Forbes Nash

The ex–Silicon Valley golden boy who engineered the screens that divided us—now using them to bring us back together.

“Books are like our Selves. It’s hard for our loved ones to unsee the ugly first drafts.”—ForbesNash.com, recovering #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author

In 2021, shortly after our father’s death, my brother Wyoming and I changed our names, deleted our social media profiles, and went undercover to infiltrate the world’s largest gathering of capitalists. In a Nevada desert, we came across an eclectic and extraordinary band of songwriters, screenwriters, jokewriters, codewriters, copywriters and — ahem — underwriters.

We concluded that the world was too broken to change, so we decided to create a new one, and invite the world into it.

We wrote a book about this new world, scored it like a musical, and titled it THE MILLIONAIRE’S CAMPFIRE: A “True” Story about Culture, Capitalism, Community, and Coming Home.

It’s being trickled out this year, in advance of being served to an aching world at The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland next year.

Below is my brother’s subscribers-only blog and invitation-only podcast:

If you're wondering how we joined this remarkable group of writers, keep reading.

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“Forbes Nash is not a rich narcissist. but he does play one on television.”

RiverfrontTim.com, PR stuntman and shockjock “podcast jockey” (PJ) on SONGA.FM*

Before I belonged, I didn’t. I was a data miner who wrote the disgracebook algorithms that made media less social. I was the son of an oil miner in a small field in the plains of West Texas. You might know the company I cofounded by a different name. I bet you use the platform I built too — probably even a little bit too much. Well, I used your data. And I became the company’s CMO, the Chief Marketing Officer, but I was later reviled as its Chief Manipulation Officer, because my algorithms manipulated—and sold—

YOU.

Click ▶️ below to listen to instrumental
music while you continue reading:
2nd Inner Mission_Instrumental .mp3

I had hoped to create joy and connection in the world, but I was paid handsomely by our Shareholders at Sequoia Capitol™ on the bottom line, so I drove traffic to our platform using the emotions that sold best—Anger and Division, Hate and Fear.

When we started scrolling, we stopped livin’, and lovin’. When my heart and life grew dark, I finally lost my Self.

But the greatest tragedy came later. As our screens got smaller, so did our gatherings, until our screens got so small that we didn’t gather at all.

I sold the eyeballs that those negative feelings drew to companies for a massive profit. And as the social media landscape I helped architect tore apart society’s fabric—and millions of families along with it—my bank account grew beyond imagination. But along the way, I lost my imagination,my joy, and ultimately, my family too.

Wyoming, before he changed his name and became the one named enigma that the world’s come to know him by, was my rival for Shy Ann’s love, and once upon a time, he was also my brother. We had two different mothers: Mine, the sister of a game theorist who’d won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Uncle John Nash was a novel thinker known in Nobel circles for his theories, helping the world better understand the interconnectedness of our societal fabric, the very fabric I’d destroyed with the algorithms that fascinated me as a young engineer at disgracebook.

I’d never really taken his Nash Equilibrium to heart, because the prisoners my uncle saw, Wyoming (“Wy”) and I, we were trapped in our own Prisoner’s Dilemma, fighting for our father’s attention in a game where no player benefitted while the others strategy remained unchanged. Uncle John solved The Prisoners Dilemma.

Wy and I could never release ourselves from that prison of our own making, the one my father helped create.

They called him domineering. Wy and I played the same game growin up, our father’s game.

Me, the unseen son, in Wyoming’s shadow—quiet, overanalytical, overlooked. But during those hot Texas summers, when Wy would leave St. Louis and come to our father’s ranch,

We’d fight for his affection, convinced it was a winner-take-all-game for our father’s love. He liked it that way.

I manufactured crisis and played the Victim. I’d inflate my successes and play the Hero. None of it seemed to buy my father’s love which was never for sale, as much as he pretended it could be bought. Wy accused me of manipulation. So, it only made sense I’d pursue a career in it.

We lost touch as I went to MIT for a degree in computer science. I wasn’t done running, trying to prove myself. So, I went to France for an MBA from INSEAD. Everyone was obsessed with marketing and accounting classes, but for me, it was all about distribution.

But what I was distributing out into the world was greed and selfishness, borne from the scarcity mindset our father had instilled in us as kids, and mirrored in the capitalist system that I entered after graduation: the one that pitted us all, against each other.

Capitalism failed us, and it’s failed…

… YOU.

Wy and I weren’t released from the prison that we created until the Warden became sick

When our father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and there was no familial scoreboard, no more game to play. On the day of our father’s funeral, Wyoming approached me at the grand mansion he’d bought in the heart of St. Louis’ Tower Grove neighborhood. He brought me into a recording studio, turned on the mics, and we discussed his plan to reverse the societal disconnection we both felt, and I’d helped cause at disgracebook.

I decided to fix the problems I’d created.

We hatched our The Plot to Save the Soul of Business (with music) and take down my former employer, disgracebook.

I picked up a pair of orange sunglasses. A reminder that I wasn’t just looking at the world anymore; I was finally seeing it. For the first time in years, I wasn’t manipulating emotions—I was feeling them.

My brother and I penned the viral social manifesto predicted to win a Nobel Prize for Economics, and a Tony Award for Best Musical.

We scheduled opening night in a small theater in Davos and cast our friends and family for parts in a our social play.

“What if the screens that helped cause this rip in the fabrics of our family, and society, could be the same that helped stitch it back together? What if there's a way to create media that connects us, instead of divides us?”

And thus, the world’s first SOCIAL me(dia) change game platform was born. Insiders call it a ‘son’ game, a game for unseen sons, and daughters. But outsiders call it ‘songa dot me’ (songa.me)

Because when conversation died, so did nuance, or attempts at understanding. For millennia, we’d had the village fire where dialogue was essential to function, and survival.

What if we could return to the fire? What if we could create social media that actually makes us more social, not less?

Explore how we’re doing just that @ songa.org

in the meantime, let’s connect on Instagram,then, let’s connect—for real—in real life.

Live the interactive story that’s emerging

LIVE before your very eyes, and ears, at Songa Studios ST LOUIS and @ live.songa.org.