The last few months have been quite a time. My daughter went off to college in New Orleans (Roll Wave), my youngest entered high school, my oldest started the job hunt and will probably end up in grad school, my book, Shroomies, just landed in stores, and I separated from my wife. That relationship, which buoyed us into middle age, no longer served either of us in its current form. And so it goes.

Buy Shroomies

As you might suspect, I’ve been quite busy dealing with all of that over the last few months, and as a result, I let this newsletter lapse. I’m bringing it back this month.

Why? Because the world, despite evidence to the contrary, needs art. It needs language and growth and change. It needs voices in the darkness calling for light and voices in the light calling for us to turn toward the darkness, if only for a moment.

I forgot a lot of these needs this year. I forgot to read and write and bring outside voices to the forefront of our minds. So I’m going to climb back in and get it done.

All I ask is for you all to share some of your favorite books with me. I’ve been so deep in my own shit that I haven’t had time to look around. Respond to this email with what you’ve been reading.

Further, if you’ve ever been thinking about a social media and newsletter strategy, I’m still taking clients. The $1,500 price tag includes a weekly call to level set your goals and help setting up and running your weekly newsletter. I also do a bit of light press relations and investor/speaking prep. I’m ready to work if you need help.

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I hope November will be a good one and the December following will bear us all into cozy season. It’s been hard but I’m happy. I hope you are, too.

And now, on to the books.

Devil On My Shoulder

by Alice Cooper and Daniel Richler

I knew approximately nothing about Alice Cooper or, to his parents, Vincent Damon Furnier, when I picked this book up. I was pleasantly surprised. Written in an almost Hollywood-esque, jokey style, the book tells the story of a kid who wanted to play music with his friends and discovered a knack for showmanship. You’ll notice one wild thing about this book: there is very little mention of the debauchery attributed to Heavy Metal in the 1970s and 1980s and instead there are a lot of insider tales of growth, change, and joy. It’s a really nice read.

Pattern Recognition

William Gibson

William Gibson’s Blue Ant series — Pattern Recognition is the first book — deals with reality. Set in a post-9/11 world, the book eschews sci-fi tropes for reality. This is Gibson’s writing at its most masterful and fluid and I keep going back to this passage that defines Gibson’s writing in this period:

It’s not his best book but it is his most beautiful.

The Last Lone Inventor

Evan I. Schwartz

This is a fascinating tale of the inventor of television and the corporate boss who worked hard to steal the earth-shattering invention out from under him. Philo Farnsworth was an Idaho potato farmer’s son with a penchant for science. While plowing a field one day, young Farnsworth came up with the idea for electronic television. The systems then used to display moving images were clunky and mechanical, whereas Farnsworth’s system used magnets and electron tubes to paint a picture one line at a time on a specially coated screen. On the other side was the rapacious head of RCA, who wanted Farnsworth’s work and patents for himself. The end result of this battle is probably sitting in front of you right now in the form of an LCD screen, but the tale of how we got here is fast-paced and well told.

Bonus Show

Phony - Hulu

Phony is a funny, well-paced psychological thriller in the vein of Widow’s Bay. The story — about a mom who disappears — is quite clever and uses imposter tropes to make you think everyone in the show is nuts. The show is still running so you can jump in, watch a few of the first episodes, and give it a try. I’ve been enjoying it.

Hello from the ashes of my life!

This summer has been wild and difficult and strange and I’ve been super remiss at posting to this newsletter. I’ll get started in October but until then I have two things I wanted to share. First, I’m having a book party for my new book, Shroomies, on Tuesday, September 29th at Krupa Grocery in Windsor Terrace. This is a celebration and a chance to give you all some signed copies so I’d love for you to attend. I’ll have a bit of an open bar and some food so PLEASE come by if you can.

RSVP

Want to read the book? You can buy it in hardcover and for Kindle here and I’m happy to send you a signed copy at cost if you’d like. Please let me know!

Buy Shroomies

I also launched a new gadget site called Gearology. Basically it’s Gizmodo but for old people like me. I’ve been writing weekly deep dives about cool tech I loved from back in the day. Please check it out!

Until next time, please keep me in your prayers, atheistic or otherwise.

Best,

JB

Gearology

The OLPC XO was the little green laptop that tried to change the world

In the mid-2000s, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte had a wild idea: what if every child in the developing world had a computer? And this wasn’t some smoky gaming cafe or a school computer. It was a machine that the child owned and could use every day. I twas connected to the nascent internet, had a simple operating system, and was rugged enough to survive any conditions…

Read more

2 months ago · John Biggs

Gearology

The Motorola ROKR was the iPhone’s strange first draft

Steve Jobs was pissed…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · John Biggs

Hello from the ashes of my life!

This summer has been wild and difficult and strange and I’ve been super remiss at posting to this newsletter. I’ll get started in October but until then I have two things I wanted to share. First, I’m having a book party for my new book, Shroomies, on Tuesday, September 29th at Krupa Grocery in Windsor Terrace. This is a celebration and a chance to give you all some signed copies so I’d love for you to attend. I’ll have a bit of an open bar and some food so PLEASE come by if you can.

RSVP

Want to read the book? You can buy it in hardcover and for Kindle here and I’m happy to send you a signed copy at cost if you’d like. Please let me know!

Buy Shroomies

I also launched a new gadget site called Gearology. Basically it’s Gizmodo but for old people like me. I’ve been writing weekly deep dives about cool tech I loved from back in the day. Please check it out!

Until next time, please keep me in your prayers, atheistic or otherwise.

Best,

JB

Gearology

The OLPC XO was the little green laptop that tried to change the world

In the mid-2000s, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte had a wild idea: what if every child in the developing world had a computer? And this wasn’t some smoky gaming cafe or a school computer. It was a machine that the child owned and could use every day. I twas connected to the nascent internet, had a simple operating system, and was rugged enough to survive any conditions…

Read more

2 months ago · John Biggs

Gearology

The Motorola ROKR was the iPhone’s strange first draft

Steve Jobs was pissed…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · John Biggs

Hello from the ashes of my life!

This summer has been wild and difficult and strange and I’ve been super remiss at posting to this newsletter. I’ll get started in October but until then I have two things I wanted to share. First, I’m having a book party for my new book, Shroomies, on Tuesday, September 29th at Krupa Grocery in Windsor Terrace. This is a celebration and a chance to give you all some signed copies so I’d love for you to attend. I’ll have a bit of an open bar and some food so PLEASE come by if you can.

RSVP

Want to read the book? You can buy it in hardcover and for Kindle here and I’m happy to send you a signed copy at cost if you’d like. Please let me know!

Buy Shroomies

I also launched a new gadget site called Gearology. Basically it’s Gizmodo but for old people like me. I’ve been writing weekly deep dives about cool tech I loved from back in the day. Please check it out!

Until next time, please keep me in your prayers, atheistic or otherwise.

Best,

JB

Gearology

The OLPC XO was the little green laptop that tried to change the world

In the mid-2000s, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte had a wild idea: what if every child in the developing world had a computer? And this wasn’t some smoky gaming cafe or a school computer. It was a machine that the child owned and could use every day. I twas connected to the nascent internet, had a simple operating system, and was rugged enough to survive any conditions…

Read more

2 months ago · John Biggs

Gearology

The Motorola ROKR was the iPhone’s strange first draft

Steve Jobs was pissed…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · John Biggs

Two and a half score ago, America woke to a new morning. The bicentennial was a roaring national party, effusive, patriotic, and loud. It was a party held by the men and women who had limped joyfully out of World War II and then roared joylessly out of Vietnam, helicopter blades cutting the hot air over a barren jungle. It was a party held by people who had lived through racism and misogyny, religious judgment and conservative backlash, illiteracy and inequality. It was a celebration held by survivors who still believed there were better days ahead.

I remember the echo of that hoopla. Streamers in a forgotten drawer. Photos of parades. My grandmother in red, white, and blue. Me in a party hat next to a cake. Buttons and glasses and the flotsam of a party, the little things we kept to prove that the good times had happened.

To a degree, the people in those faded Kodachromes had little to celebrate. Stagflation was hitting. Unemployment was near 9%. Gas shortages plagued the nation, and wages remained flat. We were under Republican rule, and tax cuts were the lever of choice. But out in the hills, there was still work. The steel mills still rang in the Ohio Valley. Detroit still hummed. The docks in New York and Los Angeles were full. The little money people had was spent on good food, big cars, and trips to Myrtle Beach. It was an America well clear of the agrarian doldrums that had defined her before the war, and still living off the breakneck industrial expansion of the 1940s.

Two and a half score ago, America woke to a new morning full of promise, joy, struggle, and growth. Sure, she hit bumps after that fateful year. They busted the unions, and the workers had nowhere to go. Cities were overrun with crack, and the countryside was overrun by uppers and opiates. The good jobs went away. Detroit hollowed out, falling from 1,350,000 souls in 1975 to 649,095 today. The Ohio Valley dwindled into dust. The cities on the plains, cities that once sent their best and brightest into politics, literature, science, and industry, began producing brains that left small college towns and melted into the coasts.

