Burning My Ships

Why I've bid adieu to Corporate America

Earlier today I quit my jobs to work on The Tortuga Society full time.

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The first thing you should understand about this move is it’s a long time in the making, and my energies in this direction have been percolating for years now.

So why the hell did it take this long?

That’s an entirely reasonable question. But as much as I’d love to spin an intricate self-serving narrative where I heroically assert my will to power on the world, the truth is it was mostly an unglamorous logistical matter of escaping addiction and debt.

For a couple years I surrendered my hedonic treadmill to a decadent and self-indulgent life of asymmetric maximalism, and mostly didn’t think about the future because I sort of figured I’d be dead by fifty. And I’ll never regret or disavow this period of my life, as it opened the door to some very unique experiences and offered fascinating insights into the darker sides of human nature. But there’s simply no denying the bacchanalia of my late twenties absorbed precious resources and libidinal energy that might have been allocated to more existentially significant pursuits.

Earning like a surgeon doesn’t amount to much when you spend it like a rapper.

Yet life has a way of correcting itself (or at least it does for me, maybe not for the rest of you losers), and returning to this space ended up being exactly what I needed to pivot back into a Life of the Mind just as I was approaching the event horizon of duplicitous transactional vaishyamaxxing. To some extent this year felt like waking up from a coma and rediscovering who I am after living on autopilot for half a decade.

And for the most part this has been very wonderful. Everything feels on track again.

But it isn’t quite an unalloyed good, because half the time I feel like Rip Van Winkle.

This is partly because I remain a man of the Alt Right and find the mores and sensibilities of the modern Dissident Right alien and groace. But there’s also just a sense in which Walt the artist/intellectual was frozen in amber at 24, and never had the chance to develop in the intervening years once the mass deplatforming of 2017 saw him exiled from public life. To whatever extent Big Brain Walt even existed in that era it was purely in his cocoon of anonymity lurking Reddit and Twitter.

And in his stead an entirely different sort of man emerged to face the world: a sleazy dissociated alligator who came to predicate his entire identity on juicing loopholes and asymmetric strategies to secure a maximal payoff for minimal effort.

He got really fucking good at it. And that’s why everyone thinks I’m Jewish.

The only problem is this guy doesn’t feel like me—or at least not in any deeper more aspirational sense. It’s grown difficult to develop him any further without turning into something I might feel ashamed about around my mom. Meanwhile the social capital offered by that lifestyle is basically nonexistent for spergs like me—whenever I meet other men atop this status hierarchy I inevitably end up wanting to murder them, while the women in that world aren’t nearly interesting enough not to cheat on.

But there’s also no denying that guy will always be a part of me. And while I might not want to be like him in ten years, it would also be horribly retarded not to use his gifts in the interim while I work to cultivate my gentlemanly side. Because as much as the gator bothers people, he’s far more socially adroit than the fossilized Alt Righter from 2016. He puts money in my wallet and men in my ranks and women in my bed, and I could never organize something like Tortuga without his swaggering braggadocio.

I need that bastard to carve out a space where my frens and I can sustainably pursue an intellectually and culturally generative life without worrying about gay bullshit like “a career.” But that also entitles him to a certain respect, and I ought to do a better job letting him breathe instead of instrumentalizing or even downplaying him to build credibility with folx more firmly ensconced in status hierarchies I see as aspirational.

And that, my dear reader, is the real reason I set my ships ablaze: it’s time to give the gator his due and let him off his leash a bit—to stomp on the gas pedal and show the world Cap’n Walt isn’t all talk.

It’s also just inefficient to spend my days job stacking when I could make 10x as much helping other guys job stack. I’ve had enough of half measures and testing the waters. The water’s fine. Let’s make the most of it before some fat kid pees in the pool.

Some might think me irresponsible for this maneuver, which certainly isn’t optimal from a cash flow perspective. But at this point I simply can’t bring myself to care. If I’ve learned anything in my 31 years it’s that I’m basically incapable of following a steady life script, and get the biggest bang for my buck optimizing around sustained bursts of manic energy generated by some thematically compelling narrative.

Burning my ships has always proven a superbly effective way of framing such a narrative, and I actually suspect this phenomenon explains why sacrifice was such a prevalent technology in most early religions; mankind requires a ritualized veneration of sacrifice qua sacrifice to maintain executive functioning, because a life spent in pursuit of dopamine will inevitably lead to you dissociating into sub-sentience.

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It goes without saying that committing to this endeavor will require lifestyle changes; until the Society’s revenue expands to a point where I’m no longer living off savings I must remain flexible and antifragile, which means embracing some degree of frugality. To that end I’ve already put sugaring behind me, and have committed to doing the same with restaurant food from delivery apps. Still not sure which I’ll miss more.

I also spent nearly half the day cancelling about a grand in monthly recurring charges for all kinds of retarded shit. To be honest half the reason I enjoy job stacking is that it relieves the pressure to do things like this; managing my money in such a detailed way has always felt grotesque to me. But a certain level of financial hygiene is simply part of being a good white man, and even an openhanded Sicilian or Irishman must attend to such concerns occasionally. It’s like getting your teeth cleaned. One can still be responsible without turning into a penny-pinching Nebraskan.

Now obviously these changes are pretty intense, and I suspect it will be dangerously easy to bend the rules and lose focus if I fail to create a thematically coherent set of heuristics to provide what my coolest internet friends might call a “container.”

And to that end I find myself inexorably drawn to the idea of Jihad.

Obviously I’ll throw away all the dumb Muslim shit attached to it… but that insane fanaticism and thoroughgoing self-denial is clearly just a demonically powerful social technology. It also seems like there are countless respects in which *I specifically* would become a much better man if I only acted a bit more like Osama Bin Laden.

Now don’t get me wrong—in the right time and place there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being an introspective epicurean theater kid. But if the past few months have taught me anything it’s that establishing a startup requires you to think like a general, and during a time of war nothing gets results quite like that Osama Energy.

So with that in mind here are the principles undergirding my Tortugan Jihad:

1. For the next several months I will dedicate all of my waking energy to advancing The Tortuga Society, developing our internal resources, expanding our roster, and helping our brothers secure new opportunities.

2. Until my Jihad is complete I’m going full volcel. At this point my mission is simply too urgent to let myself get distracted by comely young sheilas. Alongside this I’ll also be going nofap, as my personality is frankly too addictive to accommodate even minor temptations. I’ll also just be harder working and a million times more ambitious/cutthroat if I’m always sort of angry and full of backed up cum.

3. No more eating anything that tastes good—henceforth I am only permitted things I don’t like. This will save money and help me stop being fat, and conjoined with celibacy should help reroute pleasure-seeking behavior to Tortuga-adjacent activities. I also just find I’m smarter and more productive when I’m hungry.

4. No more shaving or cutting my hair until the Jihad is complete. Now admittedly this one is mostly informed by a LARPy veneration of barbaric Afghan insurgents holed up in a mountain taking potshots at quisling bacha bazi enjoyers… but I also think the aesthetic coheres well with what I’m going for. Also the lack of grooming should discourage me from chasing pussy and keep me focused.

5. When does my Jihad end? Only once I feel we’re established as an institution and ready to exit startup mode. And there’s a lot of shit I need to get going before it makes sense to even think about concrete timelines to that effect, but I’m not worried; whenever I actually commit to something I work fast. At this stage I’ll organize the Society’s first meetup event, where I’ll end my Jihad and facedoxx myself to the world by having

   Rajeev Ram
   shave my terrorist beard on a live feed.

These are the rules I’ll live by for the foreseeable future. If you’d like to join in on the Jihad and do a group accountability thing just message me and I’ll set up a TG.

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But let’s talk turkey—what are my plans for the next few months?

I’m not promoting aggressively at the moment because we currently have a fantastic group of smart and agentic guys who are committed to their goals and regularly making substantive contributions to the Telegram group. A lot of these men have given me superbly promising ideas for expansion and internal development, and I ought to clear out my backlog of these ideas before actively angling for new members.

That means the next few months leading up to our go-live date of 1/1/2025 are all about drip feeding new features to market while continuing to use my Substack to grow the Society slowly and organically. Yes it’s a relatively small sales channel, but that’s totally fine while we’re still in Beta, and if anything offers some upside in ensuring I needn’t spend half my time on opsec and quality control. If I can end the year with 120 high quality guys who are satisfied with their purchase and enthusiastic about leveraging the Society’s constantly expanding resources I’ll be perfectly satisfied.

Then once we emerge from Beta I’m going to scale this fucker into the stratosphere.

At that point the resources we have on hand (most importantly a way to fabricate professional experience on your resume in a way that passes commercially available background checks) will be so obviously worth the cost of admission that I’ll be able to double our fees while pivoting to a vastly more aggressive marketing campaign that reaches far beyond Substack. By the end of 2025 I expect to have 500 guys at an absolute minimum, and if we execute correctly it will be closer to 1000.

A major part of this trajectory will involve expanding into asymmetric strategies beyond job stacking. I already mentioned experience fabrication, but there are many similar ideas under consideration for 2025 and beyond. Think concerted gentrification initiatives, a dedicated infrastructure through which senior members can pivot more seamlessly into large-scale consulting by staffing their current operations with trusted midlevel Tortugans, an opsec-friendly means of shilling each other into roles, etc. etc.

We’re also in the early stages of creating an external staffing firm… think a headhunter that by all outward appearances is *totes* above board, but through some happy accident exclusively staffs its clients with members of the Tortuga Society.

Every time we place a new autistic racist at KPMG I’ll pocket like ten grand taken directly from their corporate coffers. And that’s how your beloved Uncle Walt plans to become a millionaire. The membership fee is mostly there to pay for expenses and serve as a filter so we only attract smart agentic guys who can eat what they kill.

Scalability is important, but in a world where everyone and their mom is hawking garbage AI-generated career advice our exclusivity is the real value add.

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Despite these lofty plans I intend to stay humble and take things one step at a time. I’m certainly not about to prove the naysaying faggots right by acting like Elizabeth Holmes and signing tons of checks I’ll never be able to cash. And to that end I’m fortunate to have an incredibly trustworthy and levelheaded circle of lieutenants around who’ve proven admirably proactive about keeping me honest.

In particular I’d like to thank our COO

Theon Ultima

for keeping closely abreast of developments in the remote labor market; this has gone a long way toward helping us message correctly and align expectations with circumstances on the ground. It also got me thinking about ways to scale this thing far beyond job stacking so we can help our boys leverage asymmetric strategies in all sorts of creative ways while outfoxing the dastardly pantsuits who want us back in the office filing TPS reports.

Anyway, the next few months will be an exciting time for the Society as I work like an Asian to get us in a robustly scalable position for 2025.

I’m keeping the admission fee at $250 until then, at which point it’s increasing to $500. So if you have any interest in joining it might make sense to do so now.

But honestly I’d rather you hold off, because it’s a lot better for me if you wait until I’m charging twice as much for something five times as valuable. Also everyone who joins during the Beta will retain access in perpetuity to the highest tier of Tortuga membership, which means that if you take the plunge now you’re selfishly depriving me of countless opportunities to juice you for cash down the line. That’s not cool.

But if you don’t care about Cap’n Walt’s bank account and would rather be a selfish bilge rat, feel free to stop by our website and apply for membership today.

Also if you have any questions just DM me and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

It’s not like I’ll be watching a Teams feed.