Better Strangers

Everything in America is a cult. Corporations have their own internal cultures designed towards making employees feel like they are part of something important and messianic, instead of like, a coffee chain. You regularly hear CEOs saying stuff like, “We’re not selling cars, we’re selling dreams.”

That Don Draper nonsense might just be canny advertising, but it’s also completely batshit insane, and people that actually work at these companies often believe it. American culture spends a lot of time talking about freedom, but the society is also set up in a way that fundamentally disempowers anyone but the most rich, and that effectively isolates us from our friends and neighbors. So why would anyone be shocked that so many Americans retreat into the safety of totalitarian cults, which offer certainty and protection and connection with something bigger?

It feels nice to belong! It feels nice to be one of the only people with access to forbidden and arcane knowledge about how the world really works! But if we want to ever build communities in which we really are empowered, we need to know how to not get sucked into the creepy shit. Here are some of the best books I’ve read on cults. Gimme yours in the comments.

1. Cultish by Amanda Montell

This won my “Favorite Book of 2022” because it’s not just about cults, but about the language cults employ, and how this language seeps into all corners of American life. Corporations use cult language, exercise classes like CrossFit and SoulCycle use cult language, and American politicians use cult language.

Cultish is a good primer on recognizing cult-speak, and in showing how it’s designed to shut down our brains so we can just obey what we’re being told.

Thank you for reading Better Strangers. This post is public so feel free to share it.

2. Going Clear by Lawrence Wright

The story of Scientology is absolutely wild. For that alone, this book is worth reading. From founder L. Ron Hubbard’s truly surreal attempts at founding his own religion and later, even trying to establish his own country, to current founder David Miscavige’s use of celebrity to promote the church into prominence (if not respectability), this reads like a suspense novel.

If you don’t have time for the book, there’s a documentary version that’s currently on Hulu which is also extremely good. But I recommend the audiobook. I couldn’t turn it off.

3. Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer

John Krakauer has made a career of writing about people at the extremes — mountaineers in the catastrophic Into Thin Air, free spirits in Into the Wild, and then Under the Banner of Heaven, a history of the Mormon faith coupled with a true-crime story about violence committed by one of the Church of Latter Day Saints’ many fundamentalist schism groups.

I would again recommend the book before anything else, but Hulu adapted this into a pretty solid show starring Andrew Garfield recently as well.

4. American Cult

The United States has a long history of cults and new religious movements. There have been utopian socialist experiments, there have been violent doomsday cults, there have been vegetarian communes, there have been totalitarian revolutionary movements.

American Cult is a recent anthology of comics covering just a few of the many, many cults that have popped up over the two and a half century long American experiment.

5. The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft

Much of the best horror fiction has cults at the center — Stephen King’s The Stand and The Mist have solid cult vibes, and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” remains one of the best horror stories of all time.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth is one of Lovecraft’s most effective horror stories, but I include it here because Lovecraft was an enormous racist, and in many of his stories, cults are just a way of coding his anxieties around race-mixing and immigration in the United States. For him, stuff that isn’t western is inherently sinister, and becomes the source of much of his horror.

It’s easy to see an unusual belief system and immediately identify the weirdness as a cult, but the line between say, mainstream Christianity and messianic offshoots like the Branch Davidians, is not as thick as people would like you to think, and groups like Scientology have effectively exploited the difficulty in defining what counts as a “cult” and what counts as a “religion” when trying to protect themselves in court.

Innsmouth, like most Lovecraft, is actually worth reading in spite of its racism, because as I’ve argued elsewhere, he’s a pretty good window into understanding why white America is such a trainwreck.

But even so — it’s good to be cautious about what you label a cult.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

I used to be one of the Facebook political debate kings. Long essays. Impassioned pleas. Days spent in argument with total strangers. Jobs and relationships neglected in the crafting of a withering reply. The posting was — outside occasional volunteering and donations — the entirety of my political activism.

After Trump’s election in 2016, when it became clear that Facebook had profited massively off of the misinformation campaigns led by both the president-elect and shady foreign operatives, as the reality of what algorithms driven by negativity and controversy-driven “engagement” could do to a national debate, I began to step back.