But back then, we thought we were post-history. Liberal ideals dragged the arc of justice forward. For a few decades after that morning, the morning after the celebration, we saw racial and sexual equality rise. We saw help given to those who needed it in an organized way. We were the envy of the world, a cultural behemoth that shared our ideals and our treasure in the hope that our soldiers, boys and girls born around that Fourth of July, would not have to walk into Auschwitz again or face the threat of nuclear annihilation. We were on the right track.

Because, as I said before, two and a half score ago, America woke to a new morning.

We are far from that today. Politics is toxic. The global discourse is populist and crude. Our media has been gutted. Truth comes from a million angles and a million mouths. Listening to the tumult, you would think we were living in an age of horrors, an age of coming destruction. And it matters that we keep thinking that, because the people who tell us we are all going to die, the tawdry Pandoras who keep building their own boxes, have a vested interest in preserving the last pieces of old institutional power. A man like Trump wants to keep his grifts alive. A man like Thiel wants to maintain his relevance and his fortune. A man like Musk wants to become the next Henry Ford, complete with the racism and antisemitism.

Those men want to keep their fortunes intact as America enters a new era, an era of empowerment and acceptance and growth and liberal ideals.

They know that when the revolution comes, they are the first to fall. Not in a hail of gunfire, but into irrelevance.

Because America always wakes to a new morning. Every morning. At night she limps along, desiccated, hurt, confused. Her people trust no one, not even their neighbors. Her mind rusts and shuts down. But in the morning she wakes, and the sun illuminates a library where a child who was suicidal, cuts still on her arms, finds a book about another trans person facing her struggle. Through the trees, over there, a ray of light hits a neighborhood where people still barbecue and celebrate together, where flags of all kinds fly. Through the skyscrapers you see a young mayor waking up and doing things for the people, not taking things from them. Through that window there, in a place that was once a booming mill town, a teacher wakes up and thinks about how he can help his students be better, think better, and avoid the traps of their elders.

The sun flashes off a laptop screen, a guitar, a work truck. A new toolbox catches the light and reflects onto the side of a house that a woman just built for her family. The immigrants who built it are amazed at the sunrise, fascinated by colors they once saw only over dusty, war-torn hills.

The morning illuminates the church that feeds the poor, the cafe that keeps students awake, and the restaurant that celebrates a foreign land while remaining firmly American. The morning shines off minarets and twinkles off a golden ark. It plays across the wings of a cardinal in flight, a bumblebee in a riot of lavender, and a dog barking at both.

The morning light catches the water, the waves, the lakes, the rivers. It even makes the Gowanus look blue again, a canal once so polluted that people joked its bottom was paved with discarded guns. It makes her forests look lush and verdant, her factories more beautiful, her people awake and alive.

The morning comes through your window and wakes you and everyone around you. Because a new morning comes every day. It is not attached to one person, one date, or one set of beliefs. It is attached to all of us, all around the world. And it is important to remember that we are in control of what we do with that morning. We decide which call we answer, which bells of true faith drown out the bells of fake piety, and which voices we heed: the voices that preach change and growth, or the voices that exist only to scare us, divide us, and break us.

William Seward wrote in 1885:

“There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency.”

We’re in an emergency right now, but if we work together, it will pass. Two and a half score ago, America began to change, and the world we live in now would seem as strange to the people of 1976 as 1976 must have seemed to the people who celebrated America’s 150th birthday in 1926.

But there is still virtue left in her. The tank is not dry. The same forward drive that woke our ancestors a hundred years ago is still with us today. The same optimism, the same joy, the same will to work, build, and give.

Two days ago, America woke to a new morning. Yesterday, America woke to a new morning. Today, America woke to a new morning. Don’t let them force you to forget that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” because America has just woken to a new morning, and you are here to help her succeed.

A few years ago, after my father died, I wanted to walk in front of a bus.

It wasn’t a good time in my life, and my health, my mental state, and my mood reflected that. I was overweight, overwhelmed, often drunk, and very sad. The moment I decided to end it came quickly and passed just as quickly. I knew I couldn’t do that to my family or to myself, and in my mind I would have completely ruined that poor bus driver’s month. I knew I wasn’t that kind of person.

So I got psychiatric help. I started taking Pristiq, a numbing pill that helped me gain even more weight and gave me painful zaps when I tried to get off it, a side effect that is rarely discussed but familiar to the SSRI crowd. Basically, the pills made sure I’d keep taking them.

One November evening, I was sitting with a good friend, Greg Ferenstein. I had a beer in front of me, and he had tea. I was amazed, first by his self-control, and second by how happy he was. This guy had long been an interesting character in my life, someone who was constantly striving and seemed driven by something he didn’t fully understand. Now, sitting in this strange bar, he was healthy and happy and smiling.

“You’re coming with me to a session,” he said.

I asked what kind.

“Mushrooms,” he said.

I hated the idea. I didn’t want to be trapped in a room with a bunch of weirdos while they sang songs and listened to techno. I wanted to sit with my beer, my thoughts, and my mourning. I wanted to add more and more weight, more and more sadness, more and more booze, hatred, and anger. I definitely didn’t want any mushrooms.

That first trip I took with Greg set me on a new path. A second trip helped me kick the antidepressants. Subsequent trips helped me understand myself better, reduced my anxiety, and showed me a clear path out of sorrow. It hasn’t always been easy, and I won’t claim I’m cured, but if I hadn’t seen Greg on that cold night, I don’t know where I’d be today.

After writing Shroomies and thinking about the ways I could help people like myself, I decided to build something for people who don’t know where to start when it comes to psychedelic experiences. It’s called TripSitter.cc, and it’s a service for shamans, counsellors, psychologists, and others who can find and help people like you and me.

The app is up and running, and I already have nearly 50 providers from around the world. My goal is to make this your first and last stop when you’re trying to find a psychedelic services provider, whether it’s someone who holds space with you on your couch or an integration specialist who knows how to turn a bad trip into a learning experience. It’s a labour of love, although I do charge providers a small amount for vetting and profile management.

I’d love for you to try it out and tell me what you think. Where should I focus my signup efforts so I can make the app more useful in your geographic location? What do you want to do in an app like this? Schedule appointments? Do a video call? What would help you the most?

Visit TripSitter

Most of all, please just sign up. It will give the providers a sense of forward momentum, and it will help grow the community. A tool like this is missing, and I think it’s vital. I hope it can help you.

A few years ago, I wanted to be gone. Now I want to stay. I attribute that to good people who helped me through a lot of bad stuff, and I want to share that experience with you. Please give it a try and report back. I’m eager to hear what you think.

Summer is almost here, although it doesn’t feel like it. May has been a bust in Brooklyn, with chilly days and nights and plenty of wind, and the first days of June don’t look much better. I suppose at this point, we’re all supposed to accept mediocrity in everything, including our politics and, increasingly, thanks to AI, our art. It feels like this half-decade has been a smear of margarine on too much dry toast. Maybe the next one will be better.

Most recently, I’ve been working on TripSitter, a psychedelic support site for folks who are looking for local counselors and facilitators in their area. Right now, the site is pretty bare bones, but if you’re interested in psychedelics at all, I’d love for you to at least make an account so I can convince practitioners to sign up. This has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I hope you find it helpful.

And now, on to the books.

Gotham: A History of New York to 1898

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace

This one took a while. It’s a dense, dense book about New York from its first days until the late 1800s. It’s lovely to read how Manhattan turned from an oyster midden into a fortress into a city and it’s fun to discover little things like how the city was laid out over old towns born in the 1600s and where the remnants of old hunting paths turned into Broadway and Stone Street.

Tete-a-Tete: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

Hazel Rowley

I’ve been trying to dig deeper into philosophy, but because of my weird brain, I can’t wrap my head around a lot of it. This book, however, gave me something quite interesting: a measured and sometimes lovely look at a love affair that built the foundations of modern philosophy. The benefit of this book is that it makes the esoteric creators of Existentialism and Feminism into real people.

Deliverance: A Novel

James Dickey

The book was unexpected. I hadn’t read it in decades and wanted to see what I remembered. In fact, I remembered none of it. Dickey’s language and pacing are reminiscent of Raymond Carver, and the novel, which ranges from mundane suburbia to gothic horror, is far denser than the movie that we all remember in that it gives you a psychological trip into the minds of the suburban male pitted against the wild. Like the original Bourne books, this book is far more about psychology than action. Still a great read, though.

In 2000, while I was working toward a master’s in journalism at New York University, I found myself in a strange position. I was one of the few students there who cared about technology and also knew how to use it. I could host a site, write basic code, and think about publishing as something more than ink on paper. Most of the other students had come up through an older system. They were used to notebooks, typewriters, early terminals. To them, technology sat off to the side. It felt like a distraction from the work, not part of it.

I remember talking with Mark Dery about the idea of teaching HTML as part of the curriculum. Dery wrote about culture and media, about the edges of things, and he was curious about technology in an abstract way. But when I suggested that journalists should learn how to build for the web, he pushed back. He said news anchors do not need to know how to set up a camera. The point was clear. The message mattered, not the medium.

At that moment, his view made sense. Early web tools were simple enough that someone could publish without thinking much about the machinery underneath. You could open a blog, type, hit publish, and the system would take care of the rest. For someone like Dery, the craft was in the writing. The page was just a container.

