Category: Articles

Here’s a little social media “game” for us folks who still require those platforms to feed into our own platforms…

After all.

Our audience/clients/customer numbers aren’t going to increase themselves magically (I mean I wish they did) but we still have to do some work and well, it’s time to make things fun again.

We know that everyone with a ChatGPT subscription is now an expert on whatever topic is floating around and is running hot off the social media presses.

(Minster of foreign affairs and war time policy anyone?)

What you seem them do is input their vague surface level info to the Masjine and out it churns some splooge of the lowest calibre.

At first I got annoyed at it, cause you had people who have never really written anything longer than a 140 character tweet, to now (on the surface it looks good) emulated pulizter prize levels writing.

What I’ve been doing very sneakily over on the old bird app is inserting myself into the niche conversations happening there in the market I’m operating in.

I’ve been come a topical conversation whore. Some people call me a reply guy which is cool. What they don’t know is that I’m slowly turning people into my way of thinking because I’m neatly challenging these slop pushers with logic and reasoning, while also being human.

It’s a wild concept. Imagine sounding more human than those peddling trash.

Yes you need to know what you’re talking about and you don’t even have to know that much anymore because the bar is so low. Yet all you need to do is engage with people who genuinely looking to either educate themselves or make an informed opinion without being misled.

Who would’ve thought that in 2026. Taking a few minutes out of your day could win people to your side when there’s way too much noise and not enough signal out there.

Have conversations. Point people in the right direction. Show them that you stand for something and slowly but surely they’ll find themselves in your world and they’ll wonder “Where have you been all my life!”

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I’m working as fast as I can to polish up and re-write a lot of the topics I’m going to be covering in The Escape Hatch. I’m also working on creating a structure you can follow if you really just want to run with the ideas in there. I don’t have a deadline for when it’ll be done, so I’ll end up drip feeding content there to keep you going until I share a “road map”

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

The world is systematically dumbing itself down to feed the dopamine starved masses, and we’re all complicit in this intellectual race to the bottom of the barrel…

Everything is getting shorter, simpler, more digestible.

Books become audiobooks become podcast summaries become TikTok highlights become tweet

sized nuggets of “wisdom” that fit perfectly between ads for teeth whitening kits and crypto scams.

(Crypto scams have been WILD on Twitter, especially more so since all of this war shit has gotten more legs etc)

We’ve taken complex ideas and pureed them into baby food for adults who can’t be bothered to chew.

Netflix adds speed controls because sitting through a 90 minute movie is apparently too fucking demanding.

News becomes headlines. Headlines become notifications. Notifications become emotional reactions to things that may or may not have actually happened.

The algorithms are optimising for engagement and hell to us going deep on ideas and thoughts and going for enlightenment.

This is all junk food for the brain, designed to keep you clicking, scrolling, consuming and best of all…

Never thinking, never questioning, never sitting still long enough to form an original thought.

Dumbification is destroying you…

1. Your attention span is dying. You used to be able to read books. Now you struggle through long emails. Your brain has been rewired to expect constant stimulation, making deep work feel like torture instead of flow.
2. You’re losing critical thinking skills. When everything is pre-digested and spoon fed, you stop learning how to analyse, synthesise, and form your own conclusions. You become a consumer of other people’s thoughts instead of a creator of your own.
3. Your tolerance for difficulty is evaporating. The moment something requires effort. Like real cognitive effort, you bail. You’re training yourself to quit when things get challenging, which means you’ll never develop expertise in anything that matters.

But listen up. You can undumb yourself starting today…

1. Read actual fucking books again. Not summaries. Not highlights. Complete books by people who spent years thinking about complex problems. Start with one chapter a day and build your attention span back up like a muscle.
2. Embrace boredom. Stop filling every empty moment with content. Sit in silence. Let your mind wander. Some of your best ideas are hiding behind the compulsive need to check your phone every thirty seconds.
3. Seek out difficult material. Find writers, thinkers, and creators who challenge you instead of validating what you already believe. Read things that make you uncomfortable. Engage with ideas that don’t fit neatly into your existing worldview.

The dumbification isn’t inevitable.

Dumbification only happens when you pick easy choices over the ones that make you marinate in your own brain meat for more than 15 minutes…

Stop choosing easy, it’s that simple.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Do the thing. Click the link. Join the group…

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

“Who wrote the software running in your head? Are you sure you actually want it there?” – Elon Musk

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The voice in your head is right:

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You’re not where you should be, right now.

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In fact, you’re way behind where you should be.

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The matrix must have slipped you the blue pill, ‘cause now you’re behind 99% of people, and if that doesn’t drive you into an anxiety-induced monk mode, you might be destined for modern slavery forever.

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Now, be honest…

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Deep down, you suspect I’m joking.

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But that little bastard in the back of your mind still kind of believes me, and he’s actually pretty riled up right now.

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So let’s try to calm him down with a little story-time and a warm cup of reality.

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Here goes…

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The other day, I had a coaching call with a 19 year old founder who is running a $20k per month agency.

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Impressive, right?

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He didn’t think so.

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“I just feel like I’m so far behind where I should be,” he says.

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“Everyone I look up to was ahead of me, at my age.”

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I black out for a moment before drooling a response:

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“Huh?”

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“You coached Ben Bader. He was making way more money than me at 19.”

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“Bro, Ben would have been the first to tell you he was ripping bongs in his dorm room at 19. He joked about that all the time. You’re years ahead of where he was.”

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His eyes go wide.

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“Oh… Well, what about you, then?”

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“I hadn’t even made my first dollar, at your age.”

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When we finally untangled the mess of false ideas in his head, we realized:

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Not only is he not behind…

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He’s actually ahead of everyone I’ve ever worked with, everyone I’ve ever met, and damn near everyone I’ve ever heard of.

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If entrepreneurship was a racetrack, he’d be lapping us all.

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And yet, he still believed he was behind.

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That’s how insidious this idea is:

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It tricks even the best among us into thinking that if we don’t have a Lambo by the time we graduate high school, we’re failing.

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Meanwhile, most successful entrepreneurs don’t break through until their late 20s, at the earliest, and more often their 30s and 40s.

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Don’t believe me? Check the scoreboard:

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LinkedIn was launched by a 36 year old.

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Red Bull was launched by a 41 year old.

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Adidas was launched by a 49 year old.

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Starbucks, a 51 year old.

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The list goes on (and on, and on), because those aren’t the exceptions, they’re the rule.

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And, most of the exceptions you see online — the 20 year old, Lambo-driving info-bros — are:

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Exceptionally rare
Usually exaggerating
Often secretly broke, because they have big top-line revenue but almost no profit.

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(not all of them, of course — but the percentage is so high it would shock you)

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Now, I’m all for having a sense of urgency.

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And don’t mistake this message as a reason to wait around for Mercury to align with Saturn so you can finally write your first Tweet.

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But when that sense of urgency cannibalizes your creative energy and fills your head with anxiety and overwhelm, it’s time to pluck the Zyn out of that little bastard’s mouth and tell him to shut him the fxck up so you can finally think clearly again.

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Bottom line:

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The voice in your head is wrong.

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But more importantly:

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It’s not even yours.

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It’s the voice of someone who made a post once that snuck a false idea past your filters when you had your guard down.

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And now it’s time to put your guard back up.

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Take back your mind.

