Author: admin

“The world is a looking glass. It gives back to every man a true reflection of his own thoughts. Rule your mind or it will rule you.” – Siddhartha Gautama

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I’m doing one of my favorite activities, right now:

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Sitting down at a random coffee shop on my first day in a new country, and writing an email.

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It brings me back to my roots.

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The daily emails I wrote for EGT were sent from 40-something countries:

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Some, from hidden gems I still hope to find my way back to — others from sketchy holes-in-walls where gringos go to disappear.

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I once wrote an entire email from the backseat of a Rickshaw in Bali, balancing my laptop on my knees while trying not to fall off the side into the mud.

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Anyway, this morning I woke up in Mexico City and rolled out the door with a vague idea of where I wanted to go, but no solid plan.

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I took a quick left at the end of my street, then another left.

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Then the Tao winked at me.

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Minutes from my AirBnb, a specialty coffee shop materialized on a quiet, tree-lined street, across from a beautiful park, with plenty of comfortable seating, fast WiFi, friendly people, and amazing coffee.

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I’m also getting the impression it’s a regular morning stop for the female yoga class down the street.

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So that’s cool.

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But my favorite part of the “freedom business” thing has less to do with traveling, and more to do with what traveling does to you.

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Every time I land in a new country, it feels like the snow globe of my mind gets tipped upside down, and all the neurotic crap that had been stuck in dark corners and crevices comes swirling into my awareness.

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There’s an ambient paranoia that comes with being a polite little white boy in a foreign place:

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Bumbling around town speaking broken Spanglish with my laptop and credit cards and cash in clear view of the locals who can’t help staring at the lost gringo zooming in and out on Google maps, trying to figure out where the fxck he is.

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Even after a decade of traveling, I still feel the target on my back, and hear the voice in my head asking me what I’m even doing here.

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But the voice is a lot quieter now, and it fades a lot faster.

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And, rather than listening to it, I find myself watching in amusement as it fades into the background and then disappears.

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And that’s the whole point.

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When I started traveling intensively in my early 20s, it wasn’t to check items off a bucket list.

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It was to train myself to feel at home anywhere in the world.

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My goal was to settle so fully into myself that no situation, no unfamiliar surrounding could throw me off.

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To me, that’s the deeper benefit of traveling.

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But you don’t need to travel to receive it.

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You just need to throw yourself into uncomfortable situations:

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The first date, the party at a stranger’s house, the high-pressure networking event, the mushroom trip on the beach in Rio de Janiero during Carnival in 2014 where you get so sunburnt you can’t even take a shower that night.

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Normalize being uncomfortable until you feel comfortable everywhere you go.

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Lots of love from Mexico City,
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• T
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P.S. Today’s writing track.

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…fish, chips, cup ‘o tea, bad food, worse weather, Mary fucking Poppins… ENGLAND!

“I don’t like leaving my own country, Doug, and I especially don’t like leaving it for anything less than warm sandy beaches, and cocktails with little straw hats.”

“We’ve got sandy beaches…”

So, who the fuck wants to see ’em? I hope you appreciate the concern I have for my friend Franky, Doug. I’m gonna find him, and you’re gonna help me find him, and we’re gonna start at that fight…”

I love Snatch. It’s one of my favourite movies (Besides Pulp Fiction, where I’ve written a whole copywriting framework around the way Tarantino writes dialogue and stories, but that’ll be saved for another day)

Anyways…

I’m heading my way up North again. Things are all good in London. Friend is recovering and balance is being restored to the natural order of things.

In between him nearly dying and me spending time in the overly romanticised London.

I’ve been doing a lot of sitting on my hands and just deep thinking regarding all the bullshit that February has flung at me, while making sure my friend doesn’t die before me because I’m the captain of that ship.

Generally I write off January for any form of productivity, interaction and anything along the lines being a human.

I’m an awkward slab of meat and electronic impulses that is just trying to make it another 365 days on this big, beautiful and chaotic ball of soil spinning around galaxy at whoever knows what speed.

And so the deep rabbit hole of thinking has led me down a lot of pathways of what I want to do and be for people, family etc.

Was it very dark and nihilistic due to the circumstances? Yes.

Was it needed? Also, yes.

I’ve done a lot of sacrificing over the years. From being social and falling in love, to even picking up old hobbies that kept my soul burning.

