YouTuber’s autobiography isn’t just the Shawshank Redemption for nerds

Waiting for Nerdrotic is pop culture YouTuber Gary Buechler’s surprisingly honest account of a life of drug addiction and the serious crimes of his youth. He couples this with high praise for the support mechanisms of Alcoholics Anonymous. Alongside telling you why Marvel Comics matter, he’ll also tell you the secret of not getting murdered in the exercise yard at Folsom prison. Like any good story, his comes with a redemption arc.

Gary Buechler, better known as Nerdrotic, has well over a million YouTube subscribers and double that in regular viewers. His latest video is The Force Awakens – How Disney Destroyed Star Wars. He is one of the more visible pop culture commentators on the social media giant who’ve grown to prominence over the last decade fighting at the forefront of the culture war. They’d typically ask if you’ve noticed the decline in the quality of film and TV, before happily explaining why Hollywood’s forced diversity and hostility to traditional fanbases has reduced once billion-dollar movie franchises to notoriously low-quality shows locked away on streaming platforms nobody watches. Buechler’s extended circle of contributors are former TV executives, retired filmmakers and practicing screenwriters. Their appeal is credible insider insights and commentary that are more entertaining than the material they’re criticising.

Despite his success and following, Buechler’s autobiography is far from the sensationalist self-aggrandisement you might expect. He tells us more about his failures than his triumphs. Born in San Diego in 1969, he was adopted and says he displayed signs of addictive behaviour at a young age. He compulsively collected comics. His school performance declined and he ended up with predictable drug problems after he was sexually abused by a male teacher. He describes leaving school after punching a member of staff. Uneducated, unskilled and happy in his addiction to drugs, comics and movies, he broke into a house to steal money. A series of farcical events followed involving a small dog, a broken door handle and a homeowner who happened to be a champion military marksman. The arresting officer told Buechler he was lucky to be alive. He was sentenced to four years in Folsom prison.

Eventually moved to a less dangerous institution, his new cellmate talked him into attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He says it turned his life around. He was released after two years. He married twice, the second time to an old flame, adopted her child and they had one of their own. He opened a comic shop in San Francisco.

After 17 years drug-free, his relapse began when he was prescribed highly addictive painkillers after an accident hanging a Superman Returns movie poster. After getting clean and relapsing a second time, his wife dumped him at the doors of a sober living community. It worked. After the chaos of years on cocaine and painkillers, he sold his comic shop and returned to selling car parts.

The routine of a regular job helped, but he’s clear the ensuing boredom is a bad sign for addicts. In 2014, he turned to podcasting, he says to keep the brain functioning. Thus was his Nerdrotic channel born. He makes it clear it was a coping mechanism for a sober addict with ADHD. 

His book is not a sneering or self-congratulating I-made-it-big-on-YouTube story. It’s a sobering warning – and heartfelt advice – for fellow addicts. His relative fame is just the hook. It is, if you will, Alcoholics No Longer Anonymous – and he willingly accuses himself for the sake of others. His viewers will know how much he hates today’s fashionable victim narratives. The title Waiting for Nerdrotic isn’t a reference to his YouTube success at all. It’s self-recrimination. Addiction? Again?

The niche appeal of its author and the transcribed nature of the text mean the book is unlikely to be a bestseller or win any literary awards. Parts of it are drawn by famed comic book artist Kelley Jones. His inclusion anchors the book in comics culture, making it one for the fans. Buechler, unlike the mainstream, would take that judgement as the highest praise.

Waiting for Nerdrotic: From Prison to YouTube
by Gary Buechler
Legacy Launch Pad Publishing — available now

Does Starz’s Spartacus Sequel Dishonour the Blood and Sand Legacy It’s Built On?

Showrunner Steven S. DeKnight returns to the Roman era with Spartacus: House of Ashur. The show is an alternative history set in the same world, with a minor villainous character from the original show resurrected and rewarded with a gladiator school by his patron. Can the new show live up to the extremes of nudity and violence that have made the original such a winner on streaming? Or has yet another great show had its USP sanitised away?