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And get back to work.

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• T

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P.S. Balance the message in the email with this one (starts at 1:08:52)

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I had an interesting conversation with a fellow creator today, who sadly got sucked into the world of generative AI.

They were lied to by some of our favourite marketing tech bros.

The lie was that generative AI would help you grow your audience indirectly because you’d be able to create more, which in turn would give you the chance to publish more content and thus you’d have fans/customers/clients flock to you.

And we all know that’s bs on the front end.

So much so, that this person decided to bin off their 20 super fans on their current Twitter account.

To then go and make a new account and re-brand everything using every AI tool available to increase their output of work.

How do you think it all turned out over the last year?

Not good. Not good at all.

What they forgot to mention previously was those 20 super fans were buying all of their work (Prints, stickers, buttons, badges etc)

They were just thrown to the curb like an old box of toys you grew out of as a kid.

The guru’s in general are still pushing the ideology of having massive amounts of followers = the most optimal way to be profitable, especially if you’re an artist and that shit is just wrong.

It’s just that it’s so easy to sell the bigger numbers and the lifestyle that surrounds it.

On top of that. Our brains are so fried from the constant dopamine addiction we put ourselves through when we go down a scroll hole of doom, that if we aren’t building the same lifestyles the big names are doing. Well, then we’re doing it wrong.

Their new account had a lot more followers, but those weren’t super fans. They were similar people sucked into the AI cult and in that short period of time of creating the new account they had less than 10 sales, where previously they were averaging about 10-20 sales a month off of their super fans.

Size truly doesn’t matter when it comes to this whole online game. It’s all about quality and the relationships you build.

Another thing you can do is just close your eyes and visualise yourself standing in a room in front of say 20 people, hell, you’ve probably been to parties with more people than that.

Don’t let the vanity metrics fool you.

Having a tight knit group of super fans is far better overall having ALL of the numbers with no connection.

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

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

Stop over socialising. Seriously.

Every coffee meetup, networking event, and “quick catch up” is stealing time from your actual work.

We get deluded into thinking that we’re building relationships. Although what we’re doing is just masturbating our social anxiety while our creative projects die of neglect.

Most socialising is just procrastination. You tell yourself you’re “putting yourself out there” when you’re really avoiding the hard, lonely work of creating something that matters.

Your best ideas don’t come from brainstorming sessions with acquaintances over overpriced lattes.

They come from solitude. From boredom. From having enough quiet space in your head for genuine thoughts to emerge instead of just recycling whatever bullshit you heard at last week’s mixer.

Hemingway wrote alone. Virginia Woolf wrote alone. Every great creative work was born in isolation, not in some co-working space surrounded by people pretending to hustle.

Say no to most social invitations. Guard your alone time like it’s your most valuable asset.

And no. I’m not advocating becoming a complete shut out to the world.

Just saying no to 99% of everything will put you ahead.

Social media platforms and the influencer/gurus are all liars. They promote this picture perfect set up online but behind closed doors they’re truly dying to switch off.

So start doing it before it’s too late.

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

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

There’s this Hemingway quote that shows up on every basic bitch’s Instagram story next to a picture of a typewriter they’ve never touched and a whiskey glass they bought off of Amazon.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Everyone quotes it. Nobody fucking does it.

And I get why. Because right now, writing one true sentence feels like juggling live grenades while the thought police take notes.

The world has made it crystal clear what happens when you say the honest thing.

The thing that doesn’t fit inside this week’s approved vocabulary list. (Feels like something straight out of 1984 tbh)

And you see it all the time now. You get reported by professional victims. Flagged by the bots designed by cowards.

Deplatformed by tech overlords who couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag.

Dogpiled by strangers who didn’t read past your first sentence but have PhD level opinions about what you “really meant.”

Your name ends up on some blacklist you didn’t apply for. Some soulless AI in a server farm decides your words are “problematic,” and suddenly you’re shouting into the perpetual nothingness that used to be your audience.

And what usually happens? You fucking soften. You hedge like a nervous politician.

You add more disclaimers than a pharmaceutical commercial. You run every sentence through an internal focus group of “what if Karen from accounting gets offended” and what emerges is this pathetic, beige, room temperature slop that says nothing, offends nobody, and dies quietly between a sponsored post for protein powder and someone’s avocado toast.

[deep breath]

And you call that writing.

It’s not writing. I’d call it intellectual masturbation for people too scared to climax.

Hemingway knew something every frightened creative needs tattooed on their forehead right now.

Writing was never supposed to be safe.

The moment you sit down to say something genuinely true.

I mean structurally, uncomfortably, dangerously true about this fucked up world we’re living in, you’re committing an act of rebellion.

I mean look at all of this Epstein files bullshit and the unlimited amounts of conspiracy theories that are bleeding out onto the internet now.

He said write hard and clear about what hurts.

Not write soft and vague about what’s comfortable. Not write whatever today’s mob will tolerate. Not write what the algorithm jerks off to.

Hard. Clear. What actually fucking hurts.

He also said every writer needs a built in, shockproof shit detector. Yours should be going off right now like a smoke alarm in a meth lab.

You start to feel it every time you scroll through the sanitised wasteland of social media.

Every time you read something and think “that’s not even half the truth, but nobody’s got the balls to say so.”

Every time you write something real, feel its weight, then delete it because you’re terrified of the consequences.

That detector is screaming. You’re just pretending you can’t hear it because facing the truth feels scarier than living the lie.

Here’s what Papa Hemingway understood in his bones, what he proved every time he put words on paper…

The cost of not writing the true thing will destroy you faster than writing it ever could.

Not your follower count. Not your brand partnerships. Not your precious reputation.

You. The part of you that actually matters. The machinery inside that makes your words worth reading instead of just worth scrolling past.

Every time you pull a punch, you teach your soul to flinch. Every time you swap the real word for the safe word, the real word gets harder to find.

I sure as shit don’t want to lose the sentence. And I also don’t want to lose the instinct to write sentences worth losing followers over.

(Cause we’re not going to make everyone happy. I mean that’s boring anyways)

And once that instinct dies. Once you’ve trained yourself to self censor before you even know what you want to say, you’re not a writer anymore.

You’re a content producer. You’re elevator music in blog form.

Hemingway didn’t write to be liked. He wrote to be true. And the truth was frequently ugly, uncomfortable, and completely unwelcome at polite dinner parties.

He wrote about war without making it romantic. He wrote about love without making it pretty. He wrote about the long, quiet ways people destroy themselves, and he did it in short, brutal sentences because truth doesn’t need decorations or sparkles.

That’s what’s missing right now. Not more content. Not more takes. Not more sanitised wisdom that’s been focus grouped into meaninglessness.

The world is missing writers with the balls to write the true sentence.

The one sitting in your chest like a tumour. The one you keep almost saying. The one you’ve typed and deleted six times because you know, you it’s going to cost you something.

Write that sentence.

Hemingway would’ve hit send and told anyone who didn’t like it to kiss his ass.

So should you.

And even if you don’t write as much. Paint, write the song or have the conversations…

Stephen Walker.

P.S. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” He said that too. Notice he didn’t mention checking whether your blood was brand safe first.

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

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” – Franz Kafka

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It’s 7 am in Mexico City.

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I’m sitting in the only good coffee shop that opens this early, wrestling with the blank page.