I basically rolled ’em all up into a little ball and shoved them up a metaphorical asshole. (Gross? Yes. Was it a necessary metaphor/analogy? Absolutely)

So when people go down the woo woo route of self love and all that stuff…

I’m picking self love. Especially after being hit in the face with a bunch of other small series of unfortunate events.

I’m taking weekends off fully. No emails. No nothing. Dead to the world. (Well more dead to the world than I already am)

“BuT YoU cAn AuToMaTe YoUr EmAiLs!!”

I’m not about that life.

More time outside.

More time away from the internet.

More time in nature.

More good vibes.

I mean if I don’t do it. I’ll end up going insane and also, how will I come up with stupid and entertaining stories for you to read?

Wish me luck. Drunk people on the train and I’ll be fully back in Manchester by Midnight, unless I get thrown off at Wolverhampton.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I’ve listened to this set 3x in the last week to just keep my head out of my own ass. If you’re going through something, anything and it’s tough. Just remember. Things will always get better.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

“Sometimes you find yourself in positions where falling would mean death. So you don’t fall.” – Alex Honnold

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Creativity, inspiration, and clarity are non-linear.

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They comes from places you don’t expect, when you don’t expect them.

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And when they arrive, they don’t scream; they whisper — so if you don’t listen close, you’ll miss them.

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Like I almost did last night.

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It started a few days ago, when Alex Honnold climbed a 1600 ft Taipei skyscraper, live on Netflix, without a rope.

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That’s a crazy-ass thing for nearly anyone to do, but Alex has been free soloing the toughest climbs on earth for decades.

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So Taipei was more of a showcase than a real challenge.

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(his greatest achievement — the greatest physical achievement in human history — was free soloing Yosemite’s El Capitan, an iconic, 3000 ft, near-flat rock face, with no partner or rope)

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Anyway, I watched for about two minutes before I felt too queasy to continue.

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My palms actually started sweating, and I kept wiping them off in case they accidentally made Alex slip, and my fists were clenched as though my grip was the only thing keeping Alex from falling hundreds of feet and pancaking a crowd of Koreans.

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But that queasy two minutes got stuck in my brain, and I couldn’t shake it loose.

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Random fact, I was actually a competitive rock climber when I was a kid.

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I remember spending my entire allowance every week on new holds for the climbing wall I had, no joke, in my bedroom.

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(I had one of those weird ceilings that went diagonal before it went flat, and I used to boulder from my bed on one side to my desk on the other side. True story.)

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So something about Alex Honnold free soloing Taipei tickled an old, forgotten corner of my brain.

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I tried to ignore it, at first.

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(”what’s the point in going down a rock climbing rabbit hole, that’s stupid, I’ve got work to do”)

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Until last night, when I sat down for dinner and flipped on my show, and then, three minutes in, turned it off, flipped on YouTube, and dove down the rabbit hole head first.

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I ended up watching nearly two hours of free solo climbing, palms sweating the whole way.

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Then I went upstairs and listened to clips of Alex on Rogan while I brushed my teeth.

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Then I bought Alex’s biography on Amazon and read it while falling asleep.

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And now I’m sitting here writing about Alex to you.

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I have no idea what the “benefit” of this new mini-obsession is — or if there even is a benefit, other than the pleasure of the obsession itself.

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But I do know that my mind lit up when I started watching free solo climbing, and I’ve been riding a wave of fresh inspiration ever since.

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That’s what I mean when I say creativity, inspiration and clarity is non-linear:

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It comes from places you’d never expect, squeezes through hidden doors in your mind you didn’t know were there.

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If we try to logic it — to decide where it should come from and what form it should take when it appears — those doors slam shut.

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All we can do is pay close attention to what switches us on:

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Pull the unexpected threads of curiosity as far as they will go, and allow ourselves to be surprised at where we end up.

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If that sounds mystical, that’s because it is.

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It’s mysterious and magical and totally the sh*t life is all about:

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Let yourself enjoy the ride.

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• T

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P.S. A few bangers from Alex:

“I’ve done a lot of thinking about fear. For me the crucial question is not how to climb without fear — that’s impossible — but how to deal with it when it creeps into your nerve endings.”

“There is no adrenaline rush. If I get an adrenaline rush, it means that something has gone horribly wrong.”

“Doubt is the biggest danger in soloing. As soon as you hesitate, you’re screwed.”

“No matter how hot the chick is, say if I was standing at the base of El Cap, and she urged me to free solo some route, my answer would be “No way”.”