That logic did not hold for long. Within a few years, the structure of journalism started to shift. Small teams replaced large ones. In some cases, a single person reported, wrote, edited, and published. At the same time, “community content” began to fill the web. The old gatekeepers lost their grip, and many of them lost their jobs. The kind of writing Dery practiced, a guided tour of technology for readers who stood at a distance from it, had less room to exist.

Now the center has moved again. Creators have taken on the role that journalists once held, but they operate under a different set of incentives. The old markers were stability and status, a contract, a desk, a place inside an institution. The new markers are reach and attention, measured in views, shares, and subscriptions. Those metrics are as important to new writers as a publishing contract.

I am not sure this is an improvement, but it is the direction things have taken. Tools driven by AI can reshape rough drafts into something that reads clean and finished. Distribution is no longer passive. It has to be engineered, in much the same way publishers once paid for placement in stores like Barnes & Noble. The mechanics have changed, but the pressure to be seen has not.

Looking back, the gap between the early days of dial-up and the year 2000 felt large at the time. The gap between then and now is larger still. What comes next will likely move just as fast, and the people who treat the medium as secondary will find themselves outpaced again.

First, I’m pleased to say that my book, Shroomies, is now available for pre-order. This was a big surprise

Pre-Order Now

I’ve been writing this book for the past year, and it’s taken a lot out of me. I spoke to people who went through absolute hell, who lost jobs and found peace, and who were all changed by psychedelics. While I agree that psychedelics are not for everyone, they are definitely something we should all be exploring as we enter whatever dystopian age we’re living in right now, and I hope this book will be helpful.

Apple: The First 50 Years

David Pogue

David Pogue was a fixture in the tech world for decades until he kind of fell off the radar. He wrote for years at the New York Times and has written countless books, mostly about Apple. It made perfect sense for him to write this exhausting tome, and I’m here to report that if you really, really, really, really like Apple (like a lot), you will enjoy the first three quarters of this book about the history of the company, the story of Woz and Jobs, and the little asides about how your favorite tech was built. The end of the book devolves into what amounts to a laundry list of hardware and a few taciturn Tim Cook stories, but you’ll definitely enjoy that first chunk.

Exit Strategy: A Reacher Novel

Lee and Andrew Child

Read more

First, I’m pleased to say that my book, Shroomies, is now available for pre-order. This was a big surprise

Pre-Order Now

I’ve been writing this book for the past year, and it’s taken a lot out of me. I spoke to people who went through absolute hell, who lost jobs and found peace, and who were all changed by psychedelics. While I agree that psychedelics are not for everyone, they are definitely something we should all be exploring as we enter whatever dystopian age we’re living in right now, and I hope this book will be helpful.

Meet ParrotPod

My friend Mike Butcher was musing in a chat room about a service that automatically made a news podcast that gave you a digest of interesting stories on a daily basis. I thought about his request and told him I’d build it. Over the course of about two days I was able to cobble together a working MVP that essentially automatically generates an audio podcast every morning at 10am Eastern. It’s called ParrotPod and you can try it right now.

Try ParrotPod

It’s definitely not perfect and there are still things I’d like to fix but I’d love it if you could give it a try and let me know what you think. It’s a fun project and I’m curious to see what people think. If you try it, please send me feedback at john@biggs.cc.

And now, on to the books.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

William Gibson

I reread William Gibson every few years and mostly focus on the first two trilogies, the Sprawl and the Bridge. If you’ve never read Gibson, you need to start with Neuromancer, but I love this one, the last in the Bridge trilogy, for its mix of reality and sci-fi. The Bridge trilogy is all about how the digital becomes real, and this particular book focuses on what would happen if we could create digital life through nanobots. It’s way better than I’ve made it sound, and Gibson is a master of his craft.

The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes

Tom Parker Bowles

In this travel memoir, food writer Tom Parker Bowles sets out to understand why some foods are feared in one culture yet prized in another. Prompted by the food anxieties of friends, he spends a year traveling through Asia, Europe, and the United States seeking out meals that many people consider dangerous, strange, or extreme, including venomous animals, toxic fish, insects, organ meats, and hot peppers. It’s a cute, light book in the vein of Truffle Hound from January.

Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion

Chris DeVille

This is a complete history of the “indie rock explosion” that covers the early years of NYC rock like The National and Interpol along with the oddballs like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Postal Service. If you had an iPod and an eMusic account in 2002, chances are you listened to these folks on repeat, and DeVille does a solid job of going down the list and talking about each band in plenty of detail. Well worth a read if you love this music.

There is a meme that asks when, exactly, it all went wrong. People point to Reagan and Bush. Some blame the Clinton years and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Others say it was the destruction of unions. I point to Daniel Pearl.

I do not say this lightly. I am not trying to reopen old wounds for shock value. Pearl’s murder on February 1, 2002 mattered because it was the first major world event that truly lived on the internet first and foremost. Not television. Not newspapers. The internet.

September 11 happened on TV. We watched it together, live, in public places. The wars that followed unfolded on cable news and on front pages. Editors filtered what we saw. Anchors framed it. There were limits, however imperfect.

Pearl’s death crossed a line. He was a journalist investigating extremism in Pakistan. He was murdered on camera. The video was not just documented, it was designed to spread. It moved through forums, email chains, and early websites with no gatekeepers and no shared sense of restraint. This was viral horror before we had a word for it.

That moment showed what the internet was becoming. Always on. Always available. Detached from place, time, and consequence. From that soil grew two competing ways of thinking.

The first believed information should move freely, journalism, art, code, research, all of it. This idea powered early blogging, open source software, and later things like cryptocurrency. It rewarded people who shared work openly, sometimes for money, often not. The faith was simple. If knowledge moved faster, society would improve.

The second way of thinking was darker, what people now call the Dark Pill. It treated the internet as a mask. A place where fear, resentment, and powerlessness could hide behind usernames and avatars. Mostly young men, disconnected and angry, built identities larger than their real lives. They stopped seeing other people as real. Everyone else became background characters.

In that worldview, cruelty was play. Lying was strategy. Nothing was serious because nothing was real. The point was not to build. The point was to provoke, mock, and dominate attention. The earlier belief in shared progress was replaced by a hunger to watch things burn.

Over time, that second mindset proved more aggressive and more contagious. The free software world quietly shaped infrastructure. The dark internet shaped culture. The same impulse that turned Pearl’s execution into online content now drives harassment campaigns, political disinformation, and state violence performed for cameras.

The logic is the same. Flood the space. Shock the audience. Wear people down. From GamerGate to modern Republican politics, from online mobs to ICE raids filmed for intimidation, the tactic never changes. Create fear. Normalize it. Make outrage feel routine.

I think we are near the end of this phase. I do not think it ends gently. Movements like MAGA do not fade out. They exhaust themselves through escalation. The next few years will likely be worse, not better, before the collapse comes.

This is a moment of crisis. A moment when cruelty pretends to be strength. The only real response is refusal. Refusal to accept this as normal. Refusal to treat suffering as content.

Everyone deserved more, Daniel Pearl, George Floyd, Renee Nicole Good, Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Alex Pretti, Luis Beltrán Yáñez Cruz.

They were not symbols. They were people. A world that turns their deaths into spectacle is a world that has lost its bearings.

Now, on to the books.

Truffle Hound: On the Trail of the World’s Most Seductive Fungus, with Dreamers, Schemers, and Some Extraordinary Dogs

By Rowan Jacobsen

Since writing about mushrooms this year, I’ve become fascinated by everything from oysters to Hen of the Woods. This book about truffles was surprisingly readable and enjoyable, a little story about a guy who falls in love with a huge white truffle and wants to find out everything about these endearing little shroomies. He travels to Italy and Croatia and learns everything there is to know about these amazing little morels.

Coffin Moon

By Keith Rosson

This book was written with a cleaver. Rosson is a great storyteller, and his style leans on literary fiction, while the story he tells — a man trying to avenge his wife’s death at the hands of a vampire — is a bloody romp. It’s a surprising horror book in that it doesn’t feel like a monster story until the monster appears.

Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds

By John Fugelsang

I’ve been reading a few of these lately, and this one basically goes through the ranks of fundamentalists and fascists who are turning our country into a police state. Fugelsang is an interesting and open writer, and this is a readable romp through the rogues’ gallery we’re facing now.

I don’t know a lot of writers. I know a lot journalists — in passing, mostly — but honest to god novel writers are difficult for me to find. That’s why I cherish my buddy John Sundman, a guy I called a national treasure on YouTube.

Sundman is the author of, among others, Acts of the Apostles and Biodigital, two books that defined sci-fi for the post cyberpunk era. He’s an amazing, precise writer with an uncanny ability to predict the future.

He is now struggling to pay his mortgage.

I have two asks: first, buy him a coffee i.e. donate a little to him if you can, just to help out in the short term. He needs the lift to make it through the next few months.

Also, please consider paying for a subscription to his amazing newsletter, Sundman figures it out. I read every issue and I think you’d like it.

Sundman figures it out!

An episodic autobiographical meditation. Stories from farms, cities, African villages, Martha's Vineyard, Silicon Valley, molecular biology labs, truck stops, firehouses, construction sites, hacker meets — trying to figure out what it's all about.

