested in monetizing.Remember when I said we couldn’t get psychedelics approved because the FDA didn’t think we’d behave? RIP (temporarily) Lykos. This administration (i.e., RFK Jr.) is paving the way for a more favorable regulatory and political environment for psychedelics, starting an arms race to be first-to-market AKA the HBIC of psychedelics. Beckley and Atai Life Sciences announced a merger last month; today, Beckley released Phase 2b clinical trial data showing their inhaled mebufotenin (reformulated from DMT) was better at reducing depression in people living with treatment-resistant depression vs an active comparator. That they saw these results within the month is awesome, because most psych drugs take weeks/months of calibration. In February, GH Research published data on its version of inhaled 5-MeO-DMT, but their trial was smaller and compared against a placebo.
In my 2025 oracle newsletter, I predicted retail pharmacies are out and DTC drugs are in for 2025. Bloomberg reported that HHS officials met with big retailers like Amazon + Walmart to find ways for Americans to buy their drugs directly from pharma companies. I gather this was more of an exploratory conversation, but I am bullish on this as a way to trim the fat in the distribution chain (yes, I’m talking about PBMs).
In that same vein, how did I miss that Walgreens is going private?
WHAT I’M UP TO
Pacific fish is my favorite fish. I’ll choose Pacific Fish from a strip mall in Los Angeles or Honolulu over a $200 omakase in NYC. So when SNP proposed a drive out to her favorite sushi restaurant in the Bay, I assumed it would be in San Francisco. It was not! Curious, I googled the place and was immediately sold. The best sushi in San Francisco is