Also, this is epic.​

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I’m heading back from London as I write and send this…

Pick it up and read it over and over.

It’s essentially about the wall street sociopaths who turned greed into a game (And what it truly reveals about human nature)

Michael Lewis exposed the primal psychology that turns ordinary people into money obsessed predators willing to destroy anyone in their path. The same dark patterns these traders used to separate suckers from millions are being used RIGHT NOW by marketers who dominate their industries while their competitors whine about “ethics.”

Read this book and you’ll never look at persuasion, negotiation, or making money the same way again.

Here’s what you’ll steal from reading Liar’s Poker…

• You’ll discover why the biggest winners in any market are the ones who understand that business is tribal warfare, not a gentleman’s game. The Salomon Brothers traders didn’t succeed because they were smarter or worked harder… they succeeded because they grasped the uncomfortable truth that separating people from their money requires understanding human weakness at a molecular level, then exploiting it without mercy or apology.
• You’ll learn the dark art of “positioning” yourself as the authority who makes the rules while everyone else scrambles to play by them. Watch how the top traders at Salomon created their own reality distortion fields where they dictated value, manufactured urgency, and made clients feel privileged to be fleeced… then swipe this exact psychological framework for your marketing.
• You’ll see how creating artificial scarcity and FOMO is the entire game. These traders moved billions by making smart people feel stupid for not acting NOW, and you’ll get a masterclass in manufacturing the perception that hesitation equals devastation.
• You’ll understand why “fake it till you make it” isn’t just motivational nonsense peacocked around by your favourite online Guru. It’s sneakily how empires are built. Lewis shows you how 22 year old kids with zero experience convinced institutional investors to trust them with fortunes by mastering one skill… Appearing supremely confident even when clueless.
• You’ll absorb the brutal lesson that in any market, there are exactly two types of people. Those who eat, and those who get eaten. The traders who thrived weren’t the nicest or most ethical… they were the ones who understood this reality first and acted on it while everyone else was still pretending the world was fair.

(I was inspired by my boy Ben Settle to write those bullets so you can blame him)

Although this book has probably been the most influential on me in the last 5 years.

Give it a stab and tell me what you think.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I nearly forgot to drop the link while I head my way back up north.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

If you’ve been questioning what’s going on in the world and wanting a deeper dive into western society and how we’ve all been tricked and lied to…

This will arguably be the best thing you watch in 2026.

Marketers think they know things until they’ve watched this.

Psychologists think they know people until they’ve watched this.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. The regularly scheduled programming will be returning by the end of the week. Appreciate you still sticking around.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

One of my best friends nearly died a few days ago.

We were hanging out, having a couple of beers and planning a little holiday together to see some family we’ve not seen in forever.

That’s when it happened. He dropped to the floor clutching his chest and I’ve never a seen a guy as big has him drop that fast.

I managed to call an ambulance and do very basic CPR.

The thing is, he is tough as nails and will pull through and the really good news is, there’s no immense damage.

It’s a scary thing to happen and I’ve had my fair share of losses but what hit me harder was the fact that nobody else gave a shit.

Well, besides his mother who lives in Spain. His friends, brothers and sisters and close people he works with on a daily basis…

Not a single check in when he was missing in action after I made a few calls about what went down.

In the past we spoke about things like this. Mainly cause he is very much like me. He just cracks on with his work and projects and doesn’t bother with everyone because it’s gotten to that point in life, where when you’re always the one reaching out to do things or make plans, if you stop doing it. It all falls to the wayside and in the grand scheme of things, you don’t matter at all.

That’s an incredibly brutal realisation to have, especially as a guy.

You see all this “build a network” of supportive people who you can lean on when things get tough or whatever (Online especially. I mean those “guru’s” love a bit of that bullshit), yet when things do inevitably happen…

It’s just crickets.

Granted you’re lucky if you do have 5 people or less you can count on as a guy.

I was going to say that it brings me on to my next point, but my next point isn’t a politically correct point, so I’ll just leave it as is.

But I’ll leave you with this…

Seek out real friendships and relationships that are built on the quality time and interactions you spend with each other. You’ll soon notice that a lot of people just fade into the distance. They’re not bad people per se. They just have their own bullshit to deal with too. Don’t let anyone glamorise it, cause we’re all in the same boat. We’re all just wanting to live our lives as best as we can.