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This doesn’t happen often.

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I’ve been writing these emails for over 15 years, so usually the words flow pretty easily.

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But today I have something important to tell you, and I’m not quite sure how to say it.

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For context:

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We’ve had a huge flow of new subscribers join us over the past week.
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(if that’s you, welcome — if you’ve been here a while, you’ll want to see this too)

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So I should probably take a moment to tell you exactly who I am and what I do…
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…And make it simple, clear, and compelling enough to keep you reading.

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The problem is, the simple answer would be a lie.

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Sitting around the campfire at our retreat last summer, a long-time attendee put it this way:

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“When friends ask me what we do here, I never know what to say.

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We build businesses, but it’s not just about business.

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We go deep on self-development and spirituality, but it’s not about that either.

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We talk about training the mind, life strategy, relationships, communication, human potential — basically everything.

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What we do here isn’t about any single topic.

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But when we bring it all together…

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This is, hands down, the best place in the world.”

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Moments later, as the fire began to die down…

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Long-time coaching client Mason Vranes turned to me and said:

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“That’s your greatest strength… and biggest weakness.”

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Mason’s business, FundLaunch, just passed 40M in revenue, and he’s well on his way to a 100M exit before he turns 30.

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So he knows the rules of the game:

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Niche down.

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Speak to one “avatar.”

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Keep making your offer more specific until it clicks.

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Then, hit the gas and scale it as hard and fast as it’ll go.

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No doubt, that approach works:

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It’s how my first business, EGTBasketball, cracked 8 figures in lifetime sales, and held the top spot in the basketball training industry for nearly a decade.

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So I know it would be better for business if I crammed what I offer into a neat little box…

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But every time I try, we lose what makes our work so uniquely powerful.

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Since you’re here, I’m guessing you feel the same way:

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There isn’t a single word that fully describes who you are or what you’re looking for, so being forced down a one-dimensional path feels like cutting off a piece of yourself.

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The problem is, every available path feels one-dimensional.

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Business gurus tell you spirituality is make-believe.

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(sit down, shut up, work 12 hours a day, cut out all your friends, and when money doesn’t fill the emptiness inside, go make more money)

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Spiritual teachers tell you ambition is ego.

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(sit down, be peaceful, love everyone, wave these crystals at the chick with dreadlocks sitting across from you in the sharing circle so she likes your “vibes”)

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Self-improvers tell you… well, a whole lot of sh*t.

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(sit down, stop fapping, start maxxing, join my Skool community to farm that good aura so you can finally get ahead of 99% of people and escape the matrix so fast it feels illegal)

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But that’s the internet, and it’s the only one we’ve got.

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So you keep trying to fit yourself into systems built by simpler people with simpler goals…

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But no matter how much content you consume, and how much progress you make….

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It still feels like something essential hasn’t clicked yet.

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That’s where our work begins.

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I spent my 20s searching for a deeper path, as I scaled my first business while travelling to over 40 countries, training intensively in Taoist meditation and Amazonian plant medicine, and obsessively studying human potential.

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I’ve spent my 30s, so far, in a “creative retirement”, writing, teaching, running retreats, and privately coaching 6, 7, and 8 figure founders.

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I haven’t seen it all yet, but I’ve seen a hell of a lot.

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And here’s the good news:

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The most successful individuals I’ve worked with aren’t sacrificing parts of themselves to achieve their goals.

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They’re not choosing between money and spirituality, outer achievement and inner mastery, ambition and relationships, or success and freedom.

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They’re integrating all of it, because that’s what mastery is.

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If that’s the game you’re playing, welcome.

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You may have just found exactly what you’ve been looking for.

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• T

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P.S. Over our next few emails, we’ll talk more about this integrated approach to business, life strategy, and self-mastery.

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In the meantime, here’s where I recommend going deeper.​

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”― Robert A. Heinlein

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…had 47 browser tabs open like she was re-creating the matrix.

Eyes half shut. Posture of someone who’d been clinically dead for twenty minutes and just decided to come back because her coffee wasn’t finished yet.

Hair doing something ambitious. The laptop was practically breathing harder than she was.

“Rough day?”

“No. This is Tuesday.”

“What do you do?”

“I sell screenshots.”

Long pause. The type of pause where your left eye starts to twitch and your brain reboots…

“Screenshots… of what?”

“Ads.”

“You sell. Pictures. Of advertisements.”

“$37 a month. Updated every Tuesday.”

She turned the laptop around.

1,247 active subscribers.

$46,139 per month.

Selling screenshots.

My entire belief system left my body.

“Hold on. Where do you even get them?”

“Facebook Ad Library. Completely free. Public. I spend two hours scrolling and screenshot anything that’s been running longer than three weeks.”

“Why three weeks?”

“Because if an ad is still running after three weeks, it’s printing money. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that’s losing. The platform is doing the quality control for me. I’m just taking the receipt.”

“So your entire product… is screenshots you find for free on a website anyone can access?”

“Google Drive folder. 50 fresh ads every Tuesday. One sentence per screenshot explaining why it works. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”

“And people hand you $37 a month for that?”

She took a sip of her coffee.

“People hand me $37 a month to skip the two hours of scrolling they’ll never do. Time saved in the long run.”

“What’s your background? Marketing degree? Agency?”

“Receptionist. Got laid off eleven months ago.”

Eleven. Months.

Receptionist to $46K a month. Selling screenshots she finds on a free website, organised in a Google Drive folder a twelve year old could build.

“But… can’t people just do this themselves?”

She shrugged the way someone shrugs when they’ve heard this exact question 400 times and it gets funnier every single time.

“Can. Won’t. Different problem entirely.”

She picked up her coffee, turned the laptop back around, and disappeared into her 47 tabs like nothing had happened…

Now someone sent me this tale fresh off the LinkedIn bus. I re-wrote it a little to make it read better, cause people on LI are AI’d up to their nostrils.

Anyways. The lesson here is:

Simple is good and simple is profitable and in this chicks case. Very profitable.

While everyone is still gargling on the shiny metal balls of our future AI overlords. People who know people. Know that people are lazy shits.

As much as the techbros are force feeding that AI is going to take over everything. They forget that the majority of people don’t want to learn a new tool (Which is also very shit in light of new events) to then have to waste time to figure it out to do what they really need. They’d rather pay for what it is they’re looking for and be given it all down and dirty like…

Just like the people paying $37 a month for winning ads they can model.

Oh and guess what? This kind of thing is so easy to set up. You don’t need a blood sacrifice to finish it.

So think about it. What can you set up that’ll print money and make people’s lives easier?

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I’ll be throwing together a little doc that I’ll slide into The Escape Hatch

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

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

And then funny thing is, you paid for it too.

The lie is so fucking obvious that I’m embarrassed it took me this long to call it out.

In the MMO space. They told you that flashing income screenshots and Lamborghini photos would attract high quality clients to your business.

They sold you the dream that “income attracts income” and all you need to do is show people how much money you’re making to get them to pay you money.

And in the wise words of my favourite comedian of all time, George Carlin: It’s bullshit. Complete, grade A, premium bullshit.

But hey. Income porn looks good from a visual point of view. It looks sexy on Instagram reels and your Facebook feed, but you attract broke people who are desperate to make money fast.

