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M A R 2021
| DO THE HUSTLE

The

The

And The

BIODIESEL
How a member of a religious sect teamed up
with a Lambo-driving, hard-partying tycoon
to bilk the government for hundreds of millions
of dollars. The grift? Clean fuel subsidies.
ALL IN ON BEATS
 ALL IN ON STREETS

THE NEW 2021 LEXUS IS. ALL IN ON THE SPORT SEDAN.

lexus.com/IS | #LexusIS

2021 IS F SPORT shown with options using visual effects. ©2020 Lexus
FEATURES WIRED 29.03

P.34 “THIS IS At facilities across the country, gun owners are learning
tactical skills, honing their reflexes against a world of

WHAT WE pervasive threats. By preparing for battle at home, are

they calling it into being? by Rachel Monroe

TRAINED FOR”

P.46 THE MYSTERY

OF “MOSTLY
HARMLESS”
The hiker’s body was
discovered in a tent, his
identity unknown. The
internet started looking
for clues—what they
found was unexpected.
by Nicholas Thompson

P.54 THE LION, THE

POLYGAMIST, AND
THE BIOFUEL SCAM
How a member of a
religious sect teamed
up with a tycoon to bilk
the government for
hundreds of millions
of dollars.
by Vince Beiser

P.66 YOUR BODY,

HIS INSTAGRAM
When cosmetic surgery
becomes fodder for
an ambitious doctor’s
social media feeds,
who owns the story?
by Katherine Laidlaw

P.76 THE RESISTANCE

Whenever a new virus
emerges, a few lucky
people put up a strong
natural defense. Mono-
clonal antibody drugs let
them share the health.
by Roxanne Khamsi

0 0 3
CONTENTS
ELECTRIC
WORD
P.6 Rants & Raves
ON THE
COVER
Illustration by Reshidev RK
For a wild story about a bold
pair of scammers, we wanted
a wild cover to match. RK was
born in Kannur, Kerala, and
he studied sculpture at the
Trivandrum College of Fine
Arts there. He’s worked in
advertising for clients like Lee
and Diesel, IndiGo, Make In
India, Royal Enfield, and Nike.
His illustrations are, he says,
rendered in the colorful style of
his home state.
0 0 4
WIRED 29.03
MIND
GRENADES
P.8 The Mysterious Deus Ex Twitter
by Virginia Heffernan
P.12 Reenter the Office Zone, a Journey
Through Time and Space
by Paul Ford
P.14 We Need an Operation Warp Speed
for Climate Change
by Clive Thompson
P.16 A Guide to the Antitrust
Cases Against Google
by Gilad Edelman
P.18 The Chatty Future of Social Media
by Arielle Pardes
P.20 The Right Way to Hook Up
Your Laptop to a TV
P.22 The Best Gear and Gadgets
of CES 2021
P.24 Cloud Support: Am I Obligated
to Join TikTok?
by Meghan O’Gieblyn
POSTS
P.26 The Bet
In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged
a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a
wager: In 25 years, will tech have
destroyed society? Their judge just
weighed in.
by Steven Levy
SIX-WORD
SCI-FI
P.88 Very Short Stories
by WIRED readers
ELECTRIC WORD WIRED 29.03

RANTS AND RAVES

In our December/January issue, Christopher Cox
profiled network theorists who suggest that social
butterflies, not the vulnerable, should be the first
to get the Covid-19 vaccine, and Patrice Peck
chronicled what she learned about America while
writing Coronavirus News for Black Folks. And in
our February issue, Elliot Ackerman and Admiral
James Stavridis took over the entire magazine with
an excerpt of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War.

RE: “WHO GETS THE

↙
FIRST SHOT”
This makes all kinds of objec-
tive sense, and yet I would
Readers rather die than reward extro-
verts. —Sam Sanders
shared their (@DreamSong77), via Twitter
inspiration,
consternation, Distributing a vaccine based
on some rubric of how respon-
and exhaustion sibly an individual responded
a year into the to pandemic safety protocols,
pandemic. if it were possible, is not moral
if it potentially causes the dis-
ease to spread more than it
needs to. The moral approach
is to distribute the vaccine
in a way that saves the most
lives. If that means we vacci-
nate everyone who shows up
to party for spring break 2021,
then that is what we do.
—Kvaw, via Reddit
RE: “THE MESSENGER”
I am not American, but I was
impressed by the depth and
sobriety of Patrice Peck’s arti-
cle. I learned a lot from the
story (the past, history) and
RE: “2034”
was sad but not surprised to
see history repeating itself
with this pandemic.
What I found most lucid
was that even though the
BLM movement has finally
put the spotlight on the
Black community’s issues,
there’s reason to be a little
depressed that it’s happen-
ing so late and that it still
obscures all the work done by
the tireless protesters.
I hope that more and more
of us will encourage this work
of reform and reconciliation,
side by side, white and Black,
in the coming year, where cer-
tainly the vaccine gives us a
glimpse of a better future.
I very much hope that the
Black community will benefit
from the vaccine as a matter
of priority.
—Katherine, via mail@
WIRED .com
I’m glad to know that WIRED
is not just another “white-
folks-centered” magazine
and recognized Peck for her
critically important contribu-
tions to the Black community.
It is upsetting, disgusting, and
true that the Black commu-
nity is forced into continuous
struggle just to receive the
basic, simple, equal treatment
that is supposed to be the
Thanks for taking a risk,
guys. This publication never
disappoints.
—Tracy Chabala
(@tracyachabala), via Twitter
Well, shit. Just as I was feeling
optimistic about the coming
administration, you literally
blow it all away.
—Harry Foxwell, via mail@
WIRED .com
While I absolutely adore
@WIRED , I have to say their
novelette in this month’s issue
is going to be a tough sell. I
am losing sleep over our pres-
ent national and global tur-
moil. The last thing I need is to
have my imagination height-
ened of coming doom.
—Lisa Jey Davis
(@LisaJeyDavis), via Twitter
I love the new issue (who
doesn’t like a good sci-fi
story?) but was disappointed
by the lack of diversity in illus-
trations. There are women
in the story. Why are they
not pictured? Would it be
so hard to put even a simple
illustration of Sarah Hunt, as
opposed to 11 images of only
men? I can’t be the only one
who noticed the resemblance
of 2034 to 1954 when it came
to imagery.

I had to continually American way!

—Judy Fishman, via mail@
WIRED .com
—Katerine Kibitkin, via mail@
WIRED .com

remind myself Yet another example of

that this was a #COVID19 shining a bright

light on what needs fixing.
—Tiffany J. Vora

fictional story in (@TiffanyVora), via Twitter

RE: “2034”
GET MORE WIRED

order to sleep. My WIRED shows up and it’s

nothing but novel. Specially,
—Bob, via mail@WIRED .com an excerpt from the forth-
coming 2034: A Novel of the
Next World War.
All WIRED stories can be found
online, but only subscribers
get unlimited access. If you are
already a print subscriber, you
can authenticate your account
at WIRED .com/register.

0 0 6
 BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN IDEAS

The deus ex Twitter works in mysterious ways.

THE DAY OF January 6, when he hurled down

the lightning bolt that cast Donald Trump
out of Twitter and into outer darkness,
should have been @jack’s debut as an
imperial overlord. But @jack never seems
to flex. This can be maddening. Just when
you want him to act Churchillian, @jack
is more reticent than ever, a cipher, more
Sphinx than Zeus. Last summer, The New
York Times asked Jack Dorsey whether he’s
“one of the most powerful people on earth,”
and his voice was like a dial tone: “No.”
On January 13, @jack threaded ambiv-
alently about the Trump ban, ruminating
on the question of how to address “offline
harm as a result of online speech” while
holding sacred “the noble purpose and ide-
als of the open internet.” He left his pensées
unfinished.
Dorsey doesn’t generally use Twitter to
tweet. “I use it to listen and to observe and
to understand our world and my world and
myself,” he told the Times. At the same time,
he views Twitter as a cosmic verity,
a force that mysteriously predates

ILLUSTRATION / SAM WHITNEY

29.03 MIND GRENADES 0 0 9
 IDEAS
his cocreation of it in 2006. Twitter “wasn’t
something we really invented. It was some-
thing we discovered.” Like suffering, like
samsara, Twitter was just always there.
Forty-four-year-old Jack Patrick Dorsey,
the reclusive and peripatetic maxibillion-
aire from St. Louis, exists, presumably, in
time and space, somewhere behind his
Twitter handle. But it’s @jack, that numi-
nous avatar, that’s credited with bestow-
ing on his kingdom the relative well-being,
quiet, and order that appears to bless us
only when Donald Trump is in exile from
civilization. The nation would come to
know these unfamiliar sensations at the
inauguration of President Biden, weeks
after @jack, or someone acting in his
name, enacted the excommunication. In
retrospect, @jack was not just decisive and
swift; he was prescient. So he could be for-
given for giving a spike-the-football press
conference. But in the weeks since, he’s
remained every bit as elusive as Q. Or the
Holy Ghost. Or Shiva the Destroyer.
And so it has been, for four strange years.
@jack is everywhere and nowhere. He’s
either the emperor of geopolitics or a lost
Gadde wields so much
influence at Twitter that
she terrified the gnarly
crowd at the late wingnut
social platform Parler.
One Parlerite called her
“Goebbels in a pantsuit.”
druid. The relatively small but boisterous
slice of Twitter that’s preoccupied with
American politics has come to imagine
@jack, the author of our collective Twitter
being, as all-powerful. We call out for him,
but he stays silent. We beg him to smite
trolls; he does nothing. We plead for him
to exile Nazis; he retreats to a meditation
cushion. Sometimes (as in 2017) he adds
characters to our rations. Sometimes (as in
2020) he introduces Fleets, which no one
asked for. Because, like other deities, he’s
capricious—and often seems not to exist—
we’re stuck with tea leaves: what he likes,
tweets, retweets. None of it adds up. All
that can be said with any confidence is that
@jack in general likes a laissez-faire Twit-
ter—whether out of Buddhist acceptance of
what is, blithe indifference, catch-all liber-
tarianism, or anxiety about his untrained
capacity for moral discernment.
When incarnate, as in occasional appear-
ances and paparazzi photos, Jack Dorsey
does little to give the lie to the online fan-
tasy of him. In October, as he testified
before Congress via video, he wore a foot-
long gray-brown beard and a gold ring in
his left nostril. Once a Missouri fashion
model and tinkerer enchanted by dispatch
technology, then a springy boyish billion-
aire on the TED-Davos circuit, Dorsey has
now gone full Elminster Aumar. His deep-
set eyes can still be called piercing, and the
vanity of his early blue-steel pose is not
lost. What is lost is the look of complai-
sance that defines young founders looking
for capital. Dorsey, like @jack, no longer
truckles to anyone.
But there’s a twist. There is one at Twit-
ter who takes action while Dorsey mans
the monastery. She is Vijaya Gadde, Twit-
ter’s former general counsel, and now
head of legal, policy, and trust and safety
issues. At 46, Gadde wields so much influ-
ence at Twitter that she terrified the gnarly
crowd at the late wingnut social platform
Parler. One Parlerite called her “Goebbels
in a pantsuit.” Another warned, “You don’t
know her face or name because she rules
in the shadows.”
Off the mark, of course. Unlike Dorsey,
Gadde is famously non-shadowy and
forthright. Born in India, she grew up in
Southeast Texas when it was still stud-
ded with sundown towns, which shut out
people of color with threats, violence, and
racist statutes. When her father, a jobless
chemical engineer, found work knock-
ing on doors to collect insurance premi-
ums, he had to seek permission from no
less than the local Ku Klux Klan leader to
walk in his own neighborhood. “My fam-
ily felt very powerless in those moments,”
Gadde said in 2016, when she was hon-
ored at NYU School of Law, from which
she graduated in 2000. “When people ask
me why I went to law school—I went to
law school to make sure that people have
a voice and that people have someone to
fight for them.” She now sits on the board of
Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian group
and NGO that is currently working to pro-
vide emergency supplies to especially vul-
nerable families and communities during
the Covid-19 crisis.
Gadde’s earnest moral commitments at
Twitter might be explained in part by tim-
ing. She joined Twitter not at its start as a
group-text goof by Dorsey and his crew in
2006, but in 2011, one decade ago, when
29.03 MIND GRENADES 0 1 1

it moved to center stage as a communica-

tion nexus for the so-called Arab Spring.
Where most current social media leaders
CHARTGEIST by Jon J. Eilenberg

had no idea what they were getting into

in the lighter-hearted days of Web 2.0,
Gadde instantly saw the seriousness of the
endeavor. She could see Twitter’s activ-
Internet Traffic, Early 2021
ist possibilities, as well as its exploitation
by those looking to stoke disinformation
and racist speech. Above all, as she rose
in the ranks, she gained Dorsey’s druid Sea chanteys
ear. As one Twitter official told Politico, “I
can’t imagine a world where Jack looks at GameStop
stonk trades
[Gadde] and says, ‘No.’ ”
In fairness, digging in and impeding
Bernie memes
change is not Dorsey’s thing, so Twitter
may for the foreseeable future be synced Political news
to the clear-eyed moral vision of Gadde,
whose Twitter feed, @vijaya, is focused Other
more on Amanda Gorman’s poetry and
public health infrastructure than on Bit-
coin, a topic that preoccupies @jack.
And while Gadde tweets without reser-
vation about human rights initiatives and What’s Keeping Us Up at Night
progressive projects she admires, and
brooks right-wing trolls, the CEO of Twitter
continues to be singularly ill-suited to the The pandemic
world of barbs and quips he helped create.
He openly prefers the otherworldly inter- The pandemic
connectiveness of the service to the tweets puppy
that serve as its component parts. When
Lupin on Netflix
Dorsey reflects on the dynamic of tweet-
ing in interviews, he still hearkens back to
Bobbit worms
the heady early days, when it was “amaz-
(Google it—or don’t)
ing” to be able to tell friends all at once, by
making phones buzz in their pockets, that
you were headed to a yoga class.
When he had to show up to thread about
the Trump ban on January 13, though, he
showed up as himself. He expressed his Clubhouse Crowd
uncertainty, spoke with little ego, and
made it clear he was just another human,
improvising on insufficient data, hoping to
VCs VCing
promote both peace and openness in a
world where those values are sometimes Founders
at odds. However much Twitter might urge foundering
him to play oracle, @jack will refuse. The
Scammers
last sentence of the thread’s intro tweet scamming
would make an excellent epitaph and an
excellent koan: “Was this correct?” Wannabes
wannabe-ing

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN is a regular

contributor to wired.
 BY PAUL FORD IDEAS

A workplace has its own informal cardinal directions: elevatorward,

kitchenward, bathroomward. Tiny shared human geographies.

I ONCE WORKED for a few weeks at a big,
busy company, and one day I asked, jokingly,
“Where do I go to cry?” An hour later, I was
taken aside and told in seriousness about
a specific stairwell. Another person there
led me on a five-minute walk through the
skyscraper to a tiny, hidden conference
room, and then made me promise to keep
the location a secret, a vow I have kept.
(They also cried.)
I think of those as “weeping paths,”
part of the secret map of every office. You
cannot sob at your desk, so you must go
on a journey, smiling at the floor, until
you find a place where emotion can flow.
Offices have their own mental maps. “Oh,”
they say, “she’s moving to the 17th floor.”
And everyone says: the 17th floor! And
you know, being a social primate, exactly
where you are in the organization relative
to that floor. Offices all have their formal
and informal maps, whether inside a bank,
statehouse, cathedral, museum, school, or
open-plan tech firm. I say “West Wing” and
you know what I’m talking about.
I keep reading that the office era is over—
that our pandemic has proven that “office
culture” is an oxymoron. When the virus
hit we left our desks and threw away our
commutes, and now no one can tap our
shoulders (or, much worse, massage them).
And aren’t we better for it? Don’t humans
work better as nodes in a network than as
cattle in a pen? We are, finally, free to get to it.
But I don’t buy this. There’s a book I love,
Space and Place, by the human geographer

ILLUSTRATION / ELENA LACEY

29.03
Yi-Fu Tuan. Human geography is a beautiful
’70s-style academic discipline, and Tuan is
its gentlest practitioner. Space and Place is
only about 200 pages of thoughtful prose,
but I’ve never finished it; I read a paragraph
at a time, and that fills up my brain. I’ve
been reading it for a decade. He writes:
“The manager’s office may be only two
doors from the vice president’s office, but
it will take the manager years of hard work
to get there. The vice president’s office is a
temporal goal. Goal is also a place in space,
the promised land on the other side of the
ocean or mountain.” And then there’s a little
subway map where one train line is time,
ending in the vice presidency, and the other
is distance, ending in the “promised land.”
You need to see it. (So beautifully broad.
Everyone today has to be so specific.)
I love visiting offices, listening to their
hum. Literally: I sometimes went to a giant
financial firm where they traded different
kinds of securities on different floors, and
if it was a big day in bonds the fourth floor
would be loud, loud; the fifth floor, though,
focused on shorter-term investments,
would be almost silent. You could hear
the economy.
I enjoy the rituals of visiting. First, there
is security: How long will I wait? Who will
greet me in the lobby, should I ever gain
access—a human whose job is to handle
ingress and egress, or is each person
expected to greet their own visitors? Will
I get a VISITOR sticker, and will the sticker
change color in a day, for security purposes?
Home is supposed to be a
constant, steady place.
It shouldn’t change very much.
But an office is basically a big
clock with humans for hands.
Is the coffee brought to me or may I get it
myself? Sometimes you learn that people
have had sex in a given office, which is hard
to forget. There are cardinal directions—
elevatorward, kitchenward, bathroomward.
Favored stalls. Better sinks. Teensy little
geographies shared between humans.
I have a friend who worked at the White
House, back in calmer times, and he told me
about some of his workplace battles. I said
to him one of the dumbest things I’ve ever
said in my life: “The White House seems like
a really political place to work.” I still cringe
to think of it. Yet it’s a place where power is
absolutely explicit and geography means
everything. And “place,” as Tuan points out,
is really a proxy for time. The president
might summon anyone any moment of
the day, from anywhere in the nation. If
you work in one of the rare offices in the
West Wing, instead of across the alley at
the enormous Executive Office Building,
you can be in the Oval Office in a minute.
It’s purely about time, measured in the
count of footsteps between you and power.
Everyone knows that. The West Wing offices
themselves absolutely suck. The whole
place smells weird.
Home is supposed to be a constant,
steady place, a shelter for a family. It
shouldn’t change very much. But an office
is basically a big clock with humans for
hands. And I find that the people who don’t
want to go back to pre-pandemic office
culture are the people who are the most
concerned about their time. Sometimes
MIND GRENADES 0 1 3
this is their personality; they are engineers
who look at travel as a waste, who seek
efficiencies in their work and health.
Sometimes they’re people with other
stress, like parents of young children
who triangulate between the day care’s
schedule, their boss’s expectations, and
kids’ needs. For a disabled person, working
from home can save hours of daily, needless
negotiation. All of these cases are utterly
valid. And yet we’re going back. Maybe not
all of us, maybe with hybrid schedules. But
most of us. We all know it.
If you don’t believe me, try making a map
of your office. See what you remember.
Where do people go when they are
rewarded, punished? Where is power
concentrated, and where do you sit? What
paths do people take to accomplish their
goals? Are some emotions possible in one
space and not another? (Take a picture and
send it to me. I want to see.) Now make
a map of your “digital office.” It will be a
bunch of squares and a screenshot of a
web browser.
I like working at home. It’s efficient and
I’m glad for the time I get back. But digital
work has a lousy clock. Hours blur. Meetings
all look the same. My map of our company’s
office is filled with pathways, memories,
art, people who came and went. (And it’s
a small, single-floor, open office!) It’s got a
history. Some nights I stayed late, ordered
takeout, and sang loudly while getting some
terrible presentation done. Sometimes I
presented to 60 people in a room. So did
the companies that occupied the space
before—publishers, textile wholesalers—
going back a full century.
I like existing in that continuum of
memories. Someone will move in after we
move out. Screens hang all over the office
so that our remote employees can be
present. We spend a lot of time and money
making sure that they can share in office
events. It doesn’t have to be all or none. But
the office doesn’t so much give meaning to
my work as it is the meaning of my work.
It’d be hard to give that up.
PAUL FORD (@ftrain) is a programmer,
essayist, and cofounder of Postlight, a
digital product studio.
 BY CLIVE THOMPSON IDEAS

If the Covid vaccine push has proven anything, it’s that big government
works. Time to engage warp speed for climate change.

IN THE DISMAL early days of the pandemic,

a vaccine seemed depressingly far off.
Historically, the average time to develop
a new vaccine was 10 years—far too long
for our current emergency. But then
something happened to shift things into
overdrive: serious government action.
The White House and Congress cre-
ated Operation Warp Speed and started
plowing some $18 billion into it. The Feds
authorized huge, multibillion-dollar pre-
orders for vaccines, and with such a large
guaranteed market, pharmaceutical firms
moved into high gear. The government
also threw its logistical know-how at the
hellish challenge of distributing the vac-
cines. Scientifically, of course, we were
prepared and lucky. Genetic sequencing
was advanced and speedy, and scientists
cooperated globally. But it was the criti-
cal push from governments (the US and
others) that propelled the fastest vaccine
mobilization in history.
It’s also an object lesson for our trou-
bled time: When you’re facing a world-
threatening crisis, there’s no substitute
for government leadership.
This is worth reflecting on, because
we’re surrounded by existential threats.
Principally, climate change. The scale of
the problem is massive.
So is the answer: Operation Warp
Speed for climate.
The US government should throw its The US government could pledge
to buy as much clean energy as
firms can make. By being a single,
huge buyer, the feds could strip
away complexity.
29.03
muscle behind ramping up a mammoth,
rapid rollout of all forms of renewable
energy. That includes the ones we already
know how to build—like solar and wind—
but also experimental emerging sources
like geothermal and small nuclear, and
cutting-edge forms of energy storage or
transmission. It’s not as if the Feds have
done nothing on renewables; tax credits for
solar are partly why adoption is up and the
price is down. But compared to the terrify-
ing scale of the problem, the spending has
been chump change. For the past 40 years,
the US has spent 37 percent more on R&D
for fossil fuels than for renewables.
A Climate Warp Speed campaign should
invert that ratio. Hell, 10X it! More cru-
cially, the government should become a
bulk buyer of renewable energy. The Feds’
vaccine purchase is what jolted pharma-
ceutical companies to move so bloody
fast with Covid-19. “They’re not going to
make a bunch of vaccine that’s just going
to sit on a shelf and nobody’s going to buy,”
notes Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the
Georgetown Center for Global Health Sci-
ence and Security. The virus created the
demand; the Feds created the market.
With renewable energy, the US govern-
ment could pledge to buy as much clean
energy as firms can make. One thing that
slows cutting-edge deployments is that
selling energy—closing contracts with
many different states, cities, or businesses
—is often a glacial, convoluted affair, notes
Tim Latimer, CEO of Fervo Energy, a devel-
oper of geothermal energy. By being a sin-
gle, huge buyer of first resort, the Feds
could strip away the complexity.
“If the government just said, ‘Look, we’ll
buy the first batch’—all of a sudden the sci-
entists get to do what they do best, which is
focus on the science and build it with cer-
tainty,” Latimer says. “That would catalyze
all kinds of new activities.”
The US can offer more than just cash,
though. We have logistics. A climate Warp
Speed could use the organizational oomph
of our government and military to bring
clean energy to every federal building
ILLUSTRATION / ALYSSA WALKER
MIND GRENADES 0 1 5
READOUT
The world, quantified.
nationwide. They could cut through red
tape too. (They did this during Operation
Warp Speed for vaccine-component firms.)
If anything, the Trump administration erred
in not going big enough to ramp up vac-
cine supply. Emergencies gotta emergency.
Carbon sequestration needs the Warp
Speed treatment too. Startups and labs
have dreamed up prototypical hardware
125M
→
for scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere.
Increase in the number of people
But it’s a gnarly engineering challenge that worldwide exposed to heat waves
needs early support. In the long run, there between 2000 and 2016.
may well be a robust market for extracted
carbon, transformed into fuel or as con-
struction materials. But in the short run it’s
just an expensive pile o’ extracted carbon.
So the Feds should buy it.
My libertarian friends, I can hear you
protesting: Wait, won’t government spend-
10K
ing distort these markets? Can’t free enter- →
The number of “microcovids”
prise bootstrap truly world-changing new
equivalent to a 1 percent chance
tech all on its own? Nope. It rarely has. The of catching Covid-19, according
free market regarded nearly every founda- to a risk-tracking effort called the
MicroCovid Project.
tional digital tech—in its early years—as a
costly boondoggle and had little interest.
Transistors, integrated circuits? Back in the
’50s and ’60s, the first batches were often
janky messes. It took the Department of
Defense pouring dough into startup firms
$22M
like Fairchild Semiconductor to bring costs
down and reliability up, so that 20 years
→
later Woz could craft the Apple I. You’re
Covid relief funds delivered as of
welcome. (Oh, and if you like deep learn- mid-January to 600,000 informal
ing? Thank Canadian taxpayers.) workers in Togo, targeted with help
“It’s always been the symbiosis of public from machine-learning algorithms
that seek signs of poverty in satellite
and private,” as Margaret O’Mara, historian photos and cell phone data.
and author of The Code, a history of Silicon
Valley, tells me.
The Biden administration plans to retire
the Warp Speed name, but hopefully not
the approach. When you’re finally jabbed
with the new vaccine, savor our public vic-
tory. Then call your member of Congress
140K
to demand a Warp Speed for climate. The →
planet needs the same shot in the arm. Viewers who watched the Capitol
invasion play out on DLive, a Twitch-
like game-livestreaming platform
CLIVE THOMPSON (@pomeranian99) is a that has become a haven for
WIRED contributing editor and author of extremists.
Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and
the Remaking of the World.
 BY GILAD EDELMAN BUSINESS