My political beliefs have not gotten any weaker, and certainly haven’t moderated, but the strategy that myself and so many others were pursuing felt useless at best, and at worst, actively in the service of some of the darkest forces at work in our modern political world: engaging in a debate with a Nazi, after all, gives the Nazi a boost in the algorithm.

In the intervening years, I’ve found a way to still have a political life that has felt both more effective and more fulfilling off of the internet, and I thought I’d share the habits I’ve kicked here that have helped!

1. Stop arguing with your conservative family members.

I know: it’s hard. Because these are the people that you care the most about in the world, and the fact that they believe something repellent is really difficult to stomach.

But the hard truth is that people’s minds don’t change because of rational debate. People all exist inside their own reality tunnels (you do too!) and sometimes, they have to believe in a lie in order to function in the world.

Say you have a relative who fought in an American war, and was traumatized by the experience. Say they have framed this trauma in their mind as a sacrifice made in the name of a country and a set of ideals that they believe in. And say you know that said war was unjust, and was not about freedom so much as it was about the capitalist exploitation of the conquered land.

Isn’t it kind of understandable that the relative might be hesitant to throw an entire belief system out the window, especially a belief system that has given meaning to their trauma, just because you have better facts on your side?

Arguing with family members is fraught because it has all of the other baggage of being in a family, all of the personal issues and quarrels, bundled into the politics.

It’s also an enormous expenditure of energy to try and flip one single vote.

Instead of going after a specific person, find people who are like-minded locally, and think of something you can do together to make your community a better place. My pet project for the past 5 years has been libraries. It will likely stay libraries, but you could also get involved in local schools, in environmental causes, in citizen science projects, in racial justice actions, or in historic preservation, to just name a few.

You’ve got a finite amount of time and energy to spend on this. Spend it wisely: don’t argue with your family about politics. If you must try to convert them, just expose them to what you’re doing, and maybe invite them along. Seeing something positive being done may make them more open to your ideas than a “reasoned debate.”

There’s a caveat: Always speak out against heinous bullshit when you are in the presence of children.

2. Get off the internet.

This place is designed to suck the life out of you. Get off the internet. Maybe after finishing this newsletter.

I gave Book Rex on this topic earlier in the week: the internet is an attention economy, which means it’s designed to exploit your cognitive biases to keep you online as much as humanly possible. This is not healthy for you, and it’s not good politics.

The internet is only effective as a supplement to political action. It’s useful for the sharing of ideas and tactics, but none of that is useful unless you put down the phone and go outside. And it’s important to remember that much of the stuff you think is useful is actually designed to trigger your confirmation bias, or is insidiously planting misinformation in your brain to try and make you into a wingnut.

Yes. I understand the irony of me writing this on the internet. The truth about politics on the internet is it’s not useful to engage with people you don’t trust. My hope is that you trust me because of my past writing, my TikToks, my posts, our personal relationship, or whatever. If you don’t, maybe don’t listen to me? I promise you, fighting me in the comments is not going to be fun for either of us.

3. Get your news from books or longform writing.

First, I want to acknowledge that it’s important to stay updated about what’s going on in the world. But modern news media is not necessarily keeping you well-informed. This isn’t the fault of the journalists so much as it is part of the structure of modern news.

Because news has to be constantly breaking, articles, videos, programs, or whatever, tend to focus on what happened today, without putting as much emphasis on the context that the event took place in.

If you are of a left-ish bent (which hopefully you are, if you’re spending time reading this), you’ll have encountered this fact in recent years. How many white people (like myself) knew the full extent of police brutality before the George Floyd protests? How many men knew the extent of harassment and sexual violence before #MeToo? How many people knew the extent of anti-Asian discrimination prior to COVID?

It’s important to get the deeper context, the history and the perspectives of other sections of the community, if we really want to understand what’s going on in our world, and we can’t do that with 500 word articles and 2-minute videos. You’ve gotta read more in-depth stuff.

So consider taking some time off of daily news and instead reading, I dunno, The Warmth of Other Suns, or The Sixth Extinction, or A People’s History of the United States.

