If you’ve watched a $500 drone turn a $5 million tank into a smoking hole and thought, somebody is getting rich on this, you’re right. It’s just nobody in the US.

Everyone already knows that drones are changing war, it’s been on the news every night for three years, but here’s the part nobody has said out loud: the country that invented precision airpower cannot currently build the cheap version of it. The reason for that is the stupidest you have ever heard.

From exquisite to expendable

For two decades, American airpower meant the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper — beautiful, expensive, MALE-class machines (Medium-Altitude, Long-Endurance) that cost tens of millions and that nobody but a superpower could field. In the trade these are called “exquisite” systems. Exquisite as in expensive, small in number, and precious. You do not throw one away to kill a truck.

Look at the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. Azerbaijan took $1–2 million Turkish Bayraktar drones and ~$700k Israeli Harop loitering munitions and used them to find and gut Armenian armor. The Armenian separatist army, dug into its mountain defenses, had no real way to jam what was hunting it. Cheap eyes in the sky plus cheap fire from the sky, and a hundred years of armored-warfare doctrine got blown up.

Now consider Ukraine. The dominant weapon of that war is not a Reaper, but a first-person-view quadcopter, a hobby airframe with a warhead zip-tied to it. They run $200 to $2,000 a unit, built from commercial parts. They can be iterated weekly and flown straight into a tank that costs a thousand times more. The industry word for this is “attritable,” as in cheap enough to lose. If you send ten and one connects, you came out ahead by orders of magnitude. That’s the inverted cost-exchange ratio.

• FPV strike drone takes out armored vehicle: $200–$2,000 / $1–$5 million = 0.00004 - 0.002.

Now take the Geran-2. The Russians fire a lot of them into Ukraine the same way the Iranians fire Shaheds across the Strait of Hormuz. They’re kind of trash, but they’re carrying around a lot of bomb load right now in 2026. The American defense against them? Exquisite.

• Air-defense missile takes out Russian Geran-2: $3.5 million / $35,000 = 100.

Who is more likely to win by that arithmetic? Hint. Smaller numbers are good.

This isn't a fringe take. NATO's deputy supreme commander in Europe, Sir John Stringer, says the days of sitting back and engaging every threat with fast jets and surface-to-air missiles are over, and that swatting $35,000 Shahed-style drones with multimillion-dollar Patriot interceptors is unsustainable. War has stopped being about who has the most exquisite machine and started being about who can stamp out the most attritable ones. These are the munitions of the modern battlefield.

So, who has the advantage here? Who makes the cheap drones? Here is the part that should make your teeth itch.

We outlawed this industry

There is no magic in a $500 drone. Strip one down and it’s carbon fiber, aluminum, a little wood and plastic, a battery already perfected by the cell-phone industry, a motor you can wind out of ordinary copper, the same three-dollar control chip that Texas Instruments has been stamping out by the truckload since the 1990s. These are parts that any motivated teenager could find.

And American teenagers were. A decade ago, the hobbyist drone scene here was genuinely world-class. But then came the FAA. The regulatory apparatus met the emerging drone industry with a reflexive, risk-averse, process-bound “no.” You can’t do that, you can’t fly there, you can’t sell this. Fill out these forms, and wait until you give up. The hobbyists who could have launched a million hundred-dollar drones spent fifteen years wrestling with paperwork, by which point somebody else stepped in.

China, meanwhile, let its builders build. Now, they own the global supply chain. Look at the manufacturer’s label on any hobby drone, or on anything you order off Alibaba. When Ukraine needed drones at scale, a meaningful chunk of that supply ran through Shenzhen. When Beijing throttled that pipe in response to political pressure, Ukraine started losing ground. They clawed it back with home manufacture, kitchen-table assembly, and a frankly heroic gray-market smuggling operation routing parts through Europe and the Middle East. They’ve survived so far, but picture trying to win a war while your ammunition supplier is your adversary’s close friend.

If we’d had drones to sell to Ukraine … but we didn’t. We regulated ourselves out of the most important weapons category of the century.

Too Lean

The instinctive objection is, “it’s just cheap Chinese labor — structural cost advantage, nothing to be done.” Yes, China’s mass-manufacturing is a genuinely fine art and no, a domestic small-run operation is probably never going to beat Shenzhen on raw unit price. This is how China got ahead, but unit price was never the axis we’d win on.

Any cheap source manufacturing is always going to have an edge, but the thing you want is not always the cheapest thing. Everyone out there has to ask themselves whether their alliance with the PRC is permanent, and what happens if things go wrong and shipping gets interdicted.

For a generation, just-in-time manufacturing (and lean manufacturing overall) led us into horizontally integrated supply chains, sometimes of near-monopoly production. All Hard Drives Come From Thailand, Your Syringes Are Probably From The Philippines, Your Tires Were Made In Sri Lanka. It’s efficient, right up until it isn’t. A six-month chocolate shortage makes people bitchy until they get over it. A shortage of insulin, or penicillin, or bullets, and people fucking die. Drones just moved into that second category.

Nations have strategic imperatives for certain critical things necessary to maintain their sovereignty. In the modern world, that's things like food (and fertilizer), fuel/power, fresh water, and the ability to protect their borders and their citizens. In that last category you have both the literal armed forces and police and the munitions industry necessary to supply them. If you have weapons, but you’re dependent on someone else for the ammunition to keep fighting, you can’t defend yourself very long. This has led to things like concern about shortage of artillery shell manufacture, but also of course a dependency on all drones coming from China — a grave concern if you happen to be, for instance, Taiwanese.

Every nation that watched what the US did with the Predator and Reaper (and, more to the point, what Turkey did far more affordably with the Bayraktar) wants that kind of long-flight monitoring and strike, especially for policing vast expanses of ocean and low-intensity asymmetric threats like the pirates off Somalia or Malaysia. Poland is near the top of the list, and of course every Gulf state is concerned about Iranian (and Houthi) drones and speedboats. Sri Lanka wants cheap autonomous eyes over its coastal waters so badly it’s prototyped some of its own. Some nations won’t even try to build it — a manufacturing lead is hard to catch up on, and plenty of them will just stockpile drones, parts, or both, because they don’t believe they can stand up a local infrastructure. Europe is planning to spend up to €800 billion on defense by 2030, with drones threaded all the way through it. Everyone at once wants out from under the single point of failure.

Not everyone gets to be choosy. If you’re an African warlord with no industry to build your own drones, you shrug, take the bribes, stockpile what you can, and you hope the Chinese don’t decide to back your rival. You’d have taken the same deal from the Soviet Union, or the Cubans, or the CIA, or the French. China wins on price, but if you’re crosswise with Beijing’s aims, and you can imagine an insurgency suddenly enjoying Chinese support, you’d better have your own source of weapons. You need indigenous manufacture of the strategic imperatives, or a strongly allied partner who can’t be cut off by a casually sabotaged railroad. It’s wildly inefficient for most nations to run their own defense industry instead of shopping the international arms bazaar, but there are good reasons for them to do it anyway.

The right to build Bayraktars under license and make derivative versions thereof will be very useful; a whole lot of people don't trust the Turks but would like this class of drone because it's proven out. The Israelis have the same problem selling their drones; they mostly work, but a lot of people don't get along with Israel Military Industries and Israel Aerospace Industries, or can't be seen dealing with them. The appealing part for a lot of these potential customers is not just a US offering, but an indigenous solution: US tech / engineering, but with local control and manufacture so that they don’t have heartburn over their supply chain.

The suits are finally panicking

It’s fun to watch the official answer go from “no” to “yesterday.”

In June 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order titled, with zero subtlety, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance”. A month later, the Secretary of Defense signed a memo reclassifying small drones as consumable assets — ammunition — handing procurement authority down to individual commanders, and announcing that the bureaucracy’s gloves were coming off.

Builders have been screaming for a decade that the real risk is risk-avoidance. Nice of everyone to catch up. By the end of 2025 the FCC had banned new foreign-made drones (read: DJI drones) from authorization for sale, and the War Department had put out a request to industry to build 300,000 drones, fast and cheap, backed by a roughly $1.1 billion program. The man who couldn’t get a hobby permit in 2015 is now the guy the Pentagon is begging to scale.

The market has, predictably, lost its mind. The names in this space — Red Cat (RCAT), Skydio, Anduril, Unusual Machines (UMAC), AeroVironment (AVAV), Palladyne AI (PDYN) — have ripped on every headline, some of them up several hundred percent on the year. One of them, Unusual Machines, counts the President’s eldest son as an advisor and one of its largest shareholders, which tells you everything about where the connected money thinks this is going.

The actual edge here isn’t even the $500 airframe — that’s a commodity, and commodities don’t have margins. The edge is everything bolted on top: the autonomy, the AI targeting and navigation that lets the thing find its mark through jamming and spoofing, the software layer where a $3 chip turns into a weapon. That is where we could lap the Chinese, or likewise where they will push the frontier. There is a stupid amount of interest within the FPV drone space both in the fiber optic drones and in how to combat them.

The frontier past that is autonomy. No, not full autonomy. Everyone always goes down the Terminator rabbit hole, but we don’t want to whole-hog on killer robots. What if they turn around and target our own side? What people are very interested in, though, is fire-and-forget: a drone you maneuver into range, “click on” a target, and let it handle its own approach and impact.

This isn’t hypothetical. Back in 2021, a UN panel reported that a Turkish STM Kargu-2 “hunted down and remotely engaged” retreating fighters in Libya with what the report called a true “fire, forget and find” capability. The panel never actually confirmed a kill, and the breathless John-Connor coverage oversold it, but the capability is real and shipping.

Here’s where the two-tier supply chain bites again. A toy FPV drone runs on a $40 flight-controller board; an autonomous killbot doing its own computer vision and path-planning needs real silicon — an NVIDIA Jetson-class companion computer, some of it under US export control. Off-the-shelf AI guidance modules are already for sale on Alibaba, but buyers don’t trust the PRC to not put a black box in the kill loop. So, the clone projects are already underway. Ultimately, Texas Instruments can make those chips too and Sony can make the cameras. Those are names more worthy of trust than DJI.

The credentialed system spent fifteen years telling the competent people to give up, and in doing so, it handed the decisive technology of the era to an enemy. Now, what’s the next inversion, and who’s already building it?

Learn to see it coming, because the institutions won’t.

Solipsism is part of the human condition, and every generation probably thought they were witnessing a unique historical moment with themselves at center stage. The current vibe that civilization is about to pass through a one-way door is nothing new. Maybe it’s THE SINGULARITY!!!, maybe it’s THE FOURTH TURNING!!!, maybe it’s just history grinding along, but we can all feel it.

Scenebux, written by Cairo Smith and published by New Ritual Press, is a snapshot of our time, and of the (possibly hallucinated) right-wing scene of the moment. It occurs specifically between April and July of 2025; the opening scene references the death of Pope Leo on April 21st of that year. The main character and narrator is Ben Etxina (yeah I dunno how it’s pronounced either), an Idaho Basque (yes, that’s a real thing, I checked so you don’t have to). He’s a fairly ridiculous character, a recovered Internet porn addict and washed-out software engineer, writing Midwestern-Mom-porn erotic novels, and living with his serially unfaithful girlboss lawyer girlfriend in San Francisco. The book opens in a tacky, pretentious bar, with a hilarious description of Ben using the topic of nuclear war to chat up a girl. That’s the feel of the whole novel, right there: edgy humor overlaying apocalyptic dread.

Shortly afterward, a fistfight with a biker gang and a retaliatory sabotage of a motorcycle launches Ben into the meat of the book: a picaresque round-the-world chase, a sort of “Zoomer” James Bond story. Drug-addled techbro burnouts in the South Pacific, anti-AI terrorists in Berlin, a shady hedge fund manager in Dubai, and a bottom-tier spook in Laos all make appearances.

Scenebux is hilarious throughout, in a deadpan and ultra-referential way. As I said before, it is intentionally pinned to the late spring and early summer of 2025, and many of the jokes reference Substack or Twitter personalities. I won’t pretend that an oldhead like me got all of them, but I still laughed at every page. I cannot even express the joy I got from the the sly and esoteric Meat Loaf reference late in the novel.

If that last paragraph makes Scenebux sound like an unserious book, nothing could be further from the truth. Although it starts out as a farce, with the frequently drugged manchild Ben careening across the globe in an attempt to avoid retribution from the biker gang, the quest uncovers a shadowy hedge fund and a conspiracy called The Filter. Tonally, the book shifts from humor to horror, as sudden and violent death frequently interrupts scenes that begin comically. Scenebux is a fun and engaging read with an underlying thread of seriousness, as well as a perfect portrait of the current cultural moment.

I don’t know if I even believe in the Singularity, and I’m certainly not going to speculate what the far side of it will be like. Maybe nothing from this side of it will be emotionally legible to someone beyond it. But if it is, Scenebux accurately captures the vibe of standing on the brink of a great unknown.

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First contact to offer took one week. I'm still not totally over it.

A LinkedIn recruiter cold-contacted me, I had one call with her, and a day or two later I was in front of the hiring manager, talking up my data engineering skills. Within an hour of finishing that interview, they’d booked me with the department VP for the next morning. I had an offer by that afternoon. For all that we shit on LinkedIn — and I include myself in that — it was pretty insane. They moved REALLY fast.

I was coming up on a promotion and raise at my current job (call it J1) and I was trying to get some leverage to jack up whatever they were going to offer me. So I started doing market research to figure out what my skill set was actually worth.

I started by applying to a few jobs on hiring.cafe — love that website, everyone in Tortuga should be using it. Maybe 10 to 15, and I was shooting for the moon: Dropbox, Netflix, companies I had no business applying to on paper. Every one came back cold or auto-rejected. Not one led to an interview, but what did I expect? I was a stranger in a pile of strangers.

What actually worked was when I stopped trying to pile in with everybody else and made myself findable instead. I secretly toggled my LinkedIn to “Open to Work” — not the loud version with the green banner everyone can see, but the recruiters-only setting: no banner, nothing your feed or your boss can see, you just quietly surface inside the searches recruiters run. One caveat — LinkedIn tries to hide that flag from recruiters at your own company, but it doesn’t guarantee it, so if your shop runs LinkedIn Recruiter, mind that. I flipped it on in late fall, and the recruiters came. Something like 10 this calendar year alone.

The toggle only works if there’s something worth finding when they look. By the time these recruiters reached out, I’d built out my LinkedIn so the experience section was almost exactly like my resume: comprehensive detail, but not word-vomit paragraphs (I keep the actual resume to one strict page). My J1 title was right there. All the relevant stuff was on the profile.

Then the other half: I responded fast. Always had an up-to-date resume ready to send, always made myself available for calls and follow-ups, replied inside the hour whenever I could. A recruiter who has to wait two days for a reply just moves on to the next name. I had to be discoverable and ready.

Now here’s the part I can’t take full credit for. I know some of what was happening behind the scenes, because the VP told me later. The Friday before that recruiter reached out, they’d posted the job on their own job board. By Monday they had hundreds of absolutely dogshit applicants, just from the weekend. That Monday, the VP made an executive decision and killed the requisition. Then he called an account manager he knew at a staffing firm (someone he had a relationship with from a previous company) and told her to just find him someone. I think she found me literally the next day.

My luck stacked. They’d advertised it as a regional posting, which shrank the pool a lot. I’m in an LCOL Midwest area, and data engineering isn’t exactly the hottest field around here. Because they’d pitched it as a hybrid-office position, they had to geographically bound the search, and my location was sitting right there on my profile. If they’d posted it as “remote” from the start, the pool would’ve been national, and with my relatively low years of experience I’d have been passed over completely.

When they asked me how I’d do something, I never gave just one answer. Data engineering has somewhere between 270,000 and 6 million ways to solve any given problem, so I’d say: “There are a lot of ways to do this — here are two or three I’d consider off the top of my head, and obviously I’d adjust once I had more details.” I walked out thinking I’d put in maybe a 70–80% performance. It was clearly higher than that, because within an hour they’d booked me with the VP.

I also came with one hard, concrete example. I had a SQL query I’d optimized at J1 copied into a note on my second monitor, and when it came up I pasted it straight into the Teams chat and walked the interviewers through my reasoning. I could say flat out that it was saving J1 about $1,200 a year — from that one optimization. I had something real to back up my resume.

When I asked the manager later why she picked me, she said my answers showed her I thought similarly to the way she did, and she really liked that. I think that’s the multiple-answers thing. Laying out options and reasoning instead of pretending there’s one right answer is how she works, too. That’s what set me apart.

I still can’t believe the payoff. This job is over an hour from where I live. It was pitched to me as hybrid: roughly two days a week in the office, with the first three-plus months fully onsite. By the time I got to the VP, he said, completely unprompted: “Just to put your mind at ease, this is NOT a hybrid position. We’ll have you in the office on an as-needed basis, maybe once a quarter or less. We can do fully remote for you.” I don’t know if that was always the plan, or if they wanted me badly enough to restructure the job on the spot. They knew from the start I was over an hour out, so maybe they liked me enough out of that first interview that the VP decided he wanted me and was going to do what it took to keep me. My recruiters did some negotiating on my behalf too. Once the VP floated remote, I told them it was now non-negotiable, make it happen. I ended up with a 65% increase, but I'm going to negotiate again upwards.

So far, there’s no catch. I’ve been running the new job and finishing out J1 for about three weeks now. It’s an adjustment, but I think I may have genuinely lucked out. Not counting my chickens yet, though.

The front door — the apply-to-Netflix front door — is jammed. Hundreds of applications pile up there, and mostly they just get ignored while somebody with authority makes a personal call. The doors that open are the ones on the side, and they come and go quickly. All you can do is decide where and how you’ll be standing when your opportunity comes. You make your own luck.

It’s good to be a white dude in Bali.

Upon first arrival at the airport, about 15 people were trying to give me a ride to my hotel. I resisted multiple times but eventually gave in to the most persistent guy.

I recommend against this because he ended up overcharging me. If you have enough money to not care, just accept that you’re going to spend way more than you would with their version of Uber. You will have to be very firm and direct because there might be a guy who’s not particularly willing to take no for an answer.

But! He offered me his girls as he drove me to my hotel. The guy’s English was good enough, but he communicated having sex by making undignified throat noises and shit. I hadn’t even put away my luggage yet.

By the time the taxi driver dropped me off, I was pretty annoyed, so I just went along with the price he gave me, which amounted to a more expensive Uber ride by US standards. Turns out I left my credit card in the ATM in the midst of the stress of trying to figure out how the ATM worked to pay the taxi driver. But then, some man tracked me down on the sidewalk with my credit card in hand — effectively restoring my faith in the Balinese.

My first evening, I wandered my street and randomly chose a bar to check out. There was an eclectic mix of expats and locals, and the conversation turned out to be rather delightful, first featuring a flamboyant Indonesian man who was tempered by actual men from Australia and Britain, and the Indonesian women acting as a sort of middle ground between the two. I quite liked that I was the only guy in his twenties, and the only American.

I went across the street to inquire about some clove cigarettes. I don’t smoke, but at the time was lowk autistically interested in the incredibly cheap and varied selection of cigarettes offered in Bali. Most everyone smoked there, which I found to be charming at the time, cus they also had those really skinny cigarettes. As the aesthete I am, I quite liked seeing all these skinny chicks smoking skinny cigarettes, including the one I ended up fucking; more on that later.) Anyways, smoking kills and I only lightly smoked a couple for the novelty factor. This is a safe space for pretending to smoke clove cigarettes.

Bali has a healthy relationship to transactionality. In the U.S., at least in my faggy neck of the woods, people are retarded about transactionality, but in Bali, it’s spelled out. No one is getting their feelings hurt about it like a hormonal 14-yr-old girl.

Wokeism isn’t a thing there. This one caught me off guard at first, but it’s arguably what makes the place so great. The bar I mentioned, which I returned to most nights during my stay, had a Substack type of vibe — racist white men in or nearing middle age, openly objectifying the island’s abundance of beautiful women and cheap amenities, while the locals objectified the westerners’ money and appetites. All the gals at the bar are trying to get the white dudes drunk off as many daiquiris as possible, and will lowk get offended if you try to tip them cus they know on some instinctual level that tipping is not what God intended (more rumination on tipping later).

For context, I came here after a month in Australia, which I quite liked, as the woke mind virus has not quite metastasized there. So I was already buttered up and enjoying my newfound freedom to make homophobic jokes and enjoy some well deserved misogyny. I somewhat accidentally tripped really hard on acid (having had zero prior psychedelic experiences) at some night club in Melbourne a few nights before flying out to Bali, so my mind was extra open. Perhaps that’s part of why I still ruminate on this trip about once per week.