By john sundman

It’s tough out there, and it’s only going to get worse. The herd of true artists is thin and getting thinner, and we can only expect AI to make guys like John obsolete. I don’t want that to happen, and I doubt you do, either.

Please help if you can. It would mean the world to him.

Donate Now

The best thing about holidays in the Ohio Valley was the cookie table.

The tradition has changed over the years and now the cookie table usually appears at weddings. But there was a certain time when there was a yearly cookie table that appeared, like magic, every December.

My grandparents built their house themselves in 1959. The story goes that my grandfather and a few relatives poured the foundation, put up the cinderblocks for the basement, then hired a crew to finish the rest. This was Martins Ferry, Ohio, not long after the war, back when a young man could get a steady job at Wheeling Steel and afford a car, a house, and even an aboveground pool.

They dug the basement into a small hill in front of the house and carved out a root cellar, a room that stayed cool and dark no matter the season. The house itself was small, each room sized for the family that lived there, my grandmother Sadie, her husband Herman, a World War II veteran, and my father, who was still growing into himself.

Herman didn’t like animals. He would collect stones to throw at cats. There was never a dog in that house when my Dad was young.

When we visited, we arrived like a small traveling show. My sister and I came with toys and video games, a Nintendo, and the “tapes” I kept in a plastic box. My dad showed up with a 24 pack of beer. We brought our Kerry Blue Terrier, Vixen, to round out the crew. My grandfather sat quietly in his rocker and watched the news while we blew through the rooms like bad weather. Dogs barking, games blaring, someone crying over a Barbie. Our noise filled that quiet house, and it left my grandparents both thrilled and, I assume, more than a little ready for us to go.

The best part of Christmas, though, lived downstairs.

You went down the narrow basement stairs, past the boiler, toward the front of the house, and there it was, the table.

Most of the year it was just a junk table. Twine. Old toys. Random parts of household life that did not have a better home. It was a staging area for things that needed to get hauled upstairs eventually, paper towels, toilet tissue, whatever someone bought in bulk and forgot about. In the summer it became my workbench. I built bike alarms down there. I tinkered with little projects and mixed smoke bombs out of chemistry set materials.

But at Christmas it turned into something else. It became the cookie table.

When I was around ten, I didn’t like going down there alone. The table sat too close to the root cellar. The door was always there in the corner of my eye, and the root cellar always felt like a place that could swallow you if you stared at it too long. It smelled like Coca Cola, which never made sense to me. The shelves held strange, durable things. Canned tomatoes. Beans. Applesauce. Food that looked like it could outlast a person. There were bottles of Coke, beers, a jug of Gallo wine, and whatever else Midwesterners kept on hand because that is what you do, you stock up, you stay ready.

Still, if you slipped past that door and kept moving, you reached the table. And on that table were the cookies.

Chocolate chip cookies, thin but still soft, with Toll House chips. Peanut butter cookies with the fork marks pressed into the top like a signature. Thumbprints with a small crater of jam. Kiss cookies crowned with a whole Hershey’s Kiss. Pizzelles, thin and patterned, smelling of anisette, the kind of scent that announces itself before you even lift the foil.

The lineup didn’t change much. That was part of the comfort. The same classics came back every year, as steady as the ticking boiler. But sometimes there were extras. A tray of chocolates. Cookies from neighbors, never as good as Grandma Sadie’s, but politely accepted and quietly finished anyway. Things we brought from home, an offering, proof that we had tried, too. Once in a while there was a tin of butter cookies, store bought, the kind that taste like sweet air and leave you chasing crumbs. Sometimes a pretzel mix. Sometimes salted nuts.

Mostly, though, it was the real stuff. Cookies stacked on plates, covered in aluminum foil. When you lifted it, the foil crinkled and flashed in the dim basement light. That sound felt like an announcement. You had made it to the best part of Christmas.

We watched TV all morning and took a cookie every few hours. The trip downstairs was always the same. Slow steps, one hand on the railing. Past the boiler, which always seemed louder in winter, and the garage door, and that root cellar. Then the last few steps toward the table, the small burst of courage that turned into a sprint.

You came back up with three cookies in your hand and one already in your mouth. I would go down barefoot, cold floor under my feet, pajamas thin against the basement air, already thinking about the sugar hit that would warm me up from the inside.

Upstairs, I’d eat my prize under my grandmother’s tiny fake tree. On top of the television sat her ceramic Christmas house. A little Santa peeked out of the chimney. A bulb inside lit it from within, shining through colored plastic “windows” that looked like tiny ornaments. That little house felt like our house, not the real one with cinderblocks and a root cellar, but the version we wanted to live in. Cozy. Warm. Full of good things.

From the kitchen, I could hear my mother and grandmother cooking. I could hear the steady sound of my grandfather’s TV. Down the hall, in the big room, my father was reading. I was on the floor in my pajamas, playing Super Mario Brothers or Kid Icarus. Sometimes my friend George came over and we’d sneak back downstairs for more cookies, acting like it was a caper, even though nobody ever stopped us.

The day would creep toward noon, then slide downhill. It got dark early, around five, the kind of winter dark that makes the windows look black. Outside was crisp and cold, the season for snow boots, for kids brave enough, or foolish enough, to leave the house and do something with the daylight that was left.

I wasn’t one of those kids.

Christmas vacation ran like that. The murmur of family. The TV on in the background. The promise of sweetness downstairs. I have tried to recreate that feeling for decades. Not by copying the basement or the root cellar or even the exact cookies, but by building a small rhythm around food. Opening a box of chocolate stars. Making a good meal. Putting something on the table that says, without saying it, you are safe here.

Food mattered to my grandmother. She was a child of the Depression, then a single mother who sometimes barely fed herself. Later, when life finally loosened its grip and she had enough, she did what a lot of people from that world did. She showed love by feeding you. Not with speeches. Not with advice. With baked goods, stacked on plates, under foil, waiting downstairs like a quiet promise.

I’d like to go back there. I’d like to go down those rickety stairs into the dark, fumble for the pull chain, and light the place up. I’d like to take those few steps past the fear, the doubt, and the loneliness, and find the one thing that made it simple, that I was loved.

I’m close. We’re all close. I think with one more push we could get there.

Until then, happy holidays, and I hope you have a lovely New Year.

And now, on to the books.

Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

Annie Jacobsen

I found this book too dense and repetitive, but the story is fascinating. It follows former Nazis who strutted around while the Americans scrambled to figure out how to bring them into the United States to work on the U.S. space program. Many of them come off as preening fools who claimed they were only following orders. The main reason the U.S. wanted them was their V2 rocket program, along with other weapons, mechanical and even biological, developed during their brutal and pointless war. It’s worth a read on a cold, snowy weekend.

The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

Dan McClellan

Dan McClellan is a TikTok creator whose tagline, “OK, let’s see it,” challenges religious “scholars” to a battle of wits. He has a deep background in biblical history and ancient languages, and he brings clarity to what is often a jumble of stories collected by humans since the Iron Age. He’s not a great writer, but his research is deep and fascinating.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Ruth Reichl

Tender at the Bone is Ruth Reichl’s 1998 food memoir about growing up with a mother known as the Queen of Mold, and about learning to care about organic food and great cooking in 1970s California. Reichl is a lovely writer and extremely readable, and this book is one of my favorites.

Ahoy!

It’s been a few months since I was able to sit down and write one of these. I found myself unable to read recently, probably because of, well, everything going on in the world. But I took a moment and I’d love to share some of what I’m looking at.

First:

Work Update: I Was Laid Off! Hurray!

I’ve been busy these past few months trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I haven’t figured anything out but I did get laid off from my content gig at a crypto company so if you’re looking for a content team in a box including social media, video, and podcasting, please drop me a line! I have a new offering called Onfluence that involves a monthly hour-long video that I can turn into actionable and valuable LinkedIn and Instagram content for creators. If you’d like to chat about anything at all, drop me a line at john@biggs.cc.

Contact Me

Thankful for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I don’t like Christmas, and the rest of the holidays, including New Year’s, don’t do much for me. But Thanksgiving has always been my happy place.

I remember visiting my grandmother in Ohio. She would make the traditional stuff — turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes. She’d also fill the basement with dessert, an endless row of Buckeyes, peanut butter cookies with the fork markings on top, and chocolate chip cookies that were just moist enough not to crumble. I’d sneak into her basement, a large, open room with concrete floors, and head to the front of the room, next to her root cellar, where she’d keep the cookies in metal tins.

After college, I loved holding Thanksgiving for friends. My tradition was to buy a turducken and smoke it for hours on the grill, turning a chimera of meats into something special. I’d make two kinds of stuffing — some folks didn’t like celery — and lots of sides. Every year, I’d order too much wine and make too many drinks and have way too much fun.

This year I’m making the aforementioned turducken and some crawfish and some Soul Food and whatever I find in the latest issue of Bon Appétit. For me, Thanksgiving is a time of experimentation, and I like to inject a few fun dishes into the mix. I usually start cooking at 6 a.m. It’s lovely.

It’s the calm camaraderie that I like about Thanksgiving, the satiety. In an age of endless hunger, it’s nice to know I can feed people something tasty and talk about the year. We’d raid the cookies and leftovers in the garage, creating meal after meal all weekend. We’d play board games, do a puzzle, watch movies. It was the gateway into the holiday season, a bulwark against the cold to come.

