This will serve as a FAQs page for anyone curious about The Tortuga Society.
What is the Tortuga Society?
Think of us as a fraternal order for the digital age.
Our chief objective is mutual aid - economic, social, cultural, and intellectual. We’ve banded together in pursuit of this goal for two primary reasons.
The first is that so long as other groups benefit from Affirmative Action (or engage in transparent ethnic nepotism) it’s abject lunacy for White Boys not to follow suit. There isn’t any ethical mandate to abide by Marquess of Queensberry Rules when the other guy’s using Krav Maga, and choosing to do so voluntarily is simply retarded (not to mention dishonorable to anyone depending on you).
The second (and arguably more important) reason is that we’re rapidly plunging into a cataclysmic Age of Asymmetry for which our ostensibly egalitarian society is unprepared. To cite just a few of the most striking examples:
Productive labor is hugely Pareto-distributed and in most companies a small cadre of 10x engineers generates basically all value, subsidizing legions of underqualified and overcredentialed Boomers and pantsuit women who collect six figure sinecures to send out a handful of emails each week. This state of affairs is clearly unsustainable in the era of remote work, and practices like Job Stacking will rapidly arbitrage it out of existence. Even the CEO of LinkedIn agrees.
Dopamine traps like social media / infinite scroll, porn, video games, and so on have shredded executive functioning, emotional regulation, and general agency in younger generations, transforming most men into listless cum zombies and most women into neurotic Xanax-munching toddlers with no concept of personal responsibility. Such cows are easily manipulated by anyone with free will.
The 2010s saw the incel rate in men double or even triple relative to historic levels1 thanks to the emergence of hetero swipe apps, the collapse of youth drinking culture, an explosion in sexual neurosis downstream of universal addiction to porn / social media, and decades of chronic endocrine disruption tanking sex drives. Zoomettes are entering into a dating market where they often earn significantly more than male peers (many of whom have basically stopped trying), and they don’t find that hot.
The development of generative AI means people who are creative, talented at prompt engineering, and endowed with curatorial judgment are now hundreds of times more productive than the Luddite dullards who still eschew AI assistance. At this point, most people clumsily use such resources for homework / emails, and few realize ChatGPT lets you pull random business ideas out of your ass and immediately turn them into cold hard cash. For instance, Walt’s old SB has already cleared several thousand smackers selling “sex spells” on Etsy.
The top slice of Zoomers have already become transhuman in every way that matters, while their less agentic peers have wasted away into barely-sentient Dopamine Dalits. Once Gen Alpha comes of age, they’ll be either Eloi or Morlocks.
But as our Ciceronian exmo guncle Jeff Giesea observes in Take the Unicorn Pill:
Even at the top, the game never ends. In the Age of Asymmetry, there’s a massive gap between being in the top 1 or 2% and the top 0.1%. It’s a luxury problem, but it exists. This dynamic plays out in wealthy communities and elite universities, where well-off people still feel inadequate. The Age of Asymmetry puts the timeless question on steroids: When is enough, enough?
How one responds is personal and probably depends on one’s circumstances. If you’re a brilliant, well-connected 30-year-old with a STEM degree, the Age of Asymmetry presents incredible opportunity. But if you’re not as gifted, educated, or connected, it’s daunting.
…unless, of course, you encounter a private fraternity of brilliant and well-connected 30-year-olds with STEM degrees eager to serve as elder-brothers-for-hire.
And that’s Tortuga’s business model.
So what does Tortuga actually do?
When Walt Bismarck founded Tortuga in June of 2024, it was a tiny clique of software engineers and data analysts drawn almost exclusively from his inner circle here on Substack. At the time, we were overwhelmingly focused on “Job Stacking,” the practice of working several remote jobs in parallel to collect multiple salaries (yes it’s legal).
We continue to provide guidance on Job Stacking for midlevel professionals already employed in an amenable industry, but this is no longer our exclusive focus. Our member pool now includes professionals at every stage of their career, including recent grads and career-switchers not quite ready to stack, as well as seasoned professionals looking to found or upscale their own business.
We offer our boys a comprehensive “Path to Plunder” that illustrates how to leverage asymmetric strategies at every stage of one’s career to bypass gatekeepers, amass startup capital, and hit the entrepreneurial stage as soon as possible. That means resume help.
For most guys, Job Stacking will likely remain a crucial part of that process, but it shouldn’t be seen as the centerpiece of the entire venture, and certainly shouldn’t be thought of as its terminal state. This vein of gold is bound to deplete at some point, and as responsible wypipo, it behooves us to invest the proceeds judiciously.
To that end, our ultimate plans are lofty indeed: raid the crumbling, woke institutions and build our own, better ones. Why waste your time in the Navy when you could be a pirate?
What sort of guys are in this thing?
Here are some very basic analytics on member data:
To see who is aboard, visit the crew page.
What resources does Tortuga offer its members?