Starz

1 episode of 10 seen

Starz’s Spartacus series retold the story of the gladiator who led an army of freed slaves against Rome. The very idea was sacrilegious to many, given the reverence for the Stanley Kubrick/Kirk Douglas 1960 original.

The series was executed in the style of Zack Snyder’s 300 and painted a bloody picture of a will-to-power world where might was right and there was no justice for the impoverished majority. It won itself almost immediate goodwill with its sheer commitment to being as extreme as a show could be, just shy of being a snuff movie filled with hardcore porn. Can such a show possibly return unaltered in a vastly more conservative 2025?

It was the kind of show you felt sick after watching, as it didn’t flinch from showing the effects of gutting a man with a sharpened piece of rusty steel. The image of fresh corpses dragged from the arena with a meat hook is not one the viewer will forget.

However, it wasn’t merely a mindless video nasty. It was also a brilliantly written world of intrigue, scheming and violent one-upmanship. Never had the Roman Empire been depicted in such seductive and dystopian terms. Everyone spoke with deliberately stylised speech; the combination of word and image left the viewer with the sense the showrunners committed to a unique vision in a notoriously noncommittal industry. The show had signature authorial style.

The makers won more goodwill when it was revealed the original star – Andy Whitfield – had stage four cancer, and they shot a prequel series delaying the need for him to be on set. Sadly, he died, aged 38.

The two series that remained – once recast – went on to push the anti-slavery message. It was also riotously entertaining and brilliantly plotted. Yet, it also built sympathy for the characters, especially those who started out as little more than violent beasts and died as dignified free men. Of course, the show’s ending was inevitable: the slave army crucified along the Appian Way. The skill was how it got the characters and the audience there.  The final battle memorably showed how to defeat an unbeatable gladiator in single combat and still managed to show his crucifixion as his imagined public triumph. Such flourishes show how the series rose above Kubrick’s celebrated ending.

Was the show just gore-heavy softcore pornography? No – it was a highly intelligent and empathetic story disguised as trash, deliberately combining sensationalism with excellent storytelling to invoke the world and the stakes. It succeeded to such a unique degree that DeKnight kicked the sands of literal exploitation cinema in the face of the previously unassailable Stanley Kubrick. The show was raw. It wasn’t an open wound – it was a severed artery. Unlike his characters, he took on the might of Rome and won. The question in 2025 is whether he can do it again.

In the first episode (of ten) of Spartacus: House of Ashur, the newly minted title character has saved Crassus – the richest and most powerful man in the empire – from Spartacus and his army, and is given the gladiator school where the story started as his reward.

In a fit of pique, and after a speech mocking those glorifying the gladiators in previous shows, Ashur beats his best prospect to death with a broken wine jug. Hubris, of course, as this proves his undoing later, when he manages to gain his ludus admittance to the gladiatorial games but can only field a second-rate man. That gladiator speaks of Spartacus-like murder and rebellion and dies violently, mocked by the powers of the town and pitied against three – intentionally hilarious – dwarves. Ashur decides he needs to stage a shocking affront to public decency to gain the attention he deserves. He takes possession of a Nubian slave after witnessing her throwing Roman soldiers around like rag dolls and plans to pit her against men in the arena.

Ashur states such controversy will attract a new audience. For Starz’s sake, it is hoped he is correct. Dwarves played for comedy and a superhumanly strong woman feel suspiciously like a studio mandate to broaden the show’s demographic appeal. And that’s a proven way to alienate your core audience.

Where will the season take the story? The gods were not known for resurrecting men out of pity. Is this to be the story of Ashur’s ignoble fall or the glory of his rise? Either is fine, but regardless of the narrative direction, Starz’s ‘We’re all adults here’ banner is hopefully a mission statement – giving an inch on tone and content will tank its prospects faster than facing those dwarves in the arena.