This year has been stressful for all of us, I’m sure. I hope you get a chance to cook something nice for someone and just eat, quietly reveling in the marvel that is every day.

Happy November. And now, on to the books.

The Secret of Secrets

Dan Brown

I didn’t realize Dan Brown was still at it, and I missed his last book, Origin, which I just picked up. I hate-read Dan Brown because he pushes esoterica into the mainstream and turns some of us into conspiracy theorists for sport. In this sixth Robert Langdon novel, he plays with the Oversoul and golems, and sets the story in Prague. I read the whole thing and enjoyed it. It’s ice cream for the mind. If you want something weird and fun, read it.

Europe: A History

Norman Davies

Like most of Norman Davies’s histories, this one is an enjoyable slog. It surveys Europe from Rome onward, moving north and east to dwell on places he favors, including Poland and Ukraine. Still, because it’s a Davies book, the history is thorough, anecdotal, and readable. If you want a long read for the winter months, pick it up.

The Russians

Hendrick Smith

So this particular books is hard to find although you might be able to find it if you click this link. It’s a fascinating travelogue by New York Times Moscow correspondent Hendrick Smith. The book is a bit naive but it tells the story of life behind the Iron Curtain in the 1970s, a time when few had been to Russia let alone knew anything about it. It’s fascinating time capsule of a place that was waking up into industrialization while slowly casting off the many shackles of Soviet-style Communism. Smith is a lovely writer and I’m glad I picked this thing up again.

I wrote this on November 4, 2012, just after Hurricane Sandy tore through the Northeast, changing New York entirely. It’s about resilience, growth, and survival. I wanted to share it again here today because, as someone who believes technology is an unalloyed good, it’s an important message. I’m also sharing it because it reminds me — and I hope you — that we’ve always been living in devastating and interesting times.

On a crisp, sunny Sunday morning here in Brooklyn, it’s hard to imagine devastation just around the corner. Whole communities are burned and swept to sea. Gas lines and power outages stretch on. The arteries and capillaries that carry the lifeblood of this city, its people and their trains, are choked off. It’s getting better, but it’s not there yet.

We live in a time and place mediated by electronics. Our friends tweeted and messaged that they were okay. They didn’t call. They didn’t stay silent, shivering in the dark. They clung to the flickering flame of a smartphone screen as winds raged outside. Some had parties, laughing at the rain. Some prepared by firing up generators and filling bathtubs. Some barely slept.

Some lost their loved ones. We can’t forget that.

As New York digs out of sludge, sand, and slop, as the streetlights pop on down Broadway and life returns to communities hardest hit, as hammer hits nail, as neighbor helps neighbor, as we hug each other and look out on desolation or a quiet street or both, we realize we live in a strange new world.

I’ve lived through a few New York moments. 9/11 was the first. The blackouts a year later came next. A tornado hit our neighborhood, tearing down facades and uprooting trees. But this was different. We saw the horror as it happened. We saw messages, photos, and updates. A flood of information. If you watched only those and ignored television, you saw a picture of a city in cold panic, waiting for the worst. The worst came. Now we see the follow-up messages. The lens points at the horror: “This was my basement. This was my car. This was my son and his friend. This was my home. This was my moment.”

This is your moment. Let’s do something.

Let’s build the tools needed to prevent this from happening again. Let’s create tools that call neighbors together. Let’s build the walls we’ll need to hold back future floods. Let’s build the cars and energy sources we will need to keep the seemingly indifferent earth from paying closer attention to our misdeeds. Let’s find ways to communicate when the lights are out and there’s no one to call, when we’ve fallen in the dark, when we’re hungry in the gloom, when we need someone to take us out of where we are.

We’ve made tools that sap our attention. We’ve made entertainments for a connected age. But what about the tools of protection? What is our candle to curse the dark, the bucket brigade to save our town?

New York is self-healing. It routes around damage, then invisible forces come in to clean up. Walk down the streets of Coney Island in a week and a march of sneakers will have carried off the sand. The holes in the boardwalk will be a nuisance rather than a tragedy. Climb down into our hidey-holes and see the trains roaring through, one by one.

“The city is like poetry,” wrote E.B. White. “It compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.” Those engines are us, our time is now, we are that teeming life. Prepare us for the future, futurists, by building something that will last. White once wrote of “the destroying planes” that took a bead on Manhattan not long ago. Now we face a faceless force, call it progress, call it energy dependency, call it avarice, call it the best solution to a bad problem, that threatens our every shore, that flattens our plains cities and scorches our South. Let’s solve these problems before even the planes of war fall from the sky.

Those here strive to be here. Let’s show the world what comes after tragedy. Let’s show the world the future. Let’s show the world New York.

Ahoy,

I wanted to share something my friend wrote this week. It’s about how he feels as an American abroad. As someone who is highly skeptical of hyperbole, it was interesting to hear his thoughts on the direction or country is headed and what the Trump presidency ultimately means for us as a country. That said, I’m heartened by the fact that Trump will last four years and then disappear. I only hope his damage isn’t too deep and long-lasting.

Here is what my friend wrote:

Recently, my girlfriend and I drove from Venice to Rome to meet my best friend and his family who live a few blocks from my house in New York. We both observed on our trip that there has been a tectonic shift in how we Americans are regarded abroad.

Having lived outside the US since finishing my MBA in the 1990s, my expat life has spanned five presidents. While I choose to not discuss my political views except with my very closest friends, expatriates (especially Americans) nevertheless are engaged in current event conversations by people wherever we go.

Starting 2025, I have, for the first time, been consistently met with what I can only describe as incredulity. Few can understand why we would RE-elect the person we did. The actions our country's leadership has taken against our longstanding allies, the befriending of multigerational dictatorships and the unilateral business threats that have impeded international commerce with all of our trading partners baffles virtually everyone I come in contact with abroad. When I say, everyone, I mean business people who read the Economist and WSJ as well as farm workers and truck drivers who might passively hear some news on the radio, or not at all.

But the observation that strikes me, the reason I'm sharing this with you, is that while everyone is perplexed why Americans chose to re-elect this person, it is the Eastern Europeans and South Americans who recognize (recollect) exactly what is going on. The consolidation of decision making power in a single branch, the vilification of the "the media", the unprecedented images of US military and unidentified masked "enforcers" co-existing on American streets so familiar to everyone from Hollywood movies. They have seen this before. Hungarians and Russians see it every day.

The conclusions that everyone seems to be making as I travel abroad and live here in Croatia is that, for lack of a nicer way to put it, the United States is no longer regarded as an aspirational country. While we may still be a hegemon thanks to our military, currency and economy, we have lost the goodwill of much of the world. And, I'm afraid, their respect.

It breaks my heart to experience this. I have always felt that, no matter why I am abroad, my role as a person was to leave a good impression on those with whom i interact. A big part of that identity is my nationality as an American. Mom used to say, "you never know if you are the first American that someone has ever met, so be a good ambassador".

It's becoming harder to do that.

I know these last several years prevented you and Francie from traveling abroad, even visiting your beloved Italy. But I'm curious, when you guys were living abroad, did you ever experience something on this scale? As I realize how very long this email has become, I don't expect you to respond in kind. I am honestly interested if you had similar reactions from people abroad or if my interpretation is indeed right and global opinion of the US's integrity is eroding.

All I can do is to continue reinforcing my own American values (however "old school" they may be) within my team, among my friends and those with whom I come into contact. Ever the ambassador.

I’ll be in Berlin and then San Francisco next week if you want to meet up. Otherwise, here are the books:

The Fort Bragg Cartel

Seth Harp

Is is one of those books that makes a big splash and kind of fizzles out primarily because the subject matter is so specific. Harp does a great job of telling the story of special forces types who spent their time in the military selling and dealing amazing amounts of drugs while training their dogs to eat the brains of suspected terrorists. It sheds a great deal of light on a much lionized part of our country and shows the darkness that the men and women tasked with keeping us safe deal with every day.

Neuromancer

William Gibson

This is the definitive sci-fi book for me and I reread it every few years. This time I loved it even more because I knew what to expect and so reveled in the language. Gibson’s recent books haven’t been the best but this one is still glorious — messy and angry and complex in a package that reads like Tom Clancy on speed.

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

Ross King

I found this book in the little library outside my house and brought it in like a stray kitten. The read was pleasant, and now I’m ready to let it back out into the wild so someone else can take in the story of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. The book itself is a bit silly, with Ross stretching to make each chapter matter, but the portrait of a surly Michelangelo covering the most beautiful ceiling on earth with the attitude of a housepainter is oddly stirring. The kicker? Michelangelo never wanted to paint the chapel and instead wanted to build a huge, garish tomb for Pope Julius II. The painting was an impediment to his art.

Ahoy,

Big news: I wrote a book with my friend Jessa Moore called Influencer Boot Camp. It’s all about how to use the tools of virality to boost your message or marketing efforts. These same skills helped me grow my newsletter to 70,000 subscribers, my Instagram to 30,000 followers, and my podcast from 40 listens to 18,000 per episode—all in the past year.

