In 2021, shortly after **[our father’s death](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.)**, my brother Wyoming and I changed our names, deleted our social media profiles, and went undercover to infiltrate the world’s largest gathering on capitalists. In a Nevada desert, we came across an eclectic and extraordinary band of songwriters, screenwriters, jokewriters, codewriters, copywriters and — of course — underwriters.
We concluded that the world was too broken to change, so we decided to create a new one, and invite the willing to join us.
We wrote a book about it, scored it like a musical, and titled it THE BILLIONAIRE’S CAMPFIRE: A “True” Story about Culture, Capitalism, Community, and Coming Home.
It’s being trickled out this year, in advance of being served to an aching world at The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland next year.
To learn more about my “bio” continue below.
featuring music by (saint) **LewisBlews.com**
Before I belonged, I didn’t. I was a data miner who wrote the disgracebook algorithms that made media less social. I was the son of an oil miner in a small field in the plains of West Texas. You might know the company I cofounded by a different name. I bet you use the platform I built too — probably even a little bit too much. Well, I used your data. And I became the company’s CMO, the Chief Marketing Officer, but I was later reviled as its Chief Manipulation Officer, because my algorithms manipulated—and sold—
I had hoped to create joy and connection in the world, but I was paid handsomely by our Shareholders at Sequoia Capitol™ on the bottom line, so I drove traffic to our platform using the emotions that sold best—Anger and Division, Hate and Fear.
When we started scrolling, we stopped livin’, and lovin’. When my heart and life grew dark, I finally lost my Self.
But the greatest tragedy came later. As our screens got smaller, so did our gatherings, until our screens got so small that we didn’t gather at all.
I sold the eyeballs that those negative feelings drew to companies for a massive profit. And as the social media landscape I helped architect tore apart society’s fabric—and millions of families along with it—my bank account grew beyond imagination. But along the way, I lost my imagination,my joy, and ultimately, my family too.
Wyoming, before he changed his name and became the one named enigma that the world’s come to know him by, was my rival for Shy Ann’s love, and once upon a time, he was also my brother. We had two different mothers: Mine, the sister of a game theorist who’d won the Nobel Prize in Economics. [**Uncle John Nash](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.)** was a novel thinker known in Nobel circles for his theories, helping the world better understand the interconnectedness of our societal fabric, the very fabric I’d destroyed with the algorithms that fascinated me as a young engineer at disgracebook.
I’d never really taken his Nash Equilibrium to heart, because the prisoners my uncle saw, Wyoming (“Wy”) and I, we were trapped in our own Prisoner’s Dilemma, fighting for our father’s attention in a game where no player benefitted while the others strategy remained unchanged. Uncle John solved The Prisoners Dilemma.
Wy and I could never release ourselves from that prison of our own making, the one my father helped create.