About Side Effects

The Short:

Side Effects is written by Ali Mirza — a medical student, former founder, and compulsive thinker who refuses to stay in one lane. Every essay examines the unintended consequences of how systems actually work: medicine, money, education, incentives, ambition, and the ideas that shape them. If you're building something while navigating a traditional career, or wondering why the advice you've been given never quite fits — this is for you.

The Long:

Most newsletters give you the conventional wisdom. Side Effects gives you what happens after the conventional wisdom plays out — the second-order effects, the hidden incentives, the things that are true but never get said out loud.

Ali is a second-year medical student who previously built a six-figure marketing agency, has lived across five countries, manages a family investment portfolio, and is trying to build something meaningful while finishing his degree.

He writes about what he's actually learning — not to perform expertise, but to think in public and invite serious readers into the conversation. The readers who stick around are usually people who feel slightly out of place in their own field. They're resource-constrained, intellectually restless, and building something on the side. They're the medical student who's quietly learning to code. The consultant who wants to start a company. The person who took the traditional path but refuses to disappear into it. Side Effects is for them.