Also: don’t worry so much about bias. More on that in the linked article below.

4. Go hyperlocal.

A lot of what turns people off to politics is how slow it can move. I learned this in Washington, D.C. in the early 2010s, when I was working on the issue of immigration. It was next to impossible to get any sort of immigration reform passed — prior to my working in the Capital, the most recent major immigration reform had been under Ronald Fucking Reagan. We got close in 2013, but guess what! We didn’t actually get it through.

So while there has technically been national progress on that issue in my lifetime, that progress happened when I was 5 months old, and I now have two kids that are older than that, and I have gray hairs in my beard.

If you want to make change, try focusing your efforts locally. This is often still a tricky fight, but it’s one that has more victories, and more space for you to be creative and build something new. If you live in a small town, the barrier to entry is incredibly low — literally just show up. If you live in a bigger city, you might need to pay more dues, so scale it back: start in your neighborhood!

I promise, politics can be as simple as building a little free library, handing out native food seeds to your neighbors, joining a mutual aid network, or starting a local radical book club. It’s genuinely that easy.

An important aside to this is don’t assume elections are the only form of politics worth engaging in. Oftentimes, candidates aren’t chosen by the people so much as they are by connected insiders, and Americans spend a truly bonkers amount of money and time on their elections. All politics starts at the grassroots, so if your local electoral political scene is reactionary and conservative to the point where you couldn’t possibly unseat them, then find people who aren’t right-wing, and start building something together.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

Hey guys! My newest weekly column is something I’ve been doing as part of the Jimble-Jamble for a while, and I decided that it deserves its own space. It’s simple: five book recommendations on a specific theme! I’d love to have guests posting these in the future, so if you want to suggest specific books on a theme, let me know! All links are affiliates with Bookshop.org, so if you buy something through that link, I get a small cut.

Today’s Book Rex is on how the internet is destroying our lives, and how by better understanding it, we can fight back! Your soundtrack today is, naturally:

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

The biggest lie about the internet is that it is part of some idealist “information economy,” which is centered around the free and open exchange of ideas. The internet is not about information — it is about attention.

The proof of this is in that the biggest corporations do not make money off of selling any specific product, but off of selling advertising. 98% of Facebook’s revenue, 90% of Twitter’s revenue, and 81% of Google’s revenue comes from selling ads. This amount of money can’t help but have its own gravitational field, warping the internet and the information around it.

Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants covers the full history of the advertising profession, from its snake oil roots, to its usage as war propaganda in the early 20th century, to its overthrow of the early egalitarian internet. This is an incredibly interesting book. I could not put it down.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Jenny Odell is the reason I became a bird person during the pandemic. Her 2019 book How to Do Nothing (which made Barack Obama’s “best of” list for that year) is a thoughtful look into how the attention economy warps our minds, and how we can resist it, and also use tech like smart phones to actually get into a better connection with the nature around us.

Some of the apps she suggests are the Merlin Bird ID and iNaturalist apps, which became staples with me and my daughter during the early pandemic — Odell points out that most young kids can recognize dozens of brands by the time they’re a few years old, but none of the local birdsong. The day my two-year-old was sitting outside with me, cocked her head, and said, “Papa, that’s a mourning dove,” before I even realized I was hearing it was maybe the best day of 2020 for me.

If you like this article, consider sharing it! It helps me a ton if you do!

I Hate The Internet by Jarett Kobek

When Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet was published, in early 2016, it could’ve been read as a rather cynical view on Silicon Valley and what the internet has become. 7 years later, it reads more as a prophecy than anything else. Kobek self-published the book, but it nonetheless became a runaway bestseller when he was savvy enough to obscure that fact from The New York Times by inventing a fake publishing company.

And it never could’ve been published otherwise — the book is as much of a rant as it is a novel, and at one point, Kobek’s stand-in stands on top of a mountain outside San Francisco and shouts abuse at the city below, a la John Galt in Ayn Rand’s hideous magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged.

