Vol. II · No. 14 · May 18, 2026
A weekly dispatch on AI — in its utility & weirdness — by Garth House
Dispatch № 0014 · Essay · 9 min
AIchemy
inverted.
AI is
alchemy,
inverted.
↻ replay
It works and we don't know why. The true practitioners learn to endow themselves with its powers. The dishonest ones pretend they've bottled it. Seventeen years of watching SEO cycles is enough to know which kind tends to win the relationship.
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or ↻ listen, 12 min
By Garth House
Principal · Wax Plum · 17 yrs in SEO, two in alchemy
The Practice · Embedded AI
An embedded CMO who builds you the machine — then hands you the keys.
Three, in alchemy.
九转还丹
一
Embed
炼精化气
A few months inside your team as a fractional CMO. We learn the process and find where AI actually earns its keep.
二
Build
炼气化神
We build the workflow with you and burn off the hype. What survives the fire is yours to keep.
三
Hand off
炼神还虚
Your team runs the machine. You keep the recipe. We stay on to advise, analyze, and adjust.
The Index.
Recent · 6 of 6
AI is alchemy, inverted.
It works and we don't know why. A field guide to working with that anyway.
On not de-weirding the weirdness
Why the framework you bought is already wrong about your business.
A demo is not a system
Three minutes on the difference, with one client example.
KohnAI: capacity gain in one engagement
What changed when we stopped trying to make Larry faster.
The CFO is starting to suspect
They optimized the wrong variable. They are not wrong.
Core Concept №3: Copilot, not autopilot
A 90-second take on keeping the human at the wheel.
Lately on social.
All shorts & carousels ↗
Colophon · The Practice
If you'd rather
do the work
together.
Wax Plum embeds with marketing teams as a fractional CMO for a handful of months — long enough to learn your processes, find where AI actually puts something on the table (and where it doesn't), build the workflows with you, teach your team to run them, then step back to advise from the side. You keep the recipe.
1 · Embed
2 · Build
3 · Hand off
4 · Adjust