Heavies

Every so often, my Muay Thai gym Five Points Academy invites a trainer from Thailand to spend a few months with us, something like an informal residency. These guys are the real deal, often legends in the sport, who help run our fight team and make some extra money offering private lessons on the side. There’s Arjun Jud, the coach who developed a young Buakaw into a hardbodied world champion and arguably the most famous fighter outside of Thailand.

Recent news: I was profiled by Business Insider and the headline contained the gorgeous phrase “Now he’s 41 with abs.” When I die please carve it on my tombstone. My podcast SUPERHUMAN was recently featured by Apple! Give it a listen if aging, transhumanism, elite athletes, and peptides are your jam. For SSENSE I interviewed Palestinian poet and rabblerouser Mohammed El-Kurd, whose essay collection Perfect Victims should be mandatory reading.

"In terms of the practice, you don’t force anything. It’s more of an approach where we have to remove the interference of what’s causing a body to not heal by itself." When Yukiya Takahashi moved to Australia from Japan at age 13 to learn English, his host family always had a massage table present.

Last year on Valentine’s Day morning, I hiked on up to this anonymous apartment on the east side of Manhattan to meet with a lawyer and startup founder named Aron D’Souza.

As president of the New York Society of Seasonal Allergy Sufferers, my breath is something that I only became nominally aware of in adulthood. I blissfully grew up near the beach in California, so my lungs were always kissed by clean ocean air, and it was only when I moved to New York in 2008 and was subjected to the crush of pollen-spewing male trees that I became a mucus goblin, every spring, without fail.

If you were to start training martial arts, there’s a strong possibility that one of the first accounts you’ll come across is fightTIPS by Shane Fazen (YouTube follower count: 3.41 million). A former competitor himself, he’s been posting instructionals and tutorials on YouTube since 2008, and is one of the most vital voices in the online coaching space. He’s a real OG, with a deep well of knowledge—his stretching routine fixed parts of me I never knew needed fixing.

When we first adopted Hank he immediately glommed onto me. It was to the point that whenever I left the apartment, he would cry nonstop (except his bulldog cry was more like the low-register screech of a baby dinosaur). My mere presence seemed to soothe him, made him feel moored. He was the moon and I was his Earth. This was around 2019, shortly after my wife and I got married. It took a while for us to figure out why Hank took to me so quickly.

These last few months I’ve been immersed in peptide/steroid land for an upcoming project, and in hopes of better understanding that world I’ve been occasionally injecting myself in the belly with NAD+, this coenzyme that’s important for helping our cells stay energized. It helps with energy, repair, brain fog, and more.

Recently the good folks at i-D asked me to contribute a list of Ins and Outs for 2026. Scrolling, somewhat predictably, was one of my outs, and judging from everyone’s predictions/forecasts for the upcoming year—including my own on SSENSE—it certainly feels like we’ve hit a mass psychosis in terms of Internet fatigue. We grouchy bro.

Last summer, I made it to the final round of interviews for the top editor role at a popular website that deploys affiliate links — which I think would’ve been a fun and interesting job — but I ended up bricking the final interview with TK IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE INDUSTRY when I doubled down on my argument that good taste isn’t intrinsic, and can in fact be learned. That, and my face probably performed some weird contortion when I was asked about my enthusiasm for Amazon Prime Day.