The Cases
Against Google:
A Guide OK, you said there were two
cases about Google search.
What’s the other one?
→
GOOD THINGS, it is said, come in threes. Not so these days for Google.
The other case about search comes from
Just before the 2020 holiday season, the company found itself facing
a coalition of more than 30 states, led by
a trio of antitrust cases brought by state and federal enforcers. We
the attorneys general of Colorado and
sorted through the lawsuits to figure out what it all means.
Nebraska. It covers much of the same
ground as the DOJ lawsuit. (In fact, the
states have requested that their case be
combined with the DOJ’s.) Importantly,
Why are there all these separate however, this case adds the allegation
cases against Google, instead of that Google has used its monopoly over
just one? general search—the activity commonly
→ known as Googling—to discriminate
The simplest answer is that Google has a against so-called vertical search engines,
dominant position in multiple markets. which specialize in a particular niche or
This opens it up to different lines of attack product category. (Think Yelp for restau-
that don’t all fit in the same lawsuit. Two rants or Kayak for travel.) The idea is that
of the cases focus on Google’s monopoly Google wants people to begin all their
in online search and the advertising that searches on Google, rather than going
What does Google say about
appears above search results; the third straight to a vertical search site or app.
that?
focuses on its control over what you might The states argue that Google has made
→
call non-search advertising. changes over the years to how search
In response to the DOJ’s suit, Google
results appear in order to keep more
says that there’s nothing wrong with the
OK, so what are the cases? traffic flowing to Google’s own proper-
arrangements it has struck, because it’s
→ ties. That puts companies like Yelp and
easy for users to change the default if they
The US Department of Justice filed the Kayak in a tight spot—if users don’t easily
want. As the company’s chief counsel put
first case in October, joined initially by find them through Google, they may not
it in a blog post, “People don’t use Google
11 Republican state attorneys general. find them at all. This is illegal, the states
because they have to, they use it because
This is the narrowest of the three law- claim, because the goal and effect is to
they choose to.”
suits. It claims that Google has used anti- entrench Google’s share of the search
competitive tactics to protect its monopoly market, rather than to steer users to the
But why would Google spend
over general search and prevent rival best results.
billions to be the default if
search engines from getting a foothold.
people would freely choose it
Most notably, the complaint describes the What does Google say
anyway?
lengths Google has gone to to make sure to that?
→
it’s the default search engine on browsers →
Why indeed?
and smartphones—like paying Apple as Google’s public response so far is sim-
much as $12 billion a year to make Google ple: The changes it has made are purely
the default on Safari and iPhones. With its about making Google search more useful
control over the search market secure, the and relevant to users. If that’s true, there’s
GILAD EDELMAN
suit says, Google can rake in more search nothing problematic about what the com-
(@giladedelman) is
ad revenue, which in turn allows it to keep pany has done. The case may ultimately
wired’s politics writer,
the payouts flowing. The DOJ argues that turn on whether the antitrust enforcers
based in Washington, DC.
this amounts to an illegal scheme to main- can prove that Google had other goals in
tain Google’s monopoly over search. mind besides customer satisfaction.
29.03
So how about the third case?
→ it says that there was nothing special or
Just one day before the Colorado/
Nebraska coalition filed its case, a smaller
group of states, led by Texas, filed their
own suit. This one is focused on Google’s
control over the vast amount of digital
advertising that appears in places other
than search results. According to sev-
eral studies, Google controls upwards of
90 percent of multiple parts of the dig-
ital advertising supply chain: Whenever
you open a website (or an app) and see
an ad, chances are the advertiser used
Google to buy the ad placement, the pub-
lisher used Google to make the ad space
available, and the two parties made the
deal in an automated auction on Google’s
advertising exchange. This setup, where
one company represents both the buyer
and seller while running the marketplace
itself, creates obvious conflicts of interest.
According to the states’ complaint, Google
exploits its control over the advertising
pipeline to impose unfair conditions on
advertisers and publishers, discriminate
against rival ad tech firms, and rake in a
bigger cut of online ad spending than it
would earn if there were more middle-
men competing for the business.
The Texas lawsuit also includes a sur-
prising allegation: that Google struck an
unlawful deal to get Facebook to ease
up on competing with its ad business in
exchange for preferential treatment in
Google-run ad auctions. If that’s true, it
would be a straightforward case of con-
spiring to restrain trade in violation of
Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which out-
laws such deals between companies.
(Facebook isn’t named as a defendant in
the suit, but it could also face legal prob-
lems stemming from the deal.)
Sounds bad. What’s Google’s
response?
→
On the broader claim about Google’s
advertising monopoly, the company
insists that the sector remains robustly
competitive. On the Facebook allegation,
shady about the deal between the two
companies, and that Facebook is merely
one of dozens of companies that partic-
ipate in Google’s Open Bidding program.
Internal documents, however, suggest that
Google and Facebook executives real-
ized their arrangement was unusual. The
legal complaint points out that the formal
agreement between the companies men-
tions the word antitrust “no fewer than
twenty times.”
Is Google just getting punished
for being too big?
→ Ken Paxton, meanwhile, is not exactly
No. The key distinction to keep in mind
is between being competitive and being
anticompetitive. Being competitive means
trying to be the best—offering the high-
est quality, most affordable prices, and so
on—to attract the most business. Being
anticompetitive means using your mar-
ket power to exclude potential rivals so that
you don’t have to try as hard to be the best.
The common thread in all three lawsuits
is the accusation that Google has engaged
in anticompetitive conduct designed to
entrench its monopoly position, instead
of purely trying to win on the merits.
MIND GRENADES 0 1 7
So, why did different groups of
states sign onto the different
suits?
→
It may have something to do with poli-
tics. The DOJ’s decision to file its case in
October was controversial; some peo-
ple, including lawyers in the department,
thought US attorney general William
Barr was rushing the case, perhaps to
notch an accomplishment for his boss,
Donald Trump, before the election. That
might explain why only Republican states
signed onto the complaint at first. (A few
Democratic attorneys general have since
asked to join.) Texas attorney general
the kind of guy Democratic officials are
dying to make common cause with. He
has been dogged by allegations of ille-
gal and unethical behavior, and has even
been indicted for securities fraud. Most
recently, he led a bad-faith effort by
Republican states to overturn the results
of the presidential election, fueling spec-
ulation in Texas that he might be angling
for a presidential pardon. (He didn’t
get one.)
What comes next?
→
If the past is any guide, the cases could
take years to be resolved. (There may also
be more cases to come.) But, whatever
happens, Google is about to spend a lot of
time and energy fending off major law-
suits—just as Microsoft did more than two
decades ago, distracting its management
enough to create room for internet
upstarts like Google to blossom. A replay
of that dynamic could dramatically
reshape the tech industry, no matter who
ultimately wins in court.
ILLUSTRATION / SAM WHITNEY
 BY WHITSON GORDON GEAR

The Right Way to Hook

Up Your Laptop to a TV
It’s much more than just a plug-and-go operation.

WE’RE ALL STUCK at home, and that glorious new 65-inch OLED TV is right there.
But if you want to use that big screen to watch video from an obscure service, play a
PC game, or just Zoom with your family without everyone huddling around a 13-inch
laptop, your set-top streaming device won’t get you too far. You have to connect that
laptop to your TV. It can be a challenge, but we’re here to help.

GET WIRED
→ connect a display through its USB-C port,
Chromecast, Apple TV, and other
streaming devices let you show your
computer’s screen on the TV wirelessly—
just don’t expect awesome results. It’s
great for displaying photos or mirror-
ing browser tabs, but it can get choppy
when you start trying to push hi-def
USB-C: If you don’t see any other display
ports on your laptop, you may be able to
which is oval and smaller than regular
USB—check the manual to find out.
Once you suss out the port situa-
tion, fire up Amazon and search for
“ -to-HDMI cable” or “ -to-
HDMI adapter,” filling in the port type.

DIAL IN THE DISPLAYS

video or games through the connection.
For high-bandwidth streams, you need
a hard cable connection. There are so
many connection standards that finding
the right cable (or dongle) is likely the
most difficult part of the process. Here
are the most common display connec-
tors you’ll see on today’s laptops:
HDMI: Modern HDTVs use this port to
receive video and audio over one cable.
If you have an HDMI port on your laptop,
the easiest (and cheapest) way to connect
the two is to borrow the HDMI cable from
your streaming box or game console.
DisplayPort/MiniDisplayPort:
Similar to HDMI, you’ll find these on a lot
of modern computers, but you won’t find
it on your TV, so you’ll need an adapter.
→
OK, you’ve got your cable, but for the
best-looking image, you may need to
make some tweaks. Plug your computer
into your TV. After you choose the right
HDMI input, you should see your desktop
or login screen appear on the TV. If it’s
blurry or pixelated, it may be scaling your
laptop’s screen image to fit; if your TV isn’t
displaying all your windows, it’s proba-
bly treating your TV as a second monitor.
Here’s how to adjust these settings:
Windows : Right-click the desktop
and choose Display Settings. Scroll to
the Multiple Displays dropdown—you
can choose to mirror the screens (not
recommended), extend the laptop’s
display to the TV, or show your desktop
only on one screen. At the top of
this window, click the square that
corresponds to your TV, then scroll down
and make sure Display Resolution is set
to 1920 x 1080 for 1080p TVs or 3840 x
2160 for 4K models.
 MIND GRENADES 0 2 1

Mac : Head to System Preferences > WIRED RECOMMENDS

Displays and click on the Arrangement The latest picks from our reviews team.
tab. Here you can check the Mirror
Displays box, or uncheck this option to
extend the desktop across both screens.
If you choose to mirror the image on both Nokia 5.3 Budget Android
screens, go to the Display tab, open the Smartphone
Optimize For dropdown, and select your
TV from the list. → RATING: 8/1O $200

TWEAK YOUR TV
→ tery life. Uncluttered software.
Even after you’ve dialed in your displays
on the computer, you may still find that
some things don’t look right. Grab your
TV remote, open up the settings, and
check a few things:
WIRED
Costs $200! OK performance.
Decent screen. Reliable bat-
Includes two Android version
upgrades and three years of
security updates. Plastic body
= less glass to shatter. Addi-
tional niceties: a headphone
jack, expandable storage, and
NFC for contactless payments.
TIRED
No water resistance. Easy
to block the bottom-firing
speakers with your hands.
Cameras perform poorly in
low light. Doesn’t support
Verizon’s network.
—Julian Chokkattu

Turn off overscan: If your TV is

cutting off the edges of your desktop,
look for an Overscan, Screen Fit, or
Aspect Ratio setting and play with the
options until the desktop looks right.
This can differ a lot from TV to TV, so
Google your model if you aren’t sure
how to fix it.
Turn on PC mode: Some TVs may have
a setting for connecting a PC—even if you
don’t see it, you might be able to access
it by changing the input name to “PC.”
Match the colors: This is an entire
can of worms deserving of its own article,
but essentially, you want to make sure
Myx Plus In-Home
Fitness System
→ RATING: 8/1O
WIRED
Less expensive than similar
trainers. Initial “assessment Low resolution of Scenic
ride” gauges your fitness and Rides footage undercuts
adjusts your target heart-rate the immersive experience.
zones accordingly. Program Heaviest set of included
offers cycling workouts, free weights will not satisfy
weight and HIIT training, hardcore gym rats. Takes up
yoga, and meditation. Nearly a fair amount of floor space.
silent bike means you can ride —Billy Brown
at 5 am without waking the
downstairs neighbors. Large,
bright monitor swivels for use
during off-bike workouts.

your TV and computer are both set to the

same color space, either Limited or Full
RGB. If they don’t match, the picture will
either be too dark or too washed out. TVs
use Limited out of the box, and some
may have a setting for Full RGB—if yours
does, turn that on. If you don’t see that
option, change your laptop to Limited to
match your TV. Your devices should now
be on the same page—until the next time
you upgrade.
WHITSON GORDON (@whitsongordon) is a
San Diego–based writer who covers how
people can make the most of technology.
Anova Precision Oven
→ RATING: 8/1O
WIRED
Dude, cooking with steam is
so much more interesting than
air frying. It also delivers sous-
vide-style results without
the water bath and bags.
In addition to a convection
mode, it can bake and broil
like a normal oven. Steam is a
bread maker’s best friend.
For the full reviews of these products and more, visit WIRED .com/gear.
$600
TIRED
Testing revealed a couple
of physical problems like
fiddly touch control and
hairline cracks in the water
tank. It’s a countertop
behemoth. —Joe Ray
GEAR

THERE WAS NO CES in Las Vegas this year. No touching of gadgets, no in-person demos, no long
lines at Starbucks. Instead, the annual consumer tech showcase was held entirely in cyberspace,
replete with awkward Zoom calls, glitch-filled booth tours, and livestreamed press conferences
with presenters standing 6 feet apart. Even though we could only experience CES from afar,
we still were able to identify the products, components, prototypes, and trends that will shape
the next few generations of consumer tech. —WIRED Gear Team

→ BEST LAPTOP
Acer Chromebook Spin 514

Acer’s new Spin 514 has a solid aluminum chas-

sis and high-end specs, but we’re most excited
about its new chip. This is Acer’s first Chrome-
book using AMD’s Ryzen 3000-C series mobile
processor, and it’s among the first models con-
taining the chip to hit the market. Designed
with Google, the 3000 series is optimized for
Chromebooks and is part of a larger trend that
sees Chromebooks transforming from cheap,
low-end laptops to powerful machines capable
of handling big workloads. We’ll see if ChromeOS
can deliver the software users need for more
ambitious tasks, but at least the hardware won’t
be holding Chromebooks back. $TBD

→ BEST HEADPHONES
V-Moda M-200 ANC

It’s fun to watch products you like get even bet-

ter. V-Moda’s hexagonal over-ear headphones
have gone through several evolutionary steps,
from wired to wireless, rigid to folding. Now,
the company is offering a version of its flagship
cans with active noise canceling. The durable,
Italian-designed headphones deliver 20 hours
of battery life, 10 levels of noise reduction, and
support for the latest high-resolution audio for-
mats. They’re also a sign of the times: Nearly
every company in consumer audio—from Apple
to Zvox—is serving up premium noise-canceling
headphones. $500

→ BEST TV
TCL 6-Series

TCL’s great-looking yet affordable 6-Series sets

have long been our top TV choice. Last year the
company introduced MicroLED backlighting to
the sub-$1,000 line, and at CES we learned the
2021 models will have 8K resolution. Previous
8K models from Samsung and LG have been
prohibitively expensive, but an 8K 6-Series—
though pricing has yet to be announced—may
realistically land within reach of the masses.
Suddenly, 8K isn’t a niche technology anymore,
and we can expect to see more affordable 8K
TVs in the near future. Now we just need some
content for them. $TBD
 29.03
→ BEST IN PARENTING
BioMilq
Baby cows drink cow milk, and baby goats drink
goat milk. Every mammal makes the milk that’s
perfectly optimized for its infant’s develop-
ment. But for working (human) parents, nursing
or pumping breast milk can be both logistically
and physically difficult. Enter BioMilq, founded
by two women—a cell biologist and a food sci-
entist. The company collects mammary epithelial
cells while a mother is expecting. The cells are
cultivated in BioMilq’s facility and stimulated
to produce milk that is personalized (literally!)
for that person’s infant. Last year the company
raised $3.5 million, with the goal of shipping milk
to working women within five years. $TBD
→ BEST IN SUSTAINABILITY
Chipolo ONE Ocean Edition
Simple Bluetooth-enabled trackers rarely get
the love they deserve. In a house full of noise
and clutter, they’re the best way to keep track of
your wallet, the TV remote, and other wayward
essentials. So we were pleased to see one of
our favorite trackers highlight an urgent prob-
lem: The world’s oceans are teeming with plas-
tic waste. The ONE Ocean tracker has a shell
made from fishing nets, trawls, and ropes col-
lected in shallow ocean waters. Soon, you won’t
Acer; TCL
have to choose between littering the earth with
waste or permanently consigning your keys to
the Great Sofa Abyss. $29
→ BEST IN TRANSPORTATION
Low-Cobalt Batteries
The EV revolution is powered by lithium-ion bat-
teries, but mining the cobalt that goes into those
batteries is ugly business. The mineral is toxic,
there’s not much available, and the industry is
rife with human rights abuses. So it was good
news at CES to hear that battery manufactur-
ers are continuing to try to reduce the amount
of cobalt they use. Panasonic, which supplies
lithium-ion cells to Tesla, showed off new bat-
teries that are less than 5 percent cobalt, down
from typical levels of 20 percent. General Motors
has partnered with LG for its upcoming Ultium
EV batteries, which use 70 percent less cobalt;
the company says all its electric vehicles will be
using the new cells by 2023.
→ BEST IN SMART HOME
Kohler Stillness Bath
Every year, one device rises above the blinky
gizmos and shiny geegaws to become an object
of simple, uncomplicated desire. This time it’s
the Kohler Stillness Bath, which combines ele-
ments of a Japanese onsen and the infinity pool
at a luxury hotel. The deep, square tub uses a
computer-controlled system to fill the bath to
your preferred depth and temperature. While
you soak, it emits atmospheric fog infused with
essential oils as overflowing water gently trick-
les into a hinoki wood wreath below. After a year
of making use of every inch of livable space in
our homes while sheltering in place, turning your
bathroom into a steamy, serene glade feels like
a well-deserved splurge. $16,000
→ BEST CAMERA
Panasonic Lumix BGH1
Panasonic’s new Micro Four-Thirds video cam-
era is poised to become the next go-to device
for filmmakers. Building on the GH series’
strengths—high-quality video, low image noise,
and support for film-industry standards—the
BGH1 is aimed squarely at video pros. It’s small,
lightweight (under 18 ounces), and screenless.
The modular design makes it just as versatile as
its main competitors: the Red Komodo and the
Hasselblad 907x, both of which cost nearly three
times as much. Sure, those cameras have larger
sensors, but Panasonic is betting that, for many
filmmakers, its little box is good enough. Netflix
is on board: The company is reportedly sending
the BGH1 to many of its showrunners. $1,998
MIND GRENADES 0 2 3
→ BEST IN ACCESSIBILITY
CareClever Cutii
The need for new, improved companion robots
took on an urgency as the pandemic isolated vul-
nerable people, keeping them from accessing
their support networks of spouses, children, or
grandchildren. The Cutii is one of the first com-
panion robots for seniors rolling into service this
year. It doesn’t rely on a voice-activated or hand-
held remote. Instead, if you’ve fallen, the Cutii will
come at your call and dial an emergency contact.
It can also show medication reminders, serve as a
hub for video calls, and escort you to the door to
bid you farewell on your daily walk. $100/MONTH
→ BEST IN HEALTH
Toto Wellness Toilet
Leave it to Japanese manufacturer Toto to pro-
duce the concept “smart toilet” of the future.
Toto says it uses multiple sensors to scan a
person’s body and their “key outputs” each
time they sit on the throne. It then analyzes
their waste for signs of disease and suggests
dietary changes through a mobile app—“Eat
more salmon and avocado.” Sure, you can strap
on wearable sensors to glean health insights in
other, less invasive ways, but Toto says adding
AI to a toilet makes more sense, because you
use it every day whether you’re thinking about
it or not. The Wellness Toilet will ship to consum-
ers sometime in the next several years, and yes,
it’s likely to be expensive. $TBD
→ BEST IN MOBILE
Rolling Smartphones
First came phones that flip. Now it’s time for
phones that roll. No, these handsets don’t have
wheels. Instead they have displays you can gen-
tly tug outward to expand the screen, like pulling
plastic wrap out of its box. Two companies—
TCL and LG—showed off concept videos of
phones with these scroll-like screens at CES.
It’s likely that one will make it to market this
year, though neither company made any prom-
ises. The perks are apparent. Last year’s crop
of folding phones open like a book, but they’re
thick and unwieldy when closed. A phone with
a rolling screen starts out thin and gets big only
when you need it. $TBD
CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Calore, Julian
Chokkattu, Scott Gilbertson, Lauren Goode,
Jess Grey, Parker Hall, Matt Jancer, Adrienne So
PHOTOGRAPH / SUBJECT/OBJECT MANIFEST
BY MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN IDEAS 29.03

DEAR CLOUD SUPPORT:

Am I Dear [ 426 ] ,

Obligated That the young are destined to inherit the

earth would seem to be an incontrovertible

to Join fact, true of every age. But believing in the

next generation requires, first of all, a belief
in the future, which comes easier in some
historical eras than others.

TikTok? Christ, of course, blessed the meek

SUPPORT REQUEST:
From: [ 426 ] UPGRADE REQUIRED
I’m only 30, but already I feel myself disengaging from
youth trends. What’s a TikTok? Who’s Pokimane?
Sometimes, though, I suspect I’m letting society down.
Shouldn’t I stay current, the better to relate to—and
thus support—the inheritors of the earth? Besides,
I get annoyed whenever my parents call me for
troubleshooting. I should be part of the solution, right?
instead. He wasn’t much interested in the
next generation, convinced as he was that
the world was going to end with his own.
(His early followers were so certain they
occupied the final hours of a decadent civ-
ilization that they dissuaded one another
from procreating.) Today, with the prospect
of an inheritable earth again uncertain, the
willingness to believe that kids will one day
muster the sustained engagement and long-
term thinking required to solve, say, the cli-
mate crisis feels like an article of faith—a
prayer dispatched into the darkening void.
Most young people today are, as far as I
can tell, delightful human beings, and the
culture they’ve produced is very much wor-
thy of our attention. I mean this, though it’s
also the sort of thing one is obliged to say,
for fear of banishment to the isle of the
out-of-touch. In fact, at the risk of sound-
ing cynical, I find it difficult to believe that
your own motives are as altruistic as you
believe them to be. While it may be true that
we all have an evolutionary investment in
seeing the next generation flourish (regard-
less of whether it includes any children of
our own), I imagine your more immediate
concern is for your long-term viability in an
economy that regards cultural capital and
technological fluency as assets to one’s per-
sonal brand. If you happen to be in a line of
work that depends on sustaining an online
For assistance with your personal
problems, moral dilemmas, or
philosophical concerns about encounters
with technology, open a support ticket at
cloudsupport@WIRED .com.

following, keeping up with the culture is a
matter of subsistence, a prerequisite to ful-
filling one’s basic economic needs.
I’m sorry to say this quest is hopeless. For
one thing, social platforms are designed to
keep users in their demographic lanes. You
can download TikTok to satisfy your own
delusions that you are not yet beyond the
pale, but unless you have the superhuman
willpower to resist the opening chords of
that Top 40 song you loved in high school, or
a quiz that promises to determine whether
you are a true child of the ’90s, the algo-
rithms will swiftly corral you into a ghetto
of other millennials.
Many people your age are fooled into
thinking they can understand youth culture
because so much of it has been recycled
from their own adolescence. The prevalence
of nostalgia—the fact that each new batch
of kids appears more ardently devoted to
reviving trends that were popularized by
the one before them—would seem to pro-
vide a link between generations, some sem-
blance of common ground. But this is rarely
the case, in practice. Nothing is so alienat-
ing as witnessing the naive celebration of
the music, clothing, and television that you
yourself mindlessly consumed as a young
person, wrenched free of its original histor-
ical context and appropriated with ambig-
uous degrees of irony.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to keep up,
just that it requires more time and effort
than most of us have at our disposal. When
you’re young, of course, it isn’t work at all—
you breathe in the culture as mindlessly as
the air—but maintaining active engage-
ment as an adult is a full-time job, and the
knowledge you do obtain is always tenuous
and secondhand. You enter their world as
an anthropologist. There are exceptions to
this rule—the Dionne Warwicks and Tik-
Tok grannies who have managed to thrive
among a much younger milieu—though
their popularity rests on somewhat bum-
bling personae that play out-of-touchness
for laughs (and are, one suspects, orches-
trated by much younger PR teams).
I don’t mean to depress you, only to
slightly reframe the question. If perpetual
relevance is a chimeric virtue, as futile as
the quest for eternal life, the question then
becomes: What will make your life more
enriching and meaningful? On one hand,
it might seem that acquiring more knowl-
edge—staying up to date on music, slang,
whatever—will lead to more meaning, at
least in its most literal sense. To grow old,
after all, is to watch the world become ever
more crowded with empty signifiers. It is to
become like one of those natural language
processing models that understands syn-
tax but not semantics, that can use words
convincingly in a sentence while remaining
ignorant of the real-world concepts they
represent. It feels, in other words, as though
you’re becoming less human.
But knowledge is not the only source of
meaning. In fact, at a moment when infor-
mation is ubiquitous, cheap, and appended
with expiration dates, what most of us long
for, whether we realize it or not, is conti-
nuity—the sense that our lives are part of
an ongoing narrative that began before we
were born and will continue after we die.
For centuries, the fear of growing old was
assuaged by the knowledge that the wis-
dom, skills, and experience one acquired
would be passed down, a phenomenon the
historian Christopher Lasch called “a vicar-
ious immortality in posterity.” When major
technological innovations arrived every few
hundred years rather than every decade it
was reasonable to assume your children
and grandchildren would live a life much
like your own. This sense of permanence
made it possible to construct medieval
cathedrals over the course of several centu-
ries, with artisanal techniques bequeathed
like family heirlooms.
This relationship to the future has
become all but impossible in our acceler-
ated digital age. What of our lives today will
remain in 10 years, or 20, or into the next
century? When the only guarantee is that
the future will be radically unlike the past,
it’s difficult to believe that the generations
have anything to offer one another. How do
you prepare someone for a future whose
only certainty is that it will be unprece-
dented? What can you hope to learn from
someone whose experience is already
obsolete? To grow old in the 21st century
is to become superfluous, which might
explain why the notion of aging gracefully
MIND GRENADES 0 2 5
has become an alien concept. (As one Gen
Zer complained of millennials in Vice: “It
all feels like they’re trying to prolong their
youth.”) Meanwhile, the young become,
for the old, not beneficiaries of wisdom
and knowledge but aides in navigating the
bewildering world of perpetual disruption—
in other words, tech support.
Someone of your age, of course, has a
foot in both worlds: still young enough to
count yourself as part of the rising culture,
yet mature enough to perceive that you are
not exempt from the pull of gradual irrel-
evance. One difficulty of this phase of life
is feeling like you don’t have a clear role;
another is the constant anxiety over when
you will finally tip into fustiness yourself.
But to take a brighter outlook, you also
inhabit a unique vantage with a clear-eyed
view of both the past and the future, and if
there’s one thing we could all benefit from
right now, it’s a sense of perspective. Rather
than merely serving as IT for your older
friends and relatives, you might ask them
about their lives, if only to remind them—
and yourself—that there remain aspects of
human nature that are not subject to the
tireless engine of planned obsolescence.
As for those younger than you, I suspect
your life would seem more meaningful if
you focused less on keeping up with tran-
sient fads and considered instead whether
you have acquired any lasting knowledge
that might be useful to the next generation.
It is often assumed that the young have no
interest in the past—or that they regard it
merely as a source of fashions and artifacts
that can be endlessly pillaged. But nostalgia
typically reflects a fear that history is mov-
ing too fast, an anxiety that the past will be
lost and forgotten. If it’s true that the pace of
modern life is accelerating, it would make
sense that the longing for continuity would
be felt most acutely by the young.
Is this true? I don’t know. You should find
a young person and ask them. Perhaps it’s
better to abandon the pretense of knowl-
edge and assume a posture of curiosity. We
don’t always need to “relate” to one another.
Sometimes it’s enough just to talk.
Yours faithfully,
Cloud
 THE BET

In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving

doomsayer to a wager: In 25 years, will tech have destroyed
society? Their judge just weighed in.