It’s impossible to list all of the things that Kobek is furious about in this book, but it’s immensely entertaining and totally infuriating read. Kobek saw the capitalist con artistry that fueled the rise of social media long before most of us, and even if his anger about is breathtaking sometimes, he’s never actually wrong.

How to Stay Smart in a Smart World by Gerd Gigerenzer

Gerd Gigerenzer’s 2022 book is slightly inaccurately titled — Gigerenzer is interested in more than just how algorithms work and don’t work: this book is also an impassioned call for the importance of privacy, and of not handing over our data to any app that asks for it. But How to Stay Smart in a Smart World is also an incredibly informative guide to how algorithms and AI function, and how we misinterpret what they tell us.

One of the many things we fall prey to with AI, for example, is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy: this is named after the idea that a sharpshooter could exaggerate his competence by aiming his gun at a barn, clustering the bullets anywhere, and then drawing on the target afterwards. Data scientists working with AI often do this: they find things the AI seems to predict after the fact, and then say, “the AI predicted this!”

Given all the buzz around engines like ChatGPT, this is a worthy read. AI has a lot of things that humans don’t — the ability to process a lot of data very quickly, for example. But human brains are adapted to unpredictable worlds and to chaos. AI, by it’s nature, can’t deal with chaos. Gigerenzer breaks down how AI won’t replace human intelligence so much as supplement it, and how we need to be wary about putting too much of our faith into technologies we don’t yet understand.

Disrupted by Dan Lyons

Dan Lyons was a respected journalist and editor at the web and technology site ReadWrite when he created a parody blog called Fake Steve Jobs. The blog got incredibly popular, and this in turn led to Lyons being offered a job at tech start-up HubSpot.

Disrupted is Lyons’ account of his brief tenure at HubSpot which — it is no spoiler to say — didn’t end well. HubSpot was a typical Silicon Valley start-up, in that it was run by frat boy psychopaths who ran their company like a cult.

This book was recommended to me after I left a toxic media job which was run on a similar model, and it is an incredibly funny, savage take-down of the sheer con artistry that keeps the Bay Area afloat. If you have — for whatever reason — started to suspect that a guy like Elon Musk is not a visionary so much as an incredibly dumb person who is also a very good con artist, then read this book.

Things turned out okay for Lyons, by the way: he managed to leverage his experiences into a job writing for and producing the excellent HBO show Silicon Valley.

Honorable Mention (that I haven’t read yet): Stolen Focus

I haven’t had a chance to read this yet because there’s a 27-week wait on the audiobook at my library. That alone is enough to recommend, but I’ve also had a number of people I trust say Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus was their best book of 2022.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

When my wife and I had just started dating, we would occasionally go and visit her brother in New York. They had, at some point, become obsessed with the Animal Planet TV show, Finding Bigfoot: Further Evidence, and in between our trips to various bars and restaurants, we’d binge the show.

Finding Bigfoot, if you’ve never seen it, features three members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) and a skeptical field biologist, who search for proof of living Sasquatches in a process they call “Squatchin’.”

Squatchin’ involves going to towns or forests with recent Sasquatch sightings, re-creating the alleged event (usually using the Sasquatch-sized BFRO member James “Bobo” Fay as the Bigfoot stand-in), and then camping overnight in the woods to track the elusive hominid down. The tracking techniques include midnight hikes in which a branch cracking (inevitably a deer) is mistaken for a squatch, “knocking,” which is smacking a big stick against a tree, as Sasquatches are known to do when communicating over long distances, and bellowing into the void in an attempt to imitate a Squatch call.

There have been 9 seasons and 100 episodes of this show. To the layman, they have not yet proven the existence of Sasquatch, but the three BFRO members are true believers. They’ll say things like, “Looking around this area, we can see that there is no sign of a Squatch. But we know that Squatches are excellent at covering their tracks, so a Squatch has definitely been here.”

Ranae, the resident skeptic and field biologist, openly disbelieves in the phenomenon, but clearly loves being in the outdoors, and cannot believe her luck at stumbling into this gravy train that pays her to travel around the world and say things like, “I would need to see further evidence to say this was a real Bigfoot encounter.”