Jessa and I wrote this book because we both know the old methods—earned media, blogging, even journalism—are broken. Our goal is to help people who once relied on those systems for attention learn how to measure success in this new world.

The book launched quietly in May. Publishers don’t do much marketing anymore, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write this in the first place. Distribution and promotion are basically up to us. That’s fine, though—because we have you.

Here’s what I’d like to offer:
If you or your organization can buy 10 copies of the book, Jessa and I will host a free one-hour Zoom session with your marketing team. These early sales matter, and knowing that Apress isn’t going to move the needle, we’re going to do it ourselves. If you’re interested, email me at john@biggs.cc.

Still on the fence? Here’s a short blurb and an excerpt from the first chapter.

They’re not just posing for selfies. They’re reshaping what media looks like.

Influencers are everywhere. Maybe you’ve rolled your eyes at the word. Maybe you’ve tried to ignore them. But the truth is, they’re setting the tone for what we buy, watch, wear, and even believe. In Introduction to Influence, veteran media insiders Jessa Moore and John Biggs break down how this strange new world of parasocial power actually works—without fluff, false promises, or starry-eyed cheerleading.

This isn’t a handbook full of empty encouragement. It’s a sharp, clear-eyed guide to the mechanics of influence—how it’s built, measured, gamed, and used. It shows why a random TikTok post can shake up a fast-food empire, why authenticity now beats ad dollars, and how a handful of creators are outpacing legacy media without a newsroom or studio in sight.

Whether you’re trying to launch a product, grow an audience, or just understand the way modern media warps reality, this book lays it out. You won’t get guaranteed followers, but you’ll get a framework for how influence is built and sustained—and how to tap into it yourself.

Written by people who were there at the beginning of the social web, Introduction to Influence is part media autopsy, part practical field manual. You’ll learn:

• Why some creators succeed and others vanish

• What “engagement” really means (and why it’s easy to fake)

• How niche audiences hold more power than you think

• What brands still get wrong about the Internet

• Why media literacy isn’t optional anymore

Influence isn’t just a trend. It’s the new currency of attention—and if you’re not fluent in it, you’re on the outside looking in.

Introduction to Influence: Understanding the Power and Reach of Influencers

They're relaxing by the pool, holding cans of a new sparkling energy drink that quickly became popular on TikTok. They’re in matching pajamas under a Christmas tree (link to the pajamas in bio). They’re smiling at a fashion event that none of us could ever hope to be invited to.

They’re young, perfectly toned, and well-dressed. Sometimes they’re in bikinis and swim suits or lounging in white dress shirts and jeans. They’re trying on makeup, opening shopping bags, and talking about meditation and juice cleanses. They’re showing off fancy watches and new gadgets, convincing you that their lifestyle can be yours for the low, low price of “Tap to Like” or “Subscribe Now.”

They’re playing music you’ll soon love, sharing animations you’ll spread to your friends, and writing long posts about their pets that you’ll read at lunch. They're filming reviews of cars, guitars, hats, and watches. They’re hosting game shows and showing off videos of squirrel obstacle courses. They’re producing an endless stream of content for one purpose: to keep you from scrolling past them and to keep you coming back, no matter how hard it is to game the algorithms that are intent on thwarting them at every turn..

They’re influencers and they’re everywhere. And what you see regularly, the stuff that percolates to the top of your Instagram feed or TikTok river, is only the tip of the iceberg. Influencers have a wide and deep range of skills. At this point in history, they are producing more media in a way that is both new and familiar. Like bloggers before them, they are destroying old forms of media. In 2023, children spent an average of 84 minutes a day on YouTube and a mere 49 minutes on “traditional” Netflix. This move from longform video to shorts and community-generated content is probably the biggest shift in media in the past decade and it’s become a wildly lucrative way to market, sell, and entertain.

But what are influencers? Do they make any money? Are they as popular and successful as they seem? And are they vital to modern culture and business in the same way a good blog article or Vogue photo shoot are? The answers to those questions are: Yes, Maybe, and Yes.

Influencers are the new celebrities. While it might not seem like they often cross the Internet barrier between the online and the real world, they are as popular as many movie stars and definitely have more reach on the aggregate. Some YouTube videos get more views than some popular TV shows. Many stars who are trying to become influencers find themselves playing second fiddle to people who have been online longer. If follower counts are any guide, many random influencers are hitting millions of viewers while many popular stars - current and past - are barely breaking the million mark. 

If you’re interested in media or marketing at all, you need to be aware of influencers, their tactics, and how you can use their tricks to increase engagement. Maybe you want to sell something online or offer services to people in need. Maybe you want to review products and share your opinion. Maybe you’re a journalist who has been left behind by social media editors. Maybe you’re an extrovert who wants to share their thoughts with a wide audience. Whatever your goal, influencer tactics will help you achieve it.

This book will tell you how to become an influencer. We can’t promise you 1 million followers or even one follower. But we can promise you that these tactics have helped ourselves and our clients reach millions of people globally. Your co-authors, Jessa Moore and John Biggs, have worked in marketing and media for many years. They were there when many of the biggest online platforms were created, including X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook. We have seen it all and have used and abused social media for decades. 

The Power of Influencers

In early 2024, McDonald's faced a challenge. Financial reports showed poor results, largely due to negative customer perceptions. Many customers were unhappy with high prices and declining food quality, prompting some to switch to Chick-fil-A. The backlash gained traction online, where people shared photos of unappealing McDonald's burgers and hefty receipts, fueling a perception that the chain was falling short. Influencers added to the narrative by comparing McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A’s offerings and suggesting that McDonald's had allegedly copied Chick-fil-A’s sauce.

The story took off after Chef Mike Haracz, a former McDonald's developmental chef, posted on TikTok, accusing the chain of copying Chick-fil-A’s chicken sandwich style and ingredients. This claim, reported in the poultry industry publication WattPoultry, led to widespread criticism. Whether the claim was true didn’t seem to matter; viewers were quick to believe it.

From the article:

McDonald’s chose to release a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich "knockoff" over alternative recipes following owner-operator pressure, former McDonald's chef, Mike Haracz, claimed on a now-viral TikTok video.

“You might notice that the chicken sandwich [McDonald’s] launched was in a foil pouch,” Haracz said in the video. “It had butter, it had two pickles, it had a bunch of that MSG-type flavor, and it was a knock-off of Chick-fil-A. Do you think McDonald’s can out Chick-fil-A, Chick-fil-A? No, they cannot.”

Harasz served as manager of culinary innovation for McDonald’s from 2015-19, according to his LinkedIn page. According to the TikTok video, he was a part of the McDonald’s team that was focused on developing a new chicken sandwich.

The sandwich video went almost viral, maxing out at 35,600 views and over 2,900 comments. But even with those numbers, McDonalds got lucky. Other viral influencer posts can hit millions of views and have a tangible effect on stock prices, political parties, and even real lives. Essentially, influencers bring the Internet into real life. 

McDonalds is still cleaning up the perception mess. Recent videos have shown the brand’s burgers covered in slime and some viral posts feature receipts from the early 2000s compared to today. This kind of attack - uncoordinated, seemingly ridiculous, and impossible to quell - is exactly what companies have to deal with daily in this weird new world.

Just as bloggers once exposed corporate controversies, influencers now wield similar power, challenging brands and drawing attention. The result? Companies are increasingly trying to manage these influencers and preempt potential backlash from smaller influencers who can quickly post critical commentary on trending topics.

Social media has become a dominant force in shaping consumer behavior and has a wider reach than most traditional media. Platforms and content creators are reshaping consumer culture, enabling small brands to compete with large advertisers. Though it’s challenging, those who understand social media’s potential have seen significant rewards.

Consider the beauty industry: Ulta and Sephora are now stocked with indie brands designed to cater to short consumer attention spans. Beauty influencers are also launching their own brands, tailored to niche audiences. Some succeed, others don’t, but this shift reflects a broader change in how people spend their time. Rather than watching TV ads, consumers now engage directly with creators and brands through their phones. Brand loyalty is increasingly tied to the influencer or community rather than the product itself—a major shift. Where trusted brands were once names like Charmin or Tollhouse, today, trust lies with creators.

Traditional media refers to non-digital channels of communication like newspapers, television, radio, and magazines. The digital landscape encompasses online platforms, social media, websites, blogs, and streaming services. Traditional media often has a fixed distribution structure and limited interaction with the audience, whereas digital media allows for instant access, interactivity, and real-time feedback. Social media and digital media in general are more agile, with direct access to the audience in real time. This is an important component to understanding how social acts, and how to use it. 

The way we consume information and make decisions has undeniably shifted in the digital age. Social media platforms and online content creators have become a powerful force, shaping trends, opinions, and even purchasing habits. But with this influence comes a responsibility – both for creators and for the consumers of their content. 

A quirk of social media is the fact that it has a sense of intimacy which hides its power. Meanwhile, social media platforms and online content creators have become a powerful force, changing trends, opinions, and even purchasing power. Traditional ways of reaching people have also ignored the needs of people outside the groups that big advertising agencies want. This has caused social media to create whole new categories of brands. Rihanna's Fenty is a good example. It was started by a woman of color, but it has become one of the most inclusive beauty brands in the world. It is known for its wide range of foundation colors and sophisticated products. This is a huge driver of sales. Influencer campaigns and feedback from social media helped create and launch the line. 