BY STEVEN LEVY
POST
On March 6, 1995, WIRED ’s executive editor
and resident techno-optimist Kevin Kelly
went to the Greenwich Village apartment
of the author Kirkpatrick Sale. Kelly had
asked Sale for an interview. But he planned
an ambush.
Kelly had just read an early copy of Sale’s
upcoming book, called Rebels Against the
Future. It told the story of the 19th-century
Luddites, a movement of workers opposed
to the machinery of the Industrial Revolu-
tion. Before their rebellion was squashed
and their leaders hanged, they literally
destroyed some of the mechanized looms
that they believed reduced them to cogs in
a dehumanizing engine of mass production.
Sale adored the Luddites. In early 1995,
Amazon was less than a year old, Apple
was in the doldrums, Microsoft had yet to
launch Windows 95, and almost no one had
a mobile phone. But Sale, who for years
had been churning out books complain-
ing about modernity and urging a return
to a subsistence economy, felt that com-
puter technology would make life worse
for humans. Sale had even channeled the
Luddites at a January event in New York
City where he attacked an IBM PC with a
10-pound sledgehammer. It took him two
blows to vanquish the object, after which he
took a bow and sat down, deeply satisfied.
Kelly hated Sale’s book. His reaction
went beyond mere disagreement; Sale’s
thesis insulted his sense of the world. So he
showed up at Sale’s door not just in search
of a verbal brawl but with a plan to expose
what he saw as the wrongheadedness of
Sale’s ideas. Kelly set up his tape recorder
on a table while Sale sat behind his desk.
The visit was all business, Sale recalls.
“No eats, no coffee, no particular cama-
raderie,” he says. Sale had prepped for the
interview by reading a few issues of WIRED —
THE BET
he’d never heard of it before Kelly contacted
him—and he expected a tough interview.
He later described it as downright “hos-
tile, no pretense of objective journalism.”
(Kelly later called it adversarial, “because he
was an adversary, and he probably viewed
me the same way.”) They argued about the
Amish, whether printing presses denuded
forests, and the impact of technology on
work. Sale believed it stole decent labor
from people. Kelly replied that technology
helped us make new things we couldn’t
make any other way. “I regard that as triv-
ial,” Sale said.
Sale believed society was on the verge
of collapse. That wasn’t entirely bad, he
argued. He hoped the few surviving humans
would band together in small, tribal-style
clusters. They wouldn’t be just off the grid.
There would be no grid. Which was dandy,
as far as Sale was concerned.
“History is full of civilizations that have
collapsed, followed by people who have
had other ways of living,” Sale said. “My
optimism is based on the certainty that
civilization will collapse.”
That was the opening Kelly had been
waiting for. In the final pages of his Luddite
book, Sale had predicted society would col-
lapse “within not more than a few decades.”
Kelly, who saw technology as an enriching
force, believed the opposite—that society
would flourish. Baiting his trap, Kelly asked
just when Sale thought this might happen.
Sale was a bit taken aback—he’d never put
a date on it. Finally, he blurted out 2020. It
seemed like a good round number.
Kelly then asked how, in a quarter cen-
tury, one might determine whether Sale
was right.
Sale extemporaneously cited three
factors: an economic disaster that would
render the dollar worthless, causing a
0 2 7
POST
depression worse than the one in 1930; a
rebellion of the poor against the monied;
and a significant number of environmen-
tal catastrophes.
“Would you be willing to bet on your
view?” Kelly asked.
“Sure,” Sale said.
Then Kelly sprung his trap. He had come
to Sale’s apartment with a $1,000 check
drawn on his joint account with his wife.
Now he handed it to his startled interview
subject. “I bet you $1,000 that in the year
2020, we’re not even close to the kind of
disaster you describe,” he said.
Sale barely had $1,000 in his bank
account. But he figured that if he lost, a
thousand bucks would be worth much less
in 2020 anyway. He agreed. Kelly suggested
they both send their checks for safekeep-
ing to William Patrick, the editor who had
handled both Sale’s Luddite book and Kel-
ly’s recent tome on robots and artificial life;
Sale agreed.
“Oh, boy,” Kelly said after Sale wrote out
the check. “This is easy money.”
Twenty-five years later, the once dis-
tant deadline is here. We are locked down.
Income equality hasn’t been this bad since
just before the Great Depression. California
and Australia were on fire this year.
We’re about to find out if the money was
easy. As the time to settle approached, both
men agreed that Patrick, the holder of the
checks, should determine the winner on
December 31. Much more than a thousand
bucks was at stake: The bet was a show-
down between two fiercely opposed views
on the nature of progress. In a time of cli-
mate crisis, a pandemic, and predatory cap-
italism, is optimism about humanity’s future
still justified? Kelly and Sale each represent
an extreme side of the divide. For the men
involved, the bet’s outcome would be a per-
sonal validation—or repudiation—of their
lifelong quests.
Sale’s provocative book, Rebels Against the
Future, is just one title in a shelf-full of works
urging a return to a preindustrial life. His fer-
vor for the simple life took root early. John
Kirkpatrick Sale grew up in a close-knit sub-
urb of Ithaca, New York, one of three sons of
William M. Sale Jr., who taught literature at
Cornell. Sale père was a legend in the field;
his students included Kurt Vonnegut and
Harold Bloom. Kirkpatrick Sale felt that his
tiny community was idyllic. When a plan was
proposed to merge his local school into the
Ithaca district, young Sale spoke out against
it. “Something in my genes flatly resisted the
idea of leaving a human-scale school for
the vagaries of education down in the city
of Ithaca,” he later wrote. (Ithaca at the time
had all of 30,000 inhabitants.)
Kirkpatrick attended Cornell, the family
institution. He studied history, but with an
eye toward journalism. Even then he was a
rebel. In the late 1950s, there was no war to
protest against, but there was a policy called
in loco parentis, which put school adminis-
trators in charge of moral probity. Sale, who
was the former editor of the student news-
paper, was enraged by a proposal to ban
unchaperoned coeds from off-campus par-
ties. He helped incite close to 1,500 people
to demonstrate. In the hubbub, the dean of
men got hit by an egg, and protesters hurled
rocks and smoke bombs at the beleaguered
university president. Sale was suspended, as
was his roommate, novelist-to-be Richard
Fariña.
Back then, Sale also already distrusted
computers. With another classmate, he
cowrote a sci-fi musical about escaping
a dystopian America ruled by IBM; it fea-
tures an evil computer. If this sounds at all
Pynchonesque, it’s probably because Sale’s
cowriter was Thomas Pynchon. Nonetheless,
a line in it foreshadows Sale’s later work. “All
we want is someplace where every time we
turn around we don’t see that idiot damn
machine staring at us,” one character gripes.
This is 1958.
After college, Sale worked for a left-
ish publication and spent time in Africa.
Returning to the US as the counterculture
was gaining steam, he became fascinated
with the pivotal antiwar group Students for a
Democratic Society, and he wrote the defin-
itive book on the organization. He later said
that the immersion “radicalized me in a way
beyond where I’d been.”
During the ’70s, he began formulating a
philosophy that took cues from the budding
environmental movement. “I was at the din-
ing table one morning thinking about the
human scale in architecture, and how mod-
ern architecture had completely lost it,” he
says. It got him thinking more broadly about
the shortfalls of city planning, and then of
how nations are organized. He realized
he had always been, as he puts it now, an
“anarchocommunalist.” With thoughts of the
convivial village of his childhood in mind,
Sale began advocating for decentralized,
self-sufficient systems—with life organized
at “human scale,” which became the title of
a book-length manifesto. One of his trea-
sures was a collection of books that once
belonged to E. F. Schumacher, the author
of Small Is Beautiful.
Sale’s work intertwines two threads:
bitter condemnation of so-called progres-
sive civilization and idyllic blueprints for a
stripped-down life. For the 500th anniver-
sary of Columbus’ landing, he wrote a book
bemoaning the ruination of North America.
The title said it all: The Conquest of Para-
dise. In another book, After Eden, he postu-
lated that everything began going downhill
when humans started hunting large game,
kicking off a relentless trend of destroying
the natural world. He often finds himself
defending Paleolithic societies; his out-
rage at the term cavemen surpasses even
the indignation of the hirsute figure in the
Geico commercial.
While none of Sale’s own tomes became
runaway best sellers, he says that some
of them made back their considerable
advances. “They were talked about even
when disagreed with,” he says. For many
years, he was a fixture on the lecture cir-
cuit, and he estimates he visited at least 250
college campuses.
And then came the Rebels book. His
take on the Luddite story provided a novel
counterpoint to the media’s swooning over
the nascent internet, and Sale had a pop
culture moment. (I wrote about the book
myself in Newsweek.) In its pages, Sale aired
out the civilization collapse theory that he’d
been developing for years. “If the edifice of
industrial civilization does not eventually
crumble as a result of a determined resis-
tance within its very walls, it seems certain
to crumble of its own accumulated excesses
and instabilities within not more than a few
decades, perhaps sooner,” he wrote.
Sale’s Cassandra-like warning got less
attention than the stunt he used to pro-
mote it. “I had TV people from all over the
world come to me, often with their own
used computers so I’d have something to
hit,” he says. He readily complied. But that
was not his usual MO. “Kirk was always
somewhat aloof, in a grand sort of way,”
his former editor Bill Patrick says. “Just a bit
aristocratic—academic, the stodgy English
professor as opposed to the wild and crazy
drama teacher.”

Despite all the smashed machinery, the
Luddite book was also not a best seller,
according to Patrick. But one copy, circu-
lated in advance of its June publication,
ended up on the San Francisco desk of
WIRED ’s executive editor, Kevin Kelly.
At the time, WIRED was two years old. Kelly
had been a key player in its origin, urg-
ing founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Met-
calfe to move to San Francisco to launch
it. Under Kelly’s leadership, it became a
flagship not only of the new wave of tech
and internet but of a techno-optimistic way
of thinking: Hackers and entrepreneurs
would solve our problems.
Kelly had come to the post through a
nontraditional path. Growing up in a New
Jersey bedroom community, Kelly seldom
traveled. But in his freshman, and only, year
at the University of Rhode Island, he read
books that convinced him he’d find a better
education on the road. He was also inspired
by the do-it-yourself ethos of the Whole
Earth Catalog, the legendary 1960s book
of tools for hippie agrarianism. He decided
to tour Asia, indulging his passion for pho-
tography by capturing images of the most
remote spots he could find.
The journey, lasting for the better part of
a decade, transformed him. “I was in very
remote parts of Asia, parts of which were
literally medieval societies in every respect,
from the dress, architecture, beliefs, behav-
ior,” he says. “I saw completely vehicle-less
cities—people throwing garbage in the
streets, no toilets. That’s not even to men-
tion the hinterland villages, which were
without even metal.” When he returned to
the US in 1979, he had a deep appreciation
for the technology that made life easier.
Kelly got a job in a biology lab at the Uni-
versity of Georgia and, on the side, began
writing about his views and his travels. He
became a computer enthusiast when he
discovered that his Apple IIe could con-
nect him with fascinating communities.
He stumbled on the Electronic Informa-
tion Exchange System, an early online
conferencing system, and through it he
got to know Stewart Brand, founder of the
Whole Earth Catalog. Impressed with Kel-
ly’s writing, Brand offered him a job edit-
ing the in-house magazine, Co-Evolution
Quarterly, which was still devoted to the
tools-for-living ethos of the original cata-
log. Later, Kelly merged the tree-hugging
magazine with another Brand publication
covering software and called it the Whole
Earth Review. “All the organic farmers were
completely outraged that we were now
having reviews of software in their mag-
azine,” Kelly says. He would tell them, You
don’t understand, this is the next big thing.
Just like plows and gro-lights and fertilizer,
software was a tool. They all belonged on a
continuum of technology that lifts our exis-
tence out of the difficult conditions he saw
farmers coping with in his travels. “I got
to experience the world without technol-
ogy,” he says. “So when people were talking
about kind of getting rid of technology, I
was like, no, no, no, you have no idea.”
And that’s why Kelly found the ending
chapters of Rebels Against the Future so
offensive. Kelly had no problem with cri-
tiques of technology. He had once edited
an issue of the Whole Earth Review head-
lined “Computers As Poison,” and even
WIRED deviated on occasion from its ’90s-
era optimism to call out the tech world’s
flaws and foibles. But Sale’s rhapsodic
embrace of what he called “human scale”
attacked progress. In his travels, Kelly also
had seen how modern industry and tech
Boosting his optimism
into a higher gear, Kelly
believes that 25 years
from now “poverty will
be rare and middle-
class lifestyle the norm.
War between nations
will be rare. And a bulk
of our energy will be
renewables, slowing
down climate warming.”
THE BET
could improve lives. Sometimes he liked
to return to the remote villages he had vis-
ited in his youth. He saw a factory pop up
where a rice paddy had been, and the vil-
lagers who had been barefoot on his first
visit were now wearing sandals. As indus-
try grew in the cities, people eagerly aban-
doned their human-scale existence for
something different.
“They’re leaving villages that have
organic food and beautiful scenery, and
beautiful architecture and very strong fam-
ilies,” Kelly says. “Why do they do that?
Because they have choices. They don’t
have to be what their father or mother was,
which was basically a farmer or house-
wife. They could maybe be a mathemati-
cian, maybe they could be a ballerina.” (Of
course, government policy may have made
migration less of a choice.)
As he stewed over Sale’s message, a
thought bubbled up. When Kelly gets a fresh
idea, his impulse is to say, “Let’s do it!” He
had read about the history of bets in sci-
ence—one in particular was Julian Simon’s
1980 challenge to biologist Paul Erlich’s
claim of impending resource scarcity—
and liked the idea of intellectual opponents
0 2 9
POST
The collapse, Sales says,
is “not like a building
imploding, but like
a slow avalanche that
destroys everything
in its path, until it finally
buries the whole village
forever.”
Steven Levy (@StevenLevy) is wired’s editor at large. He
wrote about Huawei and the future of 5G in issue 28.12/29.01.
taking a public stand. “I didn’t know what
we were going to bet about,” Kelly says.
“I wanted him to be accountable for that
romantic nonsense that he was spouting.”
Sale didn’t see things that way. “I knew
the whole thing was a setup,” he says.
Despite feeling conned, Sale never consid-
ered just tossing Kelly out. “We were pro-
fessionals,” he says.
For more than two decades, the two bettors
didn’t speak. But as the deadline drew near,
Kelly set out to contact Sale. “He kind of fell
off the map,” Kelly says. When Kelly even-
tually reached him by email, Sale was sur-
prised to hear from his old adversary.
Sale had not forgotten the bet. He’d men-
tioned it in various interviews, as if recount-
ing an amusing anecdote. But until it came
due, he hadn’t reflected much on it. “It had
nothing to do with my journey,” he says.
When someone told him there was a web-
site of Long Bets where people could make
their own side bets on his wager with Kelly,
Sale shrugged it off, befuddled.
Over the past 25 years, Sale had con-
tinued to write about decentralization and
simplicity. But he had a harder time getting
published. He had been unable to sell the
major houses on a jeremiad against tour-
ism, another attack on computers, or his
takedown of the Emancipation Proclama-
tion, which he self-published in 2012, argu-
ing that Lincoln did Black people no favor
by freeing them without a means to gain
equality. He also became enamored of the
breakup of the US as a way to achieve his
small-town-bordering-on-tribal way of life.
In the mid-2000s, Sale cofounded the
Middlebury Institute to promote the idea of
secession. If states peeled off from the union,
the theory went, Sale’s decentralized vision
might get a little closer to reality. He was dis-
appointed that the movement did not gain
steam when George W. Bush was reelected.
His romance with decentralization even led
him to a blinkered view of the Confederacy,
which he lauded for its commitment to con-
centrating power locally. (Sale told The New
York Times he would personally prefer to
live in the independent state of Hudsonia,
a territory that would include New York City
and the Hudson River Valley.)
Sale remained convinced that civilization
was doomed. Years earlier he had advised
his two daughters not to have children; they
ignored him. Now he had an adult grand-
daughter and, it seems, would offer her the
same advice. “She’ll probably ignore me too,”
he told an interviewer this year.
So Kelly should not have been surprised
at what Sale had to say in March 2019, on
their first contact in decades. Collapse is
coming, he said. Then Sale shared the news
that he was writing a book about the bet.
The book is called The Collapse of
2020—and yes, the neo-Luddite’s latest
work is available on Kindle. In fact, Sale
has made compromises with technology.
He recently moved back to Ithaca with his
wife to be near family. He does have a com-
puter, as well as a printer, a land line, a stove,
two televisions, and four radios. He draws
the line at microwaves and smartphones.
Despite believing that social media has “a
visible deleterious effect,” he has a public
Facebook page.
In May 2020, Sale and Kelly settled on
the terms of the decision. Their editor, Bill
Patrick, would name the winner. Kelly pro-
posed that Patrick wait until the last day of
the year to issue his verdict, giving civiliza-
tion every possible chance to self-destruct.
Kelly wrote up a four-page essay to press
his case. Sale suggested that Patrick read
his book. But Patrick had free rein in mak-
ing the determination.
When Sale and Kelly made the bet, they
had assumed that by 2020 the winner would
be obvious. Maybe all it would take was a
look around: Is civilization still here, or not?
It clearly is still kicking around. But the pan-
demic, its economic consequences, and the
worsening climate crisis have made things
interesting. What would Patrick say?
Bill Patrick lives outside of Boston, editing,
ghostwriting, and book-doctoring on a free-
lance basis. He’s long since left his old job
at the textbook publisher where he’d got-
ten to know Kelly and Sale. But when Kelly
asked him if he still had the checks from
the 25-year-old bet, he knew just where to
look. He pulled open a file cabinet in his
home office, flipped to a manila folder, and
there they were, preserved in a ziplock bag.
Patrick has his own views on technology.
“I’m from the ’60s,” he says. “When comput-
ers came along, I did not view them as the
next wave of liberation.” He appreciates the
beauty of engineering but disdains what he
feels is the arrogance of technology people.
“And now the evils are very apparent,” he

says. He is not on Facebook and uses a sim-
ple cell phone, not a smartphone.
In assessing the bet, he took a judicial
stance, viewing his role more as a critical
reader of the two men’s arguments than as
an assessor of the world. “I am not an ora-
cle,” he says. “I’m just me.” He decided to
stick to the terms Sale had suggested on
the fly on March 6, 1995. Even if it wasn’t
quite fair to Sale. Patrick had a lot of sym-
pathy for his point of view, but he felt that
Sale’s extremism hurt his cause. “I wish Kirk
had taken more time to become a better
informed critic,” he says, adding that his
broad dismissal of technology left him out
of touch with reality. More relevant to the
bet, though, was the way Sale had rashly
agreed to terms that made victory contin-
gent on worst-case scenarios. “Kirk was
naive to accept on the spot,” he says.
Sale says that, even in retrospect, he
couldn’t have come up with a better answer.
“I said ‘collapse’ at dinner parties, but no
one ever asked me to be specific,” he says.
Moreover, Sales’ Collapse of 2020 book,
which came out last January, includes an
untimely concession. The very fact that his
book exists, he wrote, is the equivalent of
tossing his cards face down on the table: If
society had in fact collapsed, there would
be no books, self-published or not. “So let
me just admit that I was wrong,” he wrote.
“But … not by much. And not totally.” Yet
shortly after the book appeared, global
events seemed to tilt in Sale’s favor. The
pandemic’s effect on physical and eco-
nomic health, the growing destabilization of
democracy, and ever more extreme weather
nudged civilization closer to the precipice.
Could it be that while we haven’t retreated
to caves and hovels, Sale’s predictions have
landed in the ballpark of reality? That’s what
Patrick had to determine. In early December
he began writing up his decision. Despite his
wariness toward tech, he had no intention
of jumping on the current techlash band-
wagon. Instead, the bet was constructed on
three clear conditions, and Patrick would
consider each one separately, as if judging
a boxing match round by round.
Economic Collapse. Sale predicted flatly
that the dollar and other accepted currencies
would be worthless in 2020. Patrick points
to the Dow at 30,000 and the success of new
currencies such as Bitcoin. “Not much con-
test here,” Patrick writes. Round goes to Kelly.
Global Environmental Disaster. Kelly
tried to argue that despite worsening cli-
mate change, people are still living their
lives pretty much as usual. “If this is a
disaster, that is not evident to Earth’s 7 bil-
lion inhabitants,” Kelly wrote in his four-
page argument. But Patrick isn’t convinced.
“With fires, floods, and rising seas displac-
ing populations; bugs and diseases head-
ing north; ice caps melting and polar bears
with no place to go; as well as the worst
hurricane season and the warmest year on
record, it’s hard to dispute that we are at
least ‘close to’ global environmental disas-
ter,” Patrick wrote in his final decision. This
one is Sale’s.
The War Between Rich and Poor. Sale’s
book cites devastating statistics on income
inequality and the frayed social fabric. If he
had written his book after the pandemic,
the picture would be even worse. But are
the classes at war? Patrick notes that in the
decades since Kelly and Sale made the bet,
breathtaking economic development has
reshaped China and India, among other
countries. On the other hand, he points to
undeniable social unrest, even in the United
States, with Trumpites taking to the streets
with semiautomatic weapons, and massive
protests against police abuses. He calls this
round a toss-up, with an edge to Sale.
Round by round, the outcome would
seem to make it a draw. But when making
the final call, Patrick stuck to the language
of the original bet. In that fateful Greenwich
Village encounter, Sale called for a conver-
gence of three disasters. “Kirk must hit the
trifecta to win, meaning that all three horses
of his apocalypse must come through,” Pat-
rick wrote. “Only one of his predictions was
a winner; one came in neck and neck; and
one was way back in the pack.”
So on December 31, Patrick declared
Kelly the winner in an email to the bettors.
“But it’s a squeaker and not much cause for
celebration,” he concluded.
It’s also not terribly satisfying. Because
Kelly’s upbeat views seem to have crossed
the finish line as Sale’s apocalyptic horse-
men were closing fast, 2020 offered no
clear verdict as to civilization’s fate—or
where we will be in the next 25 years.
That’s due both to the extraordinari-
ness of 2020 and to the bettors’ own limita-
tions. They staked out extreme positions in
a world that’s always likely to regress to the
mean. Sale failed to account for how human
ingenuity would keep us from getting tossed
THE BET
into forests and caves. Kelly didn’t factor in
tech companies’ reckless use of power or
their shortcomings in solving (or sometimes
stoking) tough societal problems.
The two men are also as entrenched
as ever. Despite this miserable year, Kelly
is boosting his optimism to a higher gear.
With tech’s help, he believes, the world’s
woes will be resolved. “In 25 years, pov-
erty will be rare and middle-class lifestyle
the norm,” he wrote in his submission to
Patrick. “War between nations will also be
rare. A bulk of our energy will be renew-
ables, slowing down climate warming. Life
spans continue to lengthen.” He’s working
on a book he calls Protopia.
Sale believes more than ever that soci-
ety is basically crumbling—the process is
just not far enough along to drive us from
apartment blocks to huts. The collapse, he
says, is “not like a building imploding and
falling down, but like a slow avalanche
that destroys and kills everything in its
path, until it finally buries the whole vil-
lage forever.”
Kelly wrote to Sale on New Year’s Day,
instructing him to direct his losses—the
$1,000—to Heifer International, a non-
profit that gives away breeding pairs of
animals. Sale puzzled him by replying, “I
didn’t lose the bet.” Kelly assumed he hadn’t
seen Patrick’s decision, and he had the edi-
tor resend it.
But Sale had read it—and rejected it.
“I cannot accept that I lost,” he wrote to
Patrick. “The clear trajectory of disasters
shows that the world is much closer to my
prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that
Kevin won.”
Like the raging denialist who recently
occupied the White House, the cantanker-
ous anarchocommunalist has quit the game
after the final score left him short. Sale says
he is seeking some sort of appellate relief,
if only by public opinion, when in fact the
rules included no such reconsideration.
Kelly is infuriated. “This was a gentleman’s
bet, and he can only be classified as a cad,”
he says. Kelly warns Sale that history will
recall him as a man who doesn’t honor his
word. But Sale doesn’t believe that there
will be a history. For Kirkpatrick Sale, col-
lapse is now, and all bets are off.
0 3 1
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FEATURES WIRED 29.03

ILLUSTRATION / AARON MESHON 0 3 3

 “This is
what we trained for.”

29.03
At facilities across the country,
gun owners are learning tactical
skills, honing their reflexes against a world of pervasive
threats. By preparing for battle at home, are they calling
it into being? by Rachel Monroe

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSE RIESER

—35
 1
“Our Numbers
Grow
Every Year”
ON A MISTY NOVEMBER MORNING JUST AFTER SUNRISE,
I pulled up to a shooting range in central Texas with a
borrowed AR-15 and a few hundred rounds of dubious-
quality Russian ammunition that I’d ordered over the
internet. I followed a pickup down a gravel road and
over two cattle guards to the far end of the property.
Then I parked in a field ringed by trees whose bark was
scarred by stray bullets.
A handful of men had already arrived, and they
were loading ammunition into their magazines as
the morning birds chittered overhead. After a while,
a decorated US Army veteran named Eric Dorenbush
gathered us into a circle and gave a short safety brief-
ing—don’t point your barrel at anything you’re not will-
ing to destroy, act as if every gun is loaded—then asked
us not to share any images or videos on social media. Tears Café; at Real World Tactical, a former Marine will
We didn’t want information falling into the hands of teach you how to survive “urban chaos through armed
terrorists or other bad actors, he explained. Plus there tactical solutions.”
could be social repercussions. “This activity is consid- Under the aegis of his one-man company, Green Eye
ered … off-mainstream,” one of my fellow students, an Tactical, Dorenbush says he trains SWAT teams and mil-
orthopedist from Indiana, told me. itary contractors, but that about half of his students are
We had all signed up for a two-day tactical firearms people who don’t carry a gun professionally. In recent
course, where we’d be learning how to shoot as if we weeks, he’d worked with a 22-year-old mechanic who’d
were engaged in small-unit armed combat. Once the been robbed at work, a teenage girl, and several married
purview of law enforcement officers and military oper- couples. “Everyone has different things they’re prepar-
ators, these kinds of skills are increasingly being passed ing for, different threats,” he said.
down to ordinary, armed Americans by a sprawling Even before the recent siege on the Capitol by men
and diffuse industry. Gun ranges and private facilities wearing body armor and carrying zip ties, the idea
around the country teach the art of tactical shooting, of civilians learning tactical skills may have conjured
in setups that range from the fly-by-night to the elab- up images of militias and far-right violence—and not
orate: At a Texas resort, you can schedule a combat entirely without reason. The men who allegedly plotted
training scenario inspired by the Iraq War after your to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer last
trail ride; at an invitation-only facility in Florida, you summer prepared by running their own tactical train-
can practice taking down a mass shooter at the Liberal ing camp. In leaked private chats associated with the

Boogaloo movement, a fringe group advocating for a
second US civil war, a gun store employee brags about
recruiting customers to join his tactical training group.
“Everything is set up in order for our boog squad,” he
wrote. “Our numbers grow every year.”
But the tactical shooting world also attracts a much
wider range of people: gun bros and gamers, preppers
and adrenaline junkies, LARPers who want to spend their
weekends cosplaying as commandos, and crime victims
seeking a particular flavor of empowerment. Women
make up a growing proportion of students, and the indus-
try is increasingly catering to preachers and teachers who
want to know how to face a mass shooter. “We’re getting
a lot of nontraditional gun owners, and some people who
don’t want people to know they’re learning to shoot guns,”
says Ken Campbell, the CEO of Gunsite, which claims to
be the country’s oldest tactical training facility.
As we head into an era that seems destined to be
marked by escalating vigilantism and political vio-
—37
lence—or, if we’re very lucky, just the fear of them—it’s
time to reckon with the whole of American tactical cul-
ture. For all its power to shape this moment, that cul-
ture has roots that long precede it. The tactical world
is a byproduct of years of rampant mass shootings and
of our nation’s longest wars, the conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan. It’s a space where paramilitary ideas thrive
and where ordinary gun owners learn to see themselves
as potential heroes; but it’s also where many Americans
have simply gone looking for a way to negotiate living
in a country where there are more firearms than people.
To try to understand it better, I spent this fall absorbing
its mix of skills training, political indoctrination, and
camaraderie. Sometimes it felt like CrossFit with bullets;
sometimes it was more alarming than that.
_ 2
“IS MY WORLD SAFE?”
MY FIRST STOP IN THE TACTICAL WORLD WAS ARIZONA’S
Gunsite Academy, which describes itself as “Disneyland for
gun lovers.” The 3,200-acre facility includes a number of
indoor and outdoor simulators where students are trained
in how to stop a home invasion or engage an assailant in
a parking lot or perform emergency medical care in the
field. There are classes on night shooting, church defense,
active shooter threats, tactical tracking, and fighting with
edged weapons. A host of military and law enforcement
organizations, including the California Highway Patrol and
the CIA, have trained at Gunsite, as have some high-profile
figures, including the actor Tom Selleck, the founder of
GoDaddy, and King Abdullah II of Jordan. But as with the
much smaller Green Eye Tactical, Gunsite’s bread and but-
ter are what Campbell, a former sheriff from Indiana, calls
“earth people”—regular folks who, for a variety of reasons,
want to learn how to fight with a firearm.
Since 2015, Gunsite has had a run of record-breaking
enrollment. When Covid-19 hit, Campbell expected
rampant cancellations; instead, Gunsite had one of its
best years ever. Firearm sales surged as the pandemic
hit last spring, then skyrocketed as protests against racial
injustice spread across the country; by the end of 2020,
the United States had an estimated 8.4 million more gun
owners than it did at the year’s start.
Many states require minimal or no training to carry
a concealed weapon, but new gun owners still need
guidance. Private facilities like Gunsite and instruc-
tors like Dorenbush fill an important gap, doing more
than just teaching people to use their guns safely. “Gun
instructors are some of the gatekeepers of gun culture,”
Jennifer Carlson, an associate professor of sociology
at the University of Arizona and author of Citizen-
Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of
Decline, told me. “They’re teaching what it means to
“ You should feel
angry at the target,”
he growled.
own and carry a gun, what it means to move through
the world as a gun owner.”
On my first morning at Gunsite, which happened to
be the day before the presidential election, I was issued
a rental Glock 17, three high-capacity magazines, and a
cardboard box containing a thousand rounds of 9-mm
ammunition. (Most students bring their own firearms.)
Campbell, a chatty man in his sixties, stopped by to
Gunsite’s clientele that week was mostly but not
entirely white, male, and middle-aged, with an air of
moderate affluence; they included roofers, anesthesiol-
ogists, a homeschooling mom, and a number of retired
contractors, engineers, and consultants. One tightly
wound retiree in his sixties who was practically vibrat-
ing with excitement told me that training at Gunsite had
been on his bucket list for years. Tactical shooting is not
welcome our class. “Anyone here from California? Or an inexpensive hobby: Gunsite’s introductory five-day
Washington? Or any of those states that aren’t pro gun?” course costs around $1,800, and that’s not including
he asked. “Welcome to free America. I hope you all voted gear, ammunition, and travel expenses. For many stu-
before you got here.” Covid was widespread in Arizona in dents, the costs are well worth it. A man in his seventies
early November. Gunsite had instituted daily temperature told me he’d brought his son and son-in-law for some
checks for students and staff, but Campbell told us he saw family bonding, but also because “they’ve got to learn
the virus as an issue of personal responsibility, and that to keep their families safe.” Our head instructor and
we were free to wear a mask if we wanted to; no one did. rangemaster for the week, a lanky Special Forces vet-

