Stand-Up Call - 7/25/25
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:
13th Grade finishes another book—why Substack might not be the right platform for fiction
Can Substack work for authors without built-in audiences? Or is it just a marketing funnel?
Theon’s vision for Tortuga Publishing: in-house cover design, typesetting, and production support for members
How to build a Substack following organically—and the challenges of platform suppression
AI prompt engineering, Midjourney quirks, and how image models fail at niche expertise
Talking to AI like a person—jailbreaking, persuasion, and the humanization of LLMs
Persistent AI chats and the risk of tunnel vision—how to balance memory with adaptability
Theon’s skepticism toward fully personalized AI content and the paradox of curation
Will niche Hollywood-level trailers made by AI actually find an audience?
New shared Tortuga calendar announced—plus plans for Saturday hangouts and more live events
Sirius White’s Tortuga Media essay: pirates, camaraderie, and the new secret society
Theon, Tom Swift, and Sirius on the mission to reach the “high-IQ underserved male” demographic
Can Tortuga become a crucible for creative excellence—curated, self-improving, high-agency?
Why classical texts and ancient wisdom still resonate with modern young men
The alienation of intelligent students in mass education—and how Tortuga offers a new script
Self-teaching Latin, curriculum gaps, and the absence of elite educational pathways
Tom Swift & Theon Ultima on Latin primers: Henley or Wheelock?
Rajeev Ram previews a Tortuga Media piece on power, law, and morality via Forest Landry
Trinities in metaphysics, occultism, and Kabbalah—are the structures always the same?
Plans for a custom Tortuga AI—curated training sets, classical corpora, and design hurdles
Why AI models trained for mass engagement devolve into sycophantic nonsense
The danger of hyper-literacy: when language becomes untethered from meaning
How English enables abstraction—and how sigil magic and symbolism bypass it
Romanian Latin heritage, Slavic loanwords, and the ghost of Roman garrisons
Sanskrit and Hindi compared to Latin and Romance languages.
The internet as the “Great Anglicizer”—why Europe is becoming linguistically flat