3/5 Were we not entertained? The first episode of Spartacus: House of Ashur can’t be faulted on technical execution but wobbles on brand fidelity. Accepting time will have changed the tone, and absent the revenge/rebellion plot, the series premiere sets a cautiously familiar direction. Starz… don’t screw this up.

Swipe Left for Decades of Bad Dating Advice

Dr Andrew King’s coming book describes today’s Tinder-dominated dating scene as an unholy blend of anxiety projection, the distorted politics of self-esteem, and impersonal algorithms. As a result, modern dating is wholly inadequate for solving the age-old problem of mate-selection. 

It’s not every day that I ask a man about dating advice, especially not one who resides in central Bangkok. Fortunately, I’m speaking to a PhD-holding former journalist and not a fugitive sex offender in a Singha beer vest and elephant trousers. Of course, it helps his credibility that at no point during our interview does he ask me for money or talk knowledgeably about STDs – so you know you’re safely above the average expat.

As he talks – eloquently – I start to suspect this isn’t sneering pickup artistry as I feared, but a timely addition to the literature on our current cultural problems. If you’ve found Jonathan Haidt’s books required reading, you should add Dr King’s to your list. In a world paralysed by cultural relativism, a historical study feels almost radical.

Cultural Representation

He says: “My PhD was about indigenous people being seen as sexy in the media. If you’re seen as sexy, you become marriageable. You’re not another race to be avoided – you’re people you can have a relationship with.

“After I finished my PhD, all the funding used government money to solve worthy social problems – having more women play football or better dating apps for gay guys. There were committees and groups who had guidelines for non-traditional research outcomes – this whole area of not-publications, not-peer-reviewed articles or books. It was: ‘What value does that add to the community?’ Academia was how can we solve problems that don’t really exist.”

Asking himself whether he wanted to get good at extracting money from the Australian Government, he realised: “Academia was full of bullshit. A PhD was useless. So, I thought: ‘Okay, I need some real skills.’”

He spent many years working as a journalist in Myanmar, speaking with people free of what he describes as the imagined social problems occupying so many of his scholarly peers. He found writing about the pragmatic concerns of subsistence farmers and pagoda-enthusiasts more rewarding.

Background

Andrew King was born in Northampton General Hospital in 1976, and to put as much distance between them and the shoe trade as possible, his family moved to Perth, Australia in 1990. Tall, handsome, you’d easily imagine him riding a surfboard if you grew up watching Neighbours. He has a taste for flowery collared shirts. No trace of an English accent remains.

He doesn’t strike you as the sort who’d need self-help guides to win a mate. Yet, after a break-up, he says he read Models: How to Attract Women Through Honesty by Mark Manson. His current journey started there.

“I was sharing a house with a guy with Asperger’s,” he says. “He was very good at picking up women but not great with relationships. Simon Baren-Cohen looks at how men and women’s brains differ, talking about men having systematising brains, while women are better at identifying emotions and facial expressions. That made sense when I considered my ex-girlfriend – who was extremely keyed into others’ emotions. My Asperger’s flatmate was terrible with emotional cues, but great at remembering the exact place you put the milk in the fridge two months ago.

“I wanted to know more about those differences in people between these two extremes, what that means for attraction and relationships, and how much the culture and the education system had completely lied to me about it.”

Researching the Dating Scene

This led to a serious read of dating advice going back centuries.

“In the 1800s dating was ritualistic,” he says. “Etiquette was the main thing and that was more about chivalrous public displays – costly signals that took a lot of time to develop. Learning French, Latin, traveling, having knowledge of foreign culture was something that a man could display as cultural capital to attract a woman. Women were encouraged to show themselves as being a worthy mate by taking care of the home.”

He says urban life introduced a recognisable consumer’s dilemma into this Jane Austen Mr-Darcy-needs-a-wife picture. “Suddenly people have more choice, and relationships become more chaotic. People don’t know who to like because they used to meet through work, in their community, or just have an arranged marriage.

“Chivalry started to break down around 1900. The ideal at the time is to take care of your husband and wife, and to overlook some of their foibles. He says the absence of men post–World War Two changed things and a more clinical scientific approach took over the advice manuals.

“There were so few men there, they basically had a match.com approach – fill out a survey. Who are you going to be most compatible with? Personality type wasn’t developed as much then, so it was more ‘What’s your profession?’ ‘What’s their class status?’”

The 1970s saw an explosion of swinging clubs, singles bars, and more opportunity for consequence-free sex. He says: “There was still a lot of shaming, but it was cultural capital that you could claim. If you’re a university-educated woman you could say ‘I want to go to these clubs. I want to hang out and have sex.’ You could have sex and then just move to the next guy, but you still had to have attachment to this person. The guy would be bored with these girls and move on. It created a lot of anxiety and stress for women.”

Pickup artistry developed in the 1980s. For males, advice was very mechanical and very science based. For women, it was all about feeling good, masking anxiety behind rigid rule-based advice – wait 48 hours before you can call him up, don’t answer straight away. He says trusted sources of advice were all about manipulation and displaced anxiety. The 1980s turned the dating scene into yet another commodity market. Lots of us went home with buyer’s remorse.

Today’s Grim Picture

He says dating today is broken. His is a dystopian vision of everyone getting high on a defence mechanism cut with unearned self-esteem and sublimated guilt. He points out current thinking fixates on solutions to social problems aligned with today’s divisive academic fads rather than obvious practical ones – such as keeping the species reproducing. You’d think failing to solve the declining birthrate would have alerted keener minds to academia’s cloud-cuckoo-land pretensions sooner.

“All the contextual cues that people in previous generations used to assess mate value have been stripped away and left to algorithms. Pickup artistry – which the mainstream is very hostile towards – contains some good advice, such as going cold turkey on social media and pornography. Such a return to Victorian-era abstinence reimposes scarcity that forces us to seek social validation and sex in the real world, with real people, not on the phone or internet.”

Ah, yes. Phones and the internet. Enter the current lost generation. What are we to do with Gen Z?

“Their fear of risk, wanting safe spaces and trigger warnings, seems to come from the therapeutic culture of their boomer grandparents who embraced the idea that everyone was special, rather than fostering connection, negotiation and meaningful conversation. 

“Parents of each generation seem to outsource their parenting to education, nurseries, TV and now screens that often leave families – using Sherry Turkle’s phrase – alone together. Hence the anxiety about meeting people outside of your social group or circle.”

The implication is we need to get the kids in a room, talking and learning how to navigate a trauma-filled world if we are to produce a Gen Alpha and Beta psychologically – and evolutionarily – suited to a reality that isn’t getting any friendlier. Is there any hope for those lusty lonely hearts cruising the bars in Bangkok?

“They’re their own breed of weirdness,” he says with a groan. “They deserve their own book.”

Dr Andrew King’s book Costly Signals: How Evolution Shaped Centuries of Dating Advice will be published in 2026.

Top Gear Producer’s Memoir Motors Along at a Safe Pace

Top Gear and The Grand Tour producer Andy Wilman gives his perspective on two decades of auto-motive chaos, endless quiche buffets, and a graphic warning about dodgy salad. His memoir is a deceptively simple nostalgic look at a cultural juggernaut that presented as chaos but was actually precision engineering, arriving regularly like a rusty Volvo pulling a caravan.

By Lee Russell Wilkes

Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure: Top Gear, Grand Tour and Twenty Years of Magic and Mayhem by Andy Wilman, published by Michael Joseph.