90 [percent] of the value you’ll derive from a Tortuga Society membership comes from our lively private Telegram group. This is where our boys network, scheme, collaborate on larger entrepreneurial ventures, shill each other into plum corporate roles (and in some cases, directly hire each other), talk about how to acquire steroids and Adderall, or simply bullshit in The Poop Deck. We don’t do drama there. We tell racist jokes.
We have standup calls twice per week, on Tuesday evenings and Friday lunch times. In these calls we go round the horn to update the fellers on the status of our current projects, and about new job offers and other such wins. These calls are great fun.
The Book Club and the Writers Club each meet once a month, on weekends. Our other resources are described in reasonably thorough detail on our website, but to give you gents the gay sales pitch….
We currently offer an extensive library of resources to get you started deploying asymmetric strategies against Corporate America. The crowning jewel of this content is the Buccaneer Bootcamp - a lightweight self-study course in the fundamentals of Excel / SQL / Tableau designed by Sesped, a seasoned software engineer and data analytics professional with significant bootcamp experience. This course is designed to get an agentic and high IQ trucker or unemployed English major to the point at which he can work competently as a junior data analyst, and to do this as fast as possible.
Also included are some very useful guides on optimizing your LinkedIn and resume. This section notably includes a couple satirical essays explaining how to transform your shitty CV into an elaborate piece of metamodern performance art that plausibly stretches your unimpressive work history into something that could get you hired as a remote data analyst. Now obviously you’d never actually submit such a resume to a genuine opening at a real-life firm… but it’s certainly a fun thought experiment :D
Another cool resource on hand is Queen Anne’s Revenge - an application that automatically scrapes listings from LinkedIn and submits applications for you, either with a standard resume or by using ChatGPT to generate a custom CV for each listing. But if you’re just too lazy to do this yourself we’ll also rewrite your resume for you to make it not suck ass. This costs extra because it’s a significant effort to execute correctly.
Hold your horses, sir - you’re asking for MONEY?
But just do some basic arithmetic and you’ll quickly see we are not exactly getting rich off the $500 member fee - that’s mostly just a filtration mechanism to keep out shitheels who aren’t willing to put any skin in the game. We deliberately expanded the group quite slowly and entirely via Substack, because the real value of Tortuga comes from rigorous member curation - the thing you’re paying for is a place to get advice you know is legit from guys you actually trust. If we aggressively promoted it on Twitter or YouTube and let in hordes of sub-120 IQ savages it would ruin the whole thing.
Is this a grift?!
You sure do seem like a fast-talking Mischling-coded conman...
Nein, mein bruder!
Kindly refer to these lovely testimonials from Substackers you know and love.
Is Tortuga just for STEM dudes?
Nah.
In terms of profession, our experienced members are still mostly software engineers, data analysts, and knowledge workers in adjacent fields, with the vast majority of our resources geared toward this demographic. This is mostly a reflection of Tortuga’s genesis as a Job Stacking fraternity. Outside of STEM, Job Stacking is unconventional (though hardly unheard of) and will require a lot of agency, risk tolerance, and willingness to iterate to pull off.
But the Tortuga Society welcomes all sorts of people, and our ranks have swelled into a diverse array of professionals that now includes multiple attorneys, a couple of CPAs, and even a handful of marketing experts like Marcellino D'Ambrosio.
One major benefit to this development is we’re already starting to form the basis of a closed loop for professional networking. We consult with Tortuga’s attorneys whenever a legal quandary emerges, we’re presently about to engage one of the aforementioned CPAs to do our taxes, and on several occasions now we’ve directly consulted Marcellino about marketing best practices.
This sort of activity is something we aim to encourage a lot more of in the coming months on a member-to-member basis, because in an ideal world no Tortugan would ever need to go outside the Society for professional services. Every one of us should be able to maneuver freely in the world with the easy confidence that he Knows a Guy.
Is Tortuga only for Americans?
Negative.
We get tons of Eurobros asking if Tortuga’s right for them, and the answer is absolutely - just with the provision that a fair few items in our resource library may at times refer to leveraging very specific aspects of the American legal regime (think [weaponizing] EEOC complaints or reasonable accommodation policy per the ADA), and this obviously won’t apply to you. But your country probably has even gayer laws you can easily look up via ChatGPT or something.
Anyway Europeans are already in the group, so you needn’t worry about feeling like Tomik and Bellgarde.
How do I climb aboard?
Pay the $500 joining fee (on Substack, it’s called “Founding Member”)..
Schedule an interview.
Talk to two Tortugans for half an hour.
Get access to the Telegram group.
You can do it.
Expect questions about your background and work, the skills you want to build, the projects you have going, and what you would bring to the crew. No, you don’t need a degree or experience.
Tortuga can reject you and refund your money. Once you are in, dues are $50 a year. We take opsec seriously - we respect each other’s pseudonyms, and we keep doxxable material inside the private Telegram. If you leave, we delete all records of you.
Hopefully that answers any questions you had as to what we’re about and why you should give us money. If you have any inquiries, the bosun’s DMs are always open.
Proof:
do you accept women?
Would this work for jobs in the mental health field?