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Boom! This is Books & Biceps #342!

Welcome to our hundreds of new readers this week! We’ve crossed 23,000 sophisticated meatheads! If someone forwarded you this issue of B&B, you can join us right here:

(If you’re a new subscriber or missed my yearly book round-up, The 16 Most Memorable Books I Read in 2024, you can read it here.)

BOOKS

The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown

We’ve all gotten too comfortable. Too soft. We sit here reading or writing on our phone or laptop in 2025 and we complain about slow Wi-Fi and how annoying streaming apps are and why the delivery cost of Uber Eats is outrageous and on and on. But we have it so incredibly, remarkably, unbelievably better than our fellow Americans just five or six generations ago. Go back to the 1800s and in this case, the 1840s, to be exact.

Read the first 30 pages of this book, and then you probably won’t complain about these modern annoyances for some time. Read about Sarah Graves’ life BEFORE she and her family headed out on their tragic journey in covered wagons from Illinois to California and you’ll be beyond grateful that your biggest problem today was that you accidentally got logged out of your Netflix account and couldn’t get back in.

These people who lived on the frontier, at the edge of the midwest and west during this time period dealt with daily and weekly tragedy. Simple cuts while farming became septic and you’d lose an arm. Or die. You’d pick up malaria while fishing in a river - near modern day Chicago. A stomachache might leave you bedridden for months. You’re likely hunting and cooking most of your own meals. Didn’t catch anything that day? You’re screwed. If you’re a women you were expected to have 8 to 10 children because so few made it to adulthood and you needed help on the farm. You probably got married at 16 or 18 to the most convenient young man around. Forget love haha. Most marriages were proximity arrangements. Up at dawn. Work. Sleep. You have maybe three outfits total: summer and winter and a back-up. No showers. No bathrooms. Just rivers and outhouses.

And like I said…. you learn all this about Graves’ life BEFORE you take that entire lifestyle and put it on-the-go into covered wagons and pull your family and life’s belongings a thousand miles across rough terrain with your cattle and oxen. You walk all day. Moms. Dads. Kids. Babies. Grandparents. You camp at night. You all cram into the wagons to sleep or rest. You hunt. You set up sentry around your campsite to protect from Indians. Sick? Too bad. Really sick? You probably won’t make it… Kid falls out of the wagon and gets crushed by a giant wagon wheel (happened often)? Keep going. Relative gets washed away in a flash flood (again, happened often)? Keep going. Husband shot by Indians and you can’t pull your own weight with little kids? Sorry, lady. We’re leaving you on the prairie (again, happened). No mercy.

This book was recommended to us by fellow B&B reader Joe W. and it’s so good because it juxtaposes our modern, comfortable reality with what these frontiersmen and women and pioneers went through. And what makes it all the more compelling, aside from learning about their day-to-day life, is that this book is a tale of the tragic Donner party that got stranded in the Sierra Nevadas. So there’s a ticking clock element too. In a way, it’s kind of like the Titanic.

We learn early on that for pioneers to make the trek from the midwest to California or Oregon while avoiding winter, they must leave by May 1st. The Donner Party leaves three weeks late. And then is delayed along the way with rain, floods, deaths, Indian raids, broken wagons and on and on… With every delay, as you’re reading, you feel the impending doom get closer and closer. This reads like fiction, but it’s fact. And it’s awesome. Highly recommended (and take a moment to be grateful for modern medicine and technology, will you? haha!). Get it here.

BICEPS

Pressed for time? I was on Wednesday morning when I totally forgot about an appointment I had in the morning, which gave me only about thirty minutes to workout. No worries. I put this little circuit together and it BURNED - in a good way. I got seven rounds in… See what you can get:

QUICK FLEXES

Where my 90s dudes at???? Let’s take a minute to appreciate the glory of Gatorade Gum:

A QUICK WORD FROM THIS WEEK’S SPONSOR:

I know a lot of fellow authors read this newsletter… And I also know that so many of you have been contemplating taking your work straight to your readers. Between the confusing traditional pub payment structure, paltry royalties and gate keepers for content, I get it. If you move fast and have a strong audience, getting a book out with no middle man is appealing. I do it with my Meathead Media imprint. I’ve honed my process for over a decade, but if you’re looking for a company to help with all the blocking and tackling: design, covers, editing, distribution, etc… Lulu has a cool offer for you. I used them years ago to publish Nate Robinson’s autobiography and they were great:

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STRONG LINKS

1) My Twitter buddy Michael Girdley has one of the most unique newsletters out there (and 230k followers on X). He’s bought, scaled and sold a ton of small businesses (11) and he loves Chili’s and dad humor. I don’t always enjoy reading about business and you probably don’t either, but it’s important and one of the few dudes who makes it relatable and funny AND gives you useful advice is my guy Girdley. If you click on this link below, you’ll automatically be signed up:

2) I’m the Editor-in-Chief of MIDLIFE MALE, the fastest growing lifestyle brand for men over 40. You gotta subscribe. Here’s a quick summary:

If you’re a dude over 40 and you used to read Men’s Health or Esquire or GQ, and you’re looking for a digital magazine to get you on top of your game and keep you on top of your game, with incredible A-List interviews (Troy Aikman, Don Saladino, Gunnar Peterson and more), original columns and a curated list of weekly items second-to-none, subscribe to Midlife Male Magazine.

I’ve been helping build this publication from the ground up and it’s the magazine I used to wish existed - and now it does. We just passed 15,000 subs! Join us here.

3) This is the single most relatable newsletter about start-ups you’ll ever read. And it’s by the guy who founded Beehiiv, the platform host of this newsletter. His name’s Tyler. His newsletter’s Big Desk Energy. You’ll love it:

4) And if you love Underdog Stories in Sports, you’ll love this. One of my favorite new reads:

PS: I know we have a ton of literary agents and publishers who read this and if that’s you…

I have a lot of authors who read this also, many who have traditionally published before, reach out to me asking about agents/pubs who take submissions. If you’ve been reading this a while and are interested in seeing what the writers of the Books & Biceps crew have to offer, hit me up with your info and the best way for an author to get in touch. Let’s make some deals for the sophisticated meatheads of the world!

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