Magical thinking

I would argue that belief in cryptids like Bigfoot is a stronger, purer form of belief than a belief in God. God, after all, is squidgy, ineffable — everyone’s definition of him or her or it or they is different, and it’s impossible to prove something’s nonexistence. So there will always be spaces in between demonstrable fact in which one can cram God, no matter how hard atheists try to kill the concept.

Cryptids, on the other hand, are explicitly defined, and are objectively fake. We live in a world where every single person has a tiny camera in their pocket, and yet, no one seems to manage to snap a picture of a Squatch in spite of thousands of sightings. When a photo is taken, it is inevitably shown to be a hoax.

This means that belief in Bigfoot is a leap of faith that even the most zealous True Believer in God will never have to make. You still can’t disprove Bigfoots and other cryptids, at least not to 100% — but you could take it beyond a reasonable doubt.

In spite of all of that, millions of Americans believe in Bigfoot — 13% of adults. There’s a Sasquatch Music Festival. There’s a National Sasquatch Awareness Day. In Skamania County, Washington, it’s a felony to kill a Bigfoot.

The normal rationalist viewpoint is that this is just proof of widespread stupidity. I think it’s something better.

Ghost tours for the nonbeliever

In 2011, after 25 years of living in Cincinnati, I went on a ghost tour of the downtown Over-The-Rhine neighborhood as part of a kooky Halloween activity. I went in expecting it to be stupid (because ghosts aren’t real!) but I finished it absolutely delighted with the city I grew up in. It was a feeling of wonder I’d never felt for Cincinnati before.

Cincinnati’s Over-The-Rhine neighborhood, during my childhood, was one of the worst ghettos in the U.S. For a few years, it had the highest number of murders per square mile of any neighborhood in the country. It was a place we were told not to go.

But Over-The-Rhine is also one of the largest historic districts in the country. It got its name because the neighborhood used to be separated from the downtown area of the city by the Miami and Erie Canal, and because of the amount of German immigrants in the city, that stretch of the canal became known as “the Rhine.” The Canal is gone now, but the neighborhood’s name stuck.

At the time I went on my tour, Over-The-Rhine had started to gentrify — after race riots in 2001 (revolving, predictably, around the police shooting of a young unarmed black man), the city focused on the massive neoliberal development of the area, and now it has turned a once predominantly-black neighborhood into a bougie hipster neighborhood.

The ghost tour took us to many of the still-abandoned buildings — former beer halls, and also the city’s gorgeous and eerie beer tunnels, deep underground brick bunkers that were designed to keep beer cool during the swampy midwestern summer heat.

The ghost tour took us into these abandoned places to tell us of the ghosts that haunted them, and I quickly realized that, while I still considered the “ghost” part of this to be bullshit, I was getting a clearer glimpse into the history of this era than anything more formal and “legit.”

Because ghost stories are about the people who lived in these neighborhoods. They’re about their tragedies, their loves, their beliefs, their culture, and their lives. Other historical tours focus on important events: battles, speeches, catastrophes — things that we do not experience frequently in our everyday lives.

After that, I went on ghost tours in New Orleans, London, and the Jersey Shore. And in each of them, I felt that through this fiction, I was getting closer to the truth of life in these times than I’d ever been before.

If you are enjoying this article, share it! It helps me out in a big way.

Hot damn, it’s the Loveland Frog!

At the end of my street growing up was a woods. If you followed the creek down the hill through the trees, you would come to a giant drainage tunnel, which the braver kids could walk through to get to Lake Isabella in the town of Loveland.

Lake Isabella, and the nearby Branch Hill bridge over the Little Miami River, I would later learn, was the site of Ohio’s own cryptid: the Loveland Frog.

As cryptids go, the Loveland Frog is perhaps a bit tame, but it’s fitting for the area. The story is that one night, a Loveland Police Officer saw something scurry in front of his car. He stopped to see what it was, and saw a 6-foot-tall frog stand on its legs and point a wand at him. It shot sparks at the officer, who then emptied his clip into the creature.

Other sightings followed through the years, including as recently as 2016, when two kids playing Pokemon Go! near Lake Isabella saw two enormous glowing eyes staring at them from the water. As it emerged, it became clear — this was the Loveland Frog.