So, how do we harness this power? By learning how others have used it, and taking online influence and social media seriously. By understanding the behavior associated not just with the consumers, but the brands and platforms. 

Traditional Media Experts vs. The Rise of the Everyday Expert

Influencers have been around for a long time, but the job was only for the very few people who were famous or liked. Think royalty and celebrities. Evangelists on late-night TV, and church leaders. Political figures and rock stars. Persuasion is an art, and the successful were widely imitated, often creating fashions along the way. 

Then, as newspapers developed, we had society articles, actors, and P.T. Barnum’s bunkum. For decades, celebrities and established media outlets held sway in pop culture and news consumption. News anchors and journalists delivered information, shaping public perception of current events. The trusted voices were baked into the media and news. The pervasive idea was that “If it’s on television, it must be good.” Earned media - so-called because it can’t be bought - is still the most prized source of trust from consumers. The idea that a product is endorsed with no payment or product changing hands is very powerful. But what if you could simulate that trust and hide the pay-for-play aspect under a wrap of intimacy? 

The rise of social media led to this new intimacy. The immediacy of, say, X or Instagram has created a normalization of parasocial relationships. Creators talk to their followers, sometimes making real friends and relationships. But the breaking of the fourth wall has also created a bond that can be very helpful for people who like to buy things. All you need is a simple smartphone, and anyone with a camera and an internet connection could become a content creator. 

This democratization of the media gave rise to the "influencer" – individuals who have amassed a dedicated community online. Creators are part of this group, but not all creators are part of the group called influencers. This term is a bit controversial in the field. Influencers can focus on specific niches, from beauty tutorials and fashion styling to gaming, news, personal coaching, and financial advice. They connect with their audience on a more personal level, fostering a sense of trust and community. A creators community is their money, the social value they bring. Trust in them is usually built over years, when they use their content to become an expert in their field. The actual niches are as endless as the communities you have globally- while Kim Kardashian is often considered the gold standard, the real beauty and value in communities are the specific niches creators have built based on their interests-say, birdwatching. Or Medieval Art. For our purposes here, we will use all kinds of creators to demonstrate the power of social media.

I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir

Keith McNally

Keith McNally, the force behind Pastis and Balthazar, has long been a fixture in global food culture. That changed after a debilitating stroke left him a shadow of his former self. This book traces McNally’s rise in the culinary world, the height of his fame, and his slow recovery from a blood clot in his neck that nearly killed him—and ultimately gave him a new perspective on life and happiness. It’s surprisingly well written and worth reading, even if you’ve never set foot in one of his restaurants.

The Plot: A Novel

Jean Hanff Korelitz

I’m not even sure what to make of this book until all the pieces started falling into place and rolled through like a waterfall of delicious suspense. It’s beautifully written, in the style of John Irving, and gives a brutally honest look at a writer slogging along until something extraordinary happens. Success and money follow—everything he thought he wanted. Well, almost everything. It’s a quick read, and the twist is well worth it.

Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

Andy Letcher

One of the best books on mushrooms I’ve read. It’s a bit torpid near the end because, as I’m discovering, writing about mushrooms is hard but Andy Letcher does a wonderful job of covering mushrooms from stem to stern and his writing is at once academic and wry. A great little book.

Donald Trump finally got the military parade he had long wanted—an event initially inspired by the 2017 Bastille Day parade he saw in France. After being blocked during his first term, he returned to office surrounded by loyalists willing to carry out his demands. The parade, staged in Washington DC on his 79th birthday, was nominally meant to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, but in reality, it served as a personal display of power and ego.

The event featured tanks, jets, missiles, parachutists, and a “Happy Birthday” serenade, partly funded by taxpayers and corporate sponsors like Palantir and Coinbase. Despite the spectacle, the parade was underwhelming: soldiers marched off-beat, attendance was sparse, and the president looked bored. Rain and oppressive heat added to the lackluster mood. Meanwhile, mass protests unfolded across the country under the banner “No Kings,” presenting a stark contrast in energy and message.

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The parade itself was a year in the making. The plan was always to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army — a noble, if somewhat ham-handed, effort that was doomed to fail. The military doesn’t do culture, and parades are culture. They are supposed to be mesmerizing, exciting, and impressive and the modern military is all about force application, not jaunty playacting. As Anand Giridharadas wrote: “The country that invented jazz was never going to be good at putting on a military parade. It was never going to be us.”

Keep Going - A Guide to Unlocking Success

Keep Going: Healing After Impact

Sometimes on Keep Going, I talk to people who have failed a few times and got up again. Other times, I talk to people who were hit so hard that getting up again was the entire story…

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a year ago · 2 likes · John Biggs

Critics see the parade not just as theater but as part of a larger authoritarian shift. Trump has taken control of military units, targeted dissenters, and deployed force against perceived enemies. The parade symbolized this transformation, but it also exposed how performative his authoritarianism is—more like a TV villain mimicking strongmen than a strategic leader. Still, the danger remains: even when he looks like he’s playacting, the consequences are real.

Here’s the trick, though. Trump’s lackeys — the sycophants, the yes-men, the crypto bros — are hopeless at planning anything, let alone a government takeover. The movie Mountainhead (which is actually fine if you treat it as a very poorly paced dark comedy) expresses this delightfully by skewering the boy geniuses currently running amok in the Trump White House. From Elon Musk to J.D. Vance, everyone there thinks they know more than they do, and they’ve Dunning-Krugered themselves into gigs that are far above their mental capacities.

Consider, for example, Trump Mobile. That’s right: there’s now a Donald Trump phone—a Temu-ass smartphone clad in “gold” with three cameras and a monthly $47.45 subscription fee. Everything about this phone points to a deep lack of respect for the customer, the kind of marketing move pulled by a bunch of “CEOs” on an Adderall binge, trying to steal as many users as possible before selling them back to a real carrier once the grift gets too expensive.

Finally, there’s Trump’s move to support Israel in its war against Iran. This promises to be more of nothing. While innocents die in both countries — not to mention those dying in Gaza — Trump will waste time pretending to get things done, big boy style.

All this points to one thing: Trump is already a lame duck. He’s just waiting to get out. His crypto investments, his bluster, his sleeping on the job — all signs that he’s bored, frustrated, and tired of the charade. He knows he can’t actually become a dictator. And while I think his dictatorial potential is real if he were pulling this stuff in a country will even more grift and less democracy, I don’t believe America will let it happen. He and his team are just too stupid and the people who would vote for people like him will be dead soon enough.

So protest. Fight. Talk to your friends and family so we don’t have to live through this bullshit again. But most of all, laugh. Trump hates that — and everything he’s doing is headed toward laughable failure.

Being a writer isn’t hard. You just have to try to tell the truth every day, forever, and do it quickly—because by the time you’re done, the truth will have changed. When you’re writing fiction, it’s fairly easy to tell the truth: you take what happened to you and change the names—or, barring that, imagine yourself in a wild predicament and get yourself out of it. For journalists and nonfiction writers, it’s a bit harder because, as we said before, the truth changes daily.

Some writers try to outrun the truth by over-preparing. They interview, research, and take copious notes without an end in sight. One writer I worked with called this “covering the unknown unknowns”—by trying your damndest to outrun the falsehoods, you create a dense net to catch and slow down the truth. But again, nobody can cage the truth. Unless we’re talking about history, writing about any current moment is fraught with peril. We can’t believe our eyes.

Maybe the answer is video. But then again, video can be faked. At this point, it’s far easier to create a believable visual narrative with AI and other tools. There’s no way to tell if the LA riots are widespread (they’re not) or if they’re being shot in a way to encourage fear (they are). There will eventually be moments when we see assassinations, defilements, car crashes, and even kittens that are entirely AI-generated. We still won’t be able to believe our eyes.

So we can’t write ourselves out of this trap. We can’t take photos or video. We can barely even trust our memories. So what are we to do?

Maybe it’s this:

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself:
“I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

—But it’s nicer here...

So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?”

Or maybe it’s this:

Do to others as you would have them do to you.

Or maybe it’s this:

“By not adoring the worthy, people will not fall into dispute.
By not valuing hard-to-get objects, people will not become robbers.
By not seeing the desires of lust, one’s heart will not be confused.
Therefore, the governing of the saint is to empty one’s mind, substantiate one’s virtue, weaken one’s worldly ambition, and strengthen one’s essence.
He lets the people be innocent of worldly knowledge and desire, and keeps the clever ones from making trouble with their wits.
Acts naturally, without desire—then everything will be accomplished in its natural order.”

Or maybe it’s this:

"It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconsistency is my very essence,' says the wheel. 'Rise up on my spokes if you like, but don't complain when you are cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it is also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.'”

All that seems likely. They’re all saying that we need to accept and move and be human. It means we have to ignore foolishness and take the truth where we find it. And we have to accept that we can’t catch the truth. Maybe what we really need to catch is kindness. And when that’s in abundance, the truth matters far less. We do what we must, protect the vulnerable, and ignore the sound and the fury around us, that stuff that is busy signifying nothing.

Isn’t that what everyone wants?

We sure don’t act like it.