Do good work. Spend quality time with friends and family and realise that when you’re time comes, it just happens. You want to leave this spinning ball of a dirt a little better than when you first got here.

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Don’t worry. No soap box rant today.

Although I’ll probably be fast asleep after hitting a massive caffeine and stale cookies crash by the time you read this, so if this email makes even less sense than usual, that’s why. (Thank God for automation that isn’t bullshit)

Let’s roll…

You need to do the complete opposite of what every marketing “guru” is telling you to do right now.

And it’s not even cause I’m some contrarian edgelord who hates everything popular.

It’s more because they’re wrong.

Like, fundamentally, chronically, hilariously wrong.

These people.

The ones deemed as social media experts, the growth hackers, the woo woo crystal worshipers who promise you’ll 10x your business if you just manifest harder…

They’re all living in the same delusional bubble.

They’re chronically online.

They don’t appreciate what’s going on in the real world. They sit behind their computer screens or iPads, punching away in their own little echo chambers, completely disconnected from how actual humans actually behave.

They’re optimising for metrics that don’t matter at all. Similar to how new copywriters slide into my dm’s and ask about how they can improve open rates…

They’re now focusing on, Engagement. Followers. Virality. Going viral on TikTok. Building a “personal brand.” Posting seventeen times a day because “consistency is key.” (Christ, on FB that shit is wild right now…)

Meanwhile, out here in the real world where people have jobs and lives and aren’t scrolling social media fourteen hours a day, none of that shit translates to actual business.

And it’s weird cause they don’t really know what’s happening in the real world.

It’s about solving problems. Building relationships. Doing good work. Making offers that make sense. Treating people like humans instead of engagement metrics.

Yeah yeah, It’s revolutionary, I know.

But the gurus can’t sell courses on “just be good at what you do and don’t be an asshole.” That’s not sexy. That doesn’t scale. That doesn’t promise overnight success with their seven step framework and a $50k a year mastermind (lol)

So instead they sell you on tactics that work in their weird online ecosystem but fall completely flat when they hit actual reality.

The anti-marketer playbook is simple in that respect.

Stop posting for the whatever AI/Algorithm or Billionaire says you gotta do. Start creating for humans.

Stop trying to go viral. Start trying to be useful.

Stop obsessing over follower counts. Start obsessing over whether people actually want to work with you.

Stop doing what every other marketer is doing because “best practices.” Start doing what actually works for your specific situation with your specific people.

The gurus won’t tell you this because it doesn’t sound impressive. It doesn’t have twelve steps and a catchy acronym. It can’t be packaged into a $997 course with a countdown timer.

But it’s what actually builds businesses that last beyond the next change or platform collapse or trend cycle.

While these clowns play a game that doesn’t exist outside their screens.

And always, you don’t have to play it with them.

Do cool shit.

Make buying from you fun and a great experience.

Rinse and repeat.

It’s that easy.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. The caffeine crash is hitting hard now. It’s around 15:30ish when I wrote this… Point is this: Trust yourself over the gurus. Trust what you see working in reality over what they say works in theory. And maybe don’t survive on stale cookies and coffee. Do as I say, not as I do. Okay bye.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Here’s one of my favourite poems from my favourite poets…

Roll the dice by Charles Bukowski:

if you’re going to try, go all the

way.

otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the

way. this could mean losing girlfriends,

wives, relatives, jobs and

maybe your mind.

go all the way.

it could mean not eating for 3 or

4 days.

it could mean freezing on a

park bench.

it could mean jail,

it could mean derision,

mockery,

isolation.

isolation is the gift,

all the others are a test of your

endurance, of

how much you really want to

do it.

and you’ll do it

despite rejection and the

worst odds

and it will be better than

anything else

you can imagine.

if you’re going to try,

go all the way.

there is no other feeling like

that.

you will be alone with the

gods

and the nights will flame with

fire.

do it, do it, do it.

do it.

all the way

all the way.

you will ride life straight to

perfect laughter,

it’s the only good fight

there is.

The TL;DR if you skipped all the way?

No matter what it is you’re going to do. Go all the way and if you’re not even going to go all the way. Just don’t bother.

Food for though, eh?

Stephen Walker.

P.S. If you want a hard hitting book of poems even if you don’t like poetry, this collection of his is great…

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Every blue tick wanker on Twitter and Facebook has suddenly become a rage bait merchant.

And trust me. You’ve seen them.