On the second night, one of the older woman workers told me that she has a lot of hot young girls in the back. The people at the table informed me that this is called “The Aquarium” — a room with large glass walls and a bunch of whores, who you can select and take back and have sex with in one of the rooms. I was intrigued.

I still had some lingering libtard feelings about the proposition, but I said yes and went back. I have to say, I was quite surprised with the selection — petite, thick, tall, short, and always Asian. They select your girl of choice by shining a laser at her until she notices.

Some local guys looking at the girls asked me if I “liked them small.” I do like them small, in fact, so I chose a petite 5’ girl. Now, though, I wish I had chosen the only girl who was making eye contact with me. She was also petite, just taller. Perhaps that sex would’ve been more passionate.

The rooms had that vaguely decayed feeling from the humidity, but were otherwise perfectly clean, containing a queen-size-bed, clean sheets, a couple bath towels, a condom, and a bathtub with a hose. There were bright overhead lights, creating a curiously clinical feeling. The prostitute I chose decided to play kpop songs on her phone the whole time.

I was still experiencing the after-effects of years of taking the blue pill, which did color the entire experience. Like for example when I confirmed her age like a good boy, instead of trusting the system and getting to it. (I must disclose that I was not in fact a virgin, but was really fucking repressed, and kept trying to solve that with more blue pills.)

It’s important to note that essentially no one there gives a shit about how much sex you’ve had — being a tall white dude seems to speak for itself. They recognize that men universally want to have sex with young women, and use this fact to make money, as a service in a pretty saturated market. A local woman told me almost verbatim that the girls are just kind of lazy and don’t do much with their lives, so there is really no need to be whining about empowerment while simultaneously touting that sex work is work, as the girlies love to do in my hometown of Portland.

I even opened up to some of the local women about my conflicting feelings on the matter, mostly just saying that I generally felt bad about the situation. Even in the moment I recognized my concern as somewhat performative. I was trying to signal moral correctness, out of a fear that my pals at the bar would see me in a negative light. In retrospect, this was completely irrational, and all the women I talked to seemed pretty blasé about my concerns, but would offer me some assurance, saying things like, “It’s okay...it’s not even bad.” In fact, one of those very women encouraged me to go to the Aquarium beforehand, saying “you can just go and smash (clapping her hands aggressively to convey having sex) and then come back and have another Long Island iced tea.

The sex wasn’t even that great. Turns out positions are more limited when a foot of height difference is involved, but the nice thing is that no one is going to care how the sex was. Neither you nor the whore know each other or speak the same language, so there’s a strong sense of anonymity. That can help you make the experience more solipsistic, or whatever mindset you need to actually get into it.

Anyway, it was so cheap you could just try someone else the next night. This, I unfortunately did not do, but I intend to return. I’m sharing this partially as a personal impetus to actually make it happen. There’s also a bunch of foreigners there as well as locals who aren’t necessarily whores, so there’s plenty of different opportunities to practice actually seducing a girl.

But it wasn’t just the sex that made me want to return — I also found a unique ease of connection. I ended up going out to breakfast, to the beach and invited to someone’s abode for dinner, all from the people I met at the bar. The conversations at the bar were also a highlight for me — an older British guy who I talked to about the aquarium, and he offered me assurance by mentioning the people he supposedly killed in war as a pilot, and still sees himself as a good person. Another Brit, this one sharing my name, sparked up a conversation that frustrated me at the moment, but since then I find myself thinking about it fairly regularly. He was basically trying to get me to question my epistemic frame, starting by asking if I knew what chem trails were, then when I would speculate, he would say, “so you don’t know,” which is actually a conversational technique I still find to be obnoxious, but it basically led to him asserting that he only believes things that he could observe for himself. I still think he was partially fucking with me, but what was so electrifying was having actual different opinions and a comfort with moral ambiguity. A restaurant owner near my hotel offered me work, help finding an apartment, and said she had some connections and could take me on a cruise around the Islands. I wish I’d stayed for longer. But I didn’t.

I was feeling rejuvenated when I arrived back home to Portland, and decided to go out to a pretentious goth club to see if the DJ was any good and try my newfound skills at meeting people in bars. I happened to be paying in cash, and forgot to tip the bartender. She was being nice, saying things like “appreciate you” until the third drink, when she said “you haven’t been tipping all night.” I informed her that I had been traveling and simply forgot, and she responded, “well you’re in America now. Not everyone can afford to travel.” She also gave me the classic “If you can’t afford to tip, don’t go out,” which I told her was stupid. It was the first time I recall hearing that line, and just clocking the inherent retardation of needing to give money to someone in order to not be socially ostracized. She told me to go away or she would kick me out, and I told the person in line behind me to be sure to tip her because she was being a cunt. I don’t think the bartender heard me because she didn’t do anything.

She did end up kicking me out, after seeing me taking a sip of someone else’s drink (which was offered to me), along with a hetero soy couple, because they’d let me hit their vape. At least I didn’t get berated “for not clapping loudly enough” as one 1-star review of the place says.

None of this bullshit would ever happen in Bali. Almost everyone in the bar I went to was vaping and smoking like it was the 50s, with zero edgy pretensions attached to it. More broadly, this American way of conducting business through guilt and fear of social exclusion would not be seen as an acceptable way to maximize profits from your patrons. In Bali, tipping is generally seen as gauche. I actually tried to tip the whore the next day due to the blue pill still in my system, and the older woman (effectively one of the madams) who originally brought me back said I could tip, but I told her how much and she was like “no that’s way too much,” so I gave the whore a more acceptable, smaller, tip, and the older woman in that moment asked if I wanted the whore’s number (I took it but she never texted me back lol). The madam told me that the tip could count towards another girl that night. I said no thanks. This makes me cringe now.

The Portland bartender and Balinese prostitutes are both transactional, but the Portland model is societally corrosive because it moralizes it and relies on petty social shaming. If the Portland bartender knew about my time with the Balinese prostitute, she would likely say something like: “It’s valid for a woman to sell her body. Sex work is work. But you should not want to have sex with her. That’s taking advantage of poor people. You should tip heavily and then leave with blue balls.” Portland is not good for the white man. I want to pay $40 to fuck a hot Indonesian girl for an hour and eat a bunch of fresh fruit. I need to move to Bali.

Kat is a sheriff’s deputy in Illinois, widowed young, drinking alone, selling case tips to a sleazy lawyer to feed the online gambling habit. She answers a domestic disturbance call, and the husband who opens the door (freshly beaten) hits on her while she takes his statement. He’s warm, glib, always checking whether the joke landed. By the quarter mark this homme fatale has talked Kat into murdering his wife for the insurance money.

Kat gets inside the house, learns that everything he told her about the woman was a lie, and kills her anyway. And that’s act one.

We went in braced for Lady Cop fiction: girlboss Sherlock on one flank, the gun guy’s fantasy action Barbie on the other. Instead, Kat is competent, somewhat crooked, and realistically female. The setting also isn’t nostalgia-bait bullshit; it’s drywall, Starbucks, 5-Hour Energy. And under the pulp sits an actual theology with a father where God should be versus a tarot-reading witch in a trailer park.

: “The author owes me a night of sleep.”

: “I quit Twitter for a week because the book was more interesting.”

In 2026, there is no higher praise.

Next time, we’ll discuss Scenebux by from New Ritual Press. Check it out.

Author’s Note

This story was written in the mountains of Nepal in 2019 when I was 24. I was attempting to finish an impressionistic travel memoir entitled My Giant Goes with Me (which if it were published today would be subsumed under “autofiction”). While much of that work displeases me now, this little part of it hasn’t lost its shimmer and is the best thing I wrote during that period. This is also the first literary work that I was genuinely proud of and willing to share. My Urania (or LVIV, as it was originally titled) is the worst length possible for commercial purposes, sitting at around ten thousand words—too long for a short story and too short for even a novella. It falls under the category of the ever-neglected novelette. In today’s fast-paced world, however, such a length is perfect for a quick read, ideal for a chapbook. Perhaps I will do that one day, for it was written with the care and intensity of a lyric poem. While I have changed much, both as a writer and as a man, I can’t help but feel that this little story still perfectly encapsulates the kind of person that I am, for it marked something of an awakening for me. I have decided to not edit it because I know that the pretentious 24 year old me would not want some 31 year old guy messing with his stuff.

Lugano, Switzerland. May 2026

Je dis qu’il faut être voyant, se faire voyant.

—Rimbaud

LVIV

1

I always thought my best days while travelling would be full of adventure. I thought they would come from big events, daring escapes, tumultuous romances, and never in a million years would I have guessed that a dreary November week spent in a small town in Western Ukraine would contain the one genuinely transformative event in my life, the one moment that changed the way I perceive the world: against it the rest seems like denouement.

What happened during that week? To put it simply, I experienced the most intense and the most consistent form of happiness a man can know. For about a week my internal state remained fixed at the absolute maximum, though nothing much happened during that time. Not only was that week in Lviv devoid of all luxury, but there was no drama, no adventure, no sublime views. The feelings I felt rose suddenly and violently to the surface, though I suspect the pressure had been building for weeks, rising incrementally day by day. It may have just been luck that the eruption happened in Lviv, during the most relaxing part of the trip.

I had been travelling for two months. I had just graduated from college and was touring through Eastern Europe. After having been constantly around new people for more than two months I was finally all alone. Lviv was the first place where I had a room to myself. In every other country I followed the usual code of hostel life: I slept in crowded hostel dorms with squeaky, steel bunk beds; I showered with flipflops because the bathrooms were communal and stank of rotting hair; I wore a sleep mask and ear plugs to drown out the snoring; I put my bag in a locker to ensure that nothing was stolen; I wrote my name on the food I placed in the fridge—or if I forgot, found that the following day it had been eaten by some other person. To have one’s own space, to lay one’s clothes out over the floor in piles, to leave the dishes until later—these are luxuries that I didn’t know I had back home. For over two months I followed the rules of hostel life, and now, after all that time, I was finally by myself.

During that time I carried a thick leather-bound journal, which was only a quarter full despite my trip being all but finished. In my small apartment, in a room that contained nothing but a bed, a desk, and a small window overlooking the early winter grey, I resolved to work day and night to fill its pages with stories of what I had experienced, or if not with those then with thoughts, ideas, poems, with anything and everything that came to mind. I felt that I was somehow at war with that journal and my strategy was to blitzkrieg my way over the enemy’s white, lined territory as quickly as possible. My days passed according to a militant schedule: I would wake up, write in the journal, go for breakfast by myself, read, write more, go for a walk and continue on like that until about six o’clock at night, at which point I would meet up with some friends I made in Kyiv a few days earlier, and the four of us would go out for dinner and drinks at one of Lviv’s local gimmicky restaurants.

For a day or two things went on as normal. I was cheery but I’m naturally cheery, so that was no surprise. Then all of a sudden the water within me, which until that point was pleasant and relaxing, like a warm bath, was brought to a violent boil.

2

It all started with an awakening. Not a spiritual one, not some drug-induced enlightenment. I mean a literal awakening: it was 5am and my eyes snapped open so fast I almost felt the weight of my eyelids smack against the orbital bone. I have never been a morning person, and while travelling I slept until at least nine in the morning every day, sometimes getting out of bed as late as 11am and sleeping for more than ten hours. For that reason waking at 5am with no alarm and without a reason to get up was perplexing.

I also found that I was filled with desire, sexual desire. An almost unbearable pressure. I couldn’t remember any erotic dreams, and when I really thought about it all the erotic dreams that I had had in the past never led to anything as intense as this. Every cell of my body, it seemed, was trembling, flexed and flickering with excess energy. The average person would have just relieved themselves, but as I lay in bed, with sky beyond the windowpane still dark and dawnless, an obscure section of a famous book rose to the surface of my mind and convinced me otherwise. Months ago I had read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and although I’m not sure I buy many of the claims made by Mr. Hill, the chapter on sexual transmutation suddenly made perfect sense to me. As I understand it, sexual transmutation involves focusing your sex-drive onto your work. In Hill’s case that was making money; in mine The Great Journal War. The idea made sense to me in theory when I read it (I’d considered writing a short entry about the effects of pornography and diminished productivity in the journal); however, the full implications didn’t fully resonate with me until I experienced them for myself, until that morning when I sat down at my desk, the cells of my body buzzing like a hive of queenless, sexual bees, and began to write. All morning I wrote. I didn’t get up to do anything. Not to eat, not to use the toilet, not even to have a glass of water. Then at about 9am I went for breakfast at a small cafe.

I walked out into the street outside which smelled of espresso and cigarettes. The sky above me was lead-grey, with clouds so thick and gauzy that they hid the sun entirely. I was wandering around the inside of a snowglobe with frosted glass and no confetti. At the restaurant I ate by myself, unable to talk to the middle-aged woman at the counter who spoke no English, unable to talk to anyone, and the grey sky, the bland food, along with the omnipresent smell of cigarettes and the sight of bad teeth would be enough to make anyone feel cold, reflective and alone. But I am not anyone. After eating my breakfast in silence like a monk I wanted to explore, to see the city, to exert myself physically. I decided to walk to the top of a large hill at the edge of town, and all the way there I felt a spring in my step, felt my legs wanting to take off from under me, and whenever I went down a flight of steps I let gravity carry me down at a jogger’s speed—not so much walking as falling feet-first from step to step.

To be honest, no matter how hard I try I can’t rationally explain my experience of climbing that hill. In the end these words, no matter how skillfully written, no matter how cleverly contrived, will fail to capture what I felt. I can say that I felt amazing, that I felt energized, full of life; but those are logical thoughts, abstractions, and what I felt—perhaps all feeling in general—was beyond logic, and to that extent I need an illogical explanation, one that describes what I experienced during that walk on a more fundamental level. So when I say that some unknown force had anesthetized my body while I slept and removed my heart, I don’t mean it literally. And when I say they had replaced it with a V8 engine, I’m not crazy. They had drained my blood and pumped me full of gasoline, stripped the meat from my bones, shattered the bones themselves and cast me a new shining skeleton. I had a brand new body. Piece by piece they replaced the bones, the organs, the nerves, the muscles—everything except my brain. I was living in the future. I was normal on the outside but inside I was gyrating mechanically, held by steel braces and powered by gyroscopes, alternators and cogwheels. My heart stopped beating and began to purr softly, and as I made my way up the steps I felt restless, like a car about to stall. The RPMs were rolling too low; the clutch was burning. I jogged the rest of the way to the top, passing nobody but an old man with deep wrinkles who drew caricatures. He was waiting with canvas and pencil in hand for someone. I gave him a smile as I passed. I was the only one there.

When I got to the top I looked at the view, and it was terrible. They call Lviv “The Paris of the East” but there is nothing to look at, no major landmarks, only a few churches and older buildings, but nothing on the scale of what I had seen in Rome or Prague or Vienna, nothing that would impress me. Only the blue corrugated roofs covering the houses stood out—baby blue, metallic roofs which looked bright under the grey overcast sky, the colours being more saturated because of the lack of light. Apart from one segment of a crumbling stone wall the hill itself contained nothing of interest either. All of which made my feelings at that moment even more bizarre, for at the top of that hill those blue roofs could have held my attention forever, not because they were beautiful but because everything was beautiful. The sky, the trees, the steps, the blank canvas, it didn’t matter. You could have placed any vista before me and nothing would have changed. Replace the dreary Ukrainian countryside with a sunset in the Caribbean or a view from Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and all would have remained the same. I was maxed out—or so I thought.

After many pages of journaling and a nice dinner with my friends I went to bed, expecting that I would wake up at noon the following morning feeling tired, lonely, and terribly sad. Each action must have its reaction, yes? When I placed my head on the pillow at 1am I fell asleep instantly, only to awake with the same libidinous energy at about 6am the following morning. I wrote for another few hours and then left for breakfast. The cafeteria I liked was about ten minutes away from my apartment, and while walking there I experienced the rarest of events: a completely new feeling. Genuine ecstasy. I should note before continuing that I have never taken drugs and that I remain the only person I know of who never even tried weed in high school and college. The feelings I felt came from within me. I had no foreign substances in my body. I barely even drank while I was there, which is almost a cultural sin in the Ukraine.

It was another sombre morning of grey on grey. I was walking along happily when I passed straight out of my quotidian reality and stepped into another. I crossed a boundary, opened a doorway to another part of experience that until that point I had never known existed. And it was divine. I could exhaust the entire English language and still I wouldn’t have the words to describe it, for it was the most powerful form of happiness a man can know. It was so powerful that I can’t even think of a time in my life with which to contrast it against. That must be how it feels to become the Heavyweight Champion of The World after knocking out Mike Tyson, how it feels to win the World Series with a home run late in the 9th with two outs, how it feels to be reunited with a loved one after you thought they were dead, how Moses felt when God gave him the stone tablets—a happiness so full and deep that it fills every pore of your being, a flood of feelings so intense that you drown because you’re unable to swim back to the surface of everyday life. If somebody had asked me the time I would not have been able to give an answer. Only a smile. If a man would have tried to mug me I would have offered my watch as a tip. It was almost unbearable in its totality, and as I walked I looked across the streets, passing houses, benches, trees—all familiar vistas that I had seen previously that week, many times and in better light; I saw how they now possessed a sort of incandescent glow, a shimmer, how everything gave off these graceful undulations, like the air above black pavement in the summer heat. It was all liquescent and unstable somehow, as if I were in a dream. I even closed my eyes for a few seconds to see if the world would return to me in its solid form but it didn’t. Not for that block, nor for any of the following ones. In fact, I spent my breakfast in this state of divine bliss, sitting there by myself, eating a pancake and few bowls of fermented vegetables with no book, no phone. Nothing. Just the world which I felt as a fine, translucent fluid swirling around me and which I inhaled through the pores in my skin like a salamander.

Eventually it all congealed, and I returned to a state of functional contentment. On the way back home this state soon shifted and I began to worry that I was going insane. I have never been depressed, but still! Who else experiences these highs but a manic-depressive or some other mentally disturbed person? When I got back to my apartment I wrote a quick note about how I was feeling. A timeline of sorts. If I were going crazy at least I could show the doctor my progression. I was curious to see if I would have more of these episodes in the future, and how they were spaced. I had a few more but that first one remains unique, for it was the first opening, a kind of fissure along the glassy surface of an otherwise normal life, an open wound through which a deeper, more mysterious reality bled. Later, at the end of the week, that small opening would be ripped open and the full force of what flowed beneath it would bubble up and consume me completely. But that story starts a few weeks before coming to the Ukraine, when I was in Lithuania, in Vilnius.

3

I had been to Vilnius once before on that trip but after finding a cheap flight to Ukraine I came back for a couple days to wait for my flight. When I arrived the staff greeted me by name. I had spent a long night playing Risk with them the previous week, losing after my massive army was defeated by a paltry force of divinely protected soldiers at the tip of Australia who rolled a continuous string of sixes. I remember asking if I had the room to myself and they said no, there were two others in my room: a Polish girl and a Georgian one. Too bad, I thought. By this point I desperately wanted a room to myself, though I did fall asleep without seeing either of my roommates that night.

In the morning I remember rolling over and seeing long locks of wavy black hair spilling over the side of the adjacent bed. Perhaps I had hair on the mind because I was in Lithuania. I never noticed women’s hair until I went to Vilnius. It felt like I was in a shampoo commercial while I was there because every woman I saw had long, thick, silky hair. In any case the jet-black locks cascading over the edge of the bed stood out somehow. Upon reflection I can’t think of another moment where someone’s hair made such an impression on me, which is strange. Even now I’m surprised with how vividly I can picture those dark waves shining in the early morning light. While eating breakfast I met the owner of that amazing head of hair. Her name was Tamari, and she was from Georgia. Perhaps it’s the primacy effect, but her hair is always the first image that rises to the surface when I think of her.

I knew nothing about Georgia except for a few random historical facts and where to find it on a map, and to this day I have only met one Georgian person—namely her—and my ignorance with respect to this country and its people has formed the belief in my mind, however irrational, that the country is populated by the most beautiful and the most powerful people on earth because my sample size, which consists of a single individual (her), is so magnificent.