Now let’s set aside a couple of facts. First: a different police officer went back to the site of the first Frog sighting and found someone’s large, escaped pet iguana absolutely riddled with bullets.

Second: the Pokemon Go! frog sighting later was found to be the work of pranksters from the nearby all-boys Moeller Catholic High School, which is typical of a high school that sucks as hard as Moeller does.

What’s more interesting is that this goofy wand-toting amphibian has added an enormous amount of personality to an area that, when I was a kid, felt like it had precisely zero personality. Josh Steele, the older brother of one of my closest friends, even wrote a bluegrass musical for the Cincinnati Fringe Festival titled “Hot Damn, It’s the Loveland Frog!”

At some point, the truth of the legend matters a lot less than the way the legend bends local minds and culture. Why shouldn’t sleepy suburban Cincinnati get its own weird cryptid? Why shouldn’t New Jersey get its own devil? And what’s the worst case scenario if a bunch of goofballs go out into the woods and knock sticks against trees to summon the legendary Sasquatch?

More importantly: shouldn’t we try and find more of these cryptids? While researching the Jersey Devil for my book, I asked Jersey Pine Barren-native Kae Lani Palmisano for stories, and what she came back with wasn't just tidbits on the Leeds Devil (as it's locally called), but on myths like the Yimyammer, an enormous monster which shook the trees when it walked (and which may have been specific to just her family), or Fiddlin' Sammy Gibberson, a local fiddle player who once bet the devil a fiddle of gold that he could beat him in a fiddlin' contest and won. This story predates the Charlie Daniels song, by the way. I guess the musician didn’t think he could sell as many records with “The Devil Went Down to Jersey.”

This led me to other Jersey legends like the White Stag of Shamong, a good luck omen which wards people away from catastrophe, and which seems to have roots in both European and local Lenape myths. It led me to Big Red Eye, which is the name of the state’s own local Sasquatch, it led me to the Cape May Sea Serpent, and it led me to Ong’s Hat, the Pine Barren ghost town that is allegedly a portal to another dimension. (I am lucky, in this respect, that New Jersey has an entire publication dedicated to these legends called “Weird NJ.”)

All these stories have broken me down. I have set aside the part of my brain that values rational thought above all else, and I have made space for another, closely related section of my brain that loves ghosts, monsters, and legends, and knows that these fictions are a better window into the past than the facts will ever be.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

So this is cool! You get to hear me literally 60 seconds into my new career! I recorded this episode this morning, which is my first day after quitting my job at the public library I’ve worked at for the past decade. Instead of a read article, I decided to do a kind of loose discussion of what I found valuable about working in a library (spoiler: nearly everything) and what I found challenging (spoiler: also nearly everything).

I referenced a Drag Queen Story Hour article in the episode, you can read it below:

And as I announced, I’m going to put the podcast on a hiatus for a minute. I’m enjoying doing it, but I’ve gotta make some decisions about where to put my time in this initial stage of my career, so on Mondays, you’re going to be getting a column called Book Rex, which is exactly what it sounds like! Book recommendations on a theme each week, sometimes by me, sometimes by other people!

The pod will be back, I just need to get the ball rolling for a bit. Have a great MLK day, guys! I hope you celebrate it in a fitting way, like by contextualizing one of his inspirational meme quotes, by engaging in direct action, or by being disappointed in white liberals.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

This was one of my least clicked on articles last year! So naturally, I’m making it my second ever podcast. Here’s the text version:

This remains one of my favorite things I wrote last year, clicks be damned. I personally remain an atheist, but have gotten a bit more… pagan? I guess? In my 30’s, because I’ve come across this more playful way of thinking about Gods that works for me really well.

This is not my best recording job — I’ve still got one week left at my job, after which I’ll be able to put more into these podcasts than I have been. Share, like, subscribe if you enjoy!

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

First ever podcast, guys! This is a reading of my August 2022 article, “Be More Biased,” which you can see the text version of below:

Remember to subscribe to get the podcast every Monday!

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com