Andy Wilman – the producer of both the BBC’s Top Gear and Amazon’s The Grand Tour presents a licenced and on-brand memoir full of ‘I miss those days’ sentimentality, swearing and stories about sharing petrol station snacks with cast and crew. It’s easy to imagine the manuscript spent a lot of time with lawyers prior to release as the book contains nothing sensational. There’s no ‘The Andy Wilman Story’ TV movie coming out of this one.

Top Gear and its sequel The Grand Tour were a tabloid fever dream of populism and shameless entertainment. The presenters Clarkson, May and Hammond were worldwide celebrities. Despite its obvious cultural impact – or probably because of it and the shameful manner their TG ended – no-one involved has yet received any public honour. Wilman laughs how their irreverence meant they’d never gotten a BAFTA. Their two-fingers in the air show was welcome Sunday counterprogramming to all those turgid glorifying-the-landed-gentry costume dramas the BBC so shamelessly cranks out. The revamped Top Gear was proof the public wanted tabloid sensationalism. Fortunately, at their peak they had 350 million viewers worldwide and that brought revenue. Lots of it. The BBC liked that more.

Andy Wilman and Jeremy Clarkson attended Repton School, in Derbyshire together. After graduation, Clarkson joined a local paper, while Wilman deliberately failed the Sainsbury’s management exam. Jeremy talked him into giving journalism a try and Wilman was later feature editor at Top Gear Magazine. By accident of course, rather than skill and hard work. Clarkson and he worked on the original Top Gear show when it was a safe – if dull – regional programme based in Pebble Mill, Birmingham. Clarkson recruited his old friend when he pitched his new vision for the show.

The best of his how-it-all-began stories tells how Hammond got his presenter’s job. After a truly awful camera test, Richard went into a long self-pitying rant about always pulling defeat from the jaws of victory. He explained how the highlight of his radio career had been his on air reading of a list of farm animals for sale. By the time he’d finished, cast and crew were laughing uproariously. Thus, did fate turn.

Running his finger up and down Cameron Diaz’s nose as the cast and crew looked on in envy seemed Wilman’s high point. The low point was being asked to stop quietly singing a Who song by the man next to him. That man was the band’s lead singer Roger Daltrey – he even pointed out Wilman had gotten the lyrics wrong.

After Clarkson was let go by the BBC, they all signed on for version 2.0 – The Grand Tour – on Amazon Prime. Their opening film of Clarkson leaving a wet dreary London to drive a muscle car in the desert outside of Los Angeles is a masterpiece of audience manipulation – dull colours, slow sad music that builds to a brilliantly edited colourful climax. It cost 2 million pounds. Wiman says he even got a good luck email from Jeff Bezos.

Wilman describes awkward pitch meetings with bemused studio executives. Yet, once they saw the speed with which the crews moved and the quality they produced, all went smoothly. Clearly these boys knew a thing or two about making a first-class show. They produced 32 shows with relative ease. The streamer wanted 22 more but settled for what became the travel specials.  

Their collective mastery of the genre they created grows more obvious when he notes they had no trouble luring old Top Gear colleagues to join them at Amazon. Loyalty, perhaps. But presumably freelancers go where the money is. During their life-threatening dash through the night avoiding violent mobs in Argentina, one of the crew was filming on his phone. Casual? No. Solid professional instinct? Yes. Reducing grown men to tears – as these films did – is not casual happenstance. Ask everyone that’s tried to copy them.

Wilman’s book underplays the team’s obvious media savvy intelligence and mastery of the medium. Who cares if the whole edifice of wacky laddish spontaneity was scripted and contrived. They sold it well enough. One can love the magician while knowing it’s all smoke and mirrors. You get the impression that’s what Wilman’s book is – a book-length retrospective playing to their brand.

His book isn’t one more chance to revisit old friends because they were never your old friends to begin with, that illusion was the show’s tabloid register. No. It’s saying goodbye to some slick, manipulative and brilliantly conceived entertainment rooted in the monoculture public service ethos of 20th Century broadcasting. What else should we have expected from a couple of old boys who worked at the heart of the BBC?