Now, on to the books.

Grant

by Ron Chernow

I gave this a try and kind of fell into it. Grant isn’t really a well-known figure and I was pleased to find that this is as compelling as Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton and Washington. At the very least you get to see what happens when a country is split down the middle and stoic people have to fix it.

Dr. Fun Guy's Passport to Kingdom Fungi: A Scientist's Guide to the Wild and Wonderful World of Mushrooms, Molds, and More

By Dr. Gordon Walker

I interviewed Gordon Walker for my new book and he was a blast. He’s very knowledgable and if you have any interest in mushrooms at all this is the book to get. There is no woo woo, no weirdness, just a no-nonsense guide to shrooms.

Dominus

by Steven Saylor

Again, I’m hate-reading Saylor because I like the world he creates. The storytelling spans about a hundred years and features some of the most leaden characters and prose in fiction, but darn it if he doesn’t make you feel like you’re hanging out on the Forum. Start with Roma if this is your first book by him. Also, don’t read his Roman detective books.

This weekend was my birthday. We ate, drank, and played music in the dark — and it was a great time. It’s nice to have a weekend so full of light and love and happy faces. It almost let me forget everything else.

Last week I also interviewed Bille August, a director of great renown who has been making art for 45 years. You’ve likely seen Pelle the Conqueror, The Best Intentions, or Night Train to Lisbon. He has a new film, The Kiss, coming out. We talked about his long career, how he thinks about storytelling, and why empathy is still one of the most difficult — and beautiful — parts of being human.

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Keep Going: Bille August and the Moments That Stay With Us

I spoke with Bille August recently, and what struck me most wasn’t just his long, decorated career as a director, but the way he described why he’s still doing it. After nearly 45 years, he’s not chasing relevance or acclaim. He’s chasing those short, fleeting moments of magic on a set—when everything clicks, when the actors and script and crew fall int…

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a year ago · 1 like · John Biggs

From the very start, Bille made it clear: he’s in it for the right reasons. "Ever since I was a child... I started to write stories," he said. "That was my way of understanding what was going on." That need to process life, not escape from it, runs through everything he makes. “If there’s something that is important to me, I take the essence of what’s going on and I put it together to one development. That’s how I express myself.”

August began as a still photographer, and that sense of precision and observation still guides him. “I’m seeing, when I work — always see images or scenes. The combination of this visually way of approaching life and also cutting events together, that is for me making movies.”

When I asked him if he’s ever wanted to stop, he said yes — once or twice. “I did a film that I was really not pleased with... The script was bad, and it was badly received. I had big fights with the actors.” But then the joy returned. What brought it back? The work itself. “If you have a good scene, if it’s well written and you have wonderful actors... you create magic. You feel it. And then it’s gone again. And that’s what it’s all about.”

He explained it like this: “The great thing about all that is... the audience in the movie theaters, they will witness exactly what happened that day, those few seconds. And they will feel the same thing, hopefully. They will also feel that this has nothing to do with somebody else in the room... This is something personal. I only discovered these few moments of magic.”

There’s nothing sentimental in how he talks about art. It’s not about inspiration or genius. It’s about work. “Don’t make things more complicated. Don’t try to do something sophisticated... Be prepared.” When I asked about AI, he didn’t dismiss it. “It’s a big help, depends on how you use it.” The real problem isn’t tech — it’s forgetting the point. “Everything comes down to a good story... If you don’t have a good story, it doesn’t help.”

The Kiss, his new film, is a love story. But it’s also about pity, shame, class, and confusion. “Can love be confused by pittiness? Can pittiness be confused by love?” he asked. “It’s a beautiful dramatic story… about empathy. And that’s the big problem. He feels sorry for her. He has a big empathy for this handicapped girl.”

It’s a strange conflict, but a very real one. “If he declares he’s in love with her, it would be a scandal... But he feels so sorry for her. And all she’s asking for is to be respected as a person. That’s it.”

So I asked the obvious question: why make a film about empathy?

“Because we all have empathy, don’t we? We should have at least. Unfortunately, the world is changing a lot. It’s so much more about me, me, me... But we still have empathy, and it’s important to remember. It’s a big quality in human beings.”

He paused. “For me personally, why do I make films? Why do I tell stories? It’s to remind myself — and maybe remind the audience — that human beings are human beings.”

That was the end of our talk. He had more interviews to do, more people to talk to, more chances to pass on that reminder. But it was lovely to hear from someone who has been in the trenches for so long.

And now on to the books.

Flesh

by David Szalay

This book had no right to be as good as it was. It’s the story of a thuggish guy who makes good, makes millions, and then loses it all for reasons that seem beyond his control. On the surface, it’s kind of a Scarface story with more sex and much less violence, but deep down it’s a meditation on love and lust — and how what we take is often not what we really want. Really worth a read.

The Guest

by Emma Cline

If you’ve read this, please respond and explain the ending. If you haven’t, pick it up, read it, and let me know what you think. Basically, this is the same as Flesh, above, but shown from a female perspective. It’s a dark novel with lots of foreboding, and the characters are roundly awful. But damn it if Cline can’t turn a phrase.

The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David McCullough

I always try to fit in a little history for my monthly reads and this one was particularly interesting. In The Greater Journey, David McCullough turns his attention to a lesser-known but deeply influential chapter in American history: the 19th-century Americans who went to Paris not as tourists, but as students, artists, and thinkers seeking something they couldn’t find at home. With the same clarity and warmth that defines his earlier work, McCullough paints a portrait of a generation that helped shape American medicine, art, literature, and politics — by first looking outward.

This is not a grand narrative driven by one or two key figures. Instead, McCullough traces the paths of many: Elizabeth Blackwell, Charles Sumner, Samuel Morse, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and others, weaving their stories together with care. What links them is a shared sense of purpose and a belief that learning from another culture — especially one as rich and turbulent as France’s — could elevate their own.

It’s long but worth it.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
- The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

It’s easy to get frustrated.

We’re in a terrible winter right now, even as the days grow longer and the buds push through. The world seems to be on fire. Three major countries are at war, and more war is coming. A hot summer will bring riots again, and the only way forward is through.

But it’s not all bad.

There’s a reason I prepare these book lists every month. It’s mostly for myself—a meditative act that forces me to read and communicate. It’s also a way to share different viewpoints. To explore different ideas, different people, different lives.

I’ll be turning 50 in May. It’s a terrible number, full of portent. I won’t get another 50 years, most likely, and if I do, I probably won’t enjoy them. But these years give me perspective.

We’re not horrible people. We’re insane in the aggregate, but one on one, we’re building, improving, growing. We’re writing and painting and making music. We’re hugging and kissing, loving each other, accepting each other.

It seems like boorishness and brutality are the norm—but watch what happens. Soon, those boors, those fools, those artists of violence will get theirs. They’ll lose power. They’ll die. They’ll come to see they were wrong. It’s inevitable.

And we’ll still be here, smiling gently, waiting for spring.

And we have to march. We have to teach. We have to listen.

And we have to win.

And that’s the trick, isn’t it? No matter how bad things get, how horrible they seem, how terribly people behave, the arc of history remains long and always—always—bends toward justice.

They never win.

And we always do.

And that’s what’s driving them crazy.

I’ll be in Rome in April if anyone is around. I’d also love for you to check out and subscribe to my other newsletter, Keep Going. It’s a labor of love like this one.

Keep Going - A Guide to Unlocking Success

Keep Going: Why hardware is hard

Startups are a grind. Hardware startups? Even tougher. This week on Keep Going, I sat down with CrackBerry Kevin (aka Kevin Michaluk), the guy who made BlackBerry blogging a thing, sold a media empire, and then jumped back into the game—this time with a physical product…

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2 years ago · 1 like · John Biggs

Now, on to the books.

St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of Americas Hippest Street

Ada Calhoun

As an adopted New Yorker - I’m originally from Ohio - the history of our fair city is fascinating to me and I like to pretend that I lived a lot of it when I really didn’t. To wit: this book about St. Marks Place, a street near NYU and Tompkins Square Park that exists in the imagination as a playground of the drugged out, the wild, and the wicked. This book covers the neighborhood from beginning to end, starting during the Native American and Dutch trader days and ending with the Ramones, CBGBs, and Keith Haring. If you like stories about places, this is a great one.

Perfection

Vincenzo Latronico

Because I read on my Kobo I was unwilling to fling this book across the room upon finishing it. It’s a beautifully-written ode to Millennials who “work” from home, move to Berlin for the “art,” and cower in sex clubs until they go home and tepidly spoon. Based on a novel called Things: A Story of the Sixties, this book pretends to love its subjects while casting them as cowards, afraid to embrace even each other. Stick around for the ending that will make you howl!

The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

Benjamin Wallace

Crypto as a topic of interest is pretty much dead - Sam Bankman-Fried basically exposed the entire grift when it comes to the financial side and the best tech is hidden in the shadows - so the only big, accessible story left in that world is the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the guy who created Bitcoin. My buddy Benjamin Wallace does a good job of collecting the various tall tales associated with Nakamoto and weaves them together in a style that made his first book, The Billionaire’s Vinegar, so good. I won’t spoil the quest for you but if you’re into tech and money, this is a fun read.