(Yes. We’ve all been there. We’ve all started back in the day by Googling: “how to make money on the internet”)

But when you do all this online flashy bullshit about all the riches they can have. You end up getting clients who are more interested in your bank account than your actual skills.

You start to build an audience of wannabe entrepreneurs who think success is a Instagram story away and I mean if you’ve seen Instagram within the last 6 months. Holy shit balls it’s bad.

The thing is. These are not good clients. These are not people who will pay you premium prices for quality work. These are bargain hunters and dream chasers who will nickel and dime you to death while expecting miracles.

But your favourite guru frames it like it’s easy.

“All you need is $100 and this software and you can be raking in $5K per month in as little as 90 days!” Sure, it’s technically possible. (LLM bros lol)

But so is winning the lottery. Both require a combination of skill, timing, and luck that most people don’t possess.

What they don’t tell you is that those 90 days involve working 12 hour days, failing repeatedly, learning skills you didn’t know existed, and dealing with rejection that would make a telemarketer cry. They don’t mention that most people quit after week two when they realise that “passive income” requires active effort. I mean damn. Can’t I just push a button and make my millions?

People are lazy fucks who want results without work. Gurus know this, so they sell the dream and leave out all of those nightmarish steps. They show you the destination but hide the fucking mountain you have to climb to get there and the mountain sucks cause it’s covered in snow and there are wolves out to eat you, oh and you’re climbing barefoot AND it’s -20 degrees outside…

The coaching space is especially rotten with this too. Every other LinkedIn post is some “coach” showing off their Shopify dashboard or their course launch numbers, pretending that screenshots equal expertise, which we all know they don’t.

So you need to stop falling for it. Stop buying courses from people whose only credential is making money selling courses about making money or coaching coaches that coach coaches to coach coaches.

Fuck that noise.

Real expertise doesn’t need income porn to prove itself.

Stephen Walker.

Oh look another obnoxiously long url you should click on to join the escape hatch where cool shit will be posted for free

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

“Fear weaponizes your imagination against you.” – Jed McKenna

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Last week, I downloaded Instagram for the first time in 8 years.

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Turns out IG is a key middle-of-funnel conversion mechanism for Hinge leads in Mexico City…

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So the upside, I figured, would easily outweigh the downside.

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Right?

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Wrong.

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The moment I opened the app, I was slammed with ads from coaches coaching coaches to coach coaches who coach coaches, all of them saying some version of the same thing:

​

“You’re screwed.”

​

Business has never been harder, they say.

​

It isn’t 2020 anymore, you can’t just press the internet button and make money fly out.

​

You actually need a system, now, and the only system that works is my system, because every other system is so, like, 2021, and if you don’t install my system in the next 3 hours AI will run away with your business and your wife and leave you eating lonely microwave dinners with nothing but the cat for company, and he never really liked you anyway.

​

The good news, they say, is you can book a “discovery” (sales) call with my “team” (outsourced sales agency) so we can help you “install” (buy) my system before it’s too late.

​

If I sound old and cranky, that’s because I am.

​

But I’m also old enough to know bullsht when I see it, and it’s the same bullsht gurus have been peddling since I started back in 2010.

​

First it was “SEO is dead!”

​

Then “blogging is dead!”

​

Then “your cat is dead! — now you have to eat those microwave dinners alone because you didn’t install my system when you had the chance — just kidding, for a limited time only…”

​

Every year, it’s the same story.

​

The characters change, but the bullsh*t stays the same.

​

After 16 years online, running multi-million dollar education businesses through ~3 generations of changes…

​

The SEO, blogging & affiliate era (2010 - 2015)
The social media era (2015 - 2021)
The creator era (2021 → today)

​

(and now, of course, the AI era which I suspect hasn’t truly begun, yet)

​

…Here’s the honest-to-God truth:

​

In some ways, online business has never been easier.

​

My first website cost $5k, took 4 months to build, and had less functionality than a free WordPress template.

​

The first app I built cost a quarter million dollars to launch, and 5-figures in monthly overhead to maintain.

​

Not to mention, for the first half of my career, everything sold online was assumed to be a “scam”.

​

These days, you can sit down with a cup of coffee at breakfast and have a fully-functioning business before lunch.

​

And, you can do it at near-zero cost.

​

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

​

(this is business, after all)

​

The market has never been noisier or more saturated, for example.

​

But that also means there are more founders, having more success than ever before.

​

(that’s literally what saturation means)

​

So please, don’t let the gurus scare you.

​

Every era has upsides and downsides.

​

And — big secret:

​

There are always about as many upsides as downsides.

​

The platforms may change, but the fundamentals always stay the same:

​

Put your head down.

​

Put your blinders on.

​

Delete Instagram (she’s not worth it).

​

And get to work.

​

• T

​

P.S. In case you missed it:

​

​Here’s 16 years of business advice in 72 minutes.​

​

(no fear-mongering, no Lambos, just high-level, battle-tested strategy that applies to every era of business)

​

​

​

​

​

​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 5-420 Erb St. W, Suite 433, Waterloo, ON N2L6K6

Got a few people reply who were hesitant about getting Telegram, cause they thought I was going to do what everyone and their dog is doing, which is build an “app” on Skool.

And frankly. That’s a valid question.

Firstly. The app ecosystem sucks. It runs like shit on your mobile phone and even if you’re paying for the premium features, people are still getting blasted with adverts to join similar communities as yours…

From a security standpoint, comparing Telegram to Skool…

Telegram is a bank vault, where Skool is essentially a cardboard box with a “please don’t steal sign on it”

Telegram offers end-to-end encryption for secret chats, meaning your conversations are scrambled into unreadable code that only you and your recipient can decrypt, this also applies to your groups you create and the content you decide to house on it too.

The thing is, even Telegram itself can’t read your messages.

Skool on the other hand?

It’s a centralised platform storing all your data on servers that governments can subpoena, hackers can breach, and corporate overlords can data mine for profit.

When you’re building communities discussing sensitive topics, do you really want some Silicon Valley company having full access to every word your audience shares?

Telegram keeps your communications private by design, while Skool treats your data like a product to be analysed, stored, and potentially monetised.

One platform was built by privacy advocates who fled authoritarian regimes. The other was built by entrepreneurs who see your audience as a revenue stream.

Now I’m not saying that I’m going to be creating a community that’s going to overthrow a government or whatever.

It’s just a place for me to store ideas, while giving people a place to rest their weary legs while they try run away from social media permanently.

I mean, have you been paying attention to what’s happening in the real world?

The UK’s Online Safety Act is tightening the noose.

The US is teeing up legislation that would make your grandmother’s Facebook wall a regulated utility.

Every centralised platform is one bureaucratic sneeze away from becoming a surveillance tool that makes your members uncomfortable, quiet, or gone.

And social media?

That’s already finished. It’s a rage-bait cemetery where 300 ChatGPT clones post the same “most people won’t tell you this” carousel while an algorithm decides who sees your stuff based on how angry it makes strangers.

Verified blue-tick wankers pretending life is perfect while behind closed doors we know it’s not. Although that won’t stop them from schilling some bullshit empowerment course to you and happily keep you on that hamster wheel.

Anywho.

You know what to do.

Stephen Walker.

Definitely not an obnoxiously long link to get you to join my Telegram group.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

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

You walk into a coffee shop.

It’s one of those coffee shops.

