The Uber Eats to OnlyFans Pipeline - Rabbit Hole #2 - #1091

Kicking off with a taste test: I read ages ago that folks in America drop salted peanuts into full‑fat cola, so I saved the idea and brought it in; the salt should mute bitterness and make the sweetness pop, and the acidity plus bubbles might change the whole thing, so we let it sit before sipping.

On camera it looked wild and over‑fizzy, but the sip was sweet‑meets‑salty and then you crunch the peanuts; it tastes exactly like what it is, and the vibe may be more art project than revelation.

Quick quiz for the table: who’s the top‑earning athlete of all time—and yes, I’m counting past civilizations; answer was the Roman chariot star Gaius Appuleius Diocles, with modern‑day equivalent earnings in the tens of billions, which makes Jordan and Tiger look small.

Coming from the UK, it still shocks me that American leagues cap salaries and reward last place with the best picks, which feels more planned economy than the way Europe runs sport.

What’s overhyped or underhyped right now; I’m exhausted by all‑or‑nothing takes on AI, even though it will change a ton, and the NFT mania felt like a cleaner bubble because balanced skeptics were easier to find.

My contrarian long is mainstream media because heads of state and senior staff still orient to those headlines, even while nobody in our circles admits to watching; I clocked that while a gym TV cut from an eardrum extraction to cracked ribs at breakfast, and somehow cable still turns gore into daytime programming.

I’m weirdly bullish on the UK pound‑for‑pound against even Rome because of enduring IP—think DeepMind and Berners‑Lee—while America is world‑class at selling what we cook up; on models, I want a group chat where Claude, ChatGPT, and friends argue, roast, and converge, like Grok’s agents but rowdier.

Gen Z ‘anxiety bags’ are a thing now—mini kits with fans, cold packs, and fidgets—and instead of dunking, I asked what would go in ours; it opens the bigger point that worthy causes can bloat into jargon and litmus tests, like that Canadian press conference with an acronym that reads like a paragraph.

I joked my own kit is a bag of drugs, but seriously, people are trained to medicalize everything and then lean on labels; I’ve met homeless folks who prefer opting out, and I’ve seen friends stack diagnoses where sometimes the core issue was drugs, not a lifelong disorder.

Nuance matters—type 1 and type 2 diabetes aren’t the same, and mental health is both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed; even naming can steer behavior, which is why I’ve joked cybersecurity would be taken more seriously if we called threats ‘computer‑transmitted infections’.

I’m making a film on kratom because the over‑the‑counter extract with 7‑hydroxymitragynine behaves like a stealth opioid and people tell me withdrawals can outrank heroin; whole‑leaf powder is one thing, but the concentrated 7‑OH shots and pills are a different animal.

In Austin I watched it hook people hard—folks timing mini‑mart openings and even noticing when companies quietly halved the active dose; I tried one of the popular ‘feel free’ bottles years back and it made me anxious and nauseous, and mixing those tonics with alcohol had friends blacking out.

The sneaky part is you can function while high and miss how looped you are until you lash out over something dumb, like I did over a ten‑dollar bottle; I’ll still test 7‑OH for the doc and go to the source in Southeast Asia, and I’m not scared of withdrawals even though I know that’s a roll of the dice.

Genetics testing floored me more than any supplement—turns out I clear dopamine slowly, absorb magnesium poorly, and morphine at normal hospital doses could be lethal for me; feeding the report into an LLM gave a scary‑accurate personality readout and likely risks like glaucoma and stroke that lined up with my grandfather.

Pet peeve interlude: American bathroom stalls have gaps you can sight through, which ruins compartmentalization, and I think a lot of sanity in modern life comes from better boundaries between rooms, topics, and apps.

Side hustle corner: an Uber Eats driver started adding tasteful foot photos to delivery pics and her tips jumped, which is the quiet ‘delivery app to OnlyFans’ conveyor belt nobody talks about.

The ‘male living spaces’ subreddit is peak bachelor archeology—stormtroopers beside bench presses, couches that trap doors, and breeze‑block nightstands—and it made us joke about Norway’s cushy prisons and how different outcomes might be if incentives flipped.

Best high‑agency story I’ve read: ‘Analyst No. 3’ flew to the Strait of Hormuz, bribed his way onto a paddle boat with camera glasses, and literally counted tankers to see if the choke point was shut; it wasn’t, they were just dodging trackers and paying a toll, which explained why oil didn’t spike the way headlines implied.

That’s dark‑tourism meets market intel, and it rhymes with the Lord Miles betting mess that Coffeezilla flagged, where on‑chain sleuthing tied a wager to a staged interruption.

I once dodged an arrest by ‘going CIA’ without knowing it—cops knocked after we’d tossed junk off a balcony, my buddy yelled ‘get naked,’ and suddenly we looked like a domestic dispute they didn’t want to book; add that to my other ‘life hack’ of forgetting trash day and hauling bags in my truck until I find a dumpster.

