Nerd Nite: A Guest Post by Chris Balakrishnan and Matt Wasowski

By Chris Balakrishnan, Matt Wasowski / December 4, 2025 at 12:01 am

If you’ve ever fallen into a reading rabbit hole chasing down the most bizarre, interesting and obscure fun facts as possible, we’ve got the book for you. Read on for an exclusive essay from Nerd Nite co-founders Chris Balakrishnan and Matt Wasowski on writing How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi: Collected Quirks of Science, Tech, Engineering, and Math from Nerd Nite.

Paperback $15.00 ~~$20.00~~

How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi: Collected Quirks of Science, Tech, Engineering, and Math from Nerd Nite

By Chris Balakrishnan , Matt Wasowski
Illustrator Kristen Orr

In Stock Online

Paperback $15.00 ~~$20.00~~

In the vein of acclaimed popular-science bestsellers such as Atlas Obscura, Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry, The Way Things Work, What If?, and Undeniable, the co-founders of the global science organization Nerd Nite bring readers a collection of wacky, yet fascinating STEM topics.

Nerd Nite hasn’t always been a series of happy accidents, but it’s mostly always been a series of happy accidents.

Nerd Nite started 2003 at a dive-y bar in Boston because its staff were genuinely curious about Chris’ ornithological adventures in Cameroon, and asked him to give a talk at the bar.

“Sure, but I’d be talking about science. At a bar…”

And thus, Nerd Nite was born as a way to share nerdy scientific (and other) content in an accessible and often silly way. Over time, thanks to Matt’s oversized ego, Nerd Nites sprawled across the globe with monthly events in nearly 200 cities featuring two or three presentations a night about almost any topic imaginable, delivered in a fun-yet-informative manner.

We’ve always wanted to find a way to share our copious content from across the globe, and while we tried/are trying various things – magazines, podcasts, YouTube, and now, maybe slightly too late, Instagram and TikTok – a book always made sense.

Serendipitously, in 2022, a highly-regarded literary agent was trying to convince a hip, young New York doctor (Matt’s words, not the doctor’s) to write a book about his innovative work with medicinal maggots when he mentioned to her that he just presented about his work at Nerd Nite NYC – which piqued her curiosity and eventually led her to convince us that writing a book could marry our desire to connect all our cities with being able to reach an even broader audience. The book idea had wings. But we had to write a proposal first.

The beauty of Nerd Nite is that it relies on lovely, charming, passionate nerds who want nothing more than to share their quirky expertise with the world. If they can love a parasite, they can make you love it too. We asked five past presenters if they could turn their 18-to-21-minute stage presentations into 750-1,000 words, and within 96 hours they completed their homework and we had the guts of a book proposal. That also included a ton of stats about the global Nerd Nite audience. We always had a hunch that Nerd Nite was pretty well known, but we’d find out exactly how well only a few days later.

As our agent shopped our proposal, she immediately heard from numerous publishers who each had multiple staff who had attended various Nerd Nites over the years for fun nights out. And they all loved it. Obviously. Apparently Nerd Nite was even better known than we thought, despite our inability to capture and share so many presentations. A book was that vehicle!

We mulled our offers and enthusiastically told St. Martin’s Press that we’d love for it to put out our debut book. After all, St. Martin’s had published nerd hero Bill Nye. The book would be a collection of 70 of our favorite STEM-related presentations from across the globe. Matt (a professional event producer and curator) would reach out to all the presenters and collect their submissions, and the two of us would tag team all the edits.

Matt and Chris met in the mid-90s in college and have been friends ever since, so working on things together is not new. For some things, we’re very much in sync: for example we both like road trips and have been known to drive long distances in short amounts of time together. In other things we are very different; I’m a procrastinator and Matt tackles tasks immediately. Matt is worried about making people feel bad but I’m accustomed to the brutal editorial process of academic publishing. In the context of the book, these similarities and differences really made putting the book together easy. That and the fact that we had two decades-worth of content and presenters to draw from!

Ultimately, this book was a success story of project management that took an entire village of nerds to pull-off. Gather a list of hundreds of past presentations. Whittle it down to 70. Excitedly ask those folks to write their contributions. Edit everything for a consistent tone. Cheer-on our illustrator Kristen Orr as she designed dozens of creative visualizations.

We celebrated its publication at Nerd Nite NYC in February 2024 where we had ten presenters whose contributions were in the book all give mini-presentations on stage in front of a raucous crowd. It felt like a graduation or wedding. Our families came from around the country, as did dozens of Nerd Nite regular attendees, fans, and past presenters. After 21 years of live events, How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi: Collected Quirks of Science, Tech, Engineering, and Math from Nerd Nite perfectly sums-up the series of happy accidents that got us to where we are today.