The kind where the barista has a tattoo of a French press on their forearm and the menu board looks like it was written by a calligrapher having a panic attack.

The line is six deep. The espresso machine is screaming like a banshee being fed into a wood chipper.

There are seventeen mobile orders backed up on the counter, and somewhere in the back, a blender is doing war crimes to a bunch of ice cubes.

You get to the front. The barista.

Bless their overcaffeinated heart, is already looking past you, already mentally juggling four oat milk lattes and a whatever the hell a “cortado” is.

They’re doing their best. They are a human being in a hurricane of dairy alternatives.

And you say to them “I don’t want black coffee.”

The barista nods. Or maybe they don’t nod. Maybe they just vibrate at a frequency that suggests acknowledgment. They turn around. They do things. Steam happens. Thirty seconds later, they slide a cup across the counter.

It’s black coffee.

Of course it’s black coffee, I mean you clearly asked for it right?

And you stand there, holding this mug of liquid darkness, wondering how the hell you got here.

You specifically said you didn’t want this. You were clear. You stated your case. You communicated like a grown adult human person (or so you thought, duh)

I need you to tattoo this somewhere you’ll see it every morning, maybe on the inside of your eyelids or whatever…

You didn’t tell them what you wanted. You told them what you didn’t want. And the only actionable noun in that sentence was “black coffee.”

That barista heard two words through all of the yap yap…

BLACK. COFFEE.

The “don’t” got swallowed. The “don’t” evaporated like a drop of water on a hot skillet. The “don’t” never stood a chance.

This is all about your brain though.

Your brain is that barista.

Your brain is an overworked, under appreciated, slightly frazzled meat computer that is constantly processing a multitude of sensory input, emotional garbage, intrusive thoughts about whether you locked the front door, and the inexplicable urge to remember the lyrics to “Mambo No. 5” at three in the morning.

Your brain is busy. Your brain is juggling flaming chainsaws while riding a unicycle on a tightrope over a pit full of your childhood traumas.

And when you tell your brain “I don’t want to fail,” your brain hears: FAIL.

When you say “I don’t want to be broke,” your brain hears: BROKE.

When you say “I don’t want to screw this up,” your brain grins its terrible little brain grin and says, “Oh, we’re thinking about screwing things up? GREAT.

Let me allocate all available resources to imagining, in high definition cinematic detail, every possible way we can screw this up.”

There’s actual science behind this, by the way.

I’m not just pulling it out of my ass.

A psychologist named Daniel Wegner called it ironic process theory, which is the most perfectly named thing in all of psychology because it is, in fact, deeply ironic.

Wegner told people, “Don’t think of a white bear.”

Guess what every single one of those people immediately thought about? A big, fluffy, undeniable white bear, lumbering through the tundra of their consciousness, refusing to leave.

The brain cannot process a negative without first conjuring the thing it’s supposed to negate. You have to build the image before you can try to un-build it.

And by then, it’s too late. The bear is in the room. The black coffee is in your hand. The failure is playing on a loop in your skull like a terrible movie you can’t walk out of.

This isn’t just woo woo law of attraction stuff, either. I mean, it is that too, if you’re into it. The whole “the universe delivers what you focus on” thing.

Fine.

Sure.

The universe is a space barista, and it’s very busy, and it only catches the nouns. I can work with that metaphor.

But you don’t even need to believe in manifesting or crystals or vision boards made out of magazine clippings to understand why this matters.

This is just how attention works. This is mechanical. Your reticular activating system. That’s the bouncer at the door of your conscious awareness, that lets in what you’re focused on and filters out the rest.

If you’re focused on debt, you will see debt everywhere. Reminders of debt. Evidence of debt. Opportunities to acquire more debt. Your brain will be extremely helpful in confirming that yes, debt is the central theme of your existence, because that’s what you told it to look for.

You told the barista “black coffee,” and by God, you’re getting black coffee.

So what do you do instead?

You tell the barista what you actually want.

“I’d like a lavender oat milk latte with an extra shot.” Specific. Positive. Actionable. The barista now has something to make, not something to avoid. That’s a fundamentally different task.

Sports psychologists figured this out ages ago. You don’t tell a golfer, “Don’t hit it into the water.” You know what a golfer’s brain does with that sentence? It takes a beautiful, panoramic mental photograph of the water. It studies the water. It falls in love with the water. And then the golfer’s body, being the obedient servant of the brain’s attention, sends the ball right into that water with the accuracy of a guided missile.

Instead, you say, “Aim for the center of the fairway.” Now the brain has a target, not a fear. The mental image is the fairway, green and wide and inviting. The body follows the picture. The ball goes where the mind was already looking.

This applies to and I cannot stress this enough, basically everything.

Don’t write your goals as a list of things you want to avoid. “I don’t want to be unhealthy” is garbage. Your brain just heard “unhealthy” and is now Googling symptoms of diseases you don’t have.

Try for the most part…

“I want to feel strong and energised.” That’s a destination. Your brain can work with a destination.

Don’t frame your creative work around what you’re afraid of. “I don’t want to write something boring” cause you just put the word BORING in forty foot neon letters across your imagination.

Try…

“I want to write something that makes people feel like they’ve been punched in the heart in the best possible way.” Now there’s a creative brief your muse can sink her teeth into.

Most of us spend an astonishing amount of our mental energy describing, in exquisite detail, exactly what we don’t want. We are poets of avoidance. We can articulate our fears with the precision of a surgeon and the passion of a revival preacher.

Ask someone what they don’t want, and they’ll give you a forty five minute TED Talk with slides.

Ask them what they do want, and they’ll stare at you like you just asked them to solve a differential equation in Klingon.

The real work is building the positive image. Getting specific about what you want. Giving your brain your overworked, overwhelmed, beautiful disaster of a barista brain, a clear order.

Walk up to the counter of your own mind. Look it dead in the eye. And say with your whole chest:

“Here’s what I’m having.”

Then watch it get made.

Specificity is key.

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

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

Got a few replies asking about what other things will be shared in that group.

So I might as well drop the full menu.

These are just a lot of notes and concepts I’m researching and building but it’ll cover everything from:

Psychology & Human Behaviour, Sales, Marketing, Creativity, Trading & Markets, Making Money Without Losing Your Soul and Meta concepts / Why This Group Exists

Here’s the other bullets, however things are subject to change over time…

The “confession close” used by a legendary door-to-door Bible salesman from Mississippi that works almost disturbingly well over text especially on high ticket offers where the prospect has been burned before

Why the worst thing you can do after someone raises an objection is “handle” it and what a 1960s car lot manager called “the lean back” that turns objections into buying signals almost involuntarily

The single sentence that saved a dead deal worth over $40,000 and why it works precisely because it sounds like you’re walking away from the money

How to use “strategic silence” inside a DM conversation to create so much tension the prospect closes themselves (this feels deeply uncomfortable the first time you do it)

A technique stolen from high stakes hostage negotiators that makes people feel “heard” at a level so deep they’ll hand you their credit card just to keep the conversation going

Why “adding more value” to your pitch is often the fastest way to kill a sale and the counterintuitive thing top closers do instead that looks almost lazy from the outside

The “broke dentist” problem that explains why most people who are great at their craft are terrible at selling it and the embarrassingly simple shift that fixes it in about 48 hours

What a bookie in East London taught me about “reading the weight of money” in a sales conversation and how to know the exact moment a prospect has mentally committed before they’ve said a single word of agreement

Why your “lead magnet” is probably repelling the exact customers who’d spend the most money with you and the strange type of freebie that attracts ravenous buyers like blood in shark water

The “newspaper obituary test” for writing subject lines, hooks, and headlines that makes the whole “how do I get attention?” question almost irrelevant

A marketing lesson hidden inside the way cult leaders structure their “introductory” meetings used ethically, this is the most potent onboarding sequence I’ve ever seen (and it costs exactly zero dollars to implement)

Why “niching down” the way most marketing coaches teach it actually traps you in a coffin sized box with no leverage, no pricing power, and no joy and the far more profitable way to think about your “who”

The “Grateful Dead model” of audience building that turns casual followers into lifers who buy everything you make, defend you in public, and never once ask for a discount

How to engineer “I was JUST thinking about that” moments inside your content on purpose, on schedule, every single week using a framework from a retired political speechwriter

The one type of email almost nobody sends that generates more replies, more trust, and more sales than any launch sequence, welcome series, or “value stack” ever created

Why the best marketing you’ll ever do looks nothing like marketing and what it looks like instead (There’s a reason Michelin stars are awarded by a tyre company)

A positioning trick from the luxury watch industry that lets you charge 3x to 5x more than your competitors while your audience actually thanks you for the higher price

The “shitty room” method used by a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright to generate more usable ideas in 20 minutes than most people produce in a month of “brainstorming”

Why consuming more content to “stay inspired” is the creative equivalent of drinking saltwater when you’re thirsty and the one daily practice that fills the well without draining it

The strange connection between boredom and creative breakthroughs and how to manufacture “productive boredom” on command even if your life is chaotic and overstimulated

A counterintuitive constraint method used by a famous ad agency in the 1960s that turns creative block into creative fuel in about fifteen minutes (this works for copy, content, product ideas, and even trading setups)

Why “finding your voice” is terrible advice and what actually happens neurologically when someone develops a style people recognise and crave

The “magpie principle” of original thinking that explains how every genius you admire actually got their ideas and why it means you’ve been dramatically overcomplicating the creative process your entire life

How to use what a jazz musician calls “wrong notes on purpose” to make your content, your offers, and even your personality magnetically distinctive in a sea of beige sameness

The “casino owner” mindset shift that separates traders who make money over 10,000 trades from traders who blow up every 6 months and why it has nothing to do with your system, your edge, or your risk management rules

Why the financial “news” you’re consuming is engineered to make you do the exact opposite of what would make you money and the one information diet that actually correlates with better returns (it’s almost offensively simple)

A position sizing method borrowed from a blackjack card counter that keeps you in the game long enough for your edge to actually show up even if you hit a losing streak that would make most traders tap out

The “emotional P&L” concept that explains why some traders are technically profitable but still miserable and why fixing this is the single fastest way to also improve your actual P&L

What a retired pit trader told me about the real reason most retail traders lose money and it’s not spreads, not commissions, not “the algorithms,” and not lack of education (it’s something far more uncomfortable to admit)

The “Sunday night acid test” for knowing whether your trading approach is sustainable or whether it’s slowly hollowing you out like a parasite wearing a suit

Why the best traders I know spend less time looking at charts than beginners do and what they’re doing with that extra time that actually gives them their edge

A psychological framework from competitive poker that helps you tell the difference between a genuinely good trading idea and one your ego is dressing up in a fake moustache to sneak past your risk rules

The “reverse journal” technique that reveals your real trading patterns not the ones you think you have, but the ones your account statement proves you have (this is uncomfortable but it’s worth about ten courses)

Why “passive income” as sold by the internet gurus is a lie and what actual financial freedom looks like for people who still want to feel something when they wake up on a Monday

The “Enough Number” exercise that takes about 9 minutes and shows you exactly how much money you actually need to live the life you want, which for most people is shockingly, almost embarrassingly, lower than the number they’ve been chasing

A question a Benedictine monk asked me that completely rewired how I think about money, ambition, and the quiet dread of “making it” only to discover the view from the top is just a car park

Why the hustle culture crowd and the anti hustle crowd are both wrong and the third option nobody talks about because it can’t be turned into a clickbait headline or a course

The “integrity premium” that makes certain people’s businesses almost recession proof and how to build it into your own operation without becoming some insufferable “purpose-driven” cliché

How to spot the exact moment a money making opportunity crosses the line from “smart leverage” into “selling a piece of your soul on layaway” before you’re in too deep to walk away

A brutal but clarifying exercise from a palliative care nurse’s research that reveals whether you’re building something you actually want or just running from something you’re too scared to face

Why this group is on Telegram instead of some shiny custom app and what that tells you about how we think about your attention, your data, and your phone’s home screen

The real reason most “communities” turn into ghost towns within 90 days and the one structural decision we made on day one that makes The Escape Hatch almost immune to it

Why we will never have 10,000 members and why that number would actually destroy the thing that makes this place work

What happens inside this group that cannot happen on Twitter, on a podcast, or inside a course no matter how “premium” the course is or how big the guru’s following…

Yes that’s a meaty one to get through.

And now I’m going for a nap.

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

P.S. There is no P.S. I’m tired.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

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

It feels like an eternity since I sent the last email.

Best friend didn’t die, which is obviously good and he also jokingly said that I’m supposed to die before him anyways…

So it just goes to show that a dark sense of humour can get you through pretty much anything.

(He’s recovering well too btw)

I’m finally settled back up North again after taking an extra break because of all of the fuckery that went on.

It was a needed break because even though what happened to my friend was horrible. It was a wake up call we both needed.

It left him and I talking about a whole bunch of things we used to go on about when we worked together and did all the nerd shit in the I.T. world, where we should probably write a book or 3 on it but anyways…

(It did take me 10 minutes to figure out how to get my laptop to work again, cause who knew that not opening it up for a few weeks could lead the not so fully charged battery to be dead…)

Equally, I’m grateful for everyone who reached out via email to check in on me. I appreciate you.

I’ve also yeeted myself off of social media. Just straight up deleted the apps off my phone completely. No more Facebook or Instagram.

I’ve kept Twitter because It’s mainly used as a lead generation outlet, cause believe it or not.

Those people are genuine in comparison to all the peacocking and outright performative bullshit you see on the other places. I don’t know what it is about those places but they just leave me angry, even if I’m just scrolling through it.

So if I haven’t replied to anyone who happens to follow / are friends with me on there. My bad. Although you could’ve just emailed me innit…

With that all being said.

I’ve finally created a place where we can hang out where I can brain dump everything I know, while still having that human element of 1 to 1.

I want to keep it low-key as the kids would say and frankly I don’t even care if you join or not. It’s mainly a dumping grounds for what I’m doing, or working on and if you want to satisfy your nosey tendencies I’m sure you’d join in.

You can be as anonymous as you like or out there too. Whatever floats your boat.

Anywho…

Here are the types of things I’ll be drip feeding into this little world as I research, build and create them…

Why the most persuasive people in any room almost never "try" to persuade anyone and the strange 19th-century parlour trick that explains exactly how they do it (most psychologists won't touch this with a barge pole)

The "Dead Man's Hand" principle of human decision making that lets you predict what someone will do next with eerie accuracy, even if you've never met them before.

A dirty little cognitive bias retail stores have exploited since the 1920s that works even better inside a Telegram chat than it does on a shop floor (and no, it's not scarcity or social proof)

What a disgraced Navy interrogator accidentally discovered about getting people to reveal their deepest objections, without ever asking them a single question.

The real reason people "ghost" on you after saying they're interested and why it has almost nothing to do with you, your offer, or your follow up (this one stings, but it's liberating once you see it)

How an obscure 1947 hypnosis paper explains why most marketing falls on deaf ears and the two word "pattern interrupt" that snaps even the most jaded prospect out of their scroll coma.

Why trying to "build trust" the way the gurus teach actually destroys trust with the exact people most likely to buy from you.

The "kinked garden hose" phenomenon behind almost every self sabotaging behaviour you've ever had and the absurdly simple way to unkink it (a trauma therapist friend shared this with me after three whiskeys and I haven't been the same since)

A little known finding from behavioural economics that shows why people who set goals the "SMART" way are statistically more likely to quit than people who do something far lazier and less respectable.

The "status game" hiding inside every conversation you'll ever have and how to spot whether someone is playing for dominance, for approval, or for something much darker (once you see this you can't unsee it)

These just a few little bits from the psychology and human behaviour things I've been deep diving on. There's going to be a whole bunch more to come and well, if you like to have your brain meat massage a little bit. You should join or not...

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

P.S. Download the app. Make an account and you can choose to be who you wanna be or not. It’s entirely up to you.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

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

“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

​

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

​

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

​

It brings me back to my roots.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

So that’s cool.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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,
​

​

• T
  ​

P.S. Today’s writing track.

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​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 5-420 Erb St. W, Suite 433, Waterloo, ON N2L6K6

…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

So this weekend I have to embark on a journey.

The journey is deep.

Not as wild as Shackleton’s famous advert for an Endurance expedition:

“Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey

Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”

But deep nevertheless…

I have to study WD Gann.

And the reason I’m dreading it is cause he touches on topics that have given me some sort of PTSD (not too serious tbh)

The tome is 232 pages and inside I’m going to discover the following gems:

William Delbert Gann or WD Gann, was a finance trader who developed securities trading technical analysis methods. Gann’s market forecasting methods are purportedly based on geometry, astronomy, astrology, time cycle analysis, and other esoteric means.

The two words that are making me rage internally is: Astronomy and Astrology. Don’t even get me started, but if you stick your head out of the window a few moments after receiving this email and you hear someone shouting in the distance. That’s me.

The lesson is this though…

Sometimes we have to do the things we hate. We gotta suck it up and crack on. I’ve got just over 100 people who want to see what my thoughts are on his work and how it affects how they are looking at the markets from a purely technical point of view. So that’s my fun for the weekend prepped.

Anywho.

In all of our creativity pursuits. We have to suck it up and do what we hate. Even if we have to do it in secret, we have to do it anyways. Who knows? Maybe our stubborn hatred will teach us something when we do the thing…

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Did I pay nearly £70 for a book? Of course I did. Now let’s see if I can learn something that’ll win back that £70 and then some in the markets.

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

“Leaps forward are often preceded by desperate, regressive leaps backward.” – Don Beck & Chris Cowan, Spiral Dynamics

We’re two weeks into 2026, and I’ve spent most of the year so far creating YouTube videos.

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And honestly, they’re driving me nuts.

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I’m in that awkward stage of the creative process where I know what I want to say, but I’m still figuring out how I want to say it:

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That unique combination of messaging, editing, and delivery that stamps my creative fingerprint and separates my work from the rest.

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And I haven’t found it yet.

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This is when most creatives and founders throw in the towel, because they mistake their growing pains as a sign the process isn’t working.

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But it’s the only way the process works.

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Every idea begins unformed, like a block of raw stone that must be hammered and shaped until the imperfections are chipped away and the finished work reveals itself.

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The creative process is comfortable for no one, and the only way through it is to create:

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To make something, publish it, learn from it, and then make something else a little better than the last.

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Then repeat that process until the stone is gone and a polished diamond sits in its place.

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If you’re in the awkward in-between (or the even more awkward still-getting-started), remember…

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It’s not:

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Think → think → think → think → think → do.

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It’s:

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Think → do → think → do → think → do.

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​Here’s the latest iteration.​

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• T

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​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 5-420 Erb St. W, Suite 433, Waterloo, ON N2L6K6

You know what keeps me from losing my shit completely when everything’s going wrong?

Gratitude.

I know, I know. It sounds like something a wellness influencer would say while selling you a $47 journal with motivational quotes.

Although it’s 2026 now, but hear me out.

When January’s trying to kill me and everything’s breaking and people are acting insane and I’m one minor inconvenience away from a full meltdown…

Having to force myself to find something to be grateful for is the only thing standing between me and complete psychological collapse.

A little bit of gratitude goes a long way.

Not the fake, toxic positivity bullshit where you pretend everything’s fine when it’s clearly not. (Insert Katy Perry I’m Fine meme)

Not the “just be grateful and your problems will disappear” garbage that makes you want to punch someone or something.

I’m just talking about practical gratitude. The kind where you acknowledge that yeah, things are fucked, but there’s still something in your life that doesn’t suck.

Maybe it’s stupid small. Coffee tastes good. Your dog’s happy to see you. You’ve got a roof over your head. Someone texted you something funny. The sun came out for five minutes (lol England)

Doesn’t matter how small it is.

Gratitude is cool cause it interrupts the spiral, even for a few minutes, hours or days.

When your brain’s in catastrophe mode, it wants to find more things to catastrophise about. (Is catastrophise a word??)

It’s looking for evidence that everything’s terrible and always will be terrible and you should panic harder and breath shallower and then your chest explodes like that poor due in Alien…

Gratitude is like one of those Ginsu knives from the early 2000s, which can cut through almost anything.

It forces your brain to notice something that isn’t complete dogshit.

Small shifts are good for the soul.

Gratitude doesn’t fix your problems. Your bills don’t magically get paid because you’re thankful for your morning coffee. Your broken plans don’t un-break themselves because you appreciated a good song.

But it keeps you sane enough to deal with those problems without completely losing your mind in the process.

Like you don’t have to be “everything’s fucked and I can’t handle this” it’s more a “okay, things are rough, but I’ve got this one good thing, so maybe I can figure out the rest.”

That’s the secret sauce.

The people who make it through the hard shit without becoming bitter, angry husks of their former selves? (nearly me)

They’re not the ones who never had problems. They’re the ones who found ways to stay grateful even when things weren’t going their way.

And I’m not saying you need to be grateful for the hard shit. Fuck that. You don’t need to be thankful that January’s trying to murder you or that your plans imploded or that everything’s harder than it should be, but you can be grateful despite it.

Grateful for the people who showed up. The skills you’ve built. The fact that you’re still here fighting instead of giving up. The small wins mixed in with the losses.

If I was selling insanity insurance. That insurance would be gratitude.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s still good stuff mixed in with the garbage. But we’ve survived worse before and I’m sure we’ll survive this too.

So just do one thing a day. Doesn’t have to be profound. Doesn’t have to be life changing.

Just something that made today slightly less terrible than it could’ve been.

And in my case. Today my heating and hot water has finally been fixed cause it’s been fucked since the 25th of December.

Cool thing is. If you do this enough. The hard stuff doesn’t disappear, but it stops feeling quite so suffocating. You get a little breathing room. A little perspective. A little sanity.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. My gratitude practice isn’t fancy. No journal. No morning routine. Just a mental check in before bed. What didn’t suck today? Sometimes it’s a good conversation. Sometimes it’s just that I made it through without completely losing it. Either way, it counts. Try it. Also this Youtube video is one of the working parts that stops be from ending up in a padded cell…

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

January is a cursed month for me.

I don’t know if it’s the moon, the stars, Mercury in Gatorade, or Cthulhu himself waking up cranky, but every January things go sideways.

Shit breaks. People lose their minds. Plans implode. The universe decides to test exactly how much fuckery I can handle before I snap.

And this January? Right on schedule.

Luckily I have a little re-frame which helps me from going postal and that is: WCYD

What Can You Do?

That’s it. Four words. Simple as hell.

When things go wrong and they will, constantly, especially in January apparently…

I’ve got two options.

Option one: Blow up. Go absolutely batshit insane. Rage at the SkyDaddy. Have a complete meltdown about how unfair everything is and how nothing works and why does this always happen to me and fuck everything forever.

Option two: Take a breath. Look at the situation rationally. Ask myself what I can actually do about it. Then do that thing.

The second option sucks less.

Does it feel good when things don’t go your way? Fuck no. Is it annoying when plans fall apart and you have to scramble? Obviously.

Would I prefer if January just skipped itself entirely and we went straight to February? Absolutely.

But the one thing and only power you have is how you respond.

That’s it. That’s the whole game. No secret $997 course with a $30k yearly mastermind and the soul of your next child.

You can’t control what breaks. You can’t control when people lose their shit. You can’t control the universe deciding to throw a wrench in your plans just for funsies. But you can control whether you make it worse by crashing out (as the kids say), or whether you take a breath and ask yourself…

What can I do right now?

Sometimes the answer is “fix the thing.” Sometimes it’s “wait it out.” Sometimes it’s “pivot completely and try something else.” Sometimes it’s just “survive today and deal with it tomorrow.”

But there’s always something you can do. Even if that something is just choosing not to make yourself crazier than you already are and I mean in generally we’re all crazy enough.

That’s the power in WCYD.

Not toxic positivity bullshit where you pretend everything’s fine when it’s clearly not. Not some guru nonsense about manifesting better circumstances through vibes.

Just a simple, practical question that pulls you out of the spiral and puts you back in the driver’s seat…

What can you do?

It works when clients flake. When tech breaks. When plans implode. When January decides to be January and everything feels like it’s held together with duct tape and spite.

You can rage about it and sometimes you should, briefly, just to get it out, or you can ask what you can actually do about it and then do that.

One of those options keeps you sane. The other one doesn’t.

I’m not saying I’ve mastered this. I’m still white knuckling my way through January like everyone else. But WCYD has kept me from completely losing my shit when every instinct says to burn it all down.

So if you’re having one of those weeks or months or where nothing’s going right and you’re about three bad days away from a meltdown and a self destructive habit or 3.

Stop. Breathe. Ask yourself what you can actually do.

Then do that thing.

It won’t fix everything. But it’ll keep you moving forward instead of spiralling.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. January ends eventually. That’s what I keep telling myself. Eighteen something more days and we’re free. Until then… WCYD. What can you do? Usually more than you think, and less catastrophically than your panic brain is suggesting. And if you click this obnoxiously long link. You’ll be sent through to a set that has some very good vibes to get you through the rest of this hell month.

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

This is gonna be quick.

A friend of mine runs a group teaching economics and market movements to a hyper niche audience.

Smart guy. Knows his shit. But today he asked me how to make his presentations more interesting.

And in soap box fashion I shared this:

Melt your entire personality into what you’re teaching.

Every hobby. Every interest. Every weird obsession. All of it gets folded into the economics lessons like you’re making the world’s most interesting burrito.

The fastest way to do this? Metaphors and analogies.

Connect market movements to his favourite fictional characters. Explain economic concepts through movies he loves. Use sports analogies. Music references. Whatever the fuck he’s into and make that the vehicle for the lesson.

Hell, he can even go there with the taboo shit. Politics. Religion. Sex. The stuff everyone’s too scared to touch. Because when you connect dry economic theory to something people actually have feelings about, suddenly it’s not boring anymore.

Which goes back to the subject line: We don’t know what we don’t know.

But we do know the things we’re obsessed with. Our hobbies. Our passions. The shit we think about in the shower.

And when someone teaches us something new by connecting it to something we already love? That’s when learning stops feeling like work and starts feeling like a conversation with someone who actually gets it, which is pretty damn magical if you think about it. Just look back on the days when you were taught things in school. Dry and boring and that’s probably why we’re all as mentally deranged as we are now…

Anyways…

The only thing your audience really needs is you being you. I’m talking about bringing your whole weird self to the table. Make the connections nobody else would make. Teach economics like you’re explaining it to your best friend at a bar. (Famous copywriting idea tbh)

That’s how you make economics or anything interesting.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. If you’re teaching anything. Writing, marketing, woodworking or underwater basket weaving. The same rule applies. You don’t want to sound like everyone else in your field. You want to be interesting and entertaining while talking about your field. That’s a massive paradigm switch and it works like magic.

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

We’re accelerating toward a culture where people take everything on the internet literally and it’s fucking terrifying.

I’m not talking about your aunt who believes every Facebook post about how microwaving your phone charges it faster.

I’m talking about a wholesale collapse in people’s ability to detect nuance, context, sarcasm, hyperbole, or any communication more sophisticated than a traffic light. (And even then people don’t even know what the amber light signals…)

Everything is literal now. Every joke needs a disclaimer. Every exaggeration gets fact checked by someone who genuinely can’t tell the difference between “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse” and an actual plan to commit equine cannibalism.

And it’s getting worse.

But my eye is twitching…

Why?

Look what’s happening in the tech industry right now.

We’ve got AI chatbots that can’t understand context. Social media algorithms that treat everything as equally true or false with no room for interpretation.

Content moderation systems dumber than a box of rocks that ban you for obvious satire while letting actual harmful shit slide through.

We’re building technology that reinforces literal thinking.

That trains people to communicate in the most basic, unambiguous, lowest common denominator way possible because anything else gets flagged, misunderstood, or turned into a viral outrage mob.

The platforms are training us to be stupider. And we’re complying.

People don’t read anymore.

They scan for keywords to get mad about. They don’t interpret or anything they just react. They don’t think they pattern match against whatever tribal checkbox they’ve downloaded into their brain meats.

Critical thinking is dying. Reading comprehension is circling the drain. The ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time without your brain short circuiting? Practically extinct. (Insert every type of political view)

And I don’t know how to fix it.

I really don’t.

You can’t educate your way out of this when the infrastructure itself is built to reward smooth brain takes and punish complexity.

You can’t argue someone out of literal thinking when they’ve been trained by the algorithm and conditioned to see everything in binary.

Part of me wants to say “read more books” or “get off social media” or some other obvious advice that roughly zero people will actually follow.

But that’s pissing into the wind at this point.

And we all know that this was no accident.

Literal thinkers are easier to manipulate.