LEFT: “TIMMY” AND HIS ASSAILANT INSIDE THE
“FUN HOUSE” AT GUNSITE ACADEMY. ABOVE: PISTOL
TRAINING AT GUNSITE.
eran named Walt Wilkinson, made it clear that we were
here to accomplish serious business: “We’re not teach-
ing you how to shoot,” he said sternly. “We’re teaching
you how to fight when death comes to your door.”
We spent most of the first two days learning system-
atized processes for simple-seeming movements: how
to draw from the holster, how to turn and aim at some-
one approaching from behind, how to press the trigger.
I’d gotten in some practice at my local shooting range
before showing up to Gunsite, but it didn’t do me much
good. Tactical shooting is more dynamic than simple
marksmanship, meant to mimic real-world action—
you’re not just trying to hit a bull’s-eye, you’re doing
so while moving or at night or from behind an obsta-
cle. We practiced the signature Gunsite “failure drill”:
two rounds to the upper chest followed by a head shot
—39
(in case those body shots failed), firing at paper tar-
gets over and over and over again from 3 and 5 and 7
and 10 and 15 yards, until the muscles in my forearms
twitched with fatigue.
The range was rigged with dynamic targets that
faced forward for only a second or two, barely long
enough to get your shots in. Wilkinson paced behind
us, shaking his head at our fumblings. He seemed to
have a sixth sense for when I wasn’t taking the exer-
cise seriously. “You should feel angry at the target,” he
growled in my ear. “It’s gonna make you do something
you’re gonna feel for the rest of your life.” To get our
adrenaline going, Wilkinson would throw out a sce-
nario: Our adversary was charging at us, brandishing
an ax; our adversary was inside our house, wearing a
hockey mask. Someone flubbed his tactical reload? Too
bad, the adversary was now eating his liver. After we
shot, Wilkinson taught us to scan for other targets, then
reload in anticipation of further confrontations. “You
ask yourself, ‘Is my world safe?’” he said. “And only
then do you put your gun back in the holster.”
The heft of the Glock on my hip, which had felt foreign
at first, soon became familiar, almost comforting. When
we broke for lunch, I was the only one who unloaded my
weapon. One of our instructors shook his head, disap- shooters should be presented with a Bernie Goetz trophy,
pointed in me. “Where will you find a better opportunity named after the so-called “subway vigilante” who shot
to get used to it?” he asked. four Black teenagers who attempted to rob him.
The gun world we live in today, in which millions Cooper had some definite opinions about why the
of Americans don’t blink an eye at the idea of eat- world was, as he saw it, devolving into chaos. As he
ing lunch with a loaded pistol on their hip, is a rela- wrote in his newsletter and his monthly column for Guns
tively recent invention, and part of the credit goes to & Ammo magazine, equality was a biological impossibil-
Gunsite’s founder, Jeff Cooper. Cooper, who died in ity, “and liberty is only obtainable in homogeneous pop-
2006, is revered at Gunsite, where his photo hangs ulations very thinly spread.” Diversity was a weakness,
on the classroom wall and his house is preserved as a he believed, and Africa “was a far better place for both
museum. An upright, broad-chested man with a stern, black and white” when it was ruled by colonial pow-
scholarly manner, Cooper was a veteran of World War ers. He was vocal about his distaste for LGBTQ people
II and the Korean War with a degree from Stanford and
a library full of history books.
Cooper was proudly old-fashioned, a fan of Teddy
Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, and African safaris. After
he returned from Korea, he began to apply his system-
atic, critical mind to one of his other passions: shooting.
GUNSITE CEO KEN CAMPBELL IN HIS
He concluded that the then-typical posture for firing OFFICE, NEXT TO A CUTOUT OF THE
a handgun—one-handed, from the hip—was ineffi- ACADEMY’S FOUNDER, JEFF COOPER.
cient in a real-world context. He helped develop a new
methodology, the “modern technique of pistolcraft,”
where the gun was shot two-handed, at eye level. Just
as important as the mechanics, though, was the mind-
set. As Cooper saw it, the world was a dangerous place,
full of potential threats. He stressed the importance of
remaining vigilant at all moments—of cultivating, as he
put it, “a tactical approach to life.”
Cooper founded Gunsite, then called the American
Pistol Institute, in Paulden, Arizona, in 1976 to spread
the tactical gospel. It was the first facility in the US with
the express purpose of teaching civilians tactical fire-
arm skills, and word traveled quickly. Civilians trained
alongside police officers, who visited Gunsite on their
own dime and began disseminating its techniques to
fellow law enforcement officers. After two LAPD SWAT
Team officers took the Gunsite pistol class in 1980, they
brought the failure drill back to their department, where
a modified version was incorporated into their training.
Cooper was at the vanguard of a major shift in attitudes
toward firearms, what Wake Forest University sociologist
David Yamane calls Gun Culture 2.0. Rhetoric around gun
rights increasingly aligned with law-and-order politics
that focused on the individual right to armed resistance
against crime. A politicized National Rifle Association lob-
bied for more permissive concealed-carry and stand-
your-ground laws. Underlying the policy arguments was
the belief that the armed citizen—the proverbial Good
Guy With a Gun—was a bulwark against anarchy and dis-
order. Cooper, who was on the NRA’s board for several
years, was a strong advocate for this worldview. “Read
the papers. Watch the news. These people have no right
to prey upon innocent citizens … They are bad people
and you are quite justified in resenting their behavior to
the point of rage,” he wrote in the early 1970s. By 1983,
Cooper insisted, crime and chaos was so bad that “we
are in WWIII now.” He suggested that the nation’s top
and regularly used slurs when referring to Muslims and
Asians. Gunsite has scrubbed most of Cooper’s overt big-
otry from its curriculum, although it still screens a video
—41
of him talking about Black Africans who’d robbed a gun
store, men he refers to as “apes.”
When Cooper founded Gunsite, hunting was the most
popular reason to own a firearm, and the right to carry
a concealed weapon was tightly controlled throughout
most of the US. (Earlier concealed-carry bans were put in
place in the Reconstruction era, largely to prevent immi-
grants and formerly enslaved people from bearing arms
in public.) Now most gun owners say they’re motivated
by a desire to protect themselves and their families, and
thanks to heavy lobbying from the NRA, nearly every state
in the nation has liberalized its concealed-carry policies.
By 1999, 2.7 million Americans had concealed-carry per-
mits; today, when violent crime rates are half what they
were at their peak in the early ’90s, some 20 million do. If
you exclude California and New York, which have highly
restrictive gun laws, nearly 10 percent of the adult pop-

ulation has a concealed-carry permit, and nearly two-

thirds of Americans think having a gun in the house makes
it a safer place to be. In the tactical world, the spectacle
of police shootings of unarmed suspects amounts to an
argument for more, rather than less, police funding; if
every officer had the kind of training I was receiving at
Gunsite, the argument goes, they would keep cooler heads
and be less likely to fire in panic.
The day after the 2020 presidential election, my third
day at Gunsite, the mood was subdued. The fate of the
presidency was still up in the air, but Fox News had
called Gunsite’s home state for Joe Biden. “Welcome
to the new, blue state of Arizona,” one of my class-
mates said glumly. He suggested that, in order to get
into the proper mindset, we could imagine that the tar-
get was Nancy Pelosi. Someone else made a joke about
how it wasn’t legal to shoot the media—yet!—and then,
remembering my presence, apologized.
At lunch, I chatted with Brian Mack, an anesthesiol-
ogist from Santa Barbara, California, who’s been mak-
ing annual trips to Gunsite with his coworkers for eight
years. In 2017 he missed the yearly visit. That October,
Mack and his wife were attending an outdoor country
music festival in Las Vegas—their first weekend away
from their kids in over a decade—when a gunman holed
up on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel opened
fire on the crowd. “I heard a pop-pop-pop, and after
you’ve been here, you know what a gunshot sounds like,”
Mack told me. He was shot in the stomach, his wife in the
head; they were saved by strangers, including a former
Mr. California. Being shot didn’t change Mack’s relation-
ship with guns, he told me: “For me, guns are associated
with good things. It’s me and my friends, we’re shooting
at steel targets.” His wife, however, had never handled
a gun before deciding to join her husband at Gunsite
in November. “My wife is very strong—she’s a buck-up
person, she gets tired of everyone saying, ‘How are you hands of her current or former partner. But we didn’t talk
guys?’” Mack told me. “But then she heard the first shot about either possibility at Gunsite.
here, and I looked over and her eyes were watery—she When it was my turn, I stood outside the fun house’s
was trying not to cry. She was just like, ‘I want to go.’ She front door, my hand gripping the pistol and my heart
had a smack in the face of PTSD. But she got through it scudding in my chest. At Gunsite, the scenarios were
fine. I don’t think she’s going to be a big gun person. But fake but the bullets were real, and it was difficult to
she’s not scared of it anymore.” know how nervous to be. I flung open the door and
By the end of the week, the drills became faster and began to move through the house, taking down bad
more complex. Finally, it was time to enter the “fun guys. A month earlier, just being in the same room as a
house,” a reinforced, roofless structure rigged with gun would have been enough to put me on edge. Over
photo-realistic targets, where we were supposed to the past five days, though, I had shot many hundreds
show off our mastery of everything we’d learned. One of rounds; I could now draw from the holster in one
of our instructors gave us the scenario: Timmy, a “blond- fluid movement and reload the Glock without looking.
haired, blue-eyed” child, was being held hostage in the I still had a bad habit of jerking the trigger in antici-
fun house by an outlaw biker gang. Timmy was scream- pation of recoil, but at certain moments, like when I
ing as “unspeakable things” were being done to him, but stepped across the threshold of the fun house’s final
the police were at least half an hour away. It was up to room and saw a swarthy man holding a gun to little
us to burst through the door, shoot the bad guys (that
is, photo-realistic targets depicting armed aggressors),
avoid shooting the good guys (targets depicting unarmed
civilians), and save Timmy.
This scenario situated us firmly in the role of what
sociologist Jennifer Carlson calls the citizen-protector—
the armed figure who finds “authority and relevance by
embracing the duty to protect themselves and police
I shot
the bad
others.” As institutions crumble and people lose faith
in traditional sources of security, the citizen-protector
sees themselves as even more essential to maintaining
order. No wonder, then, that Americans responded to a
year marked by pandemic, protest, and election uncer-
tainty by buying guns in record numbers.
The citizen-protector’s arch nemesis is the stranger
guy. It felt
with ill intent, a figure that was often invoked at Gunsite
and that is a staple of cable news and right-wing social
media. A widely syndicated column sponsored by the
NRA focuses on stories of “armed citizens” who use guns
like being
against menacing criminals. The Active Self-Protection
YouTube channel features daily footage of “real defen-
sive encounters”—bank robberies, holdups, attempted
kidnappings—analyzed by gun instructor John Correia;
right.—
its videos have been viewed nearly a billion times.
There was also a newer threat on many of my class-
mates’ minds: protesters and rioters. “The gun is a
deterrent,” one of my classmates said as we waited Timmy’s head, my focus narrowed and my hands and
for our turn in the fun house. “That’s what we did with eyes and weapon synced up in a benevolent conspir-
BLM here in Prescott. We just stood there, and they went acy, and I shot the bad guy right in the ocular cavity. It
back in their bus. They were peaceful because there was hugely satisfying, and it felt—I don’t know how else
were heavily armed people there.” (He later clarified to describe it—like being right.
that he hadn’t actually been at the protest, he’d just read In my final hours at Gunsite, I noticed that the one
about it on social media.) other woman in my class, a homeschooling mom from
“They were peaceful,” someone else said, “because a nearby town, seemed fretful. In a whisper, she told
they had to be.” me she’d learned that both her parents had come down
Danger, of course, doesn’t usually take the form of a with Covid. “I don’t understand how this could’ve hap-
rioter or a guy in a ski mask crawling in your bedroom pened,” she kept saying. She left early, before the rest
window. A white man killed by a firearm in the US is of us visited the Sconce, the house Cooper and his wife,
much more likely to be a victim of suicide than of mur- Janelle, built in the 1970s and which is preserved as a
der; if a woman dies from a gunshot, it is probably at the kind of memorial. Their daughter, Lindy, showed us all
the defensive features Cooper had built into his home:
how the walls were designed to withstand small arms
fire; how the kitchen had a narrow slit hidden by a
flounced curtain, positioned so that if anyone knocked
at the door, Cooper could point his rifle at the back of
their head. “He liked to say that if an intruder showed
up, he would call the police,” Lindy said, “but only so
they could help him clean up the mess.” She’d heard
that a few other members of the Gunsite community
were incorporating similar features into their homes.
“In these times we’re living in,” she said, “his training
seems more relevant than ever.”
_ 3
“SERIOUS TIMES REQUIRE
SERIOUS AMERICANS”
ALTHOUGH GUNSITE IS WIDELY RESPECTED IN THE GUN
world, it’s also considered a little old-fashioned—your
dad’s bucket-list destination, or maybe your granddad’s.
The fresher face of tactical training has a different style
and attitude from Jeff Cooper’s manly erudition; it’s not
Kipling-quoting devotees of the Colt 45 but rather guys
who love MMA, listen to Joe Rogan, decorate their pickups
with Punisher skulls, and display an affinity for long guns.
To get a better understanding of how tactical train-
ing has evolved, I signed up for a Small Unit Tactics
course taught by Eric Dorenbush of Green Eye Tactical.
Dorenbush, like many of his contemporaries, prefers the
AR-style semiautomatic rifles like the ones he carried
while deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo. Green
Eye Tactical is a one-man operation without a perma-
nent facility, and the courses are strictly BYO-firearm.
After I unpacked the weapon I’d borrowed for the week-
end, Dorenbush fiddled with it for a few minutes before
decreeing it was not up to snuff—there were issues with
the scope—and instead lent me his own custom rifle.
That’s a $3,000 gun, he said as I slung it around my neck.
He handed me a binder emblazoned with his logo—a
green-eyed skull over what looked like an Iron Cross—
and a quotation attributed to Hemingway: “Certainly there
is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have
hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really
care for anything else thereafter.”
My three classmates were all repeat Dorenbush cus-
tomers who had driven in from the Midwest. One, an
orthopedist who asked me not to use his name, had taken
15 Dorenbush classes spanning everything from counter-
surveillance to close-quarters combat. “I get bored as
hell at Disney World, and this is cheaper,” he said. His
van’s Hillary 2016 sticker confused me until he explained
that it was “urban camouflage.” “Does it look like this car
has an arsenal in it?” he asked proudly. Jody, a nurse-
anesthetist who could quote long passages of George
—43
Washington speeches from memory, described himself
as “more on the prepper side of things.” Nate, a thoughtful
journalist turned UPS driver, bought his first firearm five
years ago. “I was getting into arguments about guns on
Facebook, and I figured I should learn something about
it firsthand. And I have a little problem with moderation,
so …” he said, gesturing shyly at the trove of weapons in
the back of his Tacoma. Nate’s mild affect was mislead-
ing; over the years, his hobbies had also included cage
fighting and cave diving. “My wife is relieved about the
gun fighting. It’s the safest one,” he said.
Dorenbush, a strong, stout man whose dark, pointed
beard was laced with silver, surrounded his military
career in a certain amount of mystery; while he regu-
larly alluded to his time in “the Unit,” an elite, clandes-
tine special operations force, he asked me not to name
it specifically.
Many tactical trainers invoke their combat experience
as a marketing tool, which is just one way our wars don’t
stay overseas. Historian Kathleen Belew writes about the
Vietnam War’s “spillover effect” on American culture in
the 1980s and ’90s: It was the era of Soldier of Fortune
magazine, Rambo, paintball, and combat fatigues—as
well as a restive, violent militia movement. “There was
some crossover between people engaging in paramili-
tary spaces for fun and very radical elements using those
spaces deliberately to operationalize violent activism,”
Belew told me. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bomb-
ing in 1995, paramilitary culture fell out of favor. But in
recent years, a new militarized aesthetic and worldview
has seeped into our pop culture, a downstream effect of
the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those contemporary wars are disproportionately
fought by special operations teams, the elite units that
knock down doors and conduct midnight raids. Today’s
tactical aesthetic is essentially operator culture aimed
at the mass market; its signifiers include Call of Duty,
digital camouflage, wrap-around Oakleys, Black Rifle
coffee (which has been described as a “tactical caffeine
delivery system”), and the AR-15. A number of Special
Operations veterans have built brands on the back of
their wartime experiences, peddling tactical sponcon
on Instagram, landing brand partnerships with energy
drink companies and firearm manufacturers—and, of
course, teaching tactical firearms courses. Like any life-
style industry, the tactical world is self-conscious about
authenticity. No one wants to be called out as “tacticool,”
a wannabe who thinks wearing a black vest with lots of
pockets makes him an elite operator.
Earlier this year, my classmates at Green Eye had
taken a Close Quarters Battle course, where they learned
to fight an armed opponent inside a building—essen-
tially learning to clear rooms and rescue hostages. In
this weekend’s Small Unit Tactics course, Dorenbush
explained, we’d learn strategies for fighting outside.
“People will say, oh, that’s military training, we don’t
need that. But there are plenty of use cases for law
enforcement or for a civilian,” he said: for cops, a routine
traffic stop that turns violent; for civilians, a shooter in a
Target parking lot or in the driveway of your home. After
Dorenbush’s preamble, Nate pulled me aside. He wanted
to assure me that even though he owned two AR-style
rifles, he wasn’t a typical gun nut; he wasn’t even con-
servative. “If you believe you have a right to use lethal
force to defend yourself, your family, your community
against a threat,” he asked me, his brow furrowed, “why
the hell would you want it to be a fair fight?”
Dorenbush had set up half a dozen steel targets at
the far end of the field. Next to them was an ad hoc
maze made of orange netting stretched between door
frames and meant to mimic a house; it was left over
from the Close Quarters Battle course. We spent the
morning on an assault drill, simulating how to advance
on the targets while under fire: Drop into a prone posi-
tion, shoot, leap up, bound forward, drop down, and
shoot again. The exercise was akin to doing burpees
with a high-powered rifle clamped to your side. The
intensity may have been artificial, but it was effec-
tive. “Cover me while I move!” Nate shouted. “I got you
covered!” I hollered back, and as he sprinted I aimed
down the field and felt my focus sharpen. The ping of
the steel target, when I managed to hit it, was viscerally
satisfying. It wasn’t until I returned to my hotel room
that night and the adrenaline began to leach out of my
body that I discovered my hands were scraped from the
dried grass and a bruise was blooming on my clavicle
where I’d absorbed the rifle’s recoil.
For a person with certain appetites, this could be a
fun way to spend a weekend. But even the more inno-
cent reasons for embracing the tactical mindset—with
its ingrained assumption of a world under constant
threat—can lead in volatile directions. Tactical training,
and the spread of the tactical aesthetic, blurs the line
between police, service members, and ordinary citizens.
This helps explain some of the notable deference law
ONE OF THE PRACTICE RANGES AT GUNSITE ACADEMY.
enforcement showed to right-wing rioters in Kenosha,
Wisconsin, and during the Capitol siege—a guy in a tac
vest doesn’t necessarily look like a threat or a criminal
but rather someone they could’ve trained next to.
And when regular folks learn military and police
tactics from the same people who teach profession-
als, sometimes alongside those professionals, it’s easy
for them to feel that they, too, are charged with pro-
tecting the social order—or what they see as the social
order. The danger is that training for combat implies an
enemy, and that militarized civilians, like militarized law
enforcement, increasingly identify that enemy among
their fellow Americans. Carlson, the sociologist, pointed
out that many of the men who paraded with guns at this
summer’s protests described what they were doing as a
form of community defense. “Community sounds really
great, but it is not an inclusive concept,” she told me.
“People within it are protected, and people outside it are
not only not worthy of protection but worthy of violence.
And in this country, community has been drawn in terms
of class, but primarily in terms of race.”
Proposed legislation promises to give even fur-
ther legitimacy to self-deputized individuals. Over the
past two decades, NRA-backed laws have expanded
the scope and circumstances in which people can use
deadly force to defend their private property. Now law-
makers are attempting to extend those rights further
into public space, particularly during times of protest.
In 2020, Florida governor Ron DeSantis drafted legisla-
tion that would allow armed citizens to use deadly force
against anyone they suspect of looting; a proposed Ohio
law would permit anyone escaping a “riot” to kill pro-
testers if they felt threatened.
After the election, some of these latent strains in the
tactical world became more overt. Texas-based tactical
trainer and special operations veteran Paul Howe, who
teaches both law enforcement and civilians (as well as
other tactical instructors), announced a special Patriot
Tactical Training course, which would “cover actions
that may be needed during these dangerous times.” He
declared in his newsletter that Biden’s election was ille-
gitimate. “This means Use of Force rules are out and it
will be up to individuals and groups to determine what
is ‘Reasonable,’” he wrote. “Serious times require seri-
ous Americans.”
On Sunday afternoon, the final day of my Green Eye
Tactical course, Dorenbush announced he’d be test-
ing our skills with an improvisatory exercise. The sce-
nario: A bunch of meth heads had kidnapped his son.
We had to track them through the field, moving as a
unit, then enter a wooded area and react to what we
found there. He appointed me team leader over my
objections (which were, essentially, that I didn’t really
know what I was doing).
I used what I remembered of the hand signals
Dorenbush had taught us to move the group into a
wedge formation as we advanced silently toward the
—45
trees, our rifles held at the ready. At the far end of the
field, we entered the woods, descending into a gully
clogged with downed branches. Ahead of us I could
see parts of photo-realistic targets peeking through the
trees. Nate gave me an encouraging look, and I shouted
the command to begin engagement. Within seconds,
the situation felt like it had spiraled out of control; I got
overwhelmed and forgot to give commands, and the
other guys started bounding forward and shooting on
their own. The woods filled with gunfire and shouting,
the percussive sound of bullets meeting targets. The
shots seemed to be coming from everywhere around
me. I understood that Dorenbush was keeping tabs on
us so we wouldn’t accidentally wound one another,
but my body didn’t believe it. I huddled behind a tree
stump, too frightened to move, and felt the sharp taste
of panic on my tongue.
It was over fast—we’d secured the hostage,
Dorenbush declared. During the debrief, I cried.
Dorenbush stood next to one of the targets, a visibly
pregnant woman gripping a pistol. “You just shot a preg-
nant female—how does that make you feel?” he asked
Jody. Realistic training was important because it helped
acclimate the body to stressful situations, he explained.
“You’re taking steps to help yourself so it’s not such a
drastic departure from your reality. You inoculate your-
self to trauma. It takes time to build that up to where it’s
not bothering you that much anymore.”
We replayed the scenario and did another exer-
cise after that, but I’d lost my spirit and took my shots
half-heartedly. As the afternoon turned chilly and the
wind picked up, Dorenbush handed out certificates
of completion. Along with mine, I got a speech about
how I should believe in myself. But it wasn’t my fail-
ure that had upset me that afternoon in the woods. My
panic had been partly an animal terror of bullets and
chaos, but I’d also been paralyzed by a deeper dread—
the fear that in preparing for combat, we were training
ourselves to see opportunities for it all around us. That
by rehearsing for a situation, we were, in a small way,
calling it into being.
The sun was setting and Dorenbush’s energy was
clearly flagging, but my classmates wanted to get in
more practice. Dorenbush agreed to let them run
hostage-rescue scenarios in the Close Quarters Battle
“house.” They gathered at the door with their night-
vision helmets on, ARs at the ready. Nate gave the com-
mand and they burst in, each turning to a different
corner and firing at the target there. It was fascinating to
watch, in a way, this tightly choreographed dance of vio-
lence. When I drove away into the lowering evening,
they were still at it, charging into rooms in a house that
wasn’t there.
RACHEL MONROE (@rachmonroe) is a writer based
in Marfa, Texas, and the author of Savage Appetites:
True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession.
BY Nicholas
Thompson
 ILLUSTRATIONS BY
Sam Whitney

The hiker’s emaciated body was discovered in a tent, just a few miles from a
major Florida highway, his identity unknown. The internet started searching
for clues, but the answers were not what anyone expected—or wanted to hear.
 old son, and I was pulled in. We live in an age of constant machine surveillance
and tracking. Yet somehow Mostly Harmless had escaped the digital dragnet.
He had traveled without a phone or an ID. He carried cash and couldn’t be
tracked by credit card receipts. His fingerprints weren’t in any database, and
his image didn’t turn up any results when run through facial recognition soft-
ware. The authorities in Collier County, Florida, where his body was found,
were stumped, but they were certain he had died of natural causes. He must
have been smart. He appeared to have been kind. He was handsome in a
general, familiar kind of way. It was easy to map a gentle story onto his past.
His life was a mystery packed inside a tragedy. A man had died alone in a
yellow tent, and his family didn’t know. “He’s got to be missed. Someone must
miss this guy,” said Natasha Teasley, a woman in North Carolina who organized
a Facebook group with several thousand people dedicated to discovering his
identity. Members of the group lit candles for him. They talked about “bringing
him home.” They scoured every missing-persons database. Everyone had a
story they wanted to be true: He was trying to escape modern society. He was
trying to escape a medical diagnosis. He was trying to escape someone who
wanted to hurt him. This was a way to use the internet to do something good.
I published an article about Mostly Harmless the day before the presidential
election. More than one and a half million people read the story and looked
at photos that other hikers had posted. People sent me theories about who
he could have been or what he might have been doing. He had a long scar
on his abdomen, and readers diagnosed potential illnesses. He had perfect
teeth, which suggested good dental care as a child. Others dug into Da Vinci
Code–level clues. He had signed in at hostels as “Ben Bilemy,” which, with

SOMETIMES THE MOST alluring stories we

tell are the ones with the details left out.
Objects and faces can be prettier in the half
light. We see a faint shape and we add the
lines and shadows we want. We hear one
part of a story and add another part that HE MET
we hope might be true.
I first learned of the man called Mostly
Harmless this past August. A WIRED reader
HUNDREDS OF
0 4 8
sent a note to my tip line: The body of a
hiker had been found in a tent in Florida in
PEOPLE
the summer of 2018, but scores of amateur
detectives, and a few professional ones too,
ON THE TRAIL,
couldn’t figure out who he was. Everyone
knew that he had started walking south AND SEEMED
on the Appalachian Trail from New York a
year and a half before. He met hundreds of TO CHARM
people on the trail, and seemed to charm
them all. He told people he was from Baton
Rouge, Louisiana, and that he worked in
THEM ALL.
tech in New York. They all knew his trail
name, Mostly Harmless, which is how he
described himself one night at a campfire.
But no one could figure out his real one.
I had just spent three days hiking on and
off the Appalachian Trail with my 12-year-
some creative effort, could be read in reverse as “Why me, lib?” And some- hiker had Cajun roots, that his family had
times they just let their imaginations fly. “I think he could be a space alien,” come from Assumption Parish, Louisiana,
one reader wrote to me. “A kind of astral Tocqueville taking a long, long trip and that there were family members with
to get a sense of the people and the planet, and when he was done, he wasted the name Rodriguez. The founder of the
away and went back to Alpha Centauri. Think about it.” company, David Mittelman, went on Face-
And, of course, people thought they knew who he was. A few hours after the book to talk about the case. I bought Face-
story went live, I got my first ID via DM. “Hi, this is a crazy note to be send- book ads on my personal page to promote
ing but I believe I know who the hiker was.” My correspondent had gone to my story in the region of Louisiana where
high school with someone who looked like the hiker and whose name was I thought his relatives likely lived.
something like Bilemy. A few phone calls later, it was clear that the lead was In the middle of December, photographs
a red herring. Her former classmate was alive and well. of Mostly Harmless found their way to a
The tips kept coming in. One Louisiana woman sent me a photograph of her group of friends in Baton Rouge, one of
brother, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the missing man, and told me whom called the Collier County Sher-
she suspected Mostly Harmless was the illegitimate son of her drug-dealing iff’s Office. This friend, who asked to be
uncle. A man was convinced the hiker had played in a hardcore punk rock band referred to by her middle name, Marie, told
in New Orleans. But by far the most enticing tip came from a man in Virginia the detective that she knew who the hiker
who persuaded me, briefly, that he had known the hiker and that his name was was. The sheriff’s office had received hun-
Daryl McKenzie. My correspondent told a moving story of befriending the man dreds of bad tips. But this one seemed real.
in a Newport News bowling alley and hearing that Daryl had terminal can- Marie recognized the face, and she knew
cer and planned to hike to his death. Daryl had supposedly said, “I came into all about the scar. The handwriting was
this world without a name, and I’m going to go out of this world without one.” familiar, and the coding style too.
I began searching for details to validate the tale. I told my editor, who got At 5:30 the next morning, my phone
obsessed too, and she found a Facebook page for a Daryl McKenzie that hadn’t rang. It was the same person who had first
been active since 2017, the year Mostly Harmless started his trek. McKenzie sent the original tip in August. We have a
had just four Facebook friends, and his only posts were photos of the wil- name, he said: Vance John Rodriguez. He
derness. It had to be him. I contacted one of the friends and explained that a texted two new photographs that looked
hiker had disappeared and that his name might have been Daryl McKenzie. just like Mostly Harmless. The nose was the
I’d written about his story and posted it online. She burst into tears. “Oh, no, same. The ears. The eyes with dark circles
Daryl,” she said as her voice quavered. around them. I was elated to some degree.
I felt awful. I’d wanted to help identify the missing hiker. But I hadn’t focused The mystery appeared to be solved. But
on all the pain that could bring. I told her that I was sorry to have broken such then I thought back to my phone call to
terrible news so suddenly. She should take her time and call me back when- the friend of Daryl McKenzie. Someone
ever, if she even wanted to. Two minutes later my phone rang. “That’s not was going to have to tell his family now.
Daryl,” she said. The photos in my story didn’t look at all like her friend, who Someone would have to tell all the people
was indeed a hiker but who was alive and well in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the who missed him.
dedicated Facebook hunters kept going. And they were ingenious. On the trail, I started reaching out, first to Marie, then
Mostly Harmless had carried a notebook full of ideas for Screeps, an online to other old friends and girlfriends. I and oth-
strategy game for programmers. And so a group focused on digital forensics ers worked to confirm his identity, with the
went through the accounts of every possible user who had been on Screeps first press story about Rodriguez appearing
up until April 2017, the date Mostly Harmless had given other hikers for when in late December in Adventure Journal. The
he’d begun his journey. They had a bead on a user named Vaejor. Meanwhile, puzzle was formally solved in mid-January,
a woman named Sahar Bigdeli had arranged for one of the country’s leading when Othram confirmed that the DNA of the
isotope analysts to study the hiker’s teeth in hopes that clues could be discov- hiker matched that of Rodriguez’s mother.
ered about where he had lived. A genomics company, Othram, had taken his We’d all been telling ourselves stories
DNA and started to do cutting-edge genetic analysis to identify him. Collier about his life. But the man whose journey
County had sent them a bone fragment; they had extracted the hiker’s DNA had ended in the yellow tent wasn’t who
and then begun searching for genetic similarities among people in a database anyone thought or hoped. If he had been
called GEDmatch to build a tree of potential relatives. They learned that the trying to escape something, it was himself.

VANCE JOHN RODRIGUEZ, aka Vaejor, was born
in February 1976 near Baton Rouge. He had
a twin sister and an older brother. He told
friends over the years that his father had
deeply hurt him, but no one I spoke to was
clear exactly how. When he was about 15,
according to friends, Rodriguez headed
off into a field with a gun, intending to kill
himself. He fired into his stomach. But then,
as he lay bleeding to death, he decided to
live. He raised his hand weakly and a pass-
ing truck saw him and pulled over. The sur-
geries that followed were the cause of the
scar that had so intrigued the Facebook
group. Later, he would tell friends that he
wanted to be buried in that field.
At 17, with the consent of his parents,
Rodriguez was emancipated by a Lafay-
ette, Louisiana, court. Marie, who lived with
him as a friend for several years in his twen-
ties, says he was angry that his parents had
institutionalized him after the near suicide.
“He would not talk about his parents except
to say ‘Fuck them,’” Marie recalls. I wrote to
his parents and sister in early January, two
weeks after they heard the news. His sister
wrote back, “My family has no comment.”
After graduating from high school,
Rodriguez enrolled at the University of
Southwestern Louisiana, now the Uni-
versity of Louisiana at Lafayette. In the
school’s computer lab, he came to know a
man named Randall Godso. They became
off-and-on roommates for the next five
years. Occasionally they would go out and
party; one friend of Rodriguez’s wrote that
she remembers him coming to her dorm
and playing “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica on the piano. “I could be
quiet around him,” she wrote, “and it never felt awkward.”
Godso and Rodriguez were both computer nerds, with Rodriguez taking it
to the extreme. Godso remembers his roommate playing games for 18 hours
a day and shutting everything else out. “He would go through huge bouts
of depression. He’d go for a year without smiling or being nice to people,”
Godso recalls. Rodriguez, according to his roommate, had cut off all contact
with his family. “He was depressed and moody his whole life,” Godso recalls.
“But I needed a roommate, and we got along OK.” Godso adds that he doesn’t
remember Rodriguez ever showing any interest in spending time in the wild.
“Outside was between the car and the building.”
According to Godso, Rodriguez didn’t graduate. But people with computer skills
usually don’t have a hard time finding a job. Eventually, he started work at an
ecommerce company based in Baton Rouge called Shoppers Choice, where he
was recognized by many as the most talented engineer on the team. The compa-
ny’s codebase is still filled with notations of “VR,” for code that Rodriguez wrote.
Marie, who works in IT, told me, “He was a crazy good coder. Except he would
always code everything the hardest way possible, kind of like you hired Rem-
brandt to paint your bathroom. You know it is going to be lit, but over the top.”
He wasn’t particularly collaborative, but he would sit down, put on his head-
phones—listening to Temple of the Dog and Rage Against the Machine—and
solve problems. As the problems got more complex, he got more comfortable.
He was quiet but not, to his coworkers, perversely so. “If you’re asking me
if he is the guy who shows up at the party in a clown suit blasting things out
of a cannon, that’s not him,” says a former colleague named Corey Tisdale.
“But he would go to holiday parties and not look miserable.”
He ate once a day, often pizza from Walmart or lasagna from Pasta Kitchen.
He wore black jeans, a black shirt, and a black trench coat. He had long, dark
hair almost down to his waist. One day he cut it all off and gave it to Locks
of Love. He attended Dragon Con. He appeared to suffer from some mental
health issues, but, according to Marie, he refused conventional medicine.
“He self-medicated with drinking and chocolate,” she says. He would go on
what Marie and other friends called “outages,” where he lay immobile for
days, refusing food and all human contact. But eventually he would snap out
of it. “He wore his sadness like an extra layer of skin,” Marie recalls. But, she
adds, “I truly dug his imperfectly perfect solitary singular self.”
During this time in Baton Rouge, Rodriguez started a relationship that would
last for five years. But it ended quite badly. When it was over, the woman he
had dated wrote on her Facebook page: “Apartment 950 a month / bills 300
a month / Standing up to the monster that beat you up emotionally and phys-
ically for 5 years? Priceless.” After Rodriguez was identified as the hiker, the
woman’s mother commented on Facebook, “This man was so abusive to my
daughter, he changed her.”
His colleagues from that time, learning of his trek now, seemed saddened
but not entirely surprised. “He was always very introverted; kept to himself.
His jokes were usually obscure,” says a colleague named Keith Parent. “None
of this is surprising, except for the fact that, in the end, he died.”
“I looked for Vance in mid-2017 to hire him to build an app for a client of
mine,” says another coworker from Shoppers Choice named David Blazier.
“And I would have paid him literally anything he asked. I never found him.”
 0 5 1

IN 2013, RODRIGUEZ moved to New York City. He’d met

a woman, whom I’ll call K, in an online chat room.
K, who asked for anonymity because of the public
obsession about the hiker, was then finishing college in
upstate New York. They traveled back and forth to visit
each other. As their relationship evolved, they decided
to both move to New York City and live together. She
was going into fashion and had to be there. He had
spent his life in Louisiana and welcomed the change.
He’d never seen snow before. At first, he was romantic
and sweet. But soon he started to clam up and shut her
out. “If something upset him, he would stop talking to
me completely. Which can be lonely when you share
a 500-square-foot apartment,” she says.
Rodriguez kept working remotely for Shoppers Choice for about a year,
then quit and lived off his savings. He and K went out maybe once a month,
she recalls. She would ask him if he wanted to travel, and he would respond
that he didn’t need to go anywhere because he could easily look at pictures
online. The city was filled with constant motion, but that seemed to render
him catatonic. “I think it made him even more lonely to be in a place with
so many people and no one to connect to,” K recalls.
Gradually, the dreary relationship got worse. K recalls, “He did open up
to me about previous women that he knew and how he treated them. They
should have been red flags.” She stayed with him, despite her foreboding. “At
one point he locked me out of our apartment after I got out of the shower
without clothing because we started arguing about something I can’t even
remember. That wasn’t the only time he locked me out.”
 On a Saturday night in September 2016, K
was injured when a terrorist set off a bomb
on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. “I had
pretty bad PTSD, and he hated caring for
me, even kept a dated log of every time I
needed help, to the point where he left me
outside in the dark—knowing that at that
time I couldn’t be outside alone or be in the
dark without panicking,” she recalls, before
adding, “and this is only the light stuff.”
Around this time, according to K, Rodri-
guez also made a threat that was both terri-
fying because of his skills and ironic because
of the anonymity he was about to seek: He
threatened to dox K if she ever left him. She
still moved out that winter. He reached out
to Godso, who remembers worrying that
Rodriguez would commit suicide. In Janu-
ary 2017, Rodriguez wrote, in a Slack chan-
nel for Screeps users, “I’m mostly harmless
(for now).” In mid-April, he posted his last
message in the Screeps Slack and headed
into the woods. He seems to have left in a
hurry. When his landlord opened the door to WHEN I WROTE about the mysterious hiker in November, I ended the story with
the apartment, eight months later, he found two questions: “Why did Mostly Harmless walk into the woods? And why,
unopened food along with Rodriguez’s pass- when things started to go wrong, didn’t he walk out?”
port, wallet, and credit cards. Rodriguez’s friends have a theory about the second question. The time-
Rodriguez spent the next 15 months hik- line of his last few months is unclear, but he appears to have been stuck and
ing south and shedding all remnants of the starving, maybe at the same campground where he was found on July 23,
man he’d been. According to friends who 2018. By the time two hikers stumbled upon his tent, his body weighed just
saw the photographs of him on the trail, he 83 pounds. He had money, though, and he was just a few miles from a major
looked healthier than ever. He was smil- highway. Maybe his inexperience caught up to him and he was outmatched
ing. Everyone liked him. Had he become by the bugs, the snakes, and the humidity. It’s more likely, his friends sug-
a different person? I asked K this ques- gest, that he had one last, major outage. “I know that when he had to deal
tion. “He was personable when you first with anything, he would just lay down and sleep,” K told me. “I feel like that’s
met him, but after spending more time what happened. He would ignore problems and ‘sleep until it was gone.’ ”
with him in an intimate way his person- The other question is harder: Why did he go into the woods to begin with?
ality completely changed. The people on There is a simple, if reductive, answer that might apply to anyone whose mind
the trail didn’t spend years with him to see is going sideways. We go outside because it helps take us inside ourselves.
how he handled ups and downs. Maybe he We stand in the trees, breathe in the scent of cedar, and we can think and
was good at code-switching and hiding the feel. Our phones don’t ring and our screens don’t beckon us. We stand in the
person he was behind doors with me or vastness of nature, remember how small we are, and everything slows down.
others,” she said. “I think it just hurts that As I tried to make sense of Rodriguez, I thought about a man I know named
he was capable of being this person with Jesse Cody who I had raced against in high school cross country. Like Rodri-
complete strangers, but when it came to us guez, Cody had struggled in his twenties and thirties. He had treated women
he couldn’t even be a decent human being poorly. He had come to dislike himself. He had contemplated suicide. Then,
to treat me or my body with any dignity.” in an epiphany, he had decided to hike the Appalachian Trail, despite never
As he traveled down the Appalachian having pitched a tent before. And there, in the woods, he figured out how to
Trail, Vance Rodriguez was unencum- tame his demons. He now runs an organization to help people struggling with
bered by obligations and flush with cash
from his time in tech. And there wasn’t any-
one looking for him. His family wasn’t in
touch. His ex-girlfriend was afraid of him.
And his friends in Louisiana just thought he
was in “a long-ass outage,” as Marie puts it.
“Vance cut all ties and left,” she says. “Every-
one assumed he would show back up.”
 before he was known to be Vance Rodri-
guez. They had been lighting candles in an
effort to bring someone back to his fam-
ily—only to learn that he had completely
cut himself off from them. What do you do
when the answer to the mystery isn’t what
you thought or hoped? “I’ll give you a reason
not to like me,” Rodriguez had written on
Slack, describing a kind of move in Screeps,
“HE’D GO FOR A two months before he went into the woods.
After the case was solved, and after some

YEAR WITHOUT of the dark things about Rodriguez had come

to light, I corresponded with Sahar Bigdeli,

SMILING
the woman who’d tried to get his teeth ana-
lyzed. “I became immediately engaged in the
case and started to get a feeling that Mostly
OR Harmless was a kind person, probably oth-
erwise lonely as everyone else assumed.
BEING NICE After all, he did leave everything, abandon
everyone, and go off into the woods. It’s cou-
T O P E O P L E .” rageous and reminds me a bit of myself, as I
made some brash decisions in life too,” she
wrote. I asked her if she was disappointed
that Rodriguez had such a dark side. No,
she said. “I don’t think I was committed to
Vance as a human. I detached myself as a
person to Vance, in that I didn’t want to get
too attached to a dead stranger. But I was
committed to solving the case with others
0 5 3
because it would be a great way to prove
that people can do great things together.”
Maybe that’s the prettiest bow you can
put on the box that contains this strange
story. The mystery of Mostly Harmless cap-
tivated and inspired thousands of people. It
inspired a group that has committed itself to
trying to solve other cold cases. It brought
some new attention to a cutting-edge type
depression by taking them into nature. And he hasn’t stopped hiking since. of genealogical analysis. It reminded every-
Maybe Rodriguez’s story is similar to Cody’s. He was alone in a vast, unfa- one that it is still possible to disappear.
miliar city. He’d destroyed his relationships. He left his apartment in anger. Yet it’s hard not to look at this story with
And then, as he traversed the mountains, walking through sugar maple and anything but sadness. The boy who raised
oak, hickory and poplar, stepping over roots and rocks, he tamed his demons his hand to get help from a passing truck—
too. The many people who met him didn’t sense the dark, brooding, some- and whose body still bore the scar of that
times dangerous person who left Brooklyn. Maybe he did become someone Louisiana field—had grown into the man
different. Maybe that’s what he’d been seeking. who didn’t seek help as he died in a Flor-
But then again, maybe these are all just stories I’m telling myself about ida swamp. A man was able to disappear
Vance Rodriguez because I still don’t actually know what happened. I want to in no small part because no one was look-
think that he became someone else out in the woods, and I want him to have ing for him. A man was harmed and maybe
felt the things I feel when I hike on that trail. I want him to have smelled the harmful. And then he went into the woods
cedar trees the way I smell the cedar trees. I want him to have a redemptive and became Mostly Harmless.
story, like Jesse Cody’s, because I like happy endings and because it better
justifies all the time I spent researching bowling alleys in Newport News. I’m NICHOLAS THOMPSON , the former editor
sketching in details in the half light. in chief of wired, is CEO of The Atlantic.
The thing about mysteries is that they are most exciting when you’re still try- He wrote about his quest to run his fast-
ing to solve them, when you can write in your own theories, fantasies, or fears. est marathon in issue 28.05. You can find
And this reality has struck the many people who hunted for Mostly Harmless more at nickthompson.com.
 THE LION,
THE POLYGAMIST,
AND THE
BIODIESEL SCAM
BY VINCE BEISER
 How a member of a breakaway
Mormon sect teamed up with a
Bugatti-driving, hard-partying
tycoon to bilk the government for
hundreds of millions of dollars.

The grift?
Clean fuel subsidies.
private jet. His new business partner from Los Angeles was arriving on this frigid
January day in 2012, and Jacob desperately wanted to make a good impression. Too
embarrassed to bring his humble Toyota Tercel, he had rented a Cadillac Escalade
to pick up his guest. ¶ Jacob, a beefy 35-year-old with a large forehead topping a
rectangular face and wide-open eyes, had high hopes for this visit. After all, he had
three wives and many children to support. Jacob was already one of the top earn-
ers of the Davis County Cooperative Society—also known as the Order—a break-
away Mormon polygamist sect based in Salt Lake City that emphasized “conse-
crating” its members’ income back to the group. But, of course, one could always
do better. ¶ Jacob had known his new partner, Lev Dermen, for only a couple of
weeks, but the man obviously knew something about making money. The thickly
built Armenian immigrant who stepped off the plane, a pair of bodyguards in
tow, controlled a small empire of truck stops and gas stations across Southern
California. ¶ Once they had settled in to the capacious Escalade’s leather seats,
Jacob drove Dermen half an hour north through high mountain-rimmed flat-
lands to the remote hamlet of Plymouth. The town is home to some 460 people,
and to the operation Dermen had come to see: Jacob’s biodiesel plant, a recently
built complex of storage tanks, prefab buildings, and trucks. Jacob’s wife Sally and
other staff members turned out to greet Dermen with a gift basket of Armenian
fruits and a cowboy hat. The visit went well. After touring the plant, Dermen
invited Jacob and Sally to dinner. “We’re going to Seattle,” he explained casu-
ally. ¶ A few hours later, Jacob and Sally found themselves aboard Dermen’s jet,
en route to Washington. That evening in Seattle, Dermen took them to a friend’s
house where they dined on sushi while a hired Russian singer serenaded the
group. Dermen and his friends were still partying at 2 am when Sally and Jacob—
whose religious beliefs discourage drinking alcohol—went off to the hotel room
Dermen had arranged for them. On the way to the airport the next day, Dermen
stopped off at a seafood store. “Do you like crab and lobster?” he asked. They did.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY RESHIDEV RK
According to Jacob, Dermen proceeded to
buy out the store’s entire stock—about 15
boxes—and give it to the couple as a gift.
Jacob’s world, up to this point, had not
involved private jets or impulse buys of
cases of lobster. At the time he met Der-
men, he was living with Sally and their chil-
dren in a cabin where, as he later said, “the
heat didn’t work, the water didn’t work, and
it had rats and snakes.” Dermen’s lifestyle
looked mightily appealing. And in a sur-
prisingly short time, Jacob would be living
it himself. He and Dermen were about to
embark on a byzantine series of business
ventures that would involve barges of
recycled grease, real estate from Texas to
Turkey, forged paperwork, phantom truck
trips—and swindling the federal govern-
ment out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
IN 1890, WHEN THE CHURCH OF JESUS
Christ of Latter-day Saints—better known
as the Mormons—renounced polygamy,
many of its members considered the move
heresy. Forty-odd years later, in the depths
of the Depression, a white-haired die-hard
named Elden Kingston, husband to five
wives and father of 17 children, convinced a
few other families to join him in establish-
ing a communal splinter sect on some land
just north of Salt Lake City. They would pool
their wealth, exalt the taking of multiple
wives, and generally live a rigorously obser-
vant life. While other such fundamentalist
sects have set up shop in dilapidated com-
pounds in remote parts of the West, the bet-
ter to avoid the temptations of the outside
world and the attention of law enforcement,
the several thousand members of the Order—
also sometimes simply called the Kingston
group—mostly live in and around Salt Lake
City. They wear ordinary clothes, work ordi-
nary jobs, and generally blend in.
The Kingston group is organized along
strictly hierarchical lines, summed up in
the teaching of “one above the other.” Men
defer to their fathers, and on up the chain
to the sect’s hierarchy of “numbered men,” a
ranked list of powerful and honored mem-
bers. Founder Elden Kingston was num-
ber one; the Order’s current leader, Paul
Kingston, is number nine.
Collectively, the Kingston group has built
up a sizable economic base. Order mem-
bers control more than 100 businesses
across the American West, including a
grocery store, pawn shops, a casino, a cat-
tle ranch, and a tactical firearms company
recently visited by Donald Trump Jr. Family
members make up much of the workforce.
Many of those workers, according to for-
mer members, are children; girls file and
answer phones in the group’s offices, and
boys work on the ranches and in facto-
ries. Mary Nelson, a former member who
left the Order, says she was put to work in
the group’s central financial office when
she was just 6 years old. “That was nor-
mal to me,” she says. “That’s how I grew
up. The Order school bus would drop a
lot of kids off at the office to start work-
ing after school.” (A spokesperson for the
Order says that allegations of illegal child
labor are false.)
Women often marry young as well. The
Salt Lake Tribune has reported that since
1997, at least 65 Kingston group girls under
the age of 18 have been married. Jacob’s
dad, John Kingston, husband of at least 14
wives and father to some 120 children, was
imprisoned in 1998 after pleading no con-
test to charges that he beat his 16-year-old
daughter unconscious after she ran away
from an arranged marriage to her uncle.
Jacob Kingston, one of Paul’s favored
nephews, is number 95 in the hierarchy. He
grew up in Salt Lake City, the second old-
est of seven kids in a small two-bedroom
house. He also has scores of half-brothers
and half-sisters, whom his father sired with
a dozen-odd other wives.
As a descendant of the group’s second
leader, Jacob’s bloodline supposedly goes
straight back to Jesus. Jacob's behavior,
however, wasn't exactly Christlike. “He was
a troublemaker,” says Jacob’s former wife
Julianna Johnson, who is also his aunt. “He
did stupid, childish stuff as a teenager, like
skipping school, vandalizing stuff.” He once
spray-painted a stripe down her cat’s back,
she recalls. Other former members remem-
ber him as an arrogant kid who made fun of
overweight people.
Jacob worked summers on his father’s
cattle ranch in northern Utah, where he
started learning about machines. By the
time he was 17, he’d moved out of his mom’s
house and married his first wife, Sally, also
17. He married Julianna, his second wife,
two years later. She was 15 at the time.
Julianna left the Order and Jacob nearly
20 years ago, she says, largely because her
marriage was so awful. She hadn’t wanted
to get married in the first place, but her fam-
ily pressured her into accepting Jacob’s pro-
posal. “He never treated me well as a wife,”
she says. On nights Jacob was supposed to
spend with her, according to Julianna, he’d
show up at midnight, after spending the
evening with Sally.
His home life notwithstanding, Jacob
was a steady student. He went on to earn
a PhD in mechanical engineering from the
University of Utah. By the time he gradu-
ated, he and Sally already had half a dozen
children. That’s a lot of mouths for any-
one to feed. While he was at university,
though, Jacob had heard about a small but
fast-growing industry that sounded like a
good prospect.
0 5 7

IN THE 1970S, THE OPEC OIL EMBARGO
woke up the Western world to the fact that
it relied overwhelmingly on foreign, often
unfriendly countries for its most crucial
fuel. Research into alternative fuels was
suddenly in vogue. By the early 1980s,
researchers were making good progress on
a form of diesel made from vegetable oils—
aka biodiesel. It wasn’t an entirely new
idea; when Rudolf Diesel, a German engi-
neer, invented his eponymous engine back
in the 1890s, it could run on all kinds of
fuels, including oils made from vegetables.
But plant-based oils had been shunted
aside by the cheap, abundant petroleum
that was flooding into the world market.
For a country intent on breaking its
dependence on imported oil, biodiesel—
one of several types of biofuels, a category
that also includes ethanol—has a powerful
appeal. It can be used to power trucks and
heavy equipment, and as heating oil. It can
be made from renewable, all-American
feedstocks: oils derived from vegetables
like soybeans, corn, palm, and canola, or
even used cooking grease, like the stuff
left at day’s end in a McDonald’s french-
fry fryer. Those all contain high levels of
triglycerides. To make biodiesel, you mix
one of those feedstocks with methanol
or some other form of alcohol and throw
in a little sodium hydroxide or potas-
sium hydroxide as a catalyst. That pro-
cess, called transesterification, separates
the oil into glycerin and fatty acid methyl
esters—the chemical name for biodiesel.
In industry parlance it’s called B100, as in
“100 percent biodiesel.” This stuff burns
more cleanly than conventional diesel and
overall produces lower CO2 emissions.
The problem is that it’s expensive to
produce. So beginning in 2005, Congress,
prodded by worries about energy inde-
pendence and carbon emissions, as well
as by farmers eager for a new market, has
offered up billions of dollars’ worth of sub-
sidies to spur biodiesel production. Some
states have chipped in additional incen-
tives. The shape, size, and number of these
subsidies have shifted over the years, but
there are two that are important to the tale
of Jacob Kingston and Lev Dermen. These
subsidies kick in at two different steps
along the biodiesel manufacturing chain.
Step one: production. Every gallon of
B100 that a producer distills from raw
feedstock is given a “renewable identifi-
cation number” by the US Environmental
Protection Agency. Those identification
numbers work sort of like carbon cred-
its. Big oil producers are mandated by
Congress to either produce or buy a certain
amount of biofuel; they can get around this
requirement by simply buying the num-
bers from someone else—in effect, paying
another company to make the biodiesel.
Step two: blending. Producers then
mix the B100 with a little regular diesel to
produce what they call B99. (Pure B100
can be used as fuel for trucks and heavy
equipment, but its high viscosity tends to
gum up conventional engines.) Every gal-
lon of B99 produced earns them a $1 “tax
credit,” which is actually a direct payment
from the IRS. The B99 then gets sold down
the line to customers like fuel stations or
trucking companies, which usually add
more diesel to the mix, depending on their
requirements.
Those subsidies have worked: American
0 5 8

DERMEN TURNED
TO JACOB, HANDED
HIM THE KEYS TO THE
L AMBORGHINI, AND SAID
OFF-HANDEDLY,
“ H E R E . I T ’ S Y O U R S .”
biodiesel production shot from around 100 in economics, so Jacob put him on account-
million gallons in 2005 to around 1.7 bil- ing, paying him $11 an hour. He made clear
lion in 2019. But the industry is far from to Isaiah that, brother or not, he could be
self-sustaining, and supporting it hasn't fired if he screwed up.
come cheap. A 2019 report by Taxpayers for Business was terrible. The plant wasn’t
Common Sense reckons biodiesel credits near any sources of the raw materials it
have cost American taxpayers at least $12 needed, so Washakie had to pay to haul
billion so far—not all of which was used as in soybean oil from the Midwest and used
cooking oil from restaurants as far away
as Las Vegas. Even with the subsidies from
the IRS, EPA, and other agencies, the com-
pany made zero profits those first couple of
years. Jacob looked around, talked to other
folks in the industry, thought about those
federal subsidies, and came up with a new
strategy: fraud.
The Kingstons are not strangers to
the idea of ripping off government pro-
grams, according to state and federal law
I N 2 0 0 6 , S H O RT LY A F T E R G E T T I N G H I S enforcement officials. In the 1980s, the
PhD, Jacob borrowed some money, built Order’s then leader was forced to pay a
a small biodiesel production plant on $250,000 settlement for alleged welfare
land his father owned, and with Sally’s fraud (though he never admitted guilt).
help launched a company they dubbed Former members told me a common scam
Washakie Renewable Energy. They soon is for multiple wives of one husband to
added Jacob’s mother, Rachel, to the pay- declare themselves destitute single moth-
roll. She asked Jacob to hire his younger ers in need of state aid for themselves and
brother Isaiah as well—he’d been out of their children. Mark Shurtleff, Utah’s attor-
work for some time after a bout with can- ney general from 2001 to 2013, believes
cer and desperately needed a job to support members of the group also shuffle money
his wife and two kids. (Later, Isaiah added a around between their various businesses
second wife.) Isaiah had a bachelor’s degree to avoid paying taxes. Though he was never
able to marshal enough evidence to bring
a case, “there is absolutely no doubt in my
mind that they are committing financial
fraud,” he says. Federal investigators are
currently looking into allegations of welfare
fraud and student loan fraud. (A spokes-
person for the group told me via email that
allegations of welfare fraud are false and
that “the Davis County Cooperative Society
condemns in the strongest terms fraudulent
business practices and stresses to members
and nonmembers alike that this behavior is
not in line with our beliefs or principles.”)
The biodiesel industry, with all that gov-
ernment money sloshing through it, pre-
sented an enticing target—and not just to
Jacob. In recent years, more than 30 peo-
ple from California to New Jersey have been
charged with bilking the government out
of millions of dollars in biodiesel-related
fraud. Over a dozen have been imprisoned—
including one guy who sold $9 million worth
of counterfeit renewable identification
numbers from his Baltimore garage with-
out making a drop of actual fuel.
In 2010, according to federal court doc-
uments, Jacob met a New York–based
wheeler-dealer named Andre Bernard
who said he could connect Jacob with sup-
pliers of used cooking oil. Bernard intro-
duced Jacob to Tom Davanzo, owner of
a company called Biofuels of Colorado.
Davanzo had recently produced some bio-
diesel, but, according to Jacob, his company
lacked the proper license to make it eligible
to claim renewable identification numbers.
Washakie, however, had just such a license.
So the pair agreed to phony up paperwork
to make it look as if their two companies
were connected in such a way that they
could claim the identification numbers. It
worked, and Davanzo and Jacob divvied
up the proceeds.
From there, Davanzo and Jacob faked a
series of other deals. In one, Washakie pre-
tended to sell Biofuels of Colorado a load of
feedstock that simply didn’t exist. At year’s
end, the two companies hauled in $2.5 mil-
lion in tax credits. Easy money.
Those claims, though, apparently raised
a few official eyebrows. In October of
that year, EPA agents came to inspect
Washakie’s facility in Plymouth, asking
questions about production and renew-
able identification numbers. The agency
wouldn’t tell me what specifically sparked
its interest in Washakie, but it seems likely
the Feds already had their eyes on Jacob’s
new business partners. Bernard and
Davanzo were both convicted several years
later for other biodiesel-related tax fraud
scams, and both are now in prison.
At the time, though, Jacob apparently
felt he’d found an excellent new business
model, EPA inspections or no. With some
help from Bernard, he struck up illicit deals
with a handful of other biofuel outfits scat-
tered around the country, creating paper-
work to claim federal credits for biodiesel
that wouldn’t otherwise qualify, or that
sometimes never existed at all. Washakie
was soon pulling in millions of dollars in
fraudulent tax credits.
One of Jacob’s new partners was Deryl
Leon, then 32, a Miami-based former musi-
cian with a trim build and a lazy smile who
had gone into buying, selling, and trans-
porting used cooking oil and other liq-
uid fuels. In 2011, with Leon’s help, Jacob
launched an especially audacious scheme.
First, the two bought $2.3 million worth
of B99 from a Florida biodiesel company. F O R A S T U B B Y G U Y, O N LY 5 ' 7 " A N D leased some pumps and gradually built his
Then they faked paperwork to make the weighing some 200 pounds, Lev Aslan own chain of filling stations, truck stops,
B99 look like raw feedstock, and more Dermen, aka Levon Termendzhyan, car- and petroleum companies.
paperwork to make it look like Washakie ried himself with serious swagger. He It’s a classic American success story—
had processed that feedstock into B99. rolled through the streets of Los Angeles in though it seems to have been more Elmore
Voilà: tax credits! Then they sold the origi- a Lamborghini, a Maybach, a Rolls-Royce, Leonard than Horatio Alger. Over the years,
nal B99 to buyers in India. or an armored SUV. Expensive watches Dermen has been investigated, though
But their luck turned sour. While the fuel adorned his wrist, and black-clad body- never convicted, for selling customers
was in transit, the Indian buyers went out guards hovered at his elbow. He had an watered-down gasoline, dealing in sto-
of business. They refused to take posses- office on Rodeo Drive and a mansion in len fuel, evading taxes, laundering money,
sion of the cargo when it arrived. Jacob was Bel Air, and he took meetings at the Beverly assault, and brandishing a gun at a police
stuck having to ship back nearly 700,000 Wilshire. He kept his graying black hair and officer. In 2016 someone shot his son’s
gallons of B99, which, after sitting in hot beard well-trimmed and liked to dine well bodyguard five times as the young man
shipboard containers for many months, and party hard. His personal totem, and was headed home from Dermen’s office in
had likely gone rancid. Jacob needed to sometimes nickname, was the Lion. (When a black Escalade.
recoup his investment, but what kind of he changed his name to its current, more Jacob had tasked a salesman in Southern
operator would buy $2 million worth of American version, he added the middle California with finding a buyer for his
secondhand, potentially foul fuel? name Aslan, which means lion in Turkish.) rejected B99, and at the tail end of 2011,
It was a long way from Armenia, the then that salesman found his way to Dermen.
Soviet republic he had emigrated from at The Lion spotted an opportunity. He called
14. As a teenager in Los Angeles, Dermen up Jacob and told him to come to LA to dis-
grabbed the opportunities America offered cuss, pronto. Kingston number 95 was in
with both hands. While he was still a stu- Houston at the time; the next day, he was
dent at Hollywood High School, he took a on a plane to Los Angeles.
job driving a fuel delivery truck. That might From the airport, Jacob made his way to
0 6 0 not sound like the most promising career a desolate, warehouse-lined street in the
move, but Dermen made it one. He saved gritty LA suburb of Commerce. Dermen had
up and soon launched his own trucking a NOIL (Lion backward, get it?) gas station
company, Lion Tank Lines. From there, he out there, with two black lion statues stand-
ing guard in front. Behind the station sat a
double-wide trailer that Dermen used as
a field office. A couple of bodyguards loi-
tered outside by Dermen’s Escalade while
Dermen and Jacob talked.
Jacob had never dealt with anyone who
kept bodyguards around, but he liked
what Dermen had to say. Dermen appar-
ently wasn’t troubled about the biodies-
el’s quality. “I move a lot of fuel,” he told
Jacob, according to federal court docu-
ments. Jacob says that Dermen told him
he’d dumped everything “from motor oil
to yellow grease” in his tanks—and that he
agreed to buy the fuel then and there.
According to court documents, the two
decided to sweeten the deal with a little
dash of forgery. They phonied up docu-
ments that declared the incoming B99 to
be feedstock, documents that showed the
“feedstock” getting trucked from Dermen’s
storage tanks in Long Beach to Washakie’s
facility in Utah, documents that showed the
“feedstock” being converted into biodiesel,
and documents showing the “new” B99
getting trucked back down to Long Beach.
In fact, once the ship from India arrived,
the fuel was just loaded into Dermen’s
tanks in Long Beach. Jacob and Dermen
happily reaped the identification numbers
and tax credits.
Two weeks later Dermen made that
private-jet trip out to Utah. By the time
everyone was home from Seattle, they
were in business. With Dermen on board,
Washakie’s scams shifted into overdrive.
VINCE BEISER lives
in Vancouver, British
Columbia. His last feature
for WIRED, in issue 28.01,
was about soldiers who
were catfished.
SOMETIMES THE NEW PARTNERS WOULD
three-card-monte money between bank
accounts to make it look as if they were buy-
ing and selling biodiesel when they weren’t.
Sometimes they’d claim to have produced
biodiesel that didn’t exist at all. At one point,
Deryl Leon, now a partner, helped them
rotate bargeloads of B99 in a circle from
port to port in Texas and Louisiana, claiming
credits on the same batch of fuel more than
a dozen times. At one point they reprised the
India operation, buying about 100 shipping
containers of B99 from dealers in Florida
and Texas, relabeling it as used cooking oil,
and shipping it to the east coast of Panama.
There, it was unloaded onto trucks, hauled
to the west coast of Panama, reloaded onto
another ship, and sent to California, where
they pretended to process it into the B99 it
was in the first place.
Why go to all the trouble of actually
moving tons of product thousands of
miles? Because all the legitimate ship-
ping documentation generated on the
way—when added to the falsified invoices,
production records, and bills of lading—
created a much more convincing package
than if they had simply faked everything.
Jacob was learning fast about the impor-
tance of having legitimate-looking paper-
work: In addition to the EPA’s ongoing
investigation, the IRS launched an audit of
Washakie’s books in 2012.
That summer, at Jacob’s direction,
Isaiah came out to the Brigham City air-
port to bring his brother a couple of checks.
Jacob took them inside Dermen’s plane
and reemerged carrying a bag stuffed with
cash. Isaiah had already been wondering
about the legitimacy of Washakie’s business,
and this seemed like pretty good evidence
that something wasn’t right. “What’s going
on?” he asked Jacob, according to court
documents. “Well,” Isaiah says that Jacob
explained, “those projects that you and Mom
did were fraudulent.” No need to worry,
though—Dermen would protect them.
According to court documents, Jacob said
that even with the Feds snooping around,
Dermen had assured him they were being
kept safe from prosecution by Dermen’s
“umbrella”—a network of police and gov-
ernment officials he said were on his pay-
roll. To Jacob, that seemed plausible.
Dermen had taken him out to many a dinner
with LA-area police officers, some of whom
worked as his bodyguards in their off hours,
as well as with a former Secret Service agent
and at least one Homeland Security agent.
Eventually, according to Jacob, Dermen
told him he’d have to start paying to keep
his place under the umbrella. Jacob did as
instructed; the bill would ultimately run into
many millions of dollars. (Dermen’s lawyer
says his client never touted an umbrella.)
But that seemed like a bargain consider-
ing the tens of millions the partners were
hauling in. According to Jacob, Dermen
liked to keep wads of it around in cash, bun-
dles of $10,000 tied with two rubber bands.
At one point he handed Jacob a Ferrari bag
I S A I A H WA S U N E A S Y, B U T J A C O B WA S
starstruck. When Dermen called, accord-
ing to Isaiah, Jacob would drop whatever he
was doing to answer. He started showing up
at Washakie’s Salt Lake City office smelling
of cologne and wearing the same kinds of
expensive shirts and shoes Dermen wore. A
$40,000 Ulysse Nardin watch that Dermen
had given him glittered on his wrist. (Jacob
returned the gesture by giving Dermen a
watch worth $137,000.) Isaiah said Jacob
even trimmed his brown beard to look more
like Dermen’s.
And the more they reeled in from the
US Treasury, the more ideas Dermen had
about what to do with it. Jacob flew to LA
almost weekly, and soon the two of them
were traveling around the world looking
for deals and investments. They stayed in
plush hotels in New York, Miami, and Las
 Washakie often bought goods and services ily picnic. It’s a major event in the Order’s
from other businesses owned by members calendar. Hundreds of members gather
of the Order, sometimes deliberately paying to swim, eat, and play on a tree-fringed
extra as a way to spread the wealth around. swath of Order-owned land, 20 minutes
All told, Washakie steered some $30 million north of Salt Lake City, where the group’s
to other Order-related businesses. founder, Elden Kingston, supposedly met
Also, word went around: Don’t cross the Savior. Jacob and Dermen rolled up
Jacob’s friend from Los Angeles. Hansen in the Lamborghini, trailed by the body-
says Jacob told her, “You don’t wanna make guards. People crowded around to meet
him mad. He’s the guy who can make or Jacob’s mysterious friend; having any kind
break us. It’s thanks to him that we’ve got of outsider at the picnic was exceedingly
money to pay your wages.” rare, let alone one that showed up in a
At one point, Jacob confided to Dermen gleaming supercar.
that Sally was unhappy with his being away Jacob introduced Dermen to his father
from home so much. A new house closer and uncle Paul. Dermen was invited to
Vegas. They bought property in Utah and to the office in Salt Lake City might help, join them for a kids’ talent show, sitting
Texas. They visited Malaysia, Venezuela, he thought. After touring a coffee-colored, with family members in the front row. “It
and Belize, where they invested in a casino, 10 bedroom, $3.1 million mansion near the was kind of a shock, because outsiders
and Turkey, where they sank cash into a city, Jacob says Dermen told him, “This is are never allowed to those parties,” says
range of businesses. Over time, Jacob sent the house you need to buy, because this is Michelle Michaels, an Order member who
more than $130 million to Turkey. Dermen our style.” Jacob bought the house the next was there and has since left the group.
was well connected there. When Jacob’s day. (Isaiah, though he had by then been “Jacob said they were his friends, and they
son Jacob Jr. got married, Dermen threw a promoted to CFO, lived in a house worth were helping him become a millionaire.”
party for a dozen-plus Kingstons aboard a less than one-tenth the price of Jacob’s.) As the picnic wound down, Jacob walked
boat off the shores of Istanbul, followed by Dermen came out to help negotiate the back to the Lamborghini with Dermen,
a weeklong stay at a resort on the southern deal, arriving in a chrome Lamborghini, trailed by agog relatives snapping pictures.
coast. At the airport, an official whisked the plus the usual duo of bodyguards in a black Dermen turned to Jacob, handed him the
Kingstons to the front of the customs line. Escalade. While he was in town, Jacob car’s keys, and said off-handedly, “Here.
A police escort shouldered aside traffic for invited him to the Kingstons’ annual fam- It’s yours.”
the bus that took the family to their hotel.
The teetotaling fundamentalist from a
hardscrabble background was delighted
to find himself hanging out in louche night-
clubs and ritzy hotels with politicians, high
rollers, the prime-minister-elect of Belize,
and, once, the president of Turkey, Recep
EARLY IN THE YEAR,
WASHAKIE FILED FOR
Tayyip Erdoğan. Jacob invested in a cloth-
ing line with a Haitian-American rapper
named Won-G and a talent-showcasing
app for would-be “global superstars” called
MobStar. He bought a suite at Salt Lake
CREDITS TOTALING
AT THAT POINT,
City’s top sports arena and hung out with
Utah Jazz basketball players. $644 MILLION.
To Order members who wondered why
he was suddenly living like a movie star
while so many of them were struggling,
THE COMPANY WASN’T
PRODUCING A S I N G L E G A L L O N
Jacob explained that it was just part of his
job, which would ultimately benefit them
all. “He said he needed to project an image
of success so people would work with him,”
says Shirley Hansen, a former Order mem-
OF BIODIESEL.
ber who worked at Washakie. “People
thought he was doing great, earning lots of
money for the group.” Which, in fact, he was:
In line with the group’s traditional practice,

WHILE JACOB’S STAR WAS RISING IN THE
Order, Mary Nelson—the girl who had
gone to work in the financial office at age
6—was making plans to escape it. Mary’s
father, David, is Jacob’s uncle; her mother is
David’s fifth wife. When she was a kid, she
says, Mary and her mother were so broke
they had to dumpster-dive for food.
When she was 17, in 2013, Mary climbed
out of her bedroom window and ran across
a field. Bryan Nelson, an outsider she was
dating—they met at community college—
was waiting on the other side to take her
away with him. The two were married
soon after. (This kind of thing happens
often enough that there are four seasons of
a reality show called Escaping Polygamy,
which follows ex-Kingston group wives
as they help others escape their own and
other, similar groups.)
Sickened by the Order’s practices, which
they claim include sexual abuse as well as
incest, child labor, and fraud, Mary and
Bryan Nelson have since made it their mis-
sion to expose the group. “I want to see the
Order dismantled, and its leaders pay the
price for what they’ve done to all the thou-
sands of people they control,” Mary says.
(The spokesman for the Order said, “To
allege widespread fraud of any kind is com-
pletely false.”)
During the years Mary worked in the
Kingston group’s central office, she helped
process financial records, including some
pertaining to Washakie, the most lucra-
tive Order-affiliated business. She and
Bryan gathered documents and mapped
out the Kingstons’ labyrinthine family tree
on paper, and then tried to get the Feds’
attention.
“It’s extremely hard getting a meeting
with the FBI,” Bryan says. “Eventually I got
the cell number of the local FBI office head.
I called him up and tried to explain the
Order in one phone call. That’s not easy.” In
January 2014, at the agent’s request, Bryan
sent an email summarizing information he
claimed to have about the Order—includ-
ing fraud perpetrated by Washakie leader-
ship. The couple didn’t hear anything back
for six months. Then an email came with
an invitation: The FBI wanted them to meet
with some agents in the bureau’s Salt Lake
City office. That day, Bryan says, “they took
a lot of notes. It lasted two hours, and they
asked us to meet them again.” At the next
meeting, Mary says, “they brought us into
a conference room with a lot of different
people,” including IRS agents. The couple
handed over names, numbers, and con-
nections between the Order’s multifarious
members and businesses.
(Bryan and Mary have since brought a
federal lawsuit against the Order, accusing
the group of committing millions of dol-
lars’ worth of welfare fraud. They say they
are working with federal officials to bring
charges for other crimes as well. Fearing
Order members might seek retribution
against them or their children—Mary and
Bryan say they have been followed and
once had a brick thrown through their win-
dow—the couple has moved out of the Salt
Lake area.)
All the money pouring into Washakie
was, by then, starting to attract attention
elsewhere. “You had this little plant in Utah
claiming to be producing millions of gal-
lons of biodiesel,” says IRS agent Stephen
Washburn. “That was a red flag.” In 2014,
while the EPA’s civil division was still look-
ing into Washakie’s renewable identifica-
tion number claims, the agency’s criminal
arm quietly opened an investigation. The
IRS’ criminal branch—where Washburn
works—soon followed suit. Agents from
both organizations got busy subpoenaing
documents from banks, shipping compa-
nies, and other outfits that Washakie had
done business with—along with warnings
not to tell anyone at the company about
those subpoenas.
0 6 3
SOMEHOW DERMEN SMELLED THE FEDS
getting closer. It’s not clear exactly how
extensive the truck stop tycoon's umbrella
really was, but several court cases have
revealed that he did have well-compensated
allies inside law enforcement, including at
the Glendale, California, police department,
the FBI, and the Department of Homeland
Security. In March 2014, according to
court documents, Dermen and Jacob took
Dermen’s private plane to Houston to meet
with their trusty fixer, Deryl Leon. After lunch
at a local steakhouse, Dermen motioned for
Leon to come outside with him and Jacob. He
led Leon to a corner of the parking lot, out of
earshot of the valets. Suddenly, he grabbed
Leon’s wrist, which held a $22,000 Rolex.
According to Leon, Dermen said, “You’re
being too flashy. You’re looking for too
much attention.” He pointed at Jacob. “Do
you appreciate what this man has done for
you? Do you care about him?”
“Yes,” said Leon, fear rising in him.
“Would you do anything for this man?”
“Sure.”
“Would you be willing to leave the
country?”
By now Leon was terrified. “What do you
mean?”
“I’m worried because you’re weak. If they
come at you, you’ll talk.”
Dermen then insisted Leon drive back to
their hotel with him and two of his body-
guards. Riding in the passenger seat, Leon
was petrified, he later testified. He thought he
was about to get shot in the back of the head.
A few weeks later, Leon met Dermen
again, at a gigantic birthday party for Jacob
in Utah. (Dermen gave Jacob a present of a
gold Ferrari. Nice, but not quite as impres-
sive as the $1.8 million Bugatti that Jacob
had recently given Dermen for his birthday.)
Dermen again took Leon outside.
“How well do you know your wife?” he
asked.
Leon spluttered. “We’ve been together
16 years!”
 “Somebody’s talking,” said Dermen. “I the EPA and IRS were searching several the inside who are going to take care of this.”
don’t know if it’s her or who. Somebody’s other Order-related offices in Salt Lake City. “My attorney says I’m looking at a 20-year
talking.” He left it there. (Dermen’s lawyer, But they didn’t turn up much. “Federal sentence,” Leon said.
it should be noted, says these incidents agents found computers that had been According to Leon, Jacob growled, “There
didn't happen.) wiped or recently replaced, empty desks, are worse things than a 20-year sentence.”
and empty bookcases with dust outlines
where binders and other documents were
recently stored,” prosecutors later noted
sourly in court papers.
Two days after the raids, a badly rat-
tled Jacob was in Las Vegas, meeting with
Dermen in a suite at the Wynn, a high-end
hotel on the Strip. According to Jacob, the
fuel tycoon had Jacob strip down to his
underwear to prove he wasn’t wearing a
DESPITE HIS MISGIVINGS, THE LION wire. With that confirmed, he told Jacob JACO B’ S B A R E LY V E I L E D T H R E AT WA S
apparently kept chasing his prey. In March he hadn’t known about the raid but that a little late. Leon had panicked when he
2015, Washakie banked $164 million in IRS “his boys” would try to take care of it. “Stay heard about the raid and immediately hired
tax credits. Jacob claims Dermen insisted strong,” Dermen told him—and go tell Deryl a lawyer to cut a plea deal. He was already
they up the ante. Early the following year, Leon to stay strong too. talking eagerly to federal investigators by
Washakie filed for credits totaling $644 mil- So Jacob boarded a plane to Florida and the time Jacob showed up. “He realized that
lion. At that point, the company wasn’t pro- pressured Leon to meet him in a cheap search was the first card to fall in the house
ducing a single gallon of biodiesel. motel room in North Miami, not far from the of cards they’d built,” says Washburn. “He
When Isaiah saw those claims, he freaked. beach. Taking his cue from Dermen, Jacob decided he wanted out.” Leon was crucial,
“What are you doing?” he asked Jacob. “You had Leon take off his shirt and put his phone says Washburn, in cluing the investigators in
just sent us to prison!” Not to worry, Jacob in the microwave. Leon assured Jacob he to Dermen’s central role. Until then, they’d
told him; Dermen had it all under control. was not talking to the government. “Don’t been primarily focused on the Kingstons.
They had the umbrella. But the sky was get- worry,” Jacob told him. “There are people on The noose was tightening. A federal
ting awfully dark.
In early February of 2016, according to
Jacob, he got a call from someone at the Salt
Lake City IRS office—he claims not to know
who—with an urgent message: Federal agents
were planning to raid Washakie’s offices. The
family scrambled. Michelle Michaels, the for-
mer Order member, says her mother, who
worked in one of the Washakie offices, told
everyone there, “If you don’t need the record,
shred it.” Michaels, 15 at the time, was drafted
to help alter computer records. Hard drives
on computers belonging to Jacob, Isaiah, and
Rachel’s computers were replaced. Isaiah
grabbed binders full of documents and
stashed them in his car. According to court
documents, Jacob says he called Dermen. The
Lion was soothing. “I checked,” Dermen told
him. “There’s not going to be a raid.”
At 8 am on February 10, a swarm of IRS,
EPA, and Homeland Security agents rousted
Jacob and Sally from bed. All those docu-
ments the investigators had been gather-
ing had yielded enough probable cause for
a search warrant. Jacob watched as they
rummaged through his home for a solid
nine hours. Meanwhile, more agents from
grand jury had been set up and was haul-
ing in Washakie employees, and even one
of Jacob’s wives, to testify. Federal agents
were also rooting out other people who had
spun scams with Washakie in the past and
were pressuring them to talk. In March 2017,
a Homeland Security agent who had worked
with Dermen and Jacob was arrested and
charged with illegally helping a business
associate of Dermen’s travel between Mexico
and the US. That August, federal agents wav-
ing search warrants ransacked Dermen’s
home and businesses. It seems even Dermen
started getting paranoid: According to one of
his former secretaries, Dermen accused her
of feeding information to the Feds and fired
her—after she’d worked for him for 12 years.
Jacob later said that Dermen was ever
confident and promised the Kingstons he
could still make the investigation go away.
But it would require spreading around some
serious cash. Jacob added that Dermen told
him he and Isaiah had to send $6 million to a
go-between in Turkey.
At that point, though the brothers had
bilked the government out of more than
$500 million, they were almost broke. The
money had been shared with Dermen,
given to other Order businesses, invested in
Turkish real estate, and blown on sports cars
and parties. The brothers frantically drained
all of Washakie’s bank accounts, laid off
employees, and sold everything they could,
including Jacob’s fancy cars and watches.
Even Sally’s jewelry.
Jacob said they got the money to
Dermen’s man in Turkey. But by then, he
had apparently decided the umbrella wasn’t
going to protect him from what was com-
ing down.
On August 23, 2018, Jacob walked down
a sky bridge at the Salt Lake City airport,
heading for a gate from which a KLM flight
to Turkey was departing. According to
Bloomberg Businessweek, two of Jacob’s
sons and their wives, along with Sally, were
already on the plane. But before Jacob could
board the aircraft, plainclothes federal
agents stepped out and arrested him. Isaiah
and Dermen were also taken into custody in
Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, respectively,
the same day.
In seven years Jacob had gone from living
in a badly heated cabin in northern Utah to
luxurious foreign hotels to a jail cell.
FOR A FEW MONTHS JACOB AND ISAIAH
kept insisting to federal prosecutors that
they were innocent. But then the Feds
indicted their mother and Jacob’s wife
Sally as well, for mail fraud and money
laundering. They were all looking at pos-
sibly decades behind bars. Soon, all four
agreed to enter guilty pleas and testify
against Dermen in exchange for lighter
sentences.
Being associated with the big-spending
Armenian American and his polygamist
partner has since become a serious lia-
bility. In February 2020, Belize’s prime-
minister-elect resigned over allega-
tions that he took a $50,000 bribe to help
Dermen get citizenship in the tiny Central
American nation. President Erdoğan is
reportedly petitioning a Turkish court to
have a picture of him with Jacob removed
from news sites. A Beverly Hills lawyer
pleaded guilty to bribing federal agents on
Dermen’s behalf, and at least one of those
agents is awaiting trial.
At one point, Jacob and Dermen found
themselves in the same cell. “What hap-
pened?” Jacob asked.
It’s your fault, Dermen told him. It’s your
family’s fault.
“You ruined my life,” replied Jacob.
Dermen’s trial began in January 2020.
It lasted nearly two months. His lawyer,
Mark Geragos, a high-dollar LA attor-
ney whose former clients include Michael
Jackson and Colin Kaepernick, argued
that all of the fraud had been committed
by the Kingstons; Dermen, he insisted,
was just their innocent business partner.
Much of the extensive testimony from
Jacob, Leon, and others that incriminated
Dermen, says Geragos, was false—con-
fessed criminals trying to shift blame
away from themselves. Via email, Geragos
told me that the meeting in which Dermen
had Jacob strip down to his underwear
never happened. “Jacob is delusional,”
Geragos wrote. The jury, however, thought
otherwise. Dermen was convicted.
Dermen and Jacob are still sitting in the
Salt Lake County jail awaiting sentencing,
which has been delayed by the coronavi-
rus pandemic. (In March, Geragos pushed
for a retrial, arguing that the pandemic
had panicked the jurors. He was denied.
He is still fighting for a new trial on other
grounds. Among other things, Geragos
says that recently disclosed evidence
shows Dermen had no involvement in
the $6 million that Jacob sent to Dermen’s
associate in Turkey just before his arrest,
and that the money was sent to cover
legitimate legal and business expenses.)
Dermen was found guilty of 10 counts
of mail fraud and money laundering. He
could spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Jacob, even with his sentence reduced
thanks to his cooperation, is still likely to
spend many years in prison. He admitted
to a total of 41 charges, including obstruct-
ing justice, fraudulently claiming to have
made biofuel, and laundering more than
$100 million.
“It was tax fraud on an almost unimag-
inable scale,” says Jacob’s own lawyer,
Marc Agnifilo. “It’s really a simple fraud.
The government is writing these million-
dollar checks, $5 million checks, $20 mil-
lion checks, just because you gave them
some paperwork that shows that maybe
you made biodiesel.”
Here’s hoping that the federal govern-
ment has, then, learned something from
the saga of the Lion and the Numbered
Man. Because just one month before
Dermen’s trial got underway, former pres-
ident Donald Trump signed a five-year
extension of the $1-per-gallon biodiesel
blenders tax credit program.
0 6 5
 Your
BODY, His
INSTAGRAM
S O C I A L M E D I A G AV E
THE REAL DR. 6IX
A S TAG E O N W H I C H T O
SHOW OFF HIS SKILLS.
BUT WHEN COSMETIC
SURGERY BECOMES
E N T E R TA I N M E N T, W H O
OWNS THE STORY?
BY KATHERINE LAIDLAW PHOTOGRAPH BY THE VOORHES
ONE
AFTERNOON
IN DECEMBER
2016,
a woman named Laura walked through
the gilded front doors of Toronto’s
Fairmont Royal York Hotel toting an over-
night bag. A towering neo-Gothic land-
mark, the Royal York is renowned for
its luxury and celebrity clientele. Alfred
Hitchcock stayed there, and so does the
Queen of England when she comes to
town. Laura, however, wasn’t a famous
visitor. She had come for breast implants.
Laura had wanted bigger breasts for as
long as she could remember. As a child
she’d gazed up admiringly at the hour-
glass silhouettes of her mother’s friends. “I
remember thinking, I need that body,” she
says. In high school, as her friends’ bodies
transformed, her own development slowed.
“I always felt like less of a woman,” she
says. It was a feeling she’d never been able
to shake, even after her career as a model
took off, even after she met a partner who
made her feel sexy and valued. By the time
she was 26, she’d saved enough money for
surgery. On Instagram, Laura had scrolled
0 6 8
by posts extolling the mastery of a plastic
surgeon named Martin Jugenburg, whose
clinic, the Toronto Cosmetic Surgery
Institute, was located on two floors of the
Royal York. She checked out the stream of
satisfied customers in his online reviews. “I
am the happiest I have ever been in my life,”
one read. “Dr. Jugenburg is an ARTIST,” said
another. She felt empowered just booking
an appointment.
Laura knew that Jugenburg had a siz-
able following on Instagram and Snapchat,
where he called himself the Real Dr. 6ix.
The 6ix was a cheeky nod to the nickname
given to Toronto by its most famous musi-
cal export, Drake. The Real referred to the
unsparing view of blood and guts inside
Jugenburg’s operating room, as well as
the limits of what surgery can do. He was
a plastic surgeon who would tell it like it is
but also keep it light with memes, jokes,
and office antics. To build his brand, he’d
adapted the wacky style of a celebrity plas-
tic surgeon known on social media as Dr.
Miami. Laura had seen the Real Dr. 6ix’s
posts. There were selfies from a vacation
in the Cayman Islands and a video of a film
crew trying to squeeze themselves into the
back seat of his Porsche. He dressed him-
self up in filters and called out celebrities
for denying their surgical modifications.
She’d seen patients post selfies tagging
@realdrsix on their breasts or butt, an art-
ist’s signature for a virtual age.
At Laura’s first consultation, Jugenburg
held up different implants, wobbling like
water balloons in his hands, for her to try.
And he asked if he could stream her sur-
gery on Instagram Live. She remembers
the moment the tenor changed, how it felt
first like a medical appointment and then
like a sales pitch. “Everyone does this,” she
recalls him explaining. “Don’t worry about
it.” She didn’t want to say yes, but she felt
there was no room to say no. Whether it
was the nerves of an impending surgery
or some desire to please the man who’d
be wielding a scalpel on her body, Laura
acquiesced.
On that day in December, Laura took
the elevator to the clinic on the second
floor of the Royal York. Under the warm
lights, the reception area glowed: white
wood, white armchairs, white floors, and
white couches. She felt her chest tighten
with anticipation. Laura had seen Dr. 6ix’s
Instagram videos of patient procedures, so
she could imagine what her own surgery
would look like. She expected that, once
she was in the operating room, he would
take a black Sharpie and mark her body
like a map, then slide one saline implant
into an incision cut clean below one of
her breasts, and then the other. In some
of the Instagram videos, patients drifted
off under general anesthetic administered
by Dr. Sleepy, with Nurse Amazing, one of
Dr. 6ix’s operating room nurses, standing
beside him. On the other side of the table,
scalpel in hand, stood Jugenburg himself,
in his “6ix”-emblazoned scrubs.
Jugenburg is a celebrity surgeon, a
doctor turned influencer who shares his
masterworks with his followers in real
time. In his operating room, showmanship
and sutures get equal play. He seems to
revel in the way social media gives him a
stage on which to perform, to show off his
surgical arts—all while providing a kind
of public-service education on cosmetic
surgery. More surgeries mean more view-
ers, which mean more followers and more
clients. Many of those clients are happy
to play a role in his reality show, but oth-
ers, like Laura, say they’ve felt pressured to
participate. And in the years that followed
her procedure, Laura wasn’t the only one
wondering if the doctor had become more
beholden to his fans than to his patients.
Laura says her surgery was streamed on
Instagram Live that December day. Then, a
few months later, as her body began to feel
like her own again, she noticed a picture
on Dr. 6ix’s Instagram. She recognized her
long fingernails, her tattoo, the slight etch of
her abs and her bare breast. This was not a
photo from the operating room. Jugenburg
had pulled it from her personal feed and
reposted it to his. It felt like a step too far.
When she asked him to take it down, she
says he refused. (Jugenburg did not respond
to a request for comment about Laura’s
account.) Three years later, it’s still up. The
tattoo along her ribcage just below her
breast reads, “My body. My rules.”
M
artin Jugenburg was born in
1975 in what was then Soviet-
dominated Czechoslovakia.
His childhood seems plucked
from a Milan Kundera novel.
One night, his parents packed what they
could into a few suitcases, tucked the
adolescent Martin in the back seat of a
car, and passed through the Iron Curtain.
His father, Ivan, told the guards at the
Yugoslavian border that they were tak-
ing a summer holiday. The family became
refugees, living for a year in Vienna as
they waited for Canadian visas. In 1989
they settled in Canada, and Ivan eventu-
ally took a job as a pathology assistant at
a Toronto hospital. He had been trained
as a plastic surgeon and used his skills to
help restore the skin of burn victims and
trauma patients. But he couldn’t practice
medicine in his new home.
Martin grew up hearing his father’s
stories of being a surgeon and felt pulled
toward the same calling. In high school,
Ivan got him a summer job in the pathol-
ogy department where he worked. After
graduating from high school, Martin was
accepted to the University of Toronto. He
studied biology, specializing in molecu-
lar genetics, and took home scholarships
and awards from the intensely compet-
itive school. Along with two doctors, he
and his father coauthored a paper that
was later published in a medical journal.
(Jugenburg declined to be interviewed
for this story but did respond to some
fact-checking questions.)
In 1997, Martin was admitted to the
University of Toronto’s medical school,
where he took on a dizzying load of
extracurricular activities. He edited the
web page of the school’s medical journal,
mentored high school students, designed
the faculty yearbook, and taught judo.
He met the woman who would eventu-
ally become his wife. Even back then,
he extolled technology as the future
of medicine. He envisioned a world in
which doctors and patients would use the
increasingly popular email to commu-
nicate with one another. He pored over
the latest medical inventions, imagining
a future where a surgeon could command
three robotic arms at a time in an oper-
ating room.
As a boy, Jugenburg met a man whose
injured hand had been reconstructed by
his father. The hand inspired him, and after
medical school Jugenburg was accepted
into a plastic surgery residency program
in Winnipeg, Manitoba. During his resi-
dency, Martin trained his focus on breast
reconstruction surgery—years before, his
mother had been diagnosed with breast
cancer, and he saw firsthand the impact
that surgery could have on someone’s life.
He then spent a year training as a plas-
tic and reconstructive surgery fellow at
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in
New York. He coauthored papers on radio-
therapy’s impact on breast reconstruction,
neck reconstruction, and foot defects. The
next year he returned to Toronto.
Jugenburg began to work as a plas-
tic surgeon at the city’s downtown hos-
pitals, performing reconstructions on
cancer patients and attending to fire vic-
tims and workplace accidents in the ER.
He was helping people, just as his father
had, but he was also the new guy in the
OR, assigned just three and a half hours of
surgery a week. Jugenburg grew frustrated
with how little time he got to spend actually
operating. He frequently posted on a blog,
Askasurgeon.com, where he was deter-
mined to share information with the pub-
lic. He authored posts like “Tanning beds
will kill you” and “Unreliable certification …
Who is a real plastic surgeon?” As the years
went on, his view of hospitals—and the
Canadian health care system—grew more
grim. “The entire system is underfunded,
squeezed, and abused,” he wrote. “After
years and years of cutbacks, restructings
[sic] and improvements, how much more
juice can be squeezed out of this old dried
up lemon?” Jugenburg joined a private
practice, and in 2010 he started his own.
J
ugenburg threw himself into
building his business, which he
eventually named the Toronto
Cosmetic Surgery Institute.
He stopped publishing papers
and presenting at professional confer-
ences. When a mentor suggested he coau-
thor a paper on a new surgical technique,
Jugenburg demurred. He turned his atten-
tion to answering thousands of patient
questions on RealSelf, a cross between
Yelp and Wikipedia for plastic surgery.
When a prominent doctor who worked
in the posh Fairmont Royal York Hotel
retired, Jugenburg seized the opportu-
nity. It’s not unusual for plastic surgery
clinics to partner with hotels to offer their
patients a discreet and discounted place
to recover, and in late 2012 he moved his
practice to the hotel. His focus changed too.
Where once he spoke on national televi-
sion about the psychological benefits of
breast reconstruction for cancer patients,
he now performed breast augmentations
and liposuction. He registered the domain
brazilianbuttlifttoronto.com and advertised
himself as an internationally renowned
Brazilian-butt-lift expert. He opened a
clinic within the facility for injectables like
Botox and fillers, which his wife ran. He
appeared on an entertainment news show
talking up Brazilian butt lifts, inviting film
crews into his operating room to watch.
Cosmetic surgeons have always occu-
pied a hazy area, bound by the ethics of
their profession but dependent on adver-
tising. The aesthetic nature of the industry
makes visual social media platforms like
Instagram and Snapchat natural show-
cases. At first, surgeons posted before-
and-after galleries of patients. But by
2014, one Florida plastic surgeon named
Michael Salzhauer had taken things quite
a bit further, posting not just the pleasing
outcomes but the gory procedures them-
selves, in real time.
Known on Instagram as Dr. Miami,
Salzhauer had amassed 90,000 followers.
But in early 2015, Instagram shut down
his account for violating its rules against
nudity. He was despondent. Salzhauer
had grown to love the attention, feeding
off of his followers’ energy. He preached
a gospel of surgery-enhanced empow-
erment, calling his clients “beauty war-
riors.” His oldest child, 15 years old at the
time, suggested he try Snapchat. He hired
a recent college graduate named Brittany
Benson to manage his Snapchat account
and film the procedures.
Benson’s impact was undeniable: first
100,000 followers, then 500,000, then
a million. No filter was too outlandish,
0 7 0
no conversation too profane. Rapper 2
Chainz came to the operating room to
watch a butt lift, and with gold chains
piled over his scrubs and sunglasses
hanging low on his nose, he exclaimed,
“She gonna wake up with a small waist
and a fat ass!” The surgeon was a natu-
ral: Handsome and buff, with a dazzling
smile, he would break into choreographed
dances in the operating room. (A clip of
Dr. Miami dancing to rapper Plies’ song
“Ritz Carlton” has been watched 4 mil-
lion times.) The videos also caught the
attention of other doctors, which gave
Salzhauer an idea. What if this social
media model was something he could
sell, not just to patients but to colleagues?
He started a consulting business. One of
the earliest clients was Martin Jugenburg.
The pair met in early 2016, while
Jugenburg was in Miami attending a con-
ference. Jugenburg was fascinated by the
way Dr. Miami marketed his practice and
saw in Instagram and Snapchat a way to
communicate visually what he’d been try-
ing to convey on RealSelf.
When Jugenburg returned to Miami in
May, he was presented with his persona.
“It was almost a given,” Benson says. “We
had to do something with a 6ix.” They set
up his Instagram and Snapchat accounts.
He stayed for a week, observing Dr. Miami
and receiving branding and social media
advice from Benson, including copies of
the consent forms signed by Dr. Miami’s
willing patients. Benson was struck by how
naturally Jugenburg took to the doctor-as-
influencer idea. “Some doctors want to be
on social media, but you can’t teach them
that personality. Dr. 6ix had it,” she says. “He
was witty and funny and quirky.”
At the end of the week, Jugenburg
made his first cameo on Dr. Miami’s feed,
in a campy knighting scene. With Benson
behind the camera, Jugenburg stood facing
his mentor, who wore a red crushed-velvet
cape and oversize crown. “Torontoland,
you have proven yourself worthy in the
operating room,” Dr. Miami pronounced.
“Now please kneel.” Wearing a gold-
trimmed black Raptors basketball jersey,
 LAURA REMEMBERS THE MOMENT THE TENOR CHANGED,

H OW I T F E LT F I R S T L I K E A M E D I C A L A P P O I N T M E N T A N D

THEN LIKE A SALES PITCH.

PHOTOGRAPH / ANNIE SAKKAB

 I W A S T O T A L L Y E M B A R R A S S E D ,” S A R A S A Y S . “ H E H A D

ME SLICED OPEN AND WAS STICKING A CANNULA

IN MY BODY. THAT WASN’T ENOUGH? WHY WAS HE

SHAMING ME IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY?”

0 7 2 PHOTOGRAPH / ANNIE SAKKAB

Jugenburg pressed his knee to the floor. Dr.
Miami brought a clownishly large scepter
down onto his left shoulder, then his right.
“Arise, Real Dr. 6ix,” he said. “Now, go res-
cue the princess trapped in this tower.” He
handed him a glossy picture of Toronto’s
needle-thin CN Tower.
O
utside of the operating room,
Jugenburg’s graying hair hangs
floppily over his ears, giving
him the air of an affable golden
retriever. He speaks with a
soft Slovakian lilt, and his eyebrows are
slightly upturned, as if posing a perpetual
question. On camera, he was the Real Dr.
6ix, a surgeon in sleek black scrubs with
a wry smile and a penchant for unfiltered
commentary. He hired a social media
assistant and emblazoned a Dr. 6ix logo
on deep-V T-shirts, surgical scrubs, and
baseball caps. If patients asked, they were
given a Dr. 6ix T-shirt for free.
His fan base couldn’t get enough. When
he hit 100,000 followers on Instagram,
he celebrated the success with cookies
iced with “100K!” and promptly posted
them to the feed. “Am I the only one that
thinks there’s just something weird about
the way she looks?” he asked his fol-
lowers about Kim Kardashian West. He
called the look “diaper butt.” Alongside
celebrity callouts were surgery explain-
ers and images of the taut bodies of his
own patients. He posted a video of himself
headbanging to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got
Back” in the operating room. He posted a
meme that read, “Med school? Please …
I watch Dr. 6ix.” When Instagram occa-
sionally pulled down his posts for violat-
ing community guidelines, he blasted the
app for being inauthentic and prudish.
Jugenburg developed his Dr. 6ix per-
sona with the same determination he dis-
played in medical school. He operated
on a Playboy Playmate. He worked as
an official ringside surgeon for Toronto’s
UFC fights. He became one of a group of
15 surgeons called the Dr. Miami Squad.
There’s Dr. BFixin (Long Island, 215,000
followers), the Real Dr. FeelGood (Fall
River, Massachusetts, 521,000 followers),
the Real Dr. BMore (Baltimore, 36,500 fol-
lowers). The doctors pay for the affiliation:
$15,000 for the initial branding and social
media training session in Miami, then
$2,500 a month for social media promo-
tion on the Dr. Miami platforms.
In private practice, Jugenburg could set
his own hours. He operated from sunup
to sundown three days a week, posting
surgeries on Snapchat and Instagram. He
was tracking a societal shift, one in which
many of the millions who underwent cos-
metic procedures talked openly about
them as expressions of agency. Chrissy
Teigen has said liposuction made her feel
more confident. The rapper Iggy Azalea
rhapsodized about her breast implants.
“I love them so much I had to talk about
them,” she told an E! News reporter as
she walked the red carpet at an awards
show. Jugenburg’s patients talked about
them too. Five days after LaToya Forever,
a YouTube vlogger with 1.45 million sub-
scribers, got breast implants from Dr. 6ix,
she posted a comedic confessional video
about how excited she was to no longer be
on the “itty-bitty-titty committee.”
Jugenburg worked to perfect his social
media routine, which included asking
patients like Laura for their permission to
film and post their surgeries. One woman
named Sara, who came to Jugenburg
for liposuction in 2018, says she initially
refused to give permission. In the pre-op
room, she says, she was asked to recon-
sider and reluctantly agreed to be filmed
during surgery as long as her face was
covered. But when she watched Dr. 6ix’s
Instagram Stories after her surgery, she
was horrified. Her doctor bantered with his
social media assistant over her body. “She’s
in her forties and, as you can see, she’s well
tanned,” he told the camera. “Tanning and
smoking are the two worst things that you
can do for aging your skin.”
The video replayed over and over in her
mind. Her doctor’s real talk stung. “Look
at all this loose skin she’s left with,” her
doctor told the camera. “This is not going
to bounce back on its own. It just doesn’t
have the elasticity, unfortunately.” Her
face was covered in the video, just as she’d
been promised, but it almost didn’t matter.
She felt like a piece of meat. “I was totally
embarrassed. He had me sliced open and
was sticking a cannula in my body. That
wasn’t enough? Why was he shaming me
in front of everybody?” she says. “I didn’t
want this in the first place.”
A
month after Sara had her
procedure, another patient,
Ana, walked through the Royal
York’s doors for a follow-up
appointment after liposuction.
She was in searing pain. “Liposuction
feels like your skin is being peeled off of
your muscles, because it is,” says Ana (who
asked not to use her real name). Her torso
was so sensitive that the slight shake of
riding in a car made her want to cry. So
did the feeling of her girlfriend’s finger-
tips on her skin. She worked in fashion,
as a designer for brands like Escada and
Adidas, and for years had avoided crop
tops because she felt self-conscious about
the flesh around her waist.
“In the early 2000s, the look was
skinny, skinny, skinny,” Ana told me. “Now
it’s shifted and it’s curves, big breasts, a
tiny waist, a big butt. The curves are so dis-
proportionate. Back then, you could only
achieve that skinny look by being bulimic
or anorexic. Now you can only achieve
it through surgery.” She sighed. “It never
stops.” At 25, she’d started to get injections
in her lips and Botox in her face. But she’d
always wanted liposuction on her torso,
and now, in her thirties, she felt ready.
She had met Jugenburg just minutes
before her surgery. Doesn’t he want to see
what my body looks like in person before
surgery? she thought. But she loved the
new curve of her waistline, and that, she
told herself, was more important than
bedside manner. At her follow-up appoint-
ment, as she stood in an examination room
while a nurse pulled out one stitch, and then
another, Jugenburg sauntered in. “Have
0 7 4
you been massaging?” she says he asked
her. She shook her head no—it had been
too painful. “Now you will see me rant,” he
told her, pulling out his phone. (Jugenburg
denies that he ranted at anyone.) In Ana’s
recollection, he began to lecture the cam-
era about the importance of deep-tissue
massage after surgery, the implication
being that Ana hadn’t done her homework.
He turned to the nurse, reminding her to
remove the stitches from Ana’s chin, where
she’d also had some fat removed, and then
walked away. She was stunned.
It seemed to Ana that he’d spoken to his
followers on Snapchat longer than he’d
spoken to her, and she’d spent $11,995, a
price she felt merited his focus and atten-
tion. She thought back to a nurse who
lifted her gently and changed her sheets
after another surgery years before. That’s
what care felt like, not this. In the exam-
ination room, her hand ran over a ridge of
skin above her belly button, a ripple she
knew Dr. 6ix would fix for free. She left,
too intimidated to say anything about how
ashamed he’d made her feel.
T
hat same year, in 2018, a
journalist for the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation who
was working on a story about
breast implant marketing vis-
ited Jugenburg’s clinic. She was posing
as a patient and carried a hidden cam-
era. She noticed security cameras in the
clinic’s ceilings, in both the waiting room
and in the examination room where she
was told to undress. After the story aired
that December, Jugenburg acknowledged
that there were cameras in all areas of
the clinic, including examination rooms.
Footage was captured on 24 cameras
and could be accessed through an app
on his phone. He said he did this for his
own protection to guard against break-
ins and so that he would have a record if
a patient complained. A sign at the clinic
entrance and another in the OR mentioned
the surveillance, but they were small and
didn’t say where or why the footage was
captured. The College of Physicians and
Surgeons of Ontario, the province’s regula-
tory body, disabled the cameras while they
investigated, and the following February
the board directed Jugenburg to per-
manently turn off the cameras in rooms
where his patients undressed.
The regulator also investigated an alle-
gation that Jugenburg had allowed a film
crew to shoot a patient’s procedure with-
out her informed consent, and the foot-
age of her body aired on TV. Nine months
after the surgery, Jugenburg added a line
to her chart saying she had consented. At
a disciplinary hearing, Jugenburg said that
he’d erred by not making a record of the
conversation right away. In June a panel
of CPSO representatives heard that com-
plaint, along with allegations related to the
surveillance cameras, and a third accusa-
tion that Jugenburg had posted a patient’s
image on social media without her consent.
It found that Jugenburg engaged in profes-
sional misconduct. The panel was sched-
uled to hold a penalty hearing in February.
After the CBC story aired, Ana canceled
the appointment she’d made for Jugenburg
to fix the crease above her belly button.
The more she reflected on the totality of
her experience—the pressure she’d felt to
agree to appear on social media, the two
hospital visits she made after a nurse left
stitches in her bikini line and back—the
more she dreaded returning to the clinic.
When she learned about the surveillance
cameras, she began to look for a lawyer.
Laura saw the report too, and she took
to social media. She’d recommended her
doctor to friends, and she felt she had
a responsibility to share the news. The
same day, Jugenburg appeared in her
DMs. “Laura, our security cameras were
not activated when you were here. You
were not ‘violated,’ ” he wrote. “Have a
wonderful day.” Laura stared at her phone
in shock. “I thought, You’re a doctor. You
just did a surgery, and now you’re in my
DMs arguing. I couldn’t believe it.” By
then, she was starting to worry that the
implants were making her sick. She made
an appointment to have them removed.
The shame of the experience was like a
stain she couldn’t scrub away. “It was just
so much invasion of me,” she says.
The CBC report also circulated through
Toronto’s litigation community. Three law-
yers, Kate Mazzucco, Valérie Lord, and Tina
Yang, worked at different firms but were
united in their view that what the doc-
tor was doing on social media exploited
women’s bodies to build his brand and
make money. “Plastic surgery is a choice
that’s extremely private. For many of these
women, they realized that their privacy
was invaded,” Mazzucco says. “They felt
extremely violated.” In February 2020 they
filed a proposed class-action suit against
Jugenburg that called for $75 million in
damages. Ana is one of three proposed rep-
resentative plaintiffs. More than 200 other
women, including Laura and Sara, have
reached out with their own stories, saying
they want to join the suit if it moves forward.
The lawyers claimed that Jugenburg
recorded his patients in various states
of undress without their knowledge and
also published—and profited from—inti-
mate photos of his patients’ bodies on
his social media platforms without their
informed consent. In April a judge will
decide whether there’s enough evidence
for the case to proceed. In his defense, filed
in court, Jugenburg said his social media
presence is designed to “increase trans-
parency, education, and awareness, as
well as decrease public misinformation”
and the stigma of cosmetic surgery. His
clinic obtains informed and written social
media consent from each willing patient,
according to the court filing. (Jugenburg’s
lawyer declined to comment for this arti-
cle.) Ana acknowledged that she’d signed
a consent form, but for her and Mazzucco,
her lawyer, the question is whether
informed consent can truly be granted
before surgery by a patient concerned that
her refusal could affect her care.
Like cosmetic surgery, social media can
also be an expression of agency. When a
doctor takes control of patients’ stories,
it can feel like a violation of something
deeper than privacy. “It changes how you
see yourself,” says Alka Menon, an assis-
tant professor of sociology at Yale. She
researches the role of the plastic sur-
geon as cultural gatekeeper. The surgeons
Menon has interviewed talk about them-
selves as artists, as scientists, as psychi-
atrists with a scalpel. “What drew many
of them into this kind of work is the idea
of what’s possible. The idea of sculpt-
ing someone’s body,” she says. On social
media, patients become muses. “Doctors
want to showcase their artistry, show-
case a brand and a lifestyle to appeal to a
wider range of patients,” she says. But the
patients have a different point of view. For
them, “it’s a journey of self-discovery.”
I wanted to ask Jugenburg about this.
When I called him one afternoon in June,
he answered with a soft hello. I introduced
myself and said I wanted to ask him some
questions about his life, to get to know the
man behind the brand. He said that there
are things he wants to say, but he didn’t
think his lawyer would like it if he did.
“These allegations,” he said, “they’re just
not true. I’d have to be a psychopath. I’d be
locked up in prison.” His was a story he’d
wait to tell, he said, until the time was right.
W
h e n t h e c o ro n av i r u s
pandemic hit in March
and elective surgeries were
shut down, Dr. 6ix’s clinic
closed temporarily. At first,
Jugenburg spent his days in the leafy back-
yard of his sprawling white mansion or
playing with his two young daughters. He
posted memes about growing increas-
ingly restless in quarantine. He went into
his clinic and, phone held high, walked its
empty halls. He filmed a video about how
desperate he was to perform surgery again.
To keep his audience amused, he took a pair
of lemons into his OR, sliced them open,
and stuffed them with silicone implants.
When the video panned back to the oper-
ating table, he’d replaced them with melons,
the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made
of This)” playing in the background.
In the months to come, Jugenburg faces
a penalty hearing from the College of
Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario as well
as a court hearing on the proposed class
action. But that morning in May, he looked
around his empty clinic, thinking about a
video he’d seen online. In it, Cardi B walks
toward the camera showing off the sleekest
stomach money can buy. But then she turns
to the side, tosses a defiant look over her
shoulder, and exhales: Her stomach bal-
loons over her bikini bottoms. Jugenburg
held his phone up to his face and hit Record.
“Despite Cardi B being a worldwide celeb-
rity and having more money than she can
know what to do with, and having access to
the best plastic surgeons in the world, she
still has a bulging tummy after liposuction.”
People come to his office with particular
wishes, pictures of celebrities who embody
their hoped-for future selves. When they
don’t get the results they’re hoping for, they
get upset. They blame it on the surgeon or
say it was a botched job. But those beauti-
ful women with flat stomachs on Instagram
are sucking in their abdominal muscles.
“They all suck it in,” he said.
He continued: “There are some things
surgery just cannot do,” he said. “Thank you,
Cardi B, for showing us and demonstrating
what this is all about, for keeping it real. And
all the people out there, I hope this visual
demonstration was able to explain to you
that not everything you see online is real.”
He paused. “Hopefully I was able to explain
why the real world is a little different than
what you see on social media.” He took one
final beat and cracked a slight, self-satisfied
smile. “Thanks for watching,” he said, and
the screen went dark.
KATHERINE LAIDLAW (@klaidlaw) is a
freelance writer based in Toronto.
T H E R E S I S T A N C E

BY ROX A N N E K H A M S I
 Two decades ago, researchers started identifying people who
naturally produce superpowered antibodies to fend off
HIV. The goal was to create drugs against that disease.
Now, their efforts are helping to fight Covid-19.

I L LU S T R AT ION S BY NAJEEBAH AL-GHADBAN

A year ago, in January,
when John Mascola
heard that a new
coronavirus had been
detected in an animal market in Wuhan, China,
he left everything at his desk on the
fourth floor of the US government’s
Vaccine Research Center and walked
up one flight of stairs to the office of
a longtime colleague, Nicole Doria-
Rose. Felicitously, Mascola, who is the
center’s director, had been working on
ways to immunize people against coro-
naviruses. A vaccine against this new
bug, soon to be known as SARS-CoV-2,
was the first priority, the only surefire
way of halting the growing pandemic.
Mascola and Doria-Rose, an immu-
nologist, go way back. And they hoped
there was another approach that might
also contribute to the cause, one they’d
been chasing for more than a decade.
They wanted to find a monoclonal
0 7 8 antibody.¶ Everybody knows about
vaccines, which train the immune system to fight invaders, but
monoclonal antibody drugs are less familiar. To develop them,
scientists must generally find a person whose body has done bet-
ter than most at fighting a disease; scour their immune system,
needle-in-a-haystack style, to locate the most effective antibody;
and use it as a blueprint to fashion a drug for people who are sick.
When former New Jersey governor Chris Christie came down with
Covid-19 in early October, he was given an experimental mono-
clonal antibody drug made by Eli Lilly. That treatment—with the
exceedingly unpronounceable name bamlanivimab—can be
traced directly back to the conversation Mascola had with Doria-
Rose at the start of the pandemic. The Food and Drug Adminis-
tration approved it for emergency use on November 9. Similarly,
a combination of two other antibody drugs, made by the com-
pany Regeneron, was given to then-president Donald Trump
when he contracted the virus. Like the vaccines made by Pfizer
and Moderna, these monoclonals were deployed in record time.
Mascola became interested in monoclonal antibody treatments That antibody came from a man known as Donor 45. Doria-Rose,
in the early 2000s, not long after he joined the Vaccine Research who met with study participants when they came in for their reg-
Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Back then, if you studied infectious ular checkups, says that Donor 45 was an exceedingly private gay
diseases, as Mascola did, you were probably trying to understand Black man in his sixties from the Washington, DC, area. They dubbed
HIV. It had killed an estimated 22 million people and seemed the antibody VRC01—the first from the Vaccine Research Center.
unstoppable. HIV wasn’t as easy to contract as a respiratory ill- It took almost a decade to develop a drug from this antibody and
ness—bodily fluids such as blood or semen, not the air you breathe, set up a clinical trial to make sure it was safe and effective. Other
are the media for transmission—but once the virus took hold, its HIV researchers going down different roads came up with anti-
passage through the body was relentless. Patients suffered an retroviral drugs—the famous “triple cocktail”—that effectively treat
array of painful symptoms, including mouth ulcers, skin sores, and prevent HIV infections by interfering with the virus’s ability to
and pneumonia, before succumbing to a total collapse of the make copies of itself. The crisis wasn’t over. People still contracted
body’s defenses. But there was a small percentage of people who HIV, but with the antiretrovirals they could live mostly normal lives.
held out longer; they made stronger antibodies against the virus. As access to those drugs expanded, the effort to use antibodies to
Other researchers had shown it was possible to isolate one of make HIV drugs became less urgent. It plugged along, a clinical trial
those superpowered antibodies, and starting in 2006, Doria-Rose was started, but not as many people were paying much attention.
joined Mascola in setting out to catalog the immune systems of And then came Covid-19. That day in January 2020, Mascola
exceptional HIV fighters. They first had to find HIV patients who immediately saw that everything he and his colleagues had learned
had been infected for years but had remained relatively healthy; from studying HIV antibodies could be mobilized to treat the new
then, from each of those people, they had to collect and analyze pathogen. It would be “the culmination of a life’s work,” he says.
samples of blood to know if the donors were among the estimated Mascola is a restrained kind of guy. He communicates with econ-
1 percent of people with the virus who made highly effective anti- omy. “When he puts one exclamation point in an email, you know
bodies. The blood was processed through machines that quickly you have done something phenomenal!” Doria-Rose wrote to me.
separated out antibody-producing cells, called B cells, which were So when he came to her office, they got straight down to business.
then deposited into the tiny wells of a tray resembling a Keebler Doria-Rose began asking team members to fire up the cell-sorting
elf’s muffin tin. From there, Mascola’s team would capture the machines and fill the tiny muffin tins and engineer test cells that
antibodies produced by each cell cocooned in the individual wells. glowed. They overhauled their work schedules and went all in.
Next, they tested the antibodies for strength. They took a line of
specially engineered human cells, designed to glow green when
infected with an HIV-like virus, and bathed them in antibodies.
Then they exposed the cells to the virus. If the antibody was a
dud, the infected cells would glow; if it had superpowers, they
wouldn’t. Most of the time the mixture glowed. This went on for
months; hundreds of samples failed.
But one day in 2009, while Mascola was sitting in the labora-
tory break room about to eat a sandwich, one of his scientists
bounded toward him with a big smile on her face: They’d found
the no-glow they’d been looking for.

Even
before
you
were born, your immune system started making antibodies to
fight potential pathogens. They are stunningly diverse: The aver-
age person has billions of B cells that can produce somewhere
between 9 and 17 million distinct antibodies. Antibody molecules
are Y-shaped, and their tips have nooks and crannies that can lock
onto specific viruses or bacteria. When that binding happens, the
antibodies block the invaders from attaching to healthy cells and
shuttle them away. The truly ingenious thing, however, is not just
that an antibody can seek out its enemy for destruction, but that
the act of locking onto the pathogen is also a signal to the immune
system to make more of that particular shape. Even one antibody
can call up the troops, allowing your immune system to wage war
against an invading army.
Unfortunately, when an entirely new pathogen like HIV or the
new coronavirus emerges, a well-matching shape is rare, even
in our massive preexisting natural repertoire of antibodies. Vac-
cines, which typically consist of a weakened virus or fragments
of a virus, train the body to develop a locking antibody—one that
will bind to and neutralize the real pathogen when we encoun-
ter it in the world. This is known as active immunity. The body’s
immune system goes to basic training, and it emerges with a fit
fighting force. In contrast, antibody therapies like the ones Mascola
worked on for HIV give you passive immunity: A mercenary army
is introduced into the body to temporarily do the work for you.
The discovery of passive immunity reaches back to the end of
the 19th century, when Emil Behring, a German scientist with sad,
hooded eyes and a trim beard, began injecting 220 children with
animal blood. The children had all contracted diphtheria, a grue-
some disease that slowly suffocated its victims. Behring had been
trying to treat the disease, experimenting with rabbits, guinea pigs,
goats, and horses, giving infected animals the blood of recovered
ones. He didn’t know why, but the sick animals improved. So he
gave the children the blood of diphtheria-exposed animals, and
in 1894 he published the results: About twice as many children as
would normally be expected to survive actually did survive. Beh-
ring’s “serum therapy” approach was deemed such a success that he
later received the first-ever Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Over the next century, scientists discovered that antibodies in the
blood serum accounted for the success of the diphtheria treatment.
They were then able to figure out how to isolate individual antibodies
from lab animals and manufacture them. A defining moment came
in 1986, when the US Food and Drug Administration approved the
first monoclonal therapy. It was derived from mice and stopped the
body from attacking and rejecting transplanted organs.
HIV, however, is tricky. One of the wiliest viruses, it mutates
rapidly, shape-shifting to outmaneuver the body’s attempts to
find a locking antibody. In the early 1990s, when the struggle to
combat HIV accelerated, an immunologist at the Scripps Research
Institute in La Jolla, California, named Dennis Burton set his sights
on solving that problem.
First, Burton had to find an antibody that worked against many
different strains of HIV—what he called a “broadly neutralizing”
antibody. He and his collaborators landed on one from a man in
the US, in 1994. They called it B12, and it neutralized many of the
virus strains they tested against it. Finally, there was proof that find-
ing and deploying antibodies against HIV was possible. Burton’s
work inspired Mascola and his colleagues, who discovered VRC01.
Since then, some 100 antibody drugs have arrived on the market
in the US or the European Union. About half are designed to fight
cancer, and most of the rest work against autoimmune disorders.
Very few of them target infectious diseases. In fact, only seven such
treatments have ever been approved by the FDA—the first for a
deadly lung infection in 1998 and the most recent for Ebola, more
than two decades later. For Covid-19, there are more than 40 efforts
to produce antibody-based treatments. Just as Covid-19 revved up
vaccine researchers to do in a year what used to take a decade, so
has it sped up development of new infectious disease treatments.
0 8 0

Born
in a
suburb
of Boston, Mascola came to the National Institutes of Health after
medical school and various government research positions. His
defining character trait is an absorbed single-mindedness. About
20 colleagues in a meeting once pranked him by each wearing a
sweatshirt printed with an image of his face. The joke was to see how
long it would take him to notice. “I think they clocked it at like two
and a half minutes,” Mascola says, “which obviously is a long time.”
Outwardly reserved, Mascola is inwardly optimistic. When he
switched gears in January to focus on the coronavirus, he was
buoyed by the apparent stability of SARS-CoV-2. While extremely
contagious, it did not seem to mutate quickly. Unlike with HIV,
scientists wouldn’t need to find someone whose antibodies had
kept a virus at bay over a long period of time. They just needed
to find someone who had definitely been sick with Covid-19 and
whose body had mounted a successful response.
When the first US cases emerged in Washington state, a vial of
blood from a patient who had recovered was shipped to a Cana-
dian company called AbCellera for analysis. The firm’s specialized
machines and software enabled it to screen more than 5 million
immune cells from the very first sample and identify more than 500
antibodies within five days. AbCellera FedExed tiny plastic vials of
some of these antibodies to Mascola’s team in Bethesda. Over years
of studying HIV, Doria-Rose and others had developed more auto-
mated and efficient methods of vetting antibodies, and the staff tested
them against SARS-CoV-2, all day and on nights and weekends.
Around the time the antibodies were arriving at the Vaccine
Research Center in late February, the institute went into lockdown.
Doria-Rose attended weekly video conferences with AbCellera
scientists and experts around North America. At one of those
meetings in March, a colleague shared a spreadsheet of the anti-
bodies isolated from one of the first individuals from Seattle who
had been hospitalized and volunteered to donate blood to the
effort. The sheet was color-coded (though, for the layperson,
counterintuitively): Green rows indicated antibodies that bound
weakly to SARS-CoV-2, yellow rows were for moderately good
antibodies, and red rows indicated antibodies that were the best
candidates to turn into drugs. “You’re scanning down an Excel
spreadsheet looking for red,” Mascola told me. “And it was a lit-
tle bit disappointing at first. There were lots of green—lots of
weaks—and a couple of yellows. Within hundreds and hundreds
of rows from that one patient, there were just a couple of reds.”
One of them, number 555, stood out. The antibody seemed to be
a potent neutralizer. It worked well against SARS-CoV-2 at lower
concentrations than any other in the spreadsheet. A promising lead.
The Vaccine Research Center can do a lot of things, but it’s still
a government agency. It doesn’t have factories where it manufac-
tures drugs. So it shared its findings with AbCellera, which inked
a partnership with Eli Lilly, a maker of monoclonal antibodies
for cancer and other illnesses. The antibody that stood out in the
spreadsheet became known as LY-CoV555.
At Lilly, the person responsible for managing the developing
Covid antibody treatments was Dan Skovronsky, the company’s
chief scientific officer. It was up to him to decide whether to go
ahead and test LY-CoV555 in a clinical trial or wait to see if a bet-
ter antibody would crop up later. It was a weighty choice. Clinical
trials and drug development cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
For Skovronsky, though, expense wasn’t the main consideration.
Lilly had factories that could produce monoclonal antibodies at
a large scale, but at the time there were limited free slots in the
assembly line. “If we picked wrong,” he says, “we could have
been delayed by as much as a couple of months before there was
another slot and another molecule could go in.”
Skovronsky’s team was divided. Some people thought they should
wait for a better antibody candidate. Lilly’s computer algorithms,
designed to predict how well antibodies would perform, were sug-
gesting that LY-CoV555 would clear rapidly from the patient’s body,
presumably reducing its efficacy. But there was no time to rigor-
ously test that assumption. In normal times the next step would be
monthslong efficacy tests in different animals. But the coronavirus
was spreading rapidly. It was April, and cities had shut down. Hospi-
tals in New York and New Orleans were overrun. More than 13,000
people in the US had already died of the virus. Time was critical.
Finally, one Saturday evening during dinner, Skovronsky
excused himself and took his plate to his home office, where he
dialed in to a long call with about a dozen collaborators from Lilly
and AbCellera. He had to make a decision. Going forward with the
0 8 2
 antibody meant rejecting the findings of the company’s predic-
tive algorithm, a step Lilly had introduced at great cost in order
to make more sensible drug development decisions. But by the
end of the call, he’d decided to move forward with LY-CoV555. It
continued to work better at lower concentrations than other anti-
bodies studied by Lilly and its academic collaborators. He emailed
his team to let them know. The next day—a Sunday—the company
started the lengthy process of manufacturing enough of the anti-
body for the clinical trials it hoped to launch by early summer.
Settling on LY-CoV555 so early was a risk. But it turned out to
be a worthwhile gamble: Skovronsky’s team kept looking for more
powerful antibodies over the next several months and none came
along. “Remarkably,” he says, “555 still looks to be the best, the
most potent antibody—which we can only say is luck.”

This
“IF WE PICKED
WRONG, WE spring,

C O U L D H AV E B E E N
D E L AY E D BY A S
MUCH AS A COUPLE
O F M O N T H S .”
T I M E WA S C R I T I C A L .

Alex
Stemer, a medical director within the Symphony Care Network, a
chain of nursing homes in the Midwest, got an unexpected call from
an old friend and former medical student he had mentored named
Myron Cohen. An infectious disease specialist at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Cohen also helped design clinical
trials and knew that Eli Lilly needed older volunteers, who were
among the most vulnerable, to test its new preventive Covid therapy.
He’d instantly thought of Stemer and the nursing home residents.
In March, Symphony had experienced a terrible tragedy. At its
facility in Joliet, Illinois, a maintenance worker diligently installed
tables in residents’ rooms so they wouldn’t risk spreading Covid
while mingling in the dining hall. But in a horrible twist, the worker
turned out to be a presymptomatic carrier of the virus. An out-
break followed, and within a month 26 people had died, includ-
ing the maintenance worker himself.
Stemer was an obvious choice to oversee the chain’s Covid-19
response. He has been passionate about treating infectious dis-
eases ever since he alerted his colleagues to a salmonella outbreak
in a hospital while he was a medical resident. Stemer, who had
worked in the field for years in Indiana, was eager to participate in
the Lilly trial. He connected Cohen with the Symphony leaders. In
his first call, Cohen made his pitch with all the scientific nitty-gritty
of how antibody therapies work. Then the conversation took an
unexpectedly emotional turn. The Symphony team wanted to start
collaborating right away. Cohen had to explain that it would take
weeks or perhaps months before the antibodies were ready and
available for testing. “But people are dying right now,” they told
him. “It was probably one of the more upsetting conversations
I’ve ever had,” Cohen says. The urgency continued in follow-up
calls. “I literally just about cried after every phone call,” he says.
It took until the end of May to manufacture enough doses of
LY-CoV555 for clinical testing to get going. Lilly began launching
some of the four key clinical trials, starting with people already
sick with Covid-19 in a hospital. Near the end of August, Stemer
got a call that set things into motion: An employee at Symphony’s
assisted living facility in Chesterton, Indiana, had tested positive for
Covid-19. On Saturday, August 29, after Stemer was done making
his rounds, he made his way into a large conference room. There,
about 30 residents along with Stemer and other staff, were given an
intravenous infusion containing either saline solution (the exper-
imental control) or molecules of LY-CoV555. Could the drug pre-
vent the spread in the center? The trial could provide an answer.

Antibody

therapies

didn’t
need a hype man, but they found one in President Trump. On Octo-
ber 8, he tweeted a video of himself standing on the sunny White
House lawn, six days after receiving the drug made by Regen-
eron. “I went into the hospital a week ago; I was very sick and I
took this medicine and it was incredible,” he said. Not long after,
Chris Christie, who spent seven days in the ICU, said he received
antibodies from Lilly. After Christie recovered, he thanked Lilly
for access to “their extraordinary treatments,” although nobody 0 8 4
can say for sure whether the drugs helped either of these poli-
ticians more than any of the other treatments they were given.
Both Regeneron and Lilly released preliminary data from their tri-
als last fall, reporting that people who got their drugs were less likely
to require hospital or emergency room care than the people who got
the saline-solution placebo. That prompted the FDA to bless both
companies’ monoclonal antibodies with an emergency use autho-
rization, allowing doctors to prescribe them for people who have
tested positive for the new coronavirus. The US government com-
mitted to buying 1.5 million doses of Regeneron’s drug to distribute
at no cost to patients, along with almost a million doses from Lilly.
It took just 10 months from Mascola’s conversation with Doria-
Rose to get to a drug with provisional approval from the FDA. In
some ways, though, that ended up being the easy part. Monoclonals
work best when administered to Covid-19 patients within days of
their first symptoms. But to get them within a recommended 10-day
window, you need a Covid-19 test result and must meet certain eli-
gibility requirements. In many places, patients simply don’t learn
they are eligible in time and are disqualified from getting the treat-
ment. Hospitals feared there would be a shortage of the drugs, but
in fact they often go unused. The delivery mechanism for mono-
clonals like Lilly’s—a slow IV infusion rather than a quick stab in
the bicep—can be another barrier to distribution. The wards where
infusions typically take place are reserved for cancer treatments;
hospitals are understandably averse to seating infectious Covid-19
patients in areas with vulnerable cancer patients. In the midst of a
pandemic, many haven’t had the staff or facilities to do it elsewhere.
By January, two vaccines had been approved for use in the US,
but their rollout has been achingly slow. At the same time, new
variants of Covid-19 have been detected in the United Kingdom,
South Africa, and Brazil. There’s worry, based in part on data from
Lilly’s own lab experiments, that individual monoclonal treatments
might not be effective on some emerging variants.
Still, health officials in different parts of the country are opti-
mistic about the drug. Jeremy Cauwels, chief physician of Sanford
Health, a network of hospitals in the Midwest, believes that the
antibody treatments will prove their worth during these months
as people are waiting for the vaccine—and after, for those who
refused to get it and become ill. Several hospitals he oversees did
manage to create antibody drug infusion centers by repurposing
spaces and recruiting surgical and other nurses who were less busy
during the pandemic. By his calculations, over several months
these medications prevented an estimated 35 people from having
to be admitted into the Sanford system. Those 35 people got to go
home and be treated as outpatients, which was good for them.
And their absence translated into more than 200 days of open
hospital beds, which was good for the patients who needed them.
In early December, health officials in El Paso, Texas, made the
infusions of monoclonal antibodies available at the city’s conven-
tion center, which had been operating as a dedicated Covid treat-
ment site for people with mild to moderate cases of the disease.
Those patients didn’t have to go to the hospital to get infusions.
“That, for us, was sort of a game changer in terms of everybody
then feeling comfortable not only talking about it but disseminat-
ing it and getting it to patients,” says Ogechika Alozie, an infectious
disease specialist and a cochair of El Paso’s Covid-19 task force.
“The first two or three weeks were really slow. All of a sudden,
around Christmas, it ramped up.”
On January 21, Lilly issued a press release. The company said it had
data from the trial of nursing home staff and residents in which Alex
Stemer had participated. The results gave new hope. The company
said that bamlanivimab could actually prevent people from getting
infected with the pandemic coronavirus. While the results have yet
to be peer-reviewed, the data suggested that the drug reduced the
risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2 by 57 percent among the par-
ticipants, and up to 80 percent among the particularly vulnerable
nursing home residents. The next week, Regeneron released data
suggesting that its antibody combination could also reduce the risk
of becoming infected by the pandemic coronavirus.
0 8 6 from Donor 45. The trials involved more than 4,600 people from
The
Covid-19
pandemic
has brought so much death and economic devastation. But at least
in the scientific response to the virus, we’ve been lucky—lucky that
this fearsome coronavirus happens to mutate slowly; lucky that
researchers had been working on relevant vaccine and treatment
technology for years. But, of course, luck doesn’t truly describe
what happened. It wasn’t chance that researchers knew exactly
what to do when Covid-19 hit. They’d been well prepared by a long
progression of meticulous, hard-fought scientific steps. But their
work on this virus is also a cautionary tale. We might not be so
prepared with the next virus. In fact, we’re still struggling with HIV.
HIV is trickier than SARS-CoV-2, despite the emergence of new
concerning variants. Not only does HIV mutate much more quickly
than the coronavirus, it also hides in a sugar coat that makes it an
especially slippery target for antibodies to bind to. HIV still infects
some 1.7 million people around the world every year. Antiretrovi-
rals have made it possible to live with the disease, and even pre-
vent transmission if taken daily. But the real goal is to stop people
from getting HIV in the first place. Unfortunately, scientists have
tried and failed for more than three decades to come up with a
working HIV vaccine. Now, some of them say monoclonal anti-
body drugs—given prophylactically, rather than as a treatment—
might be the best immediate bet to prevent new infections.
The fierce push for antibody drugs in the current coronavi-
rus pandemic may ultimately give a lift to the HIV research that
laid the groundwork in the first place. Companies like AbCellera
and Regeneron have gotten faster and better at both finding and
manufacturing monoclonals. Moreover, the benefit conferred by
antibody drugs against the coronavirus in early clinical trials has
also been encouraging. “The success of monoclonals in Covid is
going to shine a brighter light on the potential of HIV monoclo-
nals,” says Myron Cohen, “both in treatment and prevention.”
In January, results finally were presented from a pair of four-
year-long clinical trials for the antibody against HIV that had come
Brazil to Botswana to Switzerland who were at high risk for con-
tracting HIV. Researchers knew, based on testing in the lab, that
certain strains of the virus are more susceptible to the antibody,
and the results seemed to confirm it: The number of patients who
contracted those strains was 75 percent lower than normal. But the
antibody was no silver bullet. Overall, the drug didn’t significantly
reduce HIV infections, because only about a third of the strains
were susceptible to the powers of VRC01. Still, the trials were an
important proof of concept: They showed that an antibody drug
could block HIV infection. Mascola is quick to point out that, in
recent years, even more potent antibodies against HIV have been
discovered, including several that are already in clinical testing.
“Some of these antibodies are about tenfold more potent than
VRC01, and they also are active against a greater number of HIV
viruses,” Mascola says. He remains an optimist.
So why did Donor 45 possess an antibody that could fend off
the worst of HIV’s assaults and survive for years while so many
others died? No one really knows. The human immune system is
bafflingly complex. When scientists sequenced the human genome
two decades ago, they skipped over detailing the immune system
genes, because these bits of DNA are so variable and have a pro-
pensity to rearrange randomly during cell division.
This ability, of course, is also what makes our immune system
so amazing. According to the work of Dennis Burton, the Scripps
researcher, and his collaborators, humans have the potential to gen-
erate 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 different kinds of antibodies,
which means that we all, theoretically, possess the ability to neutral-
ize a vast number of pathogens. The immune system is a random-
izer, evolution’s way of preparing for uncertainty. We can’t predict
exactly what terrible new virus will emerge, but we know one will.
And by harnessing the most effective antibodies—like the antibod-
ies from Donor 45—we might be able to find solutions for humanity.
Donor 45 died in 2013 but surpassed all expectations of how
long someone could live with HIV without any medication. He and
the other “elite neutralizers” who made potent antibodies were
lucky, of course, to have survived longer with a disease that had
killed so many of their friends and lovers. But their survival also
left them alone, isolated. Doria-Rose kept a box of tissues in her
office for these visits. “I cried with Donor 45 one time,” she says,
recalling how the loneliness weighed on him, as did the burden
of knowing he survived when others hadn’t.
When the Vaccine Research Center scientists isolated VRC01,
it was Doria-Rose’s job to tell Donor 45 that his blood contained
a powerful molecule that might help others. She printed out a
copy of a scientific report detailing the findings and showed it to
him when he next visited the clinic. He had expressed to her all
along a desire to aid research so that others could benefit. Donor
45 did not live to see this month’s trial results, but on that day, he
seemed to understand. “He got it,” she says, “that we had found
what we had been looking for.” This time, they didn’t cry.
ROXANNE KHAMSI (@rkhamsi) is a science writer living in
Montreal. She wrote about a cancer treatment based on
evolutionary principles in issue 27.04.
Personal records that
helped get this issue out:
Eleven months of #WFH; watching the
boss’s hair grow in multiple directions on
Zoom; having Roti join the staff; feeling
proud of running nearly every day, but then
realizing it’s at 1⁄20 the distance and speed
of the boss; the boss running the Chicago
Marathon in 2:29:13; most conversations
with the editor in chief’s family during a fact-
check about said marathon; the boss run-
ning what amounted to a kids’ soccer camp
for months on end during quarantine; getting
a quarter of the number of tasks done that
Nick Thompson does in a day, and feeling
very accomplished. Nick, we will miss you.
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SIX-WORD SCI-FI: STORIES BY WIRED READERS WIRED 29.03

IN SIX WORDS, WRITE A STORY ABOUT A FUTURE AMERICAN PRESIDENT:

AN ALIEN.
WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. Maayan Brodsky,
via Facebook

↙ HE DIED AS HE LIVED: ONLINE.

D.A. SMITH, VIA EMAIL
SHE WON CANINE VOTE BY LANDSLIDE.
JANNA DETHMERS, VIA EMAIL
“INTRODUCING YOUR NEXT PRESIDENT:
VERSION 7!”
Honorable BEN N, VIA EMAIL
Mentions BUT IT WON THE ELECTORAL HACKATHON!
ZACHARIE BARROU DUMONT, VIA EMAIL
“I STILL CAN’T SMELL,” SHE WHISPERED.
SEAN FITZGERALD, VIA EMAIL
“I HEREBY PARDON ALL MY CLONES.”
@MORGAN, VIA TWITTER
SHE SMILED: MARS IS NOW INDEPENDENT.
@SEPOHONPOKOK, VIA TWITTER
FUTURE PRESIDENT BORN TODAY,
SUPERCOMPUTER PREDICTS.
ETHAN NOLL, VIA EMAIL
Every month, we ask for a
new six-word story on
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there, along with the hashtag
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And visit the archive at WIRED
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we’ve illustrated our favorites.

ILLUSTRATION / VIOLET REED

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