The verified accounts posting the dumbest, most inflammatory takes imaginable just to farm engagement.

It’s especially popular on Twitter because engagement of any sort = I can get monetised for my stupidity…

Although on Facebook. If you scroll for a few minutes you’ll see;

The “entrepreneurs” saying women shouldn’t vote.

The “marketers” claiming anyone who eats vegetables is a pussy.

The “thought leaders” posting deliberately wrong information just to get people arguing in the comments and I remember towards the back end of 2025 this shit was all over LinkedIn.

These clowns have figured out that the algorithm rewards outrage.

Say something stupid enough, offensive enough, or wrong enough, and people can’t help themselves.

It’s like they have to respond. They have to correct you. They have to tell you how dumb you are.

It’s worse than Cunningham’s law.

The wild thing is that every comment, every quote tweet, every angry response feeds the machine and pushes that post to more people.

So now everyone’s doing it.

Every mediocre marketer with a blue checkmark has abandoned actual strategy in favour of “say inflammatory bullshit and watch the engagement roll in.”

And you know what? It works. For about five minutes.

Then people catch on. They realise you’re not interesting. You’re just annoying.

They realise you don’t actually believe half the shit you’re saying. They realise you’re the digital equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum for attention.

(ever see a little kid in the shops drop its ass to the floor and flap about because you wouldn’t get it a new set of lego?”

That’s you when you do it.

They tune you out. Or worse, they start associating your brand with being a disingenuous rage farming dickhead.

And here I go again on my ol’ soap box, cause these blue tick wankers don’t understand…

Attention isn’t the same as influence. Engagement isn’t the same as trust. Getting people mad at you isn’t the same as getting them to buy from you.

You know what actually works? What’s worked for decades and will keep working long after the rage bait trend dies?

The fundamentals that Drew Eric Whitman lays out in Ca$hvertising.

Not algorithmic gaming bullshit. Not engagement hacking. Not pissing people off for clicks.

Real marketing stuff.

The sauce.

The kind based on actual human psychology instead of platform manipulation.

Whitman talks about Life Force 8, which is the core human desires that drive every purchasing decision…

Survival. Enjoyment of food and beverages. Freedom from fear and pain. Sexual companionship. Comfortable living conditions. Superiority. Care and protection of loved ones. Social approval.

Notice what’s not on that list?

Getting into pointless arguments with strangers on the internet.

People don’t buy because you made them angry. (I mean rage buying could be a thing)

They buy because you tapped into something they actually want. Something they need. Something that makes their life better, easier, safer, or more enjoyable.

Rage bait might get you attention, but it doesn’t build desire. It doesn’t create trust. It doesn’t make people think “I want to give this person my money.”

It just makes people think you’re an asshole.

The blue tick strategy is a race to the bottom.

Everyone’s competing to say the most outrageous thing. To be the most controversial. To generate the most angry responses. And the end result is a feed full of performative bullshit that nobody actually cares about beyond their initial rage fuelled response.

Meanwhile, the marketers who understand actual psychology are the ones who know how to tap into real human desires and fears and aspirations and are quietly building businesses that last.

They’re successful for being effective.

They’re using the principles Whitman teaches by understanding what people actually want, speaking to those desires in compelling ways, and making offers that feel like no brainers.

That’s what will reign supreme.

And it’s not trendy. It doesn’t game the algorithm. But because it’s based on how humans actually think and make decisions, which hasn’t changed in thousands of years and won’t change no matter what Elon does to Twitter next week.

You can try and build a business on rage bait if you want. You can become the person everyone loves to hate. You can generate endless engagement from people who would never buy from you in a million years.

Or you can learn actual marketing. The kind that persuades instead of provokes. The kind that builds loyalty instead of animosity. The kind that makes you money instead of just making you infamous.

One of those strategies has staying power. The other one burns out the second the algorithm changes or people get tired of your fuckery.

I’d probably say choose wisely but I can guarantee some people are going to go down that route cause some dumbass on LinkedIn or Facebook has created the Rage Bait Bible for $997 and well, let’s get another shiny object innit?

Stephen Walker.

P.S. If you haven’t read Ca$hvertising, do yourself a favour and grab a copy. It’s not sexy. It’s not trendy. It won’t teach you how to go viral. But it will teach you how to actually sell things to humans, which turns out to be pretty fucking valuable when you’re trying to build a business instead of a circus act.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom