Kirk W. Johnson

I mean, I really liked all of them.

Also, Kirk Wallace Johnson was really, really cool.

The author of The Feather Thief.

John had a previous relationship with them and knew him.

But interesting thing about fly fishing, real quick, I...

This is gonna not be a surprise to a lot of people who are in the fly fishing world, but I have never been, and I read a super interesting book this month, uh, called The Feather Thief by Kirk Johnson.

And-

I feel like I've heard of that.

And a couple of years ago, that allegation was tested by a group of authors.

In 2024, the authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson all sued Anthropic, the creator of Claude, alleging that the company had wrongfully digested millions of copyrighted works, including some of their very own, to train its AI models.

That lawsuit grew to include more than 300,000 writers, and in September of 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the writers' claims.

Now, split between everyone, each author might receive about $3,000 apiece, but the payout isn't the most interesting part about that lawsuit.