My current life hack is skepticism: when someone leads with ‘a study shows’ or ‘science‑backed,’ I assume it’s flimsy until proven solid, because so much social science fails to replicate and gets rebranded instead of retired.

That habit protects you from appeals to authority, and it’s relevant to a California bill that would chill watchdog videos under the banner of safety; I’ve seen similar moves in Puerto Rico where they weakened transparency and the power grid’s privatization funneled money to consultants while residents still live with outages.

A quote I love says the ideal is when work and play blur so cleanly you can’t tell which is which; the trap is playing the wrong game with the wrong scoreboard, because the metric rewires your motives and identity even if it’s not what you truly value.

I try to keep the ‘this feels like play’ test alive so I don’t trade a good life for hollow wins, and I’m also experimenting with how I consume content—boom‑scrolling on a steep treadmill and fantasizing about killing vanity stats and adding a single ‘golden like’ each week to surface true depth.

Creators can also pick better metrics on purpose, like selling a ninety‑nine‑cent book to measure real business interest instead of chasing views, which beats falling for the McNamara fallacy of optimizing what’s easy to count instead of what matters.

That’s the spirit of this series—I know these long hangs may never outrun a celebrity episode on raw views, but they’re the kind of conversation I want to have, and that’s the scoreboard I’m choosing.

I teased you for dropping a viral high-agency essay without even tracking it, then admitted I’d checked Similarweb and saw you’d hit a million readers.

Blogs felt unfashionable and my links got buried, but doing the uncool thing worked; the hard part is knowing if you’re on the frontier or just being odd, which is why you need honest friends and a bit of nerve.

The British class ladder still sticks—your accent and school follow you—so I told the Rudolf Hess tale as a reminder that tight power circles and status hunger can drive people to wild, delusional moves.

Churchill nearly met Hitler, which shows how murky history feels in real time; a brush with charisma swayed Chamberlain, and you wonder how a Churchill meeting might’ve bent the arc.

We pulled up the 30 under 30 fraud watch and then the SBF twist: his Anthropic stake could’ve been worth tens of billions, but bankruptcy sold illiquid holdings early at a steep discount.

People who held Bitcoin on FTX got repaid at crash-day prices, not after the rebound, because that’s how the process worked, which felt like a second hit to the victims.

FTX sponsored our newsletter, and I refused to cut a paragraph noting the fuzzy FTX–Alameda tie; they ghosted us and kept the money, and later that link proved to be the rot.

Momentum often beats talent; if you seem to be winning, people forgive everything—Fire Festival almost would’ve cast Billy as a genius, and Kanye’s undeniable music lets him outrun scandal.

We’re wired to chase signals like beauty and bangers, and optics can amplify or erase truth; that’s why an unfair jab hurts most when others might believe it.

Supernormal stimuli hijack instincts the way an oversized, brighter egg draws a bird from its own nest; junk food, filters, and outrage play the same trick on us.

Cheesecake would blow a hunter-gatherer’s mind—fat plus sugar, creamy plus crunchy—and beetles once tried to mate with shinier bottles; crank the trait and you get Fisherian runaway.

There is an antidote: brief detox resets your baseline, like quitting soda until the first sip suddenly tastes sickly sweet.

A writer we like tried an hour a day of staring at a wall; when your stimulus floor drops that low, emotions surge up, which rhymes with extreme meditation feats we’ve seen in legend.

Someone’s launching a no-screens-for-a-year experiment with brain scans before and after; staying fully screen-free in modern life sounds near impossible, but I’m curious.

Your line about the moth and the lamp made me think we’ll laugh in fifty years at what we once called AI.

Watch The Thinking Game—DeepMind’s move 37 felt like a hinge in history—but don’t be soothed by safety press releases; incentives push every lab to race.

On the bright side, an LLM finally solved my decade-long dermatitis by pointing me to a basic antifungal treatment; not headline-grabbing, but life-changing.

We’ve always had Luddites and Romantics as guardrails, but almost no one wants to go back to pre-industry; I think we’ll solve more than we break.

Early data hints assistants nudge people toward the center, but deepfakes also make reality slippery enough that only firsthand experience feels trustworthy.

The precautionary principle spotlights risks we can see while hiding the solutions we can’t yet imagine; historically, we muddle through by solving forward.

Markets are goofy too—Allbirds said “AI” and the stock popped, which echoes the old blockchain rebrand mania and shreds any neat efficient-market story.

Factories in India now pay workers to film tasks so robots can learn, while Tesla wants a warehouse of robots to self-play their way into competence, AlphaZero-style.

Real-world dexterity is messy—home robots still fumble dishwashers—and Tesla leaned on top human drivers to shape its model before trying bolder training, which all feels like finishing the champagne on a sinking ship.

Before we wrap, Phil Collins is finally heading to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2026; in perfect British fashion, my dad said he’s obviously pleased and honored and left it at that—what a note to end on.

Goodbye, everybody.

I’ve listed the most life-changing books I’ve found, with notes on why—grab them free at chriswillx.com.