I knew Georgia was at one point part of the Soviet Union, so I had envisioned Russian features the previous night: a cold stare, fat cheeks, thin eyebrows, a large lower lip. Instead she had coffee coloured skin and dark brown eyes. There was something Asiatic in her appearance too, but she lacked the daintiness that women from India, China and Southeast Asia have. She was tall, with sleek, feline legs, large hips, a small waist, and perhaps the biggest back I have ever seen on a woman—a thick, broad, muscular back which the average person failed to notice because her features were so perfectly balanced, and because her movements were slick, graceful. Yes, she had a big back, but it looked no more out of place than the powerful shoulders on a puma. She had a wide mouth full of chalk-white teeth, each one perfect and without a trace of erosion. The geometry of her mouth must have fit the Greek golden ratio, for I’ve never seen such a perfect crescent of a smile. They didn’t stand out either, her teeth, which is to say they didn’t dominate her features. I noticed them only because she smiled often and easily. With her liquid hourglass shape, with her brown eyes and her straight white teeth, with those and with all the other complementary combinations and juxtapositions, she appeared to be a perfect mix; and one feels that if racism ended tomorrow and the best parts of every ethnic group were mixed together you would end with a people that looked like her.

We were formally introduced at breakfast but I can recall almost nothing from that first meeting. It obviously went well because it wasn’t long before me, Tamari, her Polish friend and a friend of mine named Ray went to see the Three Crosses, a monument that commemorates some famous event I knew nothing about. There was one moment of friction during that walk. An awkward silence. It came early on. I don’t remember what caused it but it was long and deep. We were walking through the park, along the edge of the river. The leaves were ablaze and the air was cold. Neither of us saying anything. It was the kind of silence that can be socially terminal if it is not handled with care. Then, all of a sudden, the perfect line came.

“You better say something,” I said, “this is getting really awkward.”

She laughed and the tension dissolved in the wind. I kept the joke for a little longer though.

“You better say something quick. This is getting super weird.”

“No you say something!” she said, smiling uncontrollably.

“Don’t turn this around on me. It’s your turn.”

“My turn?”

And so on”¦ After that everything passed effortlessly. There was never another bum note in all the time I spent with her. She was so happy, always smiling, always in good spirits. I wanted so badly to get to know her more, to talk with her more, one on one, but that evening her and her friend had to bus back to Warsaw. I went with them to just outside the hostel where they got a taxi. We hugged and said goodbye. Warsaw was behind me by this point (a previous stop), and I walked back to the hostel feeling a little sad because I knew I would never see her again—at least on this trip. There wasn’t enough time to go back West. I was on a freefall through Eastern Europe and would be passing through Ukraine and Romania before coming to Sofia where I would then be lifted all the way to London (on a flight that was cheaper than the shuttle bus from the airport to central London). There was no way of stopping that descent. The tickets were booked and the dates were set. But as luck would have it, Tamari had a weekend free while I was in Lviv and agreed to take the eight-hour bus ride to come for the weekend with me before I went South.

I had a few more days of reading, writing and walking between my first prolonged fit of ecstasy and her arrival at the end of the week. And what wonderful days they were! I thought my cheerful exuberance would fade after a day or two, but no: my feelings never dipped, never wavered. Sometimes I think the journal entries were the source, for I have never written so many words with so much passion. In Lviv, after two months of almost no writing, I had planned to catch up on all the events I had failed to record, to write down what had happened to me, what I had seen, where I had been, but soon I began writing about whatever was on my mind: about writing, reading, philosophy, walking, food, drink, happiness, and anything else that popped up. I sat down at the small desk in my bedroom before the leather-bound book with a full fountain pen and an empty mind, yet when I put pen to paper it flowed out of me at such a speed I could barely keep up: long sentences containing thoughts I didn’t know I had, sometimes using words whose definition I didn’t know. I felt I had dug a tunnel directly to a kind of subterranean mental spring, to the substrata where the unconscious absorbs its nutrients, and once there I slurped up everything I could, sucked all the muck that had been stuck there for decades along with a few glittering, unpolished gems through the straw of my fountain pen, day after day, all day, and when I finished I felt cleaned out, fresh. Like a piece of polished crystal I refracted a pleasant light in all directions.

I sometimes worried that a crash would come, that one day I would awake with a pitch-black depression that was every bit as dark as my joy was bright. But the terrifying fall never came. I was all lightning and no thunder. Day after day life pulsed along. The journal was steadily increasing in size and every night I went with my friends to a new restaurant. Lviv is full of fascinating restaurants, places so strange that they could exist nowhere else on earth. There are no regulations in Ukraine, or if there are nobody cares about them. The people of Lviv take full advantage of this and open all sorts of gimmicky restaurants, like a Jewish restaurant that has no prices on the menu and makes you negotiate, or the bar that reduces the price by half if you flash a special card. I even heard of a place (on my last day) whose entrance is an apartment door. You knock, an angry old man opens, yells at you for a few seconds, and then he leads you to the bar which is hidden deep inside. The whole town loves these strange ideas, and during the day at around 1pm you can see all the mascots from the various restaurants go for lunch, see a table with a hangman, an army general, fireman and a bunch of other strange characters seated in a circle drinking vodka, always vodka. But of all these interesting places one will forever stick out in my mind: the Masoch Cafe.

I knew that sadism comes from Marquis de Sade but had no idea that masochism finds its name from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian writer who was born in Lviv and whose short novel Venus in Furs detailed his bizarre sexual predilections. One of my friends, Danny, a great hulk of an Australian, thinking it would be a fun night out, suggested we go to the bar erected in his honour. When we arrived a hundred-pound Ukrainian girl dressed in an eighteenth-century corset carrying a leather whip greeted us. She was beautiful but she had these ice-blue eyes, the hard emotionless eyes of a shark. In a thin voice she told us we would have to sit downstairs in the cafe until a space opened in the bar, so we decided to have a drink and wait.

The cafe made in Sacher-Masoch’s honour is not a seedy place. I had actually spent an afternoon there a few days earlier without knowing about any of the history. The cafe section, moreover, remains free—which is to say you aren’t flogged by the servers. For about half an hour we drank, talked and looked at the various quotes that were printed across the walls, along with portraits of Sacher-Masoch. Then the girl with an icy glare returned, said there was space up at the bar and followed behind us as we left our table. Unbeknownst to us, we had been enjoying a regulated protection by sitting in the cafe section, and as soon as we began walking towards the bar we had become fair game. She began to whip us—and not in a cute, playful way but with the intent to hurt. The worst part was that she knew the most painful spots to hit. I would have been fine if she’d have smacked me on the ass a few times, but she continued aiming for that small area behind the knee where the skin is soft and tender. While she smacked us we all laughed (all except my friend Tom who was terrified) but she herself never so much as smiled. She just looked at us with this predatory stare, twirling the whip round and round as she looked for the proper angle to strike, like a viper.

At the top of the stairs the lights were dimmed and the walls bore exposed brick. There were about two dozen people up there, all seated at tables. (As an aside, I love that the bars are so strict about allowing people in. If there is no space they turn you away without hesitation, or they make you wait). We sat down and Tom took the space closest to the wall, hoping to avoid any future lashings. Of course, our new server—a smaller, bespectacled, librarian-looking girl—was even more cruel than the one who had greeted us initially and seemed to genuinely enjoy inflicting the pain. It was such a strange atmosphere because most of the time it was like any other bar, but when the girls came around they would give you a firm smack on the back. And they were stealthy about it. Tom was always looking around, not wanting to get hit, and occasionally I would see that small Ukrainian girl slide around behind him, tensing her arm for a quick snap, and then receding into the centre of the room after noticing that Tom had sensed her presence. Occasionally she did slink up on him, give him a big whack and then saunter away silently while she held back the curl of a smile.

All of this was quite fun, but things really got interesting when the show started. After about fifteen minutes they selected two girls, Americans I think, and made them bend over a pair of adjacent stools. The girls were only smiling drunkenly at each other awaiting their comical punishment. The rest of us looked over at them, bewildered. Had anyone walked in a few seconds earlier they would have thought this was like any other themed bar. The librarian and the ice queen came out with their whips, and we all expected a cute, funny demonstration. Instead they both gave the Americans a hard smack, and the crack of the whips muted the small whimper that both girls let out. They looked to the other in disbelief at how hard they had actually been hit. They couldn’t believe it. None of us could. They endured half a dozen similar strikes and were brave about it. When they returned to their seats everything returned to normal. the servers continued their rounds, acting as if nothing had happened.

I had been teasing the librarian all night, telling her that the slaps felt good, flipping the power switch a bit. I was just so full of energy that I couldn’t help being difficult. I also wanted to get in one of the shows. For one thing, when was I ever going to do something like this again? For another, I was genuinely curious to see if I would enjoy it. I’ve never had thoughts about being flogged, but one never knows what lies in the depths of the dark spring! I was game for anything. When she finally came out I was made to remove my shirt and she brought this large stick with leather straps around the ends.

“Okay, sexy boy,” she said in a high-pitched voice.

I didn’t like being subdued with the straps, but I had already committed to participating. I didn’t want to be that guy and duck out at the last minute. I put my hands in the straps and the large stick over my shoulders. I checked to see if I could get out of it, and I could. (I’ve always had a slight fear of being helpless; seen too many movies where people are killed after being incapacitated.) I knelt down against a chair with my hands behind my head. She lit two candles and began dripping the hot wax over my back to the sound of everyone’s discomfort. To be honest, it wasn’t that painful. The wax congeals as soon as it touches the skin and you feel only the flash of the first contact. Nothing very erotic about this either. If I’m honest it was just annoying. After about a minute she blew out the candles and plunged the stalks into my back. That I felt. I thought I was done so I stood up, but she angrily told me to get back down. She wasn’t finished. Then the whip came back out—perhaps a bigger whip—and she said to me in a piercing, strangely cute voice that was loud enough so the rest of the bar could hear, “I will now hit you seven times, and after each time you must say: I want more.” The I want more bit seemed repulsive to me somehow, servile. And I think here, at this moment, I understood the essence of masochism: it’s not about the pain per se; it’s about submission. The pain exists to stimulate the I want more bit. It’s wanting more, the desire to be dominated that some find so pleasurable. I felt like I understood though I did not feel it. To be honest, I just wanted to get it over with. When she hit me the first time I said, very unenthusiastically,

“I want more.”

“Louder,” she said, hitting me again.

This time I was quiet, and my silence seemed to anger her a bit, to frustrate her.

“Say it!”

Again, unenthusiastically: “I want more.”

“Louder!”

And here I may have let my high spirits get the best of me. Perhaps I would have been better off playing along, indulging her a bit, but instead I replied, “You’re going to have to hit me harder if you want me to say it louder.”

I don’t know if these words enraged her or removed the precautions that she normally took, but she began to beat the living shit out of me. She brought the whip high above her head and came down hard. The bar gave out a loud vicarious cry as I kept silent. I think it was my desire to see how far she would go and my curiosity to see how much I could take. My silence made her even more wild and she continued well after the seven hits she had promised. “Say it!” she said, hysterically. Silence. Determined to get a reply she adopted a new, machine-gun-style technique and began to hit me non-stop, as hard as she could with no breaks.

“Say it! I want more.” And then, timed with every hit: “I. Want. More. I. Want. More.”

Finally the pain was so intense that I said it, and as if it were a safe word, she relented. I must have been hit over twenty times. I stood up but she still wasn’t satisfied.

“One more.”

“You know what, I think I’ve had enough,” I said.

“No! One more!”

“Say please.”

“Please? I don’t say please. You say please!” Her eyes were burning behind her square-rimmed glasses. I thought I saw steam on their surface.

“Okay one more.”

I knelt down and she gave me one final smack. I was silent. When I was finished my back was almost bleeding. Large red striations ran lengthwise with studded bits of wax still caked on. The raw skin flared and burned as I slipped my shirt back on. When I got back to the table Tom asked me why I had taunted her so much and to be honest, I didn’t know then and I am unsure even today. All I know is that I like to push things to the end. I constantly want to feel the edge of what I am comfortable with, and while in Lviv I had the strange feeling that the edge had dissolved completely, that every obstacle could be overcome—every obstacle, that is, except for that demonic, hundred-pound Ukrainian girl.

I left the Masoch Cafe full of energy, not sexual energy but adrenaline, as if I had been in a fight, and to be completely honest in the minutes following our departure I would have loved a fight, would have loved if some drunk had come out of a shadowed alleyway looking for trouble. My body was on red alert. The nerves on my back were flaring up intermittently, as if someone were revving the engine. Of course, nothing happened on the walk back to the apartment. I wrote to relieve some of the tension and then fell instantly asleep. On my side.

Sometimes when I tell this story (and I don’t show the video) people think I am making things up or exaggerating. But as you can see, this was what I looked like when I got back to my apartment. I learned then that I’m definitely not a masochist. I must admit I didn’t really see the appeal then and I still don’t. I just remember being very angry and very sore.

4

Were there any problems that week? Any low points? Yes, yes there were. But only one. It was the morning Tamari arrived. She had taken the night bus and was scheduled to arrive in Lviv early that morning. At 4:30am. I didn’t want her arriving by herself in this strange country early on a cold November morning, so I roused myself at 3am and walked to the bus station. Although the rain had stopped some time ago, the light from the streetlamps wriggled across the cobblestones in wavering filaments, and the trees lining the streets were slick and gleaming, like bundles of black wire, each branch diamonded with small drops of water.

It was a long walk. Took me about 40 minutes. When I finally got there I ordered an espresso at the small cafe and texted her. She would be there soon. She was just crossing the border, and once past her data would be gone which meant I would no longer be able to talk with her or find out where she was. When first she passed into the blind zone I waited patiently, even happily. I had brought an ereader and a pen and paper, so I could easily distract myself until she arrived. I still remember the name of the company: Polski Bus. And I remember everything during the next hour.

At 4:15am I see a large blue bus enter the station. I think for a moment that perhaps she is early, but soon I see that it is not a Polski Bus. I read for a bit, jot some notes in a small notebook and then see another bus pull into the station. It’s 4:30 now. The time she should be arriving. I can’t see the company name in the distance, so I pack up my things, pay my tab and head out through the cold November wind. When I get there I see that it is no Polski Bus. More reading, another coffee. Then a new set of buses pull in, but still there is no Polski bus. Now she is late and my mind starts to wander. Perhaps they are stuck in traffic. Perhaps they had a flat. Perhaps”¦ and then thoughts of every kind assail me: the bus has a flat tire and is pulled over at the side of the freeway—no, it crashed and everyone died; there is another bus station in Lviv and she is waiting there; she is already here and is robbing my apartment. There is still no Polski Bus. A battle ensues between my rogue unconscious mind and the higher-level version of myself whose job it was to patiently and carefully disassembled those deranged arguments, but every time I succeeded in convincing myself that no disaster had occurred a new one cropped up, a new disaster, a new strange conspiracy. She was never coming. There never was Polski Bus. This was all a cruel joke. And on and on and on”¦.

I wanted to leave that small cafe but was worried that I might leave and then Tamari would arrive, alone, expecting to see me, and then be stuck out in the cold. Finally at 5:15 I made an ultimatum: I would leave at 6am. By now the paranoia had subsided and I was waiting again without any mad thoughts, though they were waiting too—anxieties and fears, doubts and worries—they were rapping their knuckles on the cold frame of the door, trying to get in.

Then at 5:30 a bus pulled up. A Polski Bus! I ran from the cafe and stood outside the door. A herd of old Poles passed me down the steps and collected their baggage. The smoke from their breath mixed with the exhaust fumes of the bus. So many Polish people, so much pale skin, so much blond hair. Where was she? I waited and waited, but she never came. An old man stumbled out of the bus and I looked inside and saw that it was empty. With a cloud of worries closing in around me yet again I started walking towards the cafe—but then I heard my name, heard it the way one hears a car driving past beyond the open window, far off, as if coming from the night itself. I turned, looked around, and then I saw a silhouette with a scarf wrapped around its head, a shadowy, backlit body from which no details could be discerned, but I could tell her by the shape, by that feline hourglass torso, that it was her. I came closer and then I saw her smile, a sort of crescent moon rising out of the wispy folds of her scarf. We embraced and then I immediately asked her why she was so late. She looked at her watch. “I not late. I ten minutes early!” I told her it was almost an hour past the time she said she would arrive, and then everything clicked, with the memories of maps, flights and latitudes falling into place all at once: there was an hour time change between Warsaw and Lviv.

The sky now paling at the edge. The air still sharp and frosty. Warm exhaust fumes from the taxis rising up between our legs, rising and freezing clear. After so much mental activity I felt burned out, tired, frozen stiff. But then, standing there, side by side, I felt her fine fingers weave silently in between my own. So warm! So soft! Her long smooth fingers interlaced with my own. And the spark from that small embrace travelled through the arteries, up the arm, all the way to the heart which was now racing.

5

Back at the apartment I had prepared the fold-out couch for her in case she wanted to sleep in different beds, but immediately upon entering she declared in her usual straightforward manner, “I will sleep in thees bed,” meaning the other one. My bed. We changed, laid down, and I turned off the light. Then, propping myself on my forearms, I leaned over just above her, said goodnight, looked into her eyes, and bending down slowly, kissed her.

The next few minutes were silent but not without sound, for there can never be a perfect silence. What we call silence is really life played softly with an adagio tempo, and those different melodies yield different kinds of silences: there is the silence of the waves breaking across the shore of a deserted beach, the silence of the wind sliding through a field of tall grass, but this was the silence of two bodies coming together, of hands on soft cotton, of sheets shifting, of heavy breaths and hot clumsy kisses. But then there was a noise which, like the first bolt of lightning on a summer’s night, broke the silence:

“Fuck you!”

The soft features of her face had hardened and her jaw was clenched tight. I stopped immediately, but as soon as I did she told me to keep going. Everything was fine, she said. And that was it: no explanation, no warning, no holding back. From my perspective this demonstrated supreme—no, divine trust. Her swearing was so important, so idiosyncratic and remains so vivid in my mind for just that reason. That whole week was marked with extremes, with the dissolution of boundaries, and the swearing (along with the biting, the scratching and all the rest that followed that night) seemed perfectly natural. Sometimes I feel that it couldn’t have happened any other way. Life itself was open, volatile, and crazy during that time; and since sex is part of life like any other part, it follows that it too would be open, volatile and crazy.

I had never given myself to anyone the way I gave myself to her. I had never before surrendered so completely to anything or anyone—even myself. For the first time in my life I allowed the full spectrum of my feelings to manifest, allowed the deepest parts of myself, the darkest, most powerful parts of myself to rise up without fear of what they were or what they meant. It was utter chaos, yet somehow within all that chaos there was an order, a unity. Oneness. And though it seems strange to use a mystical vocabulary when you’re talking about rough sex, it makes perfect sense to me. In Lviv there were no boundaries or borders. Just free expression, creation and liberation. We were barely more than strangers to each other, and yet there was a closeness and a passion that went far beyond the base animal cravings that such a meeting should have engendered. We could say anything, do anything, and it was all perfect. Every word, every act and every thought was justified and righteous because we were their creators. At times it was violent but so are thunderstorms. And if the sea, sun and sky are all good, then thunderstorms—which come from all three working together—must also be good, even though they are dark, violent, destructive.

Afterwards, she nestled up beside me—calm, quiet, content. Like the kettle after it’s been taken off the burner. I never asked why she swore and she never mentioned it. I said only in passing that I thought it was primal—a word she didn’t know—and never brought it up again. There was no need. At the time I understood it all without understanding anything.

6

To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect with Tamari. I knew she was happy and easygoing (my two favourite traits) but in all fairness we hadn’t spent much time together, and part of me was worried we may not get along. There were no problems; our time together was a perfect symphony. In all my travels I have never been around someone so easily. Never any tension, never a single bum note.

As with the rest of that week, the actual events that took place were simple and unexciting: we went for coffee at cafes, we made chicken and rice for dinner—or rather, she made chicken and rice for dinner (I was useless)—we hung out with friends, wandered the geometrically arranged streets of Lviv, inspected the churches that lay sprinkled throughout the city, and she studied for her exams while I wrote. Honestly, I can’t convey what happened when Tamari came to visit me. I could describe the city of Lviv. I could tell you how it fans out in concentric squares with the town hall sitting in the center, how the buildings looked, how the food tasted, but you would never understand what it felt like to walk through them, to wander under the endless grey sky without a plan, stopping now and then at one of the many beautiful cafes to enjoy an espresso, a glass of brandy and a piece of black-forest cake, the occasional cigarette. Perhaps the events aren’t important in themselves; perhaps it was our being there together that made them such. Because during that time I was still full of forked lightning and she was radiant as polished zinc: everything we saw was spangling and metallic, everything we touched was left galvanized and glowing in memory.

She was the most confident woman I have ever met, the most centred, the most joyful. I remember one night she was talking about her childhood, about a certain girl that didn’t like her. I couldn’t believe it. She was so happy, so kind, so easygoing. How could anyone dislike her? She told me the reason: “because I was more beautiful.” What I found amazing was that there was no trace of ego in that statement. She talked about her beauty the way she would have talked about her height or the weather. It wasn’t something to be proud of; it wasn’t a foundation upon which to build self-esteem. It was a fact. She was beautiful. There was no need to feign modesty or any attempt to impress me. It was a detached statement. She had no stake in it. And I feel that if anyone would have told her that she was not beautiful, rather than anger, sadness or some other negative reaction, she would have met them with an emotionless, bemused look—the same look that she would give if they had told her she was four feet tall with platinum blond hair.

She was Orthodox but embodied more stoical and Buddhistic virtues than any self-proclaimed Stoic or Buddhist I have met. She hadn’t read the books, nor did she care about the cerebral arguments: she lived it, embodied it. Nothing could suppress her ardour or diminish her insatiable love of life. She used to be a runway model when she was young but stopped at the age of fourteen. I asked why and she said, “I learn that once you get older you must do things for photographers to be model. I didn’t wish to do those things. So I quit. I would rather be happy. I just want to enjoy my life.” Again, not an iota of negative energy. She retained the same smouldering glow that she always had. And what wisdom at fourteen! To make that decision, to walk away from it. There was no need to get angry at the way the world was, even if that anger was justified. She had made a decision to be happy and nothing, not the cruelty of the world, nor any comment made by any person would disturb that peace.

She smoked occasionally, though you would never have guessed it with those chalk-white teeth. Her body seemed too strong to be affected by the tar and other toxins. I took up the habit for the week I was there, buying a few packs for five dollars, and I retain such fond memories of lighting up in the cafes with an espresso, in front of churches, restaurants and bars, or late at night on the small balcony with all the lights out, overlooking the small courtyard. I had never smoked before and thought I would do it for a week or two and then quit forever. Tom, a recently recovered smoker himself, hated this idea; thought for sure I would get addicted. I didn’t but the week in Lviv and the week that followed made me understand why people smoke—that is, what they get out of it. Having never smoked myself, having never tried a cigarette, I didn’t understand why people did it. There is such a campaign in Canada against smoking that I never considered doing it. In Ukraine, however, as well as the rest of Eastern Europe smoking is the norm, just like drinking. Everyone smokes, and the small kiosks along the streets sell cigarettes in beautiful cases. No pictures of people with rotten teeth or holes in their chests. It’s like going back in time to the sixties, to a place where everyone is blissfully unaware of the dangers.

What else is there to say? I was happy during those days. And although in general I am a happy person, possessing a naturally cheery disposition, this was something different, something more profound, what might be called a metaphysically significant form of happiness: happiness that solves the riddle of human existence. Although I wasn’t able to see all the implications, the first throb of this revelation came to me during the one full night we spent together. She was sprawled out, fast asleep beside me. All the lights were off, but the room was suffused with a dusky blue glow that kept everything from dissolving into darkness, the walls and sheets and limbs of our bodies shining with a cold phosphorescence, as if magnetized with the dust of finely ground sapphires. No camera could have captured the seething beauty of that scene: the smoking blueness, the bed like an ocean under a new moon, those ruffled sheets rising with the tide of her breath. I remember just laying there, looking at the bed, at the spread of it, and thinking how happy I was—not just happy, fulfilled. I remember thinking that I would change nothing. It was a cheap one-bedroom apartment. It was November in a small grey city in Ukraine. And yet if I had all the power and money in the world I would still have chosen to be there. With her.

In an instant I understood that everything I had wanted in the past was an illusion: a penthouse suite could not have given me a better sleep; a five-star restaurant could not have nourished me more than her chicken dinner and my rice pudding. Line up all the woman in the world and I still would have chosen her to be sleeping soundly beside me. All my dreams, all my yearnings, all my desires for more suddenly fell away, dissolved into nothing, and I felt that I was in possession of the one thing that everyone wanted, a peace and happiness that can’t be bought or earned because it is not of this world. The hedonistic calculus which until that point had ruled over my life now seemed worthless, because nothing could have been added or subtracted to make this moment any better: somehow all of those pieces, small as they were, summed to infinity.

7

At night the bus station was terribly disorganized, and she almost missed the bus. We ran from stall to stall asking which one was headed for Warsaw. Nobody spoke English, so Tamari had to ask in Russian which was shakily understood by most. When we finally found it I put her bags in the storage compartment of the bus. Then, with the sour grey fumes spilling out over the road, we hugged, kissed, said goodbye, and before disappearing into the mirrored belly of the bus she turned and gave me one more smile, that same smile I had been enjoying for the past few days, a smile that blazed white hot and steaming amid the frost and then smoke; and that’s my last image of her, that’s how I see her now and what I think of when I reflect back on those days we spent together, days which remain clear and bright and sharp, as if they were tattooed on my brain moment by moment with Japanese wooden needles, days which will remain till the end because they, like her smile, were perfect.

Admittedly, our time together was short but those short days were so densely packed with insights, laughs and meaningful moments that they take up more space in my mental firmament. Never before had I been so consciously aware of time’s relativity, for that week stands out as a trip unto itself. Like a little, glimmering constellation.

When I left the bus station I decided to walk back instead of taking a taxi. It was my last night in Lviv and I know of few more satisfying experiences than to walk the streets alone while reflecting on the silence of the surrounding night. I had prepared mentally for Tamari’s departure, and though I wished she could have stayed, wished that we both could have stayed, I knew all along that it would end like this and that there was a good chance I would never see her again. Nevertheless I felt a wistful sorrow as I crossed over the steel tracks of the tram system, not because she was speeding away from me, but because all of it was speeding away from me—my youth, my time overseas, my memories, my whole life—all of it was slipping away, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Her departure betokened the end of all things, and now everywhere I looked I saw time ticking down. The sky was clear for once but when I looked up I saw those glittering, steely lights going dark. One by one they dried up and died out, and the darkness around them grew until there was a solid black sheet above me. Then the streetlamps began to fade, and as they dimmed the world broke down: the parked cars fell apart, the leaves and branches blew off the trees, the cobblestones cracked and crumbled. The wind blew through the streets and the houses dissolved as if they were made of dust; then the cars, then the trees, then the whole world—dust. Everything was ticking down to this. A fuliginous, atomic fog. No motion, no heat, no colour, no substance. Everything would eventually go dark and Tamari’s departure was a pencil-thin shadow cast by the monument of the past few days, a cruel reminder of the endless night to come.

It was the only time during that week that I felt low, and it was about as low as I have ever felt in my life. But then as I was walking past an empty park I heard a car coming from behind me, heard its tires popping along the cobblestones, and I felt the sound of each stone reverberating up my spinal column, each one louder than the last, each one bursting like a small carbonated sphere along the surface of a glass of Dom Pérignon champagne. All of a sudden the world came flaring back to life and I felt that I was full of these small spheres, that I was boiling over. I was in awe: in awe of the sound, the stars above me, my past few days; in awe of Tamari, of the food, the coffee, the cigarettes; in awe of my trip so far and all the trips that had yet to come. Having been dropped into the abyss my pupils had suddenly dilated and become accustomed to the lack of light. I could see clearly, and all the previous fears, doubts and worries, all the arguments, theories and conjectures—they seemed utterly unimportant. In a way, what I felt then was the obverse of depression. One need not ask the depressed person why they feel that life is not worth living in the moment because their symptoms are immediate and self-evident. Now, as I fell tumbling into the end of everything I just knew: it was all worth it. I wouldn’t say I had any answers, but rather all the questions ceased to matter. If mysticism begins when you stop asking questions, then I’m a mystic. There was no need to cling to a metaphysics or an idea about God, reincarnation, life after death, destiny, no need to try, no need to do anything but spread your arms and take it in.

To surrender yourself completely, to allow the world to fill your every pore, to inhale the cold air, hear the sound of rippling rubber tires and see the stellar lights trace their arcs across the sky, to soak it up like a sea sponge and inhale the mineral-rich currents of the present moment. What else was there to know?

All this happened within the span of a couple seconds, and once the car passed and the popping faded into the night I was left with a strange mélange of disparate feelings. Such a juxtaposition! The darkest depths and the brightest heights! I was staring into this pit of pain and sorrow and felt myself falling into it. A second later I was floating, pumped full of helium. But if space is infinite what is the difference between falling and floating? Perhaps that which I loved and that which I hated were one and the same thing, for during that week I was constantly intoxicated by the flux of phenomena, by the sun rising, by rain falling, by a soap bubble popping as I did the dishes, by anything and everything, but at the same time all of those changes cast a melancholy shadow because they meant the end of whatever beautiful thing had just preceded them. A sunrise burns out the nighttime peace and rain destroys a sunny day. I love watching the change but I mourn the loss of what is changed. And though I felt that everything was somehow worth it in the end, this recognition did not negate the essential tragedy: Tamari was gone, my perfect week had ended, I was getting older, and someday far in the future it would all go dark.

I write this now as if looking back through the back end of a telescope. Everything is far away, cold, petrified. As I sat for a few minutes on the curb I felt all of this physically: a pressure behind my eyes, a sense of being too full, as if my body contained too much blood. I was bloated and forced to sit down on the curb for a few minutes with the liquid hanging at the edges of my eyes, held in place by mental surface tension. Gradually, the tears began to recede from my eyes and pooled at the base of my throat, where they coagulated into a hot, sharp lump. Then they were shed, slowly, breath by humid breath, into the night.

THE END

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The two main characters are a clever inversion of noir tropes: the protagonist and narrator is Kat, a female sheriff’s deputy in a small county somewhere near Chicago; and the villain of the piece is Will, an homme fatale. He is a charming and seductive failed rock star, with a hidden core of darkness, trapped in an unhappy marriage. After an on-duty encounter, Will seduces Kat and enlists her in a plot to murder his wife.

I admit, I nearly passed on Everything On Black when the blurb told me the main character was a lady cop. I’ve been burned so many times by mainstream books and films. I was afraid Kat would be a cardboard cutout, either a vehicle for social commentary or an exercise in wish fulfillment. I half expected a power-tripping girlboss character, Lisa Simpson in a police uniform, constantly belittling and outsmarting her dim male colleagues. Equally irritating is the Fantasy Action Barbie character, beloved by low-end male writers: an expert marksman and pro-level MMA fighter, kicking ass and taking names. And with the libido of a sixteen-year-old boy to boot.

Instead, Kat is a wrenchingly likable and human character, widowed at a young age and trying to live up to her cop father and brother. As the story begins, she is already walking a knife-edge of addiction and corruption. A single encounter with the outwardly charming Will is enough to push her off the edge and into a doomed spiral, every bad decision justified by the remorseless logic of the moment.

Kat and her father form one pole of the story; although he only enters the story once (and only in a brief phone call), his influence hangs over her throughout. It is never explicitly stated, but I presume she went into law enforcement as an attempt to live up to him. They seem to have a healthy and loving relationship, but her regard for him is her undoing; as her predicament worsens, her motivation for additional crimes is the fear of getting caught and shaming him.

The negative pole of the novel is the sociopathic Will, and his manipulative mother, Elaine. Their relationship is a dark mirror of Kat and her father. Will is boyish and handsome when he is seducing Kat, unstable and terrifying when she becomes a threat. Elaine, a trailer park fortune teller and prostitute, is revealed to be the mastermind of Will’s crimes. Will’s unthinking trust in her is his undoing, just as surely as Kat’s trust in her father, rather than God, is hers.

Everything On Black is a brutal but enjoyable read, as you watch a likable and tragic character destroy herself in real time. I read it in one sitting, and I hope to see more from F.T. Grant and from Vigilante in the future.

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Crowbar by

The core experience of the 2020s has been one of horrifying revelation. Either the greater transparency of a networked world is shining a light on things once hidden, or perhaps the powers that be are so confident of their position that they are allowing the mask to slip. Whatever the cause, in the last few years, the curtain has been pulled back to expose a whole world of things that should not be. Crowbar, the newly released novel from Andrew Edwards, imagines the roots of that world.

The novel is set in 1982, primarily in California and Oregon, amid the hedonic hangover of the 1960s. The false promises of peace, love and transcendence have given way a chaos of drugs, cults, and violence. Woodstock has become Jonestown. And below the surface, dark government research projects have merged with drug cartels and a technocratic elite to create an underworld like a bad acid trip.

Edwards spends a good portion of the book introducing characters and setting the scene. Cohen, the villain of the piece, is a shadowy government operative, drug-fueled and prone to wanton violence. He is part of a project called MK Omega; an operation to mass produce brainwashed killers by way of horrific psychological torture. Al and Jay are Rhodesian special operations veterans, set adrift by the fall of their homeland to Communism. There are many other characters, some actual historical figures and some fictional. Real: Robert Maxwell, much in the news of late. Michael Aquino, a real life Army psyops officer and dedicated Satanist. Jerry Garcia. Fictional: the brainwashed Satya, the nun Xenia, the shadowy technocrat Engelbart. And the enigmatic roadman, who is perhaps a time traveler, perhaps an angel, perhaps some sort of moral avatar. An honorary character is Orthodox mystic Seraphim Rose, whose death immediately precedes the opening of the book, and whose collected unpublished papers serve as the Macguffin of the novel.

The basic plot is fairly simple. Al and Jay take a job as bagmen for Cohen, and do his bidding until they are given a job too morally repugnant to complete, and then go rogue, with predictable consequences. Up against them are Cohen’s mind-wiped serial killers, drug cartel hit squads, and an American special operator now employed by Cohen.

This sounds like the premise for a shoot-em-up action thriller, but if you come to Crowbar looking for a Mack Bolan novel (look them up, kids, they were awesome!) you are going to be disappointed. The book opens with a quote from Blood Meridian, and McCarthy’s influence on the book is very clear. It is less a straightforward narrative than a painting made from words.

What McCarthy did with the violent Southwestern borderlands of the 19th century, Edwards now does with a time that served as prologue to our own era. The writing is deeply visual, with the meaning buried beneath the imagery. I found myself rereading passages simply so I could enjoy the pictures they created in my mind a second time. Like Blood Meridian, this is a book that improves with multiple readings. Meanings hide inside the images, rather than announcing themselves through dialog or exposition. If you are a person who wants a conventionally told story, this book is not for you.

The universe that McCarthy depicts in Blood Meridian is a harsh one, with God either indifferent or entirely absent. Crowbar, despite the horrifying violence and the glimpses of the hellish world below the surface of modernity, has something Blood Meridian lacks: a core of spirituality and hope. Despite the despair of their past and the dangerous uncertainty of their present, when confronted with something they know instinctively to be wrong, Al and Jay act with morality and honor. Cohen’s world is hell, but the very existence of that world requires the existence of something else.

Crowbar is a 5-star achievement, but it’s not for everyone. It’s best suited for readers who appreciate literary ambition in their thrillers, who want their genre fiction to challenge them formally as well as thematically. If you loved Blood Meridian but wished McCarthy had given you something to hold onto morally, if you’re fascinated by the hidden structures of power and control in modern society, if you believe violence in fiction should be rendered with both artistry and accuracy, then Andrew Edwards has written this book for you. It’s horrifying, beautiful, and deeply unsettling in equal measure.

Bottom line: A 5-star literary thriller with prose as vivid and uncompromising as Blood Meridian but anchored by a moral core, perfect for readers who want their genre fiction to function as art.

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It’s hollowing out the industry like the undead in Dark Souls.

Looking back, Gamergate was a warning shot: a flash-in-the-pan glimpse of who was coming for your vidya, and what they/them intended to do to the industry. For a while, there, it seemed as if the forceful immune response from the 4chan gigabrains—followed by the rise of Big Orange a few years later—had successfully staved off the invaders.

But unfortunately, the invaders persisted, thoroughly infecting and eventually rotting the video game industry from the inside out. The end result?

Far worse than you could’ve possibly imagined.

The Sorry State of the Video Games Industry (or: How to Ignore Your Players for Unfun and Unprofit)

If you’re not deep in the voxel trenches, it’s easy to look at the following chart and conclude that video games are doing better than ever:

The industry has grown a lot in recent years! Player spending is up across the board, and last year saw the release of over 20,000 games on PC alone, in just about every genre imaginable—and more than a few unimaginable genres, for that matter!

And, yet, the industry is laying people off at a record clip. Nearly 45,000 gaming jobs have straight up vanished into the ether over the past three years, and although last year saw layoffs ease a bit (there were “only” 9,175 layoffs in 2025, down from 2024’s 15,631 jobs lost), it’s still a bloodbath, and once-unstoppable AAA juggernauts like EA and Ubisoft are now resorting to taking truckloads of Chinese, Saudi, and PE money up the ass just to stay afloat.

When asked why the industry is in so much trouble, “expert analysts” will cite things like ballooning budgets and live-service failures. Okay, fine—those are all real and partially to blame. However, those are surface symptoms. The industry at large still refuses to recognize the root cause of its woes, even though players can see it clear as day:

AAA developers, especially Western ones, refuse to listen to their core audience.

Who’s this core audience, you ask? Well, just look in the mirror: the young, male, edgy gamers who have always formed the core market for video games despite the industry’s persistent efforts to gaslight us otherwise.

In other words, THE CHUDS.

And what do the chuds want? It’s quite simple, actually:

• Fun games

• Big guns

• Hot chicks

• Epic and tough-as-fuck boss battles

• Space to shout as many insults and slurs as we want at each other in between matches1

and, oh, yeah, let’s not forget—

• FUN GAMES

But what do game developers keep giving us?

• Preachy and annoying narratives

• Forced diversity checkboxes

• Androgynous and/or ugly character design

• Gameplay sacrificed for virtue signaling

a.k.a—

• WOKE BULLSHIT

The chuds obviously want no part in any of that nonsense, so they vote with their crypto wallets and don’t buy these games. Meanwhile, the so-called “mOdErN AuDiEnCe” that this wokeslop presumably appeals to never seems to materialize. Predictably, sales tank, the game flops, the studio closes, and the developers finally go back home to McDonald’s.

The studios that remain never seem to get the fucking hint, because after every flop, fast forward a few months and you somehow see YET ANOTHER woke shitturd release to abysmal sales, Steam review bombs, and boycotts, leading to yet more layoffs and studio closures, repeating the cycle.

As long as game devs refuse to take their heads out of their rectums and listen to what the marketplace is shouting into their ears, then the industry will never recover from the state it finds itself in.

The “Structural Factors” Cope

Making a video game ain’t cheap, and it’s only gotten not-cheaper over the years. Development costs for a AAA title often exceed $200 million, plus another $100 million or so for marketing, plus even more for a live-service game that runs on a never-ending content treadmill. If such a game flops, that’s not a blow that most publishers can absorb. And if several such games flop? That can tank even the biggest operations in gaming.

Industry analysts will often blame publishers chasing live-service games. This is mostly cope. As proof, consider that many Asian studios have recently pumped out several highly successful live-service titles, directly refuting that hypothesis.

Oh, yeah!—short aside—speaking of Asia: most of what I said about the sorry state of gaming really only applies to the Western industry. The Eastern games industry is popping off right now. They keep pumping out hit after hit, going on hiring sprees, and making deeper inroads into Western markets year after year.

Alright, so what is the difference between Western and Eastern studios?

Well, these same analysts will point out that hiring Asian developers costs way less than Western developers, once again, positing a structural diagnosis.

Are you getting tired of the cope, anon?

I will concede that, yes, this lower cost confers a massive buff to Eastern developers. But like any explanation described as “structural,” you should take it with a huge spoonful of salt and dig a few layers deeper.

Turns out: Eastern studios aren’t beholden to DEI/ESG mandates that actively impede the creation of games that center player-tested and player-approved entertainment.

The studios hardest hit by layoffs recently—almost all of which are Western studios—are the ones that, because of the aforementioned ESG mandates from investors like Vanguard and BlackRock; which acquired massive stakes in Western studios at firesale prices; and most shamelessly chased the “mOdErN AuDiEnCe” with preachy horseslop instead of iterating on what players actually wanted: tight gameplay, attractive character designs, and escapist stories free of activist agendas.

This DEI push, facilitated by subversive “cultural consultancies” like Sweet Baby Inc., compelled AAA teams to ignore the critical feedback loops that indies and Asian studios rely on, leading to multiple billion-dollar misfires. As a result, the Western gaming industry is in its death throes despite record global spending, because Western output increasingly fails to resonate with its players.

At this point, you may be wondering why nobody at these studios puts the brakes on the circlejerk. Surely, somebody within the +10k-person-strong team typical at a AAA studio must have realized this crap wasn’t going to sell. Why didn’t they just suggest listening to what the players were clearly trying to tell them?

Unfortunately, those people simply don’t exist inside Western AAA studios anymore. Yes, you read that correctly: the people whose job it is to listen to market pressures and adjust company strategy mostly don’t work for the company. The few that do have very good reasons to keep their mouths shut.

Ever since the blue-haired brigade embedded itself in the games industry during the 2010s, a culture of toxic positivity has metastasized and subsumed the AAA space. Honest feedback, leet alone genuine criticism, is discouraged and actively punished. The true believers in the cult of spiritual equality instinctively write off all player criticism as bigoted.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a dive.

The Vidya Woke Slop Hall-of-Shame

I could sit here all day long and tell you how bad things really are, and continue showing you a bajillion more graphs and figures that drive my point him. Unfortunately, this would only appeal to the pasty-skinned math nerds who have trouble holding controllers.

Instead, let me drive the point home by showing you examples of what developers in the past decade thought “players would flock to.”

Without further ado:

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Hacking Galileo (*FREE*)

by Fenton Wood

A story untold for over 30 years...

Teenage hacker Roger O. Miller made national headlines when he was arrested for hacking into NASA computers and hijacking an interplanetary probe. He told the authorities a wild story about a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Eventually, he recanted and admitted that he fabricated the whole thing.

Or did he?

I sat on this for a while because the cover looks boring and the book description has too many layers to send a clear signal. So let this be the signal: read this book. It’s a blast.

A gang of teenage boys pull pranks with electronics and get in trouble. That produces a couple of fun little anecdotes, but then they try to bounce a radio signal off Mars and we really start cooking. Because it’s not Mars that returns their signal. It’s something older, and worse. - Dan

The Powers of the Earth (Aristillus Book 1)

by Travis J. I. Corcoran (Author)

PROMETHEUS AWARD WINNER “BEST NOVEL” 2018

Earth in 2064 is politically corrupt and in economic decline. The Long Depression has dragged on for 56 years, and the Bureau of Sustainable Research is hard at work making sure that no new technologies disrupt the planned economy. Ten years ago a band of malcontents, dreamers, and libertarian radicals bolted privately-developed anti-gravity drives onto rusty sea-going cargo ships, loaded them to the gills with 20th-century tunnel-boring machines and earthmoving equipment, and set sail – for the Moon.

What a book! I haven't felt this way since I read The Martian. And like The Martian, Forces is idiosyncratic in a way you wouldn't see in mainstream science fiction. There are two stories, one about an exiled soldier hiking on the moon with a pack of illegal uplifted dogs, the other about the libertarian misanthrope who helped found the moon colony and must now overcome his antisocial nature to build his home's defenses against an upcoming invasion from Earth.

The novel doesn't do what you'd expect. It neither begins nor ends where an agent or editor or writers' workshop instructor would recommend. It's just utterly enthralling, because it's a labor of love. Corcoran loves Brin and Heinlein. He loves engineering and dogs. He loves playing with the toys he's made, and he's sharing them with you. This is everything fiction should be. Endless thanks to Jane Psmith for recommending this book. - Dan

Starquest: Catburglar of the Constellations

by John C. Wright

Crime flourishes amid the core stars. The most cunning phantom thief of all, the Merry Catburglar, can walk through walls, see through security, and not be caught! But when she encounters the masked and black robed Faceless Man, First of the Four Dark Overlords, she faces a menace beyond mortal!

This is the third book of the Starquest Series and it goes down like popcorn. Maybe buffalo wings. It’s tighter and more consistent than book two, and does a better job of weaving the big plot arcs around the central story (about a jewel heist). Risking a spoiler: a whole sequence of events I thought was a flashback to the distant past…wasn’t! Awesome. - Dan

This week we were joined by . Noah & the crew covered many topics ranging from governance principles derived from Natural Law; to the role AI plays in effective entrepreneurship; to the fundamentals of manipulation and cognitive immunity – and most importantly the current plight(s) of the sensitive, young man in the West – including the social & developmental challenges that characterize modern fatherhood.

Noah Revoy | Coach, Author, Public Speaker

A collection of my best writing on self improvement and lately, AI.

Welcome to All Hands on Deck—a special podcast for Tortuga Society members and Tortuga Media paychads.

These are recordings of Tortuga’s biweekly standup calls, in which our guys convene to update the group on progress with job stacking and assorted ventures, theorycraft business ideas, and shoot the shit on issues of the day.

Most episodes will be available to paid subscribers — our spicer discussions will be exclusive to full Tortuga Society Members.

Topics Include:

• Introduction of Noah Revoy

• Noah Revoy's Personal Mission and Career Shift

• Noah’s Published Works and Current Focus

• Personal Crisis and Rebirth

• The Path to Recovery

• Noah’s Work on understanding Manipulation and Psychological Violence

• Fifth-Generation Warfare and Aggression Types

• Developing Cognitive Defense Against Manipulation

• Manipulation, Natural Law, and Masculine Skill Sets

• Reality, Morality, and Social Immune System

• Entrepreneurship and Ethical Cooperation

• Reciprocity and Long-Term Relationships

• Post-Nation State Dynamics and the Ethical Pirate

• Technology, Isolation, and the Lure of "Junk Food"

• The Future of Social Media and Policy

• The Need for a New Direction

• Tortuga's Origins and Thriving Beyond Survival

• Parenting, Disgust, and Conscious Awareness

• Imposter Syndrome and Responsibility

• Overcoming Self-Doubt

• Noah’s Predictions for the Future

• Future Demographic and Economic Shifts

• China's Population Challenges and Geopolitical Strategy

• India's Potential and Internal Divisions

• Population Size as a Detriment and Secession Incentives

• Critique of the European Union and Common Currency

• Political Shift in the European Union

• Career Opportunities in AI Governance and Engineering

• Introduction of the Metafather Program

• Structure and Purpose of the Metafather Program

• Contact Information and Future Projects

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Being a seasoned Job Stacker, it’s also incumbent upon me to dispel any notion that job stacking is an entirely easy enterprise. In fact, today, job stacking has become one of the more difficult employment strategies to pull-off effectively (assuming you’re even of the caliber to land two remote positions).

What ensues are five reasons you SHOULD NOT Job Stack. If you want the solutions to these problems — you’ll have to pay me or become a fully fledged Tortuga Member.

The Reasons You SHOULD NOT Job Stack Are:

The Bullshit Jobs Era is Over

You Can’t Handle the Cognitive Load

You Don’t Have Thick Skin

You Don’t Have Grand Ambitions (Business / Art / Exit Plan)

You Have No True Männerbund

1. The Bullshit Jobs Era is Over

It’s the year 2021 and the market is flush with fully remote juicy sinecure positions. The hiring process is fast-paced, managers are eager to create new positions, and having a STEM or adjacent degree has never been better. Covid stimmies are flowing and the market is booming — our beloved corporations are looking to maximize profits for their shareholders. In this funny money environment — the easiest way to do so is to market just how much your vaporware nonsense enterprise specializing in extracting an additional 2 seconds of screen time from dopamine laden teens’ eyeballs is growing.

So they went on a hiring spree…

Now did they actually need 90% of these new positions? Not at all. But for the intelligent among us, this was an incredible opportunity: a surplus of high-paying remote jobs that asked little of us sans an occasional Tableau report or ad-hoc SQL query. The true glory days of job stacking…

The first reason you shouldn’t job stack is that this halcyon era of yore has long since ended. There are many reasons for this: the Fed’s raising of interest rates, the rise of AI, and deeper policy decisions rearing their ugly heads.1

Remote jobs are increasingly rare and there’s more competition than ever for the few that remain.

2

3

These trends on their own are bad enough but the situation get’s much worse when you realize these few remote full-time positions are far from “bullshit”. Even if you’re able to beat the odds and land two of them they will be a far cry from the sinecure’s of 2021.

Over the past three years in particular, layoffs have been massive and the positions that remain are increasingly asked to do more with less staff. In 2021 your particular data analysis department may have had 11 team members to split the work requests that came in. In 2026, that department likely now consists of only four team members to take care of that same workload.

Take it from me; I’ve had my two fully remote positions for over two years now and they keep me busy the entire eight hour day (and occasionally some weekend time as well). Now let me be clear — this is an amazing setup and I make well over $300k now. My wife doesn’t have to work, I was able to help my parents retire, will be able to purchase a nice house with 60% down soon and I’ve gone on some amazing trips — all thanks to job stacking.

So if you aren’t a particularly agentic intelligent guy — job stacking is most likely out of the realm of possibility for you. It ain’t 2021 anymore bucko.

2. You Can’t Handle the Cognitive Load

Here’s the thing: Job Stacking is more about juggling identities than it is about juggling tasks. A simple way to understand this is by thinking about your current role. What would it look like if you doubled the work load? Obviously, it would be a straightforward 2x increase. This isn’t the case with job stacking — it’s more like a 2.5x increase in work load.

Why?

Because we aren’t just doubling the work that needs to be performed; we’re also doubling the identities we’ll need to slip in and out of. Job A will have its own set of team members, applications/software, exigencies, meeting schedules, etc… as will Job B.

You will need to context switch multiple times every day. You will need to manage priorities among the two jobs every day. You will be held accountable by two different bosses every day.

You will need to persistently manage your calendars and block time off to avoid the dreaded double meeting and sometimes this will fail. The true mark of a pro job stacker is how many double meetings he’s survived… the left headphone attached to a meeting in Job A, the right to a meeting for Job B — engaging in the terrifying dance of remaining muted for each as long as possible and listening assiduously for your name to be called. Better make sure when you unmute for Job B you remain muted for Job A… there are many horror stories of stackers getting caught this way. 4

Best of luck to you if one or god forbid both meetings require cameras on (you best be quick on your feet for some improvisational excuses).

3. You Don’t Have Thick Skin

Invariably, if you have 2+ remote jobs you’ll encounter a time or two where you’re unable to deliver on all your workload for one reason or another. This is where you must have thick-skin and be able to stand your ground.

Concerning the matter of getting scolded by your manager(s) this will happen. If you’re going to job stack you must be able to roll with the punches. This can be especially difficult to handle if you’re a highly conscientious person. Should this occur, you’ll need to be a man about it and take responsibility for the mistake (best to have some excuse but suggest you could’ve avoided said excuse and will next time).

Beyond getting scolded there’s the larger importance of being able to stand your ground. In order to job stack effectively you need to protect your time as much as possible. When you block out time on your calendar and a higher-up schedules over it you need to be able to (professionally & politely) stand your ground that, that time is off limits. The moment you budge is the moment your superiors and team members lose any respect for your time. 5

Seriously, don’t be a pussy — you must protect your time.

See point number 2 again for the consequences of the damnable double meeting.

4. You Don’t Have Grand Ambitions (Business / Art / Exit Plan)

For many here at Tortuga we call Job Stacking “The Final Boss” of their professional ambitions. They start as lowly barnacles, work their way through the bootcamp, land their first hybrid tech position, accumulate some skills & connections through their work and Tortuga’s network, then land their first remote position with our staffing firm, finally securing their second and joining the rank of Captain.

Here’s the thing though…

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I got out of the Publishing Industry in 2022.

On spring break in the middle of COVID lockdowns, my wife and I were on a mission to escape from our apartment and decompress in the Balkan spa-and-winery complex of Starosel. Unfortunately, so was half the population of Sofia.

Just imagine us after a year and a half of being cooped up: with a grandmother, a great-grandmother, a grandfather with Alzheimer’s, a pod of feuding aunts (great and small), and, of course, our kids. We distance-learned, we zoom-met, we face-masked, balcony-clapped, hand-sanitized, and mourned — yes — the death of a great-great-grandmother. Picture my wife and me on the other side of all of that, in a pool filled with half the population of Bulgaria’s capital, attempting to swim.1

One fine day, as I stepped out of the scalding water, trying not to sneeze where anyone could hear, I received this email from my literary agent: “We just got informed that our contact at AWA has left … I do have someone else to query over there but I don’t want you to put in more energy if it won’t pay off.”

AWA was supposed to be a cooperative of comic-book artists and writers. I was going to write one of their story ideas set in Russia with a Russian artist I already knew, but two days after the invasion of Ukraine, our contact had “moved away from the project.” I was organizing classes for refugees, and my friend was getting ready to escape the Motherland, but you’d better move away from the project, Jen. Don’t want to offend anyone in Brooklyn.

I wasn’t upset, but I did feel a certain fatigue, a certain disgust. This “online comic co-operative” had never been a real business. The people pretending to run it weren’t serious. Neither was my agent. Now, I cast no aspersions on this woman, who sent me a bouquet after my colostomy. She was being a good person, but she wasn’t trying to make money. Like everyone else in the Industry, she wasn’t actually in the business of selling books.

The Con’s VIP Room

Back in 2019, my agent sold my debut novel2 to Flametree, a small British press with a line of artsy notebooks that wanted to expand into fiction. They offered very little editing and negligible marketing, but this was standard. Of course a manuscript must be “polished” before a publisher will even consider looking at it, and as for marketing: “the real work begins after you finish the novel. Nobody can market your book better than you.”

What the publisher did offer was copyediting, typesetting, cover art and design, printing, and distribution, a thousand bucks in advance, and most importantly, legitimacy.

With Flametree’s logo and ISBN on my book, I was a Published Author. I got a Kirkus review and an audiobook deal (twice the advance for the print edition). At sci-fi conventions, I could now access certain rooms. A closed web forum was no longer closed to me. Some people, if approached through the right channels, would even speak to me.

Capisce?

One such publishing elite was Sheila. She was a big enough name in the Industry that a meeting with her alone justified my tickets to EasterCon. She began our one-on-one brunch with the story of a cover artist her publishing house had once employed, who had said, in public, that he supported George W. Bush.

Well.

They never worked with him again.

Sheila did not look me in the eye and say, “capisce?” but I got the message.

Now, I did not vote for Bush. I was a well-brought-up young man. I went to a liberal arts college. I knew to face the blade of the butter knife inward when setting the table, and I could be heir to a vast network of favor and patronage. To get access to people like Sheila, I just needed to believe the right things, amuse my superiors, and, I thought, perform competently. That was back in the 2010s. How little I knew.

Take it or Leave It

If Sheila had agreed to publish me, would I have made my characters capital-B Black? Invented some Queer aliens? Maybe liquidated some bourgeoisie? I like to think I’m above peer pressure, but in reality, I would have tried to toe the party line. I would have torn myself up inside as the Party grew more demanding and the Line swept leftward. Probably, like most of my cohort, I would have just stopped writing.

You can’t let inspiration shine through you and self-censor at the same time. Many people choose censorship, and I can’t blame them. They live in a country where you can lose your job for writing something that makes the wrong person laugh. Americans brag about going “zero-contact” with crime-thinking family members. I, on the other hand, am lucky to live in Bulgaria, where I am self-employed and married to a woman who knows what Socialism does to people.

It’s a good thing, I suppose, that Sheila didn’t choose me. She had her own problems, and although it was independent at the time, her publishing house was soon purchased by a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Beijing-based media group. My own publisher would go on to become a “strategic partner” of Hachette, one of the Big Five that consolidated the market in the last thirty years. They monetize IPs, exploit backlists, and acquire portfolios of assets. They don’t, you’ll notice, sell books.

The Industry Doesn’t Work

Books, to the Industry, are at best investment instruments, at worst tokens in a financial shell game. Flametree, angling for strategic partners to woo, bought the rights to a sequel before my first book had sold a single copy, and insisted this time on the audio rights, too. They had no intention of producing an audiobook, but they wanted an Excel graph they could point to when Hachette came calling.

I wrote them their sequel.

My agent told me it was better to accept a bad deal than suffer a yearlong gap in my publishing resume, so I performed. I whipped up a novel in the time it took my editor to respond to one of my emails (6 months), and it was better than the first one. But, when the sales numbers came in, wouldn’t you know it? The line between books one and two trended down. Potential acquirers wouldn’t like that.

No more book offers from Flametree. “The numbers just don’t justify it,” said the guys with a two-point trend-line. Those statistical stallions.

My agent pressed the dull point home:

“So … what we’ve come to here is a challenging part in your career… what you really need to do is find your audience, and I would recommend delaying taking out any manuscripts until we’ve successfully done that.”

No, she wasn’t officially firing me. She would just no longer take on my work until … I was back in the graces of the flattening tastemakers.

You Work

My reply was obvious, but it took me six months to muster up the bravery to actually say it. For half a year – one editor-reply-period – I wondered if I should give up.

Instead I asked my question:

“If I do learn how to market and sell my own books to my own audience, what do I need you for?”

My agent’s answer was the standard one: cover art, printing, distribution. Except I know people who make better cover art than anything you see on traditional books. Amazon POD makes it too easy to print and distribute your books. And that’s the kindergarten level. The real elite self-publishers are capable of paying editors, artists, and designers, and signing contracts with printers and book distributors.

It’s been four years since then, and I’ve wandered the wilderness hard.3 Now I’m here to tell you, in the most grizzled way possible, why the Industry is in ruins, and what we have to build instead.

The Great and Powerful Backlist

My agent didn’t mention legitimacy. That would have been gauche, and, by 2022, a little embarrassing. Other people have already written about the Industry’s vicious purity tests, its smothering ideological monoculture, its systemic exclusion of young, white men. That’s all true, but paints too cheery a picture. If the Publishing Industry were merely a gray Marxist yoke across the necks of suffering writers, it might produce some books worth reading.

For the true scope of the desolation, see U.S. v. Bertelsmann SE & CO. KGaA, et al., in which the US Justice Department blocked the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. The court documents show us some of what’s going in Big 5 executives’ minds and on their spreadsheets.

Markus Dohle, then-CEO of Penguin Random House, testified that, “Publishers are ‘angel investors’ that ‘invest every year in thousands of ideas and dreams, and only a few make it to the top.’”4 That sounds reasonable, even poetic, until you remember that there is a whole industry of angel investors, and Dohle isn’t part of it. Real angel investors take equity stakes. 21st century Big 5 executives latch onto the accumulated capital of a century of work, and they suck it dry.

They don’t say so, of course. In the words of Madeline McIntosh, the other former-CEO of Penguin Random House: “The fact that we [Penguin Random House] have the largest and richest backlist in the industry is what gives us the latitude to take risks with new acquisitions every day.”5

Penguin Random House published George Orwell, Roald Dahl and P.G. Wodehouse, authors who are all still famous and all – as of this piece – still dead. That means the publisher doesn’t have to send anyone a cut of the profit. Those old books are much better assets than the works of an untested, unpredictable (and un-dead?) living author. If Dahl’s wicked sense of humor offends the current crop of readers, why, there’s always censorship.

So, You Want to Be an Orwell

Where did that backlist come from, Madeline? Dahl, Orwell, and Wodehouse were at one point dumb kids who couldn’t write. They learned how, yes, because of deep desires burning in their bosoms, but why novels? Why didn’t Dahl write intelligence reports, Orwell op-eds, and Wodehouse newspaper columns? They thought someone might buy their books.

But if you are a new Dahl or Orwell today, and you want someone to buy your books …

They won’t.

“Books below [expected sales over 25,000 units or advances over $150,000] received ‘only a contact in the publicity department, smaller book tours (if any), and limited media engagement.’” (p. 34-35)

So don’t quit your day job, kid. You won’t get any marketing or editing unless you have a six-figure advance, and you won’t get a six-figure advance, because the Big 5 actively fix prices (p. 14-15). It’s easy to collude when there are only five of you.

This was all still in 2022. In 2023, Simon & Schuster was sold by Paramount to private equity firm KKR for $1.62 billion. “Sorry, boys,” says Paramount, “the numbers just don’t justify keeping you.”

What Seed Corn?

Remember that time wise old Stephen King rose up and issued this fiery, scathing rebuke?

It’s all in the facial expression and tone of voice. You had to be there.6

In other words, the traditional publishing industry is a hollow shell. The Five Biggies can squeeze their big-name authors living and dead, and they don’t need anybody else.

Let’s say it takes seven years for a writer to train up to the point where he’s good enough to write a best-selling novel. Let’s also say that people don’t train for seven years unless they have some incentive to do so. Industry executives have removed that incentive. Now, as the 20th century’s last crop of big names die, there is nobody left to write anything.

What new books have you enjoyed in the last ten years? Did you find them easily?

I didn’t.

The authors we grew up on have lost their minds, sold their souls, or given up on writing at all. Because why should they write?

Publishers don’t sell their books.

These are the numbers for store sales of physical books published by the top ten Anglosphere publishers in 2022. Yes, third largest category is fewer than 12 books sold, but that’s not the worst part. If we lump this embarrassing figure in with the largest category, we find that 56.1% of new books in the core of traditional publishing’s competence (paper books in brick-and-mortar stores) sell fewer than a thousand copies. For comparison, a thousand copies is half the average print run in the Czech Republic. A thousand copies is essentially none at all.

And here are revenues from book sales. That trendline since 2008 doesn’t look so good. Not something I’d put on my resume, if I’d done that. The picture gets worse if you compare 2024 to 1992. 1992 saw A Fire Upon the Deep and Snow Crash, while 2024 gave us the stultifying The Mercy of Gods as well as Womb City, which apparently has “gender-expansive feminist rage.”

Just copy-pasting that last quote depressed me, but there’s good news. We no longer have to face the choice between toeing the party line and starving out in the cold. You think the Party has food and heat for you? The Industry doesn’t sell books, it can’t sell books. It’s in ruins. You might as well learn to like the great outdoors, because now, that’s where everyone lives.

The Outer Darkness

We’re in good company. Just in the past two years I’ve had the privilege of reading new books that work, whose authors held out against witch hunts, dopamine addiction, and the utter lack of any financial incentive. John C. Wright emerged from the contempt Tor gave him to write series after series of big-idea adventures that don’t just refrain from punishing, but actively celebrate the male reader. Travis J.I. Corcoran indulges my Randian fantasies of just floating away from the oppressive managerial state, and Karl K. Gallagher gives the Censor a good drubbing for me. Theft of Fire is actually hot. And that’s just in scifi. To really get me in trouble, ask me about my taste in contemporary literary fiction.7

Since my own exit, I’ve self-published books that would never have stood a chance in trad-pub, about such things as Christian terrorists, Pagan cults, and a disastrous pet-napping heist run out of the kitchen of an inter-species UN. I kickstarted a comic about an “Anglo” boy who teams up with a Haitian shaman to free his people in a post-apocalyptic future.8 My collaborators on that project come from three different countries and we agree about nothing politically, but that’s not what matters. What matters is that the story works, the art is beautiful, and our project was 200% funded in less than a day, at $20,000.

The Lost Reader

Good for me, but where can you buy those books? You have to sift through Royal Road or, God help you, Kindle Unlimited to find them. The Kickstarter is closed, and you can’t even buy that Haitian shaman comic.

There used to be a time when you could go to a library, run your fingers down the line of plastic-encased book spines, snag the one with a rocket ship sticker, and open it with a better-than-even chance of liking what was inside. Now, you spend hours every week reading book reviews, hitting up your friends for recommendations, trying to prompt around an AI’s political guardrails so it will tell you whether the latest BookTok craze is actually agitprop9 or just very badly written.

What readers need is a filter between them and the great mass of writing. They need someone with the taste to discriminate between good and bad, and the authority to apply it. This trust is in high demand, but currently unmet: an opportunity.

The writers I recommended above are all independent, but I’ve heard of them because they’ve built structures around themselves like little publishing houses. Devon Eriksen created an LLC to hire specialists for editing, art, audio, and distribution. Karl Gallagher and his wife started a family company. They actually sell books.

Back to Work

In a way, the marketers were right. The real work does begin after the book is finished. The question is, who is working for whom? And for what? You made this story and readers need this story, but somebody has to build the bridge between them.

1. First, take your writing seriously. Would you write a manuscript and then file it away in a cabinet in your house? That’s a hobby. Would you write a manuscript and fire it through a cannon directly into the brains of all your neighbors? That’s a profession. You love your reader and you know what’s good for them, which is to read your books.

   Books that you have to write. Every day. Finish that novel and start the next one. Then stop, keep some energy aside for the necessary work of paying invoices, interviewing marketers, and carrying heavy boxes back and forth from the post office. Twenty percent of your work should support the other eighty percent.

2. Find the overlap between what you like doing and what makes money. Too much of the first and you’re back in hobby territory again, designing one alien lifeform or alternate-history language after another, to the interest of nobody. Too much of the other, and you’ll teach yourself to hate your art and you’ll burn out. You got to do both.

3. Get good.10 Fall upon every information source like a starving corsair and steal every piece of good advice you can find. After that, Thomas Umstattd’s AI tools are multifarious and well worth the $10 price of subscription. Go to the “AI Thomas” tool and ask “what are all the steps I need to go through from finished manuscript to printed book in the purchaser’s hands?” Then just do it.

4. Finally, once you’ve got yourself figured out, find people you can trust and work with them. Both of those are important, too: trust and work. Potential readers trust you when they agree to add their emails to your mailing list.11 Fans trust you when they open your next book. Your cover-artist trusts you not to fire him when you find out who he voted for. All of you share in the belief that the next book you write will be worth spending time on.

It’s sad that the publishers aren’t publishing and the editors aren’t editing. Sad, but no longer important. We’re still reading. We’re still writing. That’s why we’re lucky.

They made us walk the plank, but it turns out their ship was sinking. And constructed mostly of spreadsheets and loud opinions. We don’t have to put up with that nonsense any more. We can build something real here, as we swim with half the population of the world.

Welcome to All Hands on Deck—a special podcast for Tortuga Society members and Tortuga Media paychads.

These are recordings of Tortuga’s biweekly standup calls, in which our guys convene to update the group on progress with job stacking and assorted ventures, theorycraft business ideas, and shoot the shit on issues of the day.

Most episodes will be available to paid subscribers — our spicer discussions will be exclusive to full Tortuga Society Members.

Topics Include:

• Quarter 1 Newsletter and Substack Growth

• Ports of Tortuga Initiative Launch

• Website Overhaul Project

• 's Professional Update & Additional Contributions

• ’s Novel and Publishing Update

• 's Training and Project Work

• 's Rental House Progress

• Discussion on Leveraging Repair Skills

• 's Electronics Investigation and the Chips Act

• Test Tutoring as a Business Opportunity

• Discussion on HBD and Intelligence Selection

• Genetics, Environment, and Social Ramifications

• The Prerequisite for HBD Debate

• Continuity of Differences and Taxonomy

• Identity and the Term "Latino"

• European DNA in American Indians and Cultural Tracking

• Validation of Older Anthropological Ideas

• Eugenics and Societal Development

• Update on Claude Document and Philosophy Cafe

• Overview of the Qualia Bootstrapping Problem

• The Qualia Bootstrapping Problem and Epistemological Conflict

• Proposed Solution via Expectation Maximization Algorithm

• Criterion for Synchronization and Experience of Imminence

• Challenges and Bias in Resolving the Problem

• Converging Formal Models and Phenomenological Experience

• Ports of Tortuga Survey is below the PayWall!

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Hello Tortugans, and a good morning to those passing through our shores today.

Today, we bring to you our second official newsletter; you can check out our previous one here.

This winter has been full of challenges, and our crew is excited to melt away our old troubles and seek some greener vistas in the upcoming months.

As usual, we will we share all the wins we’ve been accumulating, and also share some of our plans that are soon to come to fruition.

The Captain’s Log

This section provides General Updates and an Overall Summary.

I was the first landlubber to jump aboard and join The Tortuga Society nearly two years ago… We had a litany of naysayers & doubters, we were called scammers, we were told our little fantasy group of raiders would never amount to anything.

How we’ve proven them wrong mates!

Nearly two years — it’s hard for your humble Captain to believe. We’ve come so far and where are those same scallywags now? Our crew has filled their coffers with stacks of cash, we’ve successfully placed our bilge rats in high paying roles, four of these pitiless Bucs have written & published novels on our site, and our Pirate hideaway now boasts over 180 members.

It’s been an incredible privilege & honor to serve as your captain you Scurvy Dog Hornswogglin' Scoundrels!

On a personal note: Your playboy wench enjoying Captain is now a married man & a father — how the times have changed lads.

-Theon Ultima

Crew Victories

This section is dedicated to Recent Tortuga Member Wins.

Have a win to share? Post it in our Telegram chat, or message one of the Captains or Admins to be featured.

Captain Codebeard

• Released a recipe app: “My app can import recipes from anything! Snap a picture, and boom — you have a searchable recipe.”

• Officially began job-stacking this past quarter!

• Started yet another job; this time as data science contractor.

Wonder

• Secured a job that pays 50% more using Tortuga’s professional resources.

Council Victories

This section is dedicated to Recent Tortuga Admin Wins.

Want to contribute to larger organizational efforts? Have specific questions about internal progress or highlights? Send us a message, or post a comment or question on this post.

• We welcomed 17 new members into our society since our last newsletter.

• We gained 150+ new subscribers to Tortuga Media in, including many paid subscribers, putting us close to the coveted 1K mark.

• We have successfully hosted many talented individuals as a part of our “Special Guest Stand-Up Calls”.

  • These include , , , and

  • We’re have quite a few openings for upcoming special guests, so if you’re interested chatting with the guys, please get in touch.

• We recently formed a brand new Tortuga Privy Council that will be closely supporting the admin team in its endeavors moving forward. The individuals chosen have demonstrate great loyalty and enthusiasm toward Tortuga’s endeavors. They include:

  • and : Head of Tortuga’s publishing and creative writing efforts

  • and : Head of Tortuga’s technology stack and technical learning materials

  • : Tortuga’s marketing lead

  • : Tortuga’s chief business and academic advisor

• We are now hosting many of our published authors’ works on our website. Please check out these excellent novels and support their ongoing creative work.

Great Posts From The Crew

Below are listed some of the best essays & podcasts from Tortuga members over the past several weeks.

The Proper Attitude for Prose Stylists –

Krug argues that the MFA workshop culture of agonizing over every word has quietly strangled English prose, and that the right model for a serious writer isn't the painstaking craftsman but the improvisational musician — someone who has internalized the instrument so deeply that thought and expression become one. A rich, inspiring manifesto for writers who actually want to write.

Costco’s Secret Weapon –

Professor Axelrod makes the sharp and underappreciated case that Costco's true competitive advantage over Walmart isn't the hot dogs or the membership loyalty loop — it's that the membership model functions as an anti-theft mechanism, quietly shielding them from the retail "shrinkage" epidemic that has gutted their competitors in an era of decriminalized shoplifting. Funny, sharp, and more politically observant than a piece about bulk toilet paper has any right to be.

You Should Be Shooting More Karens, Anon –

Bingo Bobbins brings spicy and salacious interpretation to the events that transpired in Minneapolis leading to Rene Good’s timely end.

The 1911 Project –

Tom Swift diagnoses the modern West as intellectually post-Classic: drowning in data but incapable of the serious, standards-driven debate that animated the Victorian educated class. He proposes a “Great Restoration” anchored in classical formation, honest epistemic standards across the ideological spectrum, and the pursuit of two civilizational frontiers — the deep ocean and space — as the engines that will drive the next heroic age.

Mayor Mamdani’s Zoomette Art Hoe Wife Found Liking Nick Fuentes Clips on Instagram –

A short, sharp piece of gonzo gossip reporting on NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani's wife Rama Duwaji, whose anonymous Instagram account was allegedly caught deep in a Nick Fuentes like-spree. Ringleader delivers the scoop with maximum irreverence and minimum restraint — and yes, Fuentes did respond on Signal."

I’m Going to Have Sex With My Bitcoin –

CSW goes full cryptorotica in this deranged and surprisingly coherent love letter to Bitcoin — tracing the full arc of western sexual liberation from boomers to furries to AI, before arriving at his inevitable conclusion: that BTC, scarce, volatile, ungovernable, and immune to sweet talk, is the perfect postmodern lover. Diamond hands as foreplay; the blockchain as wedding vows.

Debunking Alex Nowrasteh’s Research on Immigrant Assimilation –

Simon L takes a scalpel to the Cato Institute's widely-cited claim that immigrants politically assimilate by the 2nd or 4th generation, exposing a fatal methodological flaw

Five Things to Do Before You Buy the Ring –

Noah Revoy makes the sharp observation that modern courtship unfolds almost entirely inside comfort — restaurants, couches, climate-controlled rooms — meaning couples often marry a version of each other that only exists when everything is going well. His antidote: five deliberately stressful pre-engagement tests designed to strip away the courtship mask and reveal actual character before you put a ring on it.

Fiddler’s Green (Chapter 1) –

Nemesis Fiction has begun serializing The 13th grades’ novel, Fiddler’s Green. The book begins with common Western tropes, but those who have read the first chapter will have realized that the Old West of the novel is not the Old West we are familiar with. Texas is an independent nation, at war in Mexico, and Colorado is in another country. An alternate history.

How to Read the Bible –

Top Shelf Theology serves Catholic catechesis with a Cape Cod in hand, arguing that biblical literalism and smug New Atheism are two sides of the same dim coin, while walking through the rich symbolic numerology embedded in scripture — sevens mean covenant, sixes mean failure, forties mean suffering — and wrapping it all up with a surprisingly illuminating tangent on why soldiers rubbed olive oil on themselves before battle, which is exactly why we anoint kings and priests today.

What a French Nobleman Learned From a Tribe of Cannibals (That We Still Haven’t) –

Aion Armstrong takes Montaigne's 1580s essay "On the Cannibals" apart stitch by stitch, asking whether the philosopher was making a genuine case that European "civilization" was more barbaric than the Tupi cannibals of Brazil — or just running the most elaborate Renaissance shitpost in history.

Of Wizards and Walrus-Men –

Daniel M. Bensen delivers a punchy February book roundup from Bulgaria, dispensing with Games People Play (true but stale), praising the first three volumes of Bakker's Second Apocalypse while diagnosing the series as the purest specimen of Gen X nihilism — great at tearing things down, useless at building anything back up.

Butterfly Effect –

joined host to discuss the Solar counterpoint to their previous discussions’ Lunar Donnie Darko — exploring the theme of the limits of Male Agency.

Friends of Tortuga

Below are listed some of the best reads from friends and allies of Tortuga over the past several weeks.

Your Gym Should be a Temple – by

A Short History of the Gender Wars – by

Stranger In a Strangeland – by

Conservative breeding revolution: not happening - by

The Cathedral & the Ceiling: Coordination Technologies & Conservative Art - by

Molested by Elite Human Capital in Mexico City – by The Calipers

Upcoming Horizons

This section provides a glimpse of our Short-Term Roadmap.

The Tortuga Society has grown and transformed a lot since our initial days! To that end, we are finally planning to expand into the real world this year. The digital world is enticing, but our job is to make both the internet and the physical world a fun place to occupy.

1. We are officially launching The Ports of Tortuga.

   The Ports of Tortuga is an initiative designed to foster local connections and meetups among Tortuga Society members.

   That’s right – we will be hosting our first in person meetups this year. Our privy council is working hard to coordinate with select crew members to kickoff some great in-person activities. (Tortuga members can find the survey behind the paywall at the end of this article)

2. We are in the midst of planning an official Tortuga Publishing platform.

   Tortuga Publishing is here to identify once-in-a-generation literary talent and help them level up both their skills and their sales

   Tortuga has a desire to move beyond just simply featuring great works. We want to be a place where talented guys can get the help they need to launch the creative side of their lives.

You’ll hear more about both of these efforts in the upcoming months.

Closing Notes From Tortuga’s Leaders

Damn it feels good to be a Tortugan — we’ve got so much on the horizon mates. If you’re not a full member yet what’re you waiting for? Reach out to me a Theonultima@tortugasociety.biz if you have any questions.

Pluribus Inservimus!

— Theon & Rajeev

Ports of Tortuga Survey For Full Members!

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Welcome to All Hands on Deck—a special podcast for Tortuga Society members and Tortuga Media paychads.

These are recordings of Tortuga’s biweekly standup calls, in which our guys convene to update the group on progress with job stacking and assorted ventures, theorycraft business ideas, and shoot the shit on issues of the day.

Most episodes will be available to paid subscribers — our spicer discussions will be exclusive to full Tortuga Society Members.

Topics Include:

• Introduction and Announcement of Ports of Tortuga — Tortuga’s distributed local get together infrastructure

• ’s Writing and Publishing Update

• ’s Staffing and Personal Focus

• ’s Marketing and Website Development

• Tortuga Stand-up Call Schedule Change (First call of the week alternates Tuesday 8pm est then Monday 6:30pm est.)

• First Writer Workshop Call Announcement - lead by

• Discussion on Current Events (The Straits and US Politics)

• ’s Gaming Projects

• Tortugan Engagement with Platforms

• Substack Engagement Preferences

• Future Strategy for Tortuga Platforms

• Appreciation for Special Guest Calls

• Value of Call Archives

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Welcome to All Hands on Deck—a special podcast for Tortuga Society members and Tortuga Media paychads.

These are recordings of Tortuga’s biweekly standup calls, in which our guys convene to update the group on progress with job stacking and assorted ventures, theorycraft business ideas, and shoot the shit on issues of the day.

Most episodes will be available to paid subscribers — our spicer discussions will be exclusive to full Tortuga Society Members.

Topics Include:

• Introduction and Announcement of Ports of Tortuga — Tortuga’s distributed local get together infrastructure

• Tortuga Media Updates and Q1 Newsletter

• Contextualizing the Mercor Security Breach

• Competitive Job Landscape and Contract Strategy

• Identified Culprits and Leadership Meeting Status

• Opportunity for Quality Candidates and Future Hiring

• Discussion on Video Games and Anti-Woke Revolution

• Discussion on Four Corners Nationalism and Balkanization

• Discussion on Pan-European Nationalism and Regional Identity

• Concerns about Tourism, Crime, and Demographic Issues in Barcelona

• Debate on European Unity and Geopolitical Strategy

• Assessment of European Leadership and Political Realignment

• Comparison of Social and Demographic Situations in Europe and the US

• Discussion on Europe as an Open-Air Museum and American Investment

• Migration and Cultural Dynamics in Spain

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If you do want to DIY, I respect that. Just understand what you’re signing up for: resume writing is basically marketing, but the product is you, and the customer has the attention span of a goldfish. That said, this guide is going to help you build a resume that gets read, makes sense quickly, and gets you interviews.

What the hell is a resume, anyway?

First, let’s start with the opposite: a resume is not a diary of everything you’ve ever done.

Nobody cares that you are super smart, and aced college while completing a sub-1 hour Minecraft speed run during class (all while having a 9-inch dick). Well, actually, we care and applaud you: but, sadly, HR McKaren does not.

Alright, so what is a resume, then? It’s a one to two page document designed to answer three questions, quickly:

1. Can you do the job?

2. Have you done similar work before, or close enough?

3. Do you look like someone worth spending 30 minutes interviewing?

That’s it. Your goal is not to impress the applicant tracking system with buzzwords and vibes. Your goal is to make a real person say “okay, I get it” in under ten seconds.

How do you get the largest number of people to that point? There is a simple flow that works best, and continues to work for the hundreds of clients I serve.

The flow that reliably wins

Are you ready?

Here’s how the content should be organized so that is reads clean and builds a compelling “yes”, to even the most intransigent girlboss.

1. Clean layout: this make the page scannable

2. Strong top third of page one: this makes the information land instantly

3. Bullets that show value: not ones that show you’re good at tasks

4. Proof and specificity: detailed numbers, scope, outcomes

5. Skills that match the job posting: not personality traits nor fancy adjectives

That’s what we’ll cover. Afterward, I’ll briefly spend some words on:

6. Debugging: how to identify and fix the stuff that silently ruins resumes)

7. Examples and further resources

Let’s dive in!

1. Write for the human eye first and foremost

One of the biggest shortcomings I see on resumes I get, whether from society members or from the outside, is that people are not crafting their resume with the human eye in mind. You pack in all the buzz words, optimize your keywords, what have you, but if you forget to ask the simple question “Does this look good?” you’re severely hindering your success rate.

As automated as the job application process is nowadays, ultimately a person is going to end up looking at your resume, and probably just for a few seconds at that, before sorting it into one of several groups. You need the important points to pop immediately and be easy to read and digest. This is not just about sentence flow. It’s the literal design and layout.

Too often I see people:

• Include photos: never!

• Use “fun” colors: not actually fun!

• Try to cram what should be a comfortable two pager into one page because “a resume should be one page” (two pages are completely acceptable)

You must internalize that the way to standing out is not by displaying originality. Standing out means being clean, clear, and immediately readable. Thus,

Keep it clean, professional, and simple:

• Use a professional font. Times New Roman and Helvetica are safe. Plenty of other clean fonts work too. Just do not get creative with novelty fonts (sorry Wingdings), or weak fonts like Calibri.

• Make section headers obvious. Bold headers like Education, Work Experience, and Skills. Add a strong divider line under each header so the document is easy to scan.

• Left align almost everything. People read left to right. At most, center your name and contact info at the top. Otherwise, keep it left aligned.

• Design for scanning. Put yourself in the hiring manager’s position. If it takes effort to find your company names, titles, dates, or top accomplishments, you’re losing.

2. The top third of page usually makes or breaks you

What to include up top

• Name + location + phone + email + LinkedIn

• A short summary; optional, but useful if you’re pivoting roles)

• A skills line that matches the job

Summary guidance

• Keep it 2 to 3 lines.

• Mention your role identity, scope, and a real strength area.

Example:

Operations coordinator with experience supporting cross functional teams, improving workflows, and maintaining clean reporting in fast moving environments. Known for reducing confusion through clear process ownership and consistent follow through.

Use language that sounds like results, not job descriptions

Aesthetics alone will not be enough to win you that interview. The language you use has to be active and clear. Flaccid or clunky language, too many buzzwords, poorly written bullets, and trying to sound overly eloquent are all things that weaken your resume. You want confident, direct writing that shows impact.

Start every bullet with an active verb that shows ownership

• Strong options: Led, built, improved, launched, streamlined, resolved, negotiated, delivered, increased, reduced, trained, implemented, coordinated, analyzed, designed, optimized.

• Weak options to avoid: Responsible for, helped with, assisted, worked on, was involved in.

• Keep tense consistent.

◦ Current job: present tense (manage, lead, coordinate)
◦ Past jobs: past tense (managed, led, coordinated)

Attach a purpose or outcome. If a bullet ends and the reader still wonders “so what?” rewrite it.

3. Write bullets that demonstrate value

Most people write about their duties. Being a workhorse is not a virtue. Being someone that moves the needle actually means something.

Use this structure: Verb + what you did + how you did it + result

Examples:

• Reduced invoice processing time by 30% by rebuilding the tracker and clarifying owner handoffs across teams.

• Trained five new hires on onboarding workflows, cutting ramp up time from four weeks to two.

• Managed scheduling and communication for a 12 person team across rotating shifts.

• Built Excel dashboards using pivot tables and lookups to track KPIs and flag exceptions.

Quick rules to incorporate

• One idea per bullet. If you have three commas and two “and”s, you’re probably cramming.

• Cut filler words. If you can delete a phrase without changing meaning, delete it.

• Avoid internal jargon. If your bullet only makes sense to your current company, rewrite it in plain language.

4. Use numbers when they help

Quantifying your work makes it believable fast. You do not need insane stats. Use what you actually know and keep it relevant.

Good things to quantify:

• Volume: calls per day, tickets per week, accounts managed, reports built

• Time: hours saved, turnaround time, deadlines hit

• Money: budget managed, revenue influenced, costs reduced

• Quality: error reduction, compliance rate, fewer escalations

• People: team size, trainees, stakeholders supported

If you are not sure of an exact number, do not make it up. Use honest scope language:

• Handled 30 to 50 customer requests daily during peak periods.

• Supported a team of roughly ten with scheduling, reporting, and coordination.

Alright, at this point, save you internalized the basics? At this point, I expect that you can do a first pass of edits and vastly improve your resume.

Once you finish that, proceed below: now we need to work on the most important part: how not to fuckup your resume in a hundred small ways.

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Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin’
Watched his hair been turnin’ grey, yeah
He’s been workin’ and slavin’ his life away
I know he’s been workin’ so hard

We gotta get out of this place
If it’s the last thing we ever do
We gotta get out of this place
‘Cause girl, there’s a better life for me and you
- We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, The Animals

It was only a few minutes after my last article on taxes before people started asking me what to for situations where they had multiple income sources. This is common enough really - you might have a rental house from which you derive some landlord income, you might have a side business, you might have a consulting gig from time to time, you might just drive for Uber on the weekends (this doesn’t generally net you much anymore but for a while people used to pull in some spending cash this way if you were in the right city). Of course, the Tortuga crowd has traditionally emphasized job stacking - which if you’ve got the energy and agency to do so, can certainly put you ahead on the income bracket for a while, and could let you bootstrap your way into one of the other options like building a real estate portfolio or dividend income or the like. (Really though: if you’re going to do that, you should plan to only do it for a finite period of time and typically for a particular goal like buying your house or building your investment portfolio to a certain target value or clearing your debts or whatever - or perhaps for a certain duration - it’s awfully easy to burn out otherwise if you make it your lifestyle for a long time frame.)

Or, hell, a business built on vending machines or a laundromat, who am I to judge? I know people who have made a solid income stream out of both of those - not my cup of tea, but they seem to find it workable, and as I’ve been told endlessly: “beats hanging drywall!” (yeah, I bet!)

There’s also a section on how to maximize the multiple-income-stream lifestyle paired with the stay-at-home spouse for those of you looking to do the trad homemaker sort of life. It may be aspirational - it may be a good thing to plan to “move into” as you start to build a family - the concept of being an “Etsy mom” instead of a part time RN or substitute teacher is perhaps attractive to some, but the thought of also just focusing on running the family and the household (or maybe the volunteer and charity efforts, depending on your inclinations and income level) is probably something that appeals to many.

And - at special request - I’m taking a look at how a couple of high profile people managed to use the Traditional IRA and Roth IRA systems to each grow an absolutely huge tax free savings: Mitt Romney and Peter Thiel.

So… when you start complicating things with multiple streams of income… what’s different?

Tax planning becomes more complex with multiple income sources because your total combined income determines your overall tax bracket, potential underwithholding or overwithholding, and eligibility for certain deductions or credits. The IRS treats all income as part of your adjusted gross income (AGI), but each type has unique rules for reporting, taxation, deductions, and payments. Under current 2026 laws (including permanent extensions from the 2017 TCJA and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or BBB), key brackets are progressive (10% to 37%), with the top rate kicking in over $626,350 for single filers or $751,600 for married filing jointly. Long-term capital gains rates are 0%, 15%, or 20% based on income thresholds. Standard deductions are $15,750 (single), $31,500 (married filing jointly), or $23,625 (head of household). State taxes may (usually do) add layers, but this focuses on federal tax implications. Use this document as a baseline and also consult with a tax professional - especially if you have to deal with state taxes.

You’ll report everything on Form 1040, attaching schedules as needed (e.g., Schedule C for 1099 business income, Schedule E for rentals). Common pitfalls include underpaying estimated taxes (leading to penalties) or missing deductions. Strategies like adjusting Form W-4 withholdings, making quarterly payments, and maximizing retirement contributions can help. Use the IRS Tax Withholding Estimator for personalization.

There are some key tax planning differences with multiple income sources. The sort of obvious one involves combined income pushing you up into another tax bracket, because income from all sources adds up, which often kicks you into a higher bracket where more of your earnings are taxed at elevated rates (e.g., from 22% to 24%). Cold consolation that only the portion above the threshold is taxed higher. (This is easy to fall prey to if you’re running pass-through entities like S-corps or LLCs with S-elections - a recent Tortuga all-hands call had Theon Ultima lamenting exactly that “problem”.) Next major one is going to be withholding vs estimated payments: W-2 jobs automatically withhold taxes, but this assumes it’s your only income - so, multiple sources often lead to underwithholding since there’s an assumption of default deduction. Non-W-2 income (e.g., 1099 or rentals) requires you to handle payments yourself via quarterly estimates (due April 15, June 15, Sept. 15, Jan. 15 - do not miss these dates, the IRS is unfriendly about this) to cover at least 90% of your liability or 100%-110% of last year’s tax (higher if AGI >$150,000). And don’t forget self-employment tax: which applies to 1099 income (15.3% on net earnings: 12.4% Social Security up to $176,100 wage base, 2.9% Medicare unlimited, plus 0.9% additional Medicare on earnings over $200,000 single/$250,000 joint). Deduct half as an above-the-line adjustment. You’ll definitely want to watch for deductions and offsets: business expenses (Schedule C), rental costs/depreciation (Schedule E), and losses can reduce taxable income. Passive activity rules limit rental losses to passive income unless you qualify as a real estate professional (750+ hours in real estate, which is not actually all that crazy hard to qualify for). Up to $25,000 in rental losses can offset other income if AGI <$150,000 and you actively participate. Beware of the “edge case” additional taxes like Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT, 3.8%) on rentals/investments if your modified AGI >$200,000 single/$250,000 joint - also, there’s additional Medicare tax on high wages/self-employment (and annoyingly, you really don’t get anything in return for that, other than the privilege of helping keep Medicare going).

Let’s also look at the important optimization strategies, which may not surprise you but certainly bear a look to make sure you can take advantage of them if you can. Certainly contribute to retirement (e.g., traditional 401(k) up to $24,500, or SEP-IRA for self-employed up to $70,000 total) to lower AGI. Use HSAs (up to $4,150 single/$8,300 family) for tax-free medical savings. Bunch deductions (e.g., charitable giving) to itemize over the standard deduction. Harvest capital losses to offset gains (and also up to $3,000 per year against ordinary income, which can roll over if you have a lot of losses). Consider QBI deduction (20% on qualified 1099/pass-through income, subject to limits).

The common categories you’ll (tend to) hit:

OK - first requested scenario. Let’s say you have a standard W-2 (paycheck) job - and also landlord income. This is a pretty common thing, which will still cause you heartburn come tax season if you don’t do it right (but also, it’s pretty easy to get it right - because it tends to be pretty predictable!) Just plan for it ahead of time.

Rental income is taxed as ordinary income, added to your W-2 wages, and follows the same brackets. It’s generally passive, so losses are limited to other passive income (carry forward excess), but if you materially participate and AGI <$100,000-$150,000 (phaseout), up to $25,000 can offset W-2 income. There’s no self-employment tax on pure rentals, but NIIT may apply.

As far as planning ahead for this: Track all your expenses (repairs, insurance, property taxes—SALT cap $40,000 under BBB) - a Google Sheet or Excel document is fine, hell, you can just keep all the receipts in a shoebox and give them to your accountant if you don’t mind paying them to unwind it all, but it’s a little silly because this is easy enough to classify yourself. Use depreciation (e.g., 27.5 years for residential) or bonus depreciation for improvements. If short-term (e.g., Airbnb average less than 8 days), it may qualify as active business income, allowing losses to offset W-2 and QBI deduction. Adjust W-4 to withhold more from paycheck for rental income, or pay estimates. Convert to/from personal use carefully—special proration rules apply.

Second requested scenario - for people moonlighting, especially for the Tortuga crowd - honestly, I should have written this the moment I walked in the door there, because several people I have talked to here seem to be getting spanked by the IRS courtesy of holding multiple jobs - but this section is specifically if you have both a conventional W-2 job and 1099 income. Classically this was a paycheck job and a side moonlighting “consulting” gig for a few extra hours or some expert witness work or something (or something you do during the summer while school’s not in session) - these days it can be more aggressive job stacking, some people are holding down several jobs at once and … damn, do you guys ever sleep? Anyway, it’s applicable with multiple 1099s as well.

This mix combines withheld W-2 taxes with self-managed 1099 obligations. Your total income sets brackets, and 1099 adds SE tax, but you get deductions W-2 workers don’t.

My basic tips: Report 1099 on Schedule C; deduct expenses (e.g., supplies, 50% meals through 2025). Claim QBI (20%) if eligible - there’s no phaseouts for most below $182,100 if filing single/$364,200 joint. Use W-4 Step 4(c) to withhold extra from W-2 for SE tax, or pay quarterly (which is essential to avoid penalties, you’re probably going to need to watch for this and make sure you adjust if your earnings are sort of uneven). If your 1099 job is a side gig, track mileage (67 cents/mile in 2026) and home office expenses. Self-employed health insurance is 100% deductible - and that can be a sizable chunk of change these days. Solo 401(k) or SEP-IRA can shelter more than a standard 401(k) - I’ve talked elsewhere about how to use these for disproportionate benefit.

The extremely related (third) scenario for the Tortuga crowd - or even just the classically overworked sort - is when you have two or three jobs - and thus have multiple W-2s.

All W-2 income is combined on Form 1040; each employer withholds independently, often leading to underwithholding since they don’t “see” your other jobs - if you work “evenly” for these other jobs, this will nearly always happen. This can bump you into higher brackets or trigger additional Medicare tax.

As far as planning for this: use W-4 Step 2 checkbox for multiple jobs - it applies higher withholding rates. Or add extra in Step 4(c). If over $176,100 total wages, claim excess Social Security withheld as a credit. No SE tax, but monitor for NIIT if investments involved. Bunch 401(k) contributions across jobs (total limit $24,500).

In all cases, consult a tax pro if your income is over $100,000 - (if you’re successfully job stacking knowledge worker jobs this may be pretty easy) or complex (e.g., multi-state - pretty common for the remote worker). Early planning avoids surprises… start with last year’s return as a baseline, but also if you know that things are going to be a hairball, start before tax season causes everyone to become short on time and patience.

Now, you’re in a little bit different of a situation if the alternate income stream you’re talking about is a pension from your first job (and you’re supplementing it in your second career) - it’s kind of a nice problem to have, mind you, but it’s a bit rare these days. Still, people started poking me about it (it often seems to be the case if you had a government job for a while and retired but still want to work, if so - more power to you). So let’s talk about that, too.

Tax planning for a salary (W-2 income) combined with pension income involves treating both as ordinary income that aggregates to determine your overall tax bracket and liability. Pensions are generally taxable (fully or partially, depending on any after-tax contributions), reported on Form 1099-R, and added to your W-2 wages on Form 1040. This can push you into higher brackets, increase the taxability of Social Security benefits if you’re receiving them, and require proactive withholding adjustments to avoid penalties. Under 2026 rules, including inflation adjustments and provisions from the Big Beautiful Bill (I will never be able to say this with a straight face), key thresholds like standard deductions and a new senior deduction may help offset some impact.

There are some key tax planning differences. Combined income and brackets is of course a major one: both salary and the taxable portion of your pension count as ordinary income, summed for AGI. This total determines your bracket (e.g., 10%-37%), with only the excess over each threshold taxed at the higher rate. For example, if your salary is $60,000 and pension adds $30,000 taxable, your $90,000 total might shift from the 12% to 22% bracket (threshold ~$47,150 single in 2026).

Taxation of pension is going to be one to put careful eyes on. It’s fully taxable if employer-funded with no after-tax contributions; partially nontaxable if you have a cost basis (recover via Simplified Method for most qualified plans - divide basis by expected payments based on age/life expectancy tables). No self-employment tax applies, unlike 1099 income.

Withholding and payments - salary has automatic withholding via W-4, but pensions use optional withholding on Form W-4P (treated like wages unless you elect none). If underwithheld across sources (e.g., owing >$1,000 or <90% of liability), pay quarterly estimates to avoid penalties - pretty much like anything else with the IRS.

As far as additional taxes, high combined income (> $200,000 single/$250,000 joint) may trigger 0.9% additional Medicare tax on wages/pensions or 3.8% NIIT on nonqualified pensions. Also, there’s potential social security impact: if you are receiving social security disbursements alongside, pensions increase “provisional income” (AGI + nontaxable interest + half of social security), potentially taxing up to 85% of benefits if over $25,000 single/$32,000 joint. If that applies to you, there are some senior-specific rules: if you’re 65+ by end of 2025, claim a new BBB-based deduction of up to $6,000 (individual) or $12,000 (joint) above the standard deduction - there’s no itemizing needed, but phases out starting at $75,000 MAGI single/$150,000 joint. Also, standard deduction rises to $16,100 single/$32,200 joint/$24,150 head of household, plus existing extra for 65+ (~$1,950 single/$3,900 joint). RMDs required if 73+ (or 75+ if born 1960+); failure incurs 25% excise tax. (Be careful about that!)

The optimization strategies are going to be similar to what I usually tell you, but there’s some pension-specific material - and I’ll be the first to say there may be other fancy maneuvers beyond what you see here, pensions aren’t my area of expertise, but this should get you in the right ballpark at least. Certainly start by adjusting witholdings: update W-4 for salary to withhold extra, or W-4P for pension to cover the gap - use IRS Tax Withholding Estimator. As ever, retirement contributions are a great way to finesse your tax bill: if still working, max salary deferrals (e.g., 401(k) up to $24,500 + $8,000 catch-up if 50+, or more if 60-63) to lower AGI and offset pension tax. Deductions and credits are always ideal if you can take them: bunch itemized deductions (e.g., SALT up to $40,000 cap under BBB) if exceeding standard; claim senior deduction if eligible. Public safety officers exclude up to $3,000 for health premiums, so you should definitely do that if it applies. And to the extent that you can, there’s going to be some useful things to do with timing and planning. In the broad camp of timing and rollovers, you may want to delay your pension start if possible (yes, I realize this sounds unintuitive, but your payout is likely to be higher if you can do so); rollover lump sums to IRA to defer tax (20% withholding if not direct). For early pensions (<59½), avoid 10% penalty with exceptions like age 55+ separation. And to the extent that you can do multi-year planning for your financial needs - and I realize this isn’t always in the cards, but if you can - forecast RMDs, SS, and salary to stay in lower brackets; consider Roth conversions if your pension is traditional.

If income is high or involves SS/RMDs, consult a tax advisor… rules can vary by pension type (qualified vs. nonqualified).

But for Tortugans in particular - and other folks who might have occasion to draw multiple paychecks at the same time - the employment scenario that will generally frustrate you the most when dealing with the IRS is multiple conventional W-2 jobs, because the system isn’t generally set up to handle it and the assumption is that you haven’t got more than one (so the defaults and withholdings are going to be very much off-base, leaving you having to do a lot of recalculation).

The best ways to mitigate taxes with multiple W-2 jobs focus on two main goals: (1) fixing inaccurate withholding to avoid surprises/penalties, and (2) reducing your actual taxable income through pre-tax accounts and deductions. Multiple employers mean each withholds taxes independently (often assuming you’re their only job - well, it’s ordinarily a pretty safe assumption), which frequently leads to under-withholding overall. You file one Form 1040 combining all W-2s, so total income determines your brackets, but you can still optimize aggressively. Here’s a prioritized list of the most effective, legal strategies (based on 2026 rules):

First, fix your withholding with updated W-4 forms (this is almost certainly going to be your biggest cash-flow fix). Each employer doesn’t know about your other jobs, so you often end up under-withheld and owing money (plus potential underpayment penalties) or over-withheld and giving the IRS that infamous interest-free loan. Use the free IRS Tax Withholding Estimator tool at IRS.gov (enter your paystubs from all jobs). It tells you exactly how to fill out your W-4s. Then, submit a new Form W-4 to each employer. Step 2 (multiple jobs and/or spouse works) - unsurprisingly, use the Multiple Jobs Worksheet, check the box if you have exactly two similar-paying jobs, or add extra withholding (usually on your highest-paying job via Step 4(c)). Check withholding again mid-year or after any pay change. This doesn’t reduce your tax bill - it just prevents surprises and penalties - and the IRS will be happy to hand those out otherwise.

As usual, I’ll give you the recommendation to maximize pre-tax retirement contributions across all jobs. This directly lowers your W-2 taxable wages right away (and builds wealth, which is what you are actually after, as much as we’re sort of in the game of mitigating taxes - this is all actually so you can build your wealth, after all).

There’s the 401(k)/403(b): the 2026 employee deferral limit is $24,500 total across all plans (plus $8,000 catch-up if 50+, or higher $11,250 catch-up if age 60–63). You can split contributions between jobs if needed. Now, there’s a huge advantage of multiple jobs: Employer matches are calculated separately per plan. Max out matches from every employer for free money (not limited by your $24,500). Overall annual additions limit per plan is $72,000 (your deferral + employer match + any after-tax). Also, you may have access to the 457(b) plans (governmental or certain nonprofit jobs): These have a separate $24,500 limit - so this is a perfect double-dip if you have one. If a plan allows after-tax (non-Roth) contributions, consider a “mega backdoor Roth” for even more tax-free growth. Prioritize getting full matches everywhere, then fill your deferral limit.

Max an HSA (if you’re eligible - this is triple tax-advantaged) - if any job offers a high-deductible health plan (HDHP), the 2026 limits are roughly $4,400–$4,450 self-only or $8,750–$8,950 family (+$1,000 catch-up if 55+). Contributions are pre-tax (or deductible), growth is tax-free, and qualified medical withdrawals are tax-free. It’s probably the best “hack” available to W-2 employees. You usually can’t pair this with an FSA on the same plan.

There are some other quick wins to look for if you can. FSA (Flexible Spending Account) lets you use pre-tax dollars for medical or dependent-care expenses if offered by any employer (use-it-or-lose-it rules apply). Social Security over-withholding: If your combined wages exceed the 2026 wage base (~$184,500), the excess Social Security tax withheld gets refunded automatically on your return. Itemized deductions or credits: Bunch charitable donations (or use a donor-advised fund), mortgage interest, etc., if they beat the standard deduction. Claim all available credits (child tax credit, education credits, etc.). Above-the-line deductions: Student loan interest, etc.

Less quick but still very useful… let’s call them advanced options (for higher combined income) would include topics that you have probably already heard me talk about, but I’m going to mention again because you should certainly consider all three of these: tax-loss harvesting in brokerage accounts, real estate strategies (e.g., short-term rentals with cost segregation or having a spouse qualify as a “real estate professional” to generate passive losses that offset W-2 wages), and you should almost assuredly look to do backdoor Roth IRA contributions. All of these can create bigger reductions but often need a CPA or tax attorney.

As a general rule, you probably want to start with the IRS Withholding Estimator + new W-4s today, then max every pre-tax account available (401(k) deferrals, matches, HSA). This combo usually saves the most money and hassle for people with multiple W-2s. Run the numbers mid-year, and strongly consider a tax professional or good software - especially with recent tax law changes (like the Big Beautiful Bill impacts) and/or if your total income is high. State taxes, local rules, and your exact situation can vary. This is general information, and will generally also benefit from some personalized advice - especially because state tax situations and pension intricacies may be complicating (and you will probably want to be able to make and work against a multi-year plan… at least as much as you can, what with the likelihood of legislators jacking around the tax code again).

The other thing that will frequently throw you off is realized investment gains. If you trade the stock market - I suppose I should say if you successfully trade the stock market, and most particularly if you do so on a short-term-capital-gains basis, you tend to generate income that wildly distorts your tax results for the year. While I will be the first to say this this is a nice problem to have, (hey! you made money! don’t complain!) it can still leave you at very least wincing when April rolls around and you have to write out a big check to the IRS (one hopes you have done proper withholding before then). It is difficult to give any one particular recommendation on this front, but you can certainly engage in tax loss harvesting (selling losses to counterbalance gains) and you can often to a certain extent be judicious about when you book your gains so as to push those into a next quarter or next year - but that’s of course not always possible, the market may not wait for you. It may be feasible for you to hedge a particular stock price (if you think it won’t hold) - a collared transaction can be used specifically to give you time to divest at a certain price point and effectively remove volatility from a stock that otherwise might heavily oscillate; famously, Mark Cuban wisely put an enormous stock collar on his Yahoo shares after selling Broadcast.com and was able to retain billions of value even when Yahoo stock … didn’t retain that value.

Some hopeful Tortugans asked me to comment on the value of job stacking when combined with marriage - so that your wife can focus on being a homemaker (raising the kids, and otherwise being trad). Sure, ok - it’s … actually, pretty much right there in black-and-white: deductions are higher if you’re married; there are additional child credits, and you can also fund your spouse’s IRA contributions.

Married filing jointly (MFJ) is almost always the best status here. It creates a “marriage bonus” for single-income households because deductions, brackets, and many credit limits are roughly doubled without doubling your taxable income.

There is a much higher standard deduction. In 2025: $31,500 for MFJ (vs. $15,750 if single). For 2026, $32,200 for MFJ. This alone can wipe out a big chunk of one spouse’s earnings from taxes. If you’re 65+ or blind, you get extra amounts on top. There are also wider tax brackets, by which I mean income is taxed at lower rates. MFJ brackets are approximately double those for singles, so more of your household income stays in the lower brackets. 2025 MFJ brackets (taxable income after deductions): 10%: $0 – $23,850, 12%: $23,851 – $96,950, 22%: $96,951 – $206,700, and so on (higher brackets also roughly doubled). A single filer with $100k income would hit the 22% bracket much sooner than a MFJ couple with the same household income. Then, you can also do spousal IRA contributions. The working spouse can fund an IRA (Traditional or Roth) for the stay-at-home spouse up to the full annual limit, using the working spouse’s earned income. The 2025 limit: $7,000 per person ($8,000 if age 50+), the 2026 limit is: $7,500 ($8,600 if 50+). Your total combined contributions can’t exceed the working spouse’s compensation (so you can’t do this all off savings, for instance). This is a huge way to build retirement savings (and potentially take a deduction) for the non-working spouse. You must file jointly to qualify. And of course, since you’re in theory doing this for pronatal reasons: Child Tax Credit (CTC) + other family credits (if you have kids). Up to $2,200 per qualifying child under age 17. Up to ~$1,700 of that can be refundable (Additional Child Tax Credit) if you owe little or no tax. Phase-out starts at $400,000 modified AGI for MFJ (exactly double the single threshold of $200,000). You also get better phase-out ranges for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and other credits when filing jointly.

Don’t forget, of course, the Health Savings Account (HSA) (if you have a qualifying high-deductible health plan): Family contribution limit is higher (~$8,550 in 2025). Triple tax-free: deductible, growth tax-free, and medical withdrawals tax-free. Great for kids’ medical/dental costs. Orthodontics especially add up - although the Invisalign ones are a lot less brutal (at least to wear, and seemingly a little less harsh on the pocketbook) than braces used to be!

Itemized deductions are generally a winner - well, only if they exceed the $31,500 standard deduction - but it does seem like this is not hard to do these days. The one that usually gets you there-or-close is mortgage interest on your home. Also, state & local taxes (SALT) - cap temporarily raised to $40,000 for MFJ in 2025 in some updates. Don’t overlook charitable donations (cash or goods). And you never want to face these, but to the extent that you have them (they do come up) you can deduct unreimbursed medical/dental expenses (only the amount over 7.5% of AGI).

In the annoyingly-similar-name camp we have what are referred to as Above-the-Line Deductions (which reduce AGI even if you take the standard deduction) - so even if you’re not itemizing deductions, these are worth paying attention to… effectively they’re “the even more generally applicable version” of the same thing: Student loan interest (up to $2,500), Traditional IRA/spousal IRA contributions, HSA contributions, Self-employed health insurance deduction (if applicable).

There’s some education-related benefits - (when kids reach college age or if you’re retraining or otherwise taking classes) - American Opportunity Credit (up to $2,500) or Lifetime Learning Credit. Also the 529 plan contributions (growth is tax-free; many states offer extra deductions).

Then there’s some other sort of family-friendly ones that I am going to mention which may be applicable to you. There’s still a bunch of energy-efficient home improvements, solar, or EV credits (some at a state level, some at a federal level). If self-employed or you have a family business: Deduct legitimate business expenses; pay kids under 18 (wages often payroll-tax-free and deductible for you). Child & Dependent Care Credit or Dependent Care FSA - though this is limited if one parent stays home full-time with no work-related care expenses - but if for instance one parent is full time and the other has part time work, you may get a lot of mileage out of it.

Pro tip: max out your pre-tax accounts (401(k), IRA, HSA) first … this lowers your AGI and can help you qualify for more credits or avoid phase-outs. Bunch charitable donations or medical expenses into one year if you’re close to itemizing.Marriage with a stay-at-home spouse and kids usually saves thousands compared to filing single (or even married filing separately). The exact savings depend heavily on your income, number of kids, state of residence, and whether you own a home or have high medical/education costs. Use free IRS tools, TurboTax/H&R Block estimators, or see a tax professional for a precise calculation - especially since rules can have certain sticky points (e.g., qualifying child tests, MAGI calculations). Check IRS Publication 501 or the instructions for Form 1040 for full details.

And then for those of you who have been reading through this article patiently with daydreams of moonshot tax-free growth, yes, you’ve made it to the guide to being Peter Thiel or Mitt Romney:

Let me start with the quick disclaimer - you’re probably not going to be able to replicate either of these. Not because you can’t do the basic maneuver that Thiel did, which is “put a big chunk of founding stock into your Roth IRA” - but because it requires you to then found Paypal and take it through to IPO, and then follow that on by investing in early stage Facebook and see it through to one of the world’s most valuable companies. Friends, if you can do those, the key part is not the Roth IRA - you’d be a billionaire either way! (It’s also nice, sure.)

Peter Thiel leveraged explosive growth in a Roth IRA by using it to hold massive stakes in high-potential, early-stage private companies - primarily his own startup, PayPal, and then later investments like Facebook - where the shares were acquired at extremely low valuations inside the tax-advantaged account. All subsequent appreciation and gains grew tax-free (and remain tax-free on qualified withdrawals after age 59½), turning a small initial contribution into billions without ever paying capital gains taxes on the windfall.

Based on ProPublica’s 2021 investigation (and the IRS guidelines), here’s the key steps on how he did it.

In 1999, Thiel opened a Roth IRA and contributed around $1,700–$2,000 (within the annual limits at the time; his income that year was about $73,000, qualifying him).
He used a self-directed Roth IRA (which allows alternative investments like private company stock, unlike standard brokerage IRAs limited to public securities).

Then, during PayPal’s formation (then called Confinity) - or maybe during early merger phase, I’m not actually clear, Thiel purchased 1.7 million shares through the Roth IRA at a par/founders’ price of just $0.001 per share (a tenth of a penny).

Total cost inside the IRA: $1,700.

This gave the Roth IRA a huge ownership stake in the company right from the start.

Sounds easy enough - he started small, he risked basically a year of his Roth savings (by buying highly illiquid founding shares of Paypal) - and it paid off big.

Well, it turned out that PayPal grew rapidly. When eBay acquired it in 2002 for $1.5 billion, Thiel’s shares (held in the Roth) were worth about $55.5 million—a massive multiplier.

Because the shares were inside the Roth IRA, none of that ~3,200x+ gain was taxed as capital gains. The entire value stayed sheltered.

That’s an excellent start. But what really made Peter Thiel’s name was basically doing this again - from an angel investor / venture capital perspective. You see, Thiel rolled the proceeds into other high-growth private investments. A notable one was an early stake in Facebook (reportedly around $500,000 invested via the Roth).

As Facebook (and other ventures) skyrocketed, the account continued compounding without taxes dragging down returns.

By the end of 2019, the Roth IRA reached $5 billion (up from under $2,000 in 1999), with jumps like $3 billion+ in just a few years from private equity-style gains.

He reportedly made no further contributions after 1999 - basically all growth came from internal investments and appreciation. The power of reinvesting and compounding tax-free is pretty phenomenal, especially when you got in on Facebook, Yelp, SpaceX, Spotify, Palantir, and AirBNB (let’s be fair though - a very disproportionate amount of those gains are from his early investment in Facebook stock).

So, why did this work so well? Well … apart from the outrageous luck factor of hitting the startup lottery twice in a row with Paypal and then Facebook, which is not to be overlooked … there’s some important planning factors here. The first major leverage point is of course the Roth IRA rules: contributions are after-tax, but qualified growth and withdrawals are 100% tax-free - no capital gains, dividends, or distributions taxed if rules followed. Furthermore, doing this in a Roth self-directed structure allowed buying illiquid, pre-IPO/private shares unavailable in regular IRAs.

Combine this with the exceedingly favorable share price available to him: as a founder (well, co-founder), Thiel could buy huge blocks of shares at rock-bottom founders’ prices or valuations that public investors couldn’t access; similarly, when it came time for him to invest in Facebook, the price point he was able to buy in at was far more attractive than what future investors would be able to participate at.

Now, in a taxable account, he’d have paid long-term capital gains (15–20%+) on sales or realizations; in the Roth, zero tax on the billions in appreciation. The lack of tax drag on compounding has been tremendously advantageous over the years. ProPublica dubbed it “Lord of the Roths” and highlighted how this turned a middle-class savings tool into a ultra-wealthy tax shelter, leading to complaints about how this was costing the government potentially billions in lost revenue (which seems like “you did what you were supposed to do but you did it too well!”) by following these rules. I haven’t heard if the proposed wealth taxes target IRAs that are too big, but I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised.

Important caveats (aka, You Probably Can’t Replicate This Exactly) - as noted, this strategy relied on being an insider at hyper-successful startups (first PayPal and then the eBay exit; followed by the even more spectacular return on an early investment in Facebook). Average investors, to put it mildly, lack access to founders’ shares at $0.001 or equivalent.

Self-directed IRAs can hold private stock, but:

1. Valuations must be arm’s-length/fair market (there’s significant IRS scrutiny on self-dealing).

2. Prohibited transactions (e.g., self-dealing with disqualified persons) can disqualify the IRA.

3. Annual contribution limits still apply (~$7,000 in 2025/2026, plus catch-up), so scale comes from growth, not big deposits.

Thiel’s case sparked debate about Roth IRA “abuse” and calls for reforms (e.g., limiting mega-IRAs), but as of 2026, the core mechanics remain legal for those with the right opportunities.In short: Thiel didn’t “hack” the system illegally… he maximally exploited the Roth’s tax-free compounding by loading it with asymmetric, high-upside private equity bets that exploded in value. It’s a masterclass in placing your highest-conviction, highest-growth assets inside the most tax-efficient wrapper possible.

If you’re planning to try to do this: the “disqualified persons” bit is going to potentially be a bugaboo.

A disqualified person for a Roth IRA (or actually any IRA) is an individual or entity closely related to the account owner - such as a spouse, lineal descendant (child/grandchild), ascendant (parent/grandparent), or their spouses - who is prohibited from engaging in transactions with the IRA to prevent self-dealing. Prohibited transactions include buying, selling, or leasing property, or receiving personal benefits from IRA assets. So, for instance, investing in your own company is generally not permitted. OK wise guy, so wait… then how did Thiel do it? Well, for entities, the IRS guidelines are: a corporation, partnership, trust, or estate in which the IRA owner has a 50% or greater interest; for Confinity (nee Paypal) our case study Peter Thiel had a couple partners (Max Levchin and Luke Nosek) - and thus Thiel had an only a minority interest of the company to put into his IRA. But still a very significant chunk, as it turned out.

To be fair… you’re probably not going to be able to replicate Mitt Romney’s strategy either, because you’re probably not going to be in a lead position at a powerful private equity firm. But it’s still instructive to know.

Mitt Romney grew a substantial portion of his wealth in a tax-advantaged retirement account… specifically, a large traditional IRA (not a Roth IRA)… through aggressive use of private equity investments during his time at Bain Capital. Unlike Peter Thiel’s Roth IRA (which allows completely tax-free growth and withdrawals), Romney’s was a pre-tax (traditional) IRA, meaning contributions were tax-deductible, growth was tax-deferred, and withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income. However, the massive appreciation inside the account effectively sheltered enormous gains from immediate taxation, allowing the wealth to compound without annual capital gains taxes.This strategy drew significant attention during his 2012 presidential campaign, when financial disclosures revealed his IRA was valued between $20 million and $102 million (with estimates often cited around $100 million+). More recent analyses (as of the early 2020s) suggest it could be in the range of $25 million to $125 million or even higher, though exact current figures aren’t publicly updated. The key was not exceeding contribution limits illegally but leveraging insider access to high-upside, low-initial-valuation private investments.

As far as the key component of how it worked… well, the one you’re going to have the hardest part with is that Romney co-founded and led Bain Capital from 1984 to 1999 (with some involvement extending later). Bain allowed certain partners and employees (including Romney) to co-invest in the firm’s deals via their retirement accounts, often using a SEP-IRA (Simplified Employee Pension IRA, which permitted higher annual contributions - up to around $30,000 per year during that era - funded by the employer).

So critically, this gave him (and others) access to extremely low-valuation stakes in private deals. This was a pretty sweetheart arrangement. Bain structured investments with multiple share classes. Employees could use their IRAs to buy “Class A” or similar preferred shares (or partnership interests) at very low valuations - sometimes nominal, almost near-zero - because they represented high-risk, future-oriented upside (e.g., carried interest-like profits or profits interests in portfolio companies).

These were often valued using methods like “liquidation value” or future income projections, which experts noted could be significantly below what later proved to be fair market value. When Bain’s deals succeeded (e.g., leveraged buyouts that generated massive returns), these stakes exploded in value inside the IRA.

Naturally, being an IRA, this resulted in tax-free compounding. No capital gains taxes were due on the appreciation while inside the IRA. The entire growth compounded tax-deferred until withdrawal (now required via Required Minimum Distributions since Romney is over age 73). There was also no contribution limit bypass needed -annual limits were followed, but there is no cap on how much an IRA can grow internally through investments. A small initial amount (or modest annual max contributions) could balloon if the underlying assets multiplied dramatically (just as we saw for Thiel).

I should also mention offshore and blocker structures: some Bain funds used offshore entities (e.g., in the Caymans) to help retirement accounts avoid unrelated business income tax (UBIT) that might otherwise apply to leveraged investments - though Romney has stated this provided him no personal tax reduction. It likely wouldn’t have mattered for him, given that this was in his IRA.

By comparison to Peter Thiel’s approach: Thiel used a Roth IRA for similar private equity bets (e.g., ultra-cheap PayPal founders’ shares), achieving true tax-free status on billions in growth. Romney’s traditional IRA deferred taxes but doesn’t eliminate them - distributions are taxed at ordinary income rates (up to ~37%). If Romney had used or converted to a Roth, the wealth would have been even more tax-efficient. (If you’re asking “Why didn’t he? Surely Romney was smart enough and well-advised enough by tax professionals” the answer is that the Roth wasn’t introduced until 1998.) His setup was still extraordinarily advantageous for someone with access to elite private deals unavailable to most investors.

Why this isn’t replicable for most people? Well, pretty sure you know that answer if you’ve read this far. It requires you to be an insider - heck, basically a founding insider - at a top private equity firm to access those low-valuation opportunities. Bain Capital was absolutely top shelf. Further, self-directed IRAs can hold private equity today, but valuations must be arm’s-length and fair market (IRS scrutiny on self-dealing is high). And prohibited transaction rules prevent conflicts (e.g., you can’t invest in your own company in ways that benefit you personally).

Again, this sparked debates and GAO reports on “mega-IRAs,” leading to calls for reforms (e.g., balance caps), but the core rules allowing unlimited internal growth remain.

In essence, Romney maximized tax-deferred compounding by placing asymmetric, high-growth private investments inside his IRA - legal, eyebrow-raising, but reliant on his position at Bain. It’s a prime example of how retirement accounts can become powerful wealth-building tools for those with exceptional investment access, though his wasn’t fully “tax-free” like a Roth. For personalized strategies, consult a tax professional, as rules evolve. Though to be fair, if you’re in a position to pull this off - you probably have already worked it out with your tax professional.

All of that being said… if you are actually going to try and replicate Thiel’s maneuver, you need several co-founders (like Paypal had) - you can’t do this if you own too big a piece of the firm yourself (or with your spouse or your family). I will say - it’s not a bad idea to do it (but I have never done it, or perhaps I should say, I have not yet done it; yes, I have worked out a good blueprint - if I get enough interest, I’ll do an article on how to do that for paid subscribers - or you can ask me about it in Tortuga chat). Romney’s is … easier to do, but it still requires a position of exceptional privilege from which to cleverly stuff your IRA (or potentially Roth IRA) with very strategically undervalued assets. I suspect you could probably do this pretty readily if you didn’t mind the appearance of grift, or if you were in Congress with certain access to privileged information (eg the famous Pelosi Stock Trading record) - but I should advise you against making decisions that will get the IRS or the SEC after you. You want to be able to enjoy your prosperity happily, after all.

Professor Axelrod

Let's see how long it takes to do this again

Welcome to All Hands on Deck—a special podcast for Tortuga Society members and Tortuga Media paychads.

These are recordings of Tortuga’s biweekly standup calls, in which our guys convene to update the group on progress with job stacking and assorted ventures, theorycraft business ideas, and shoot the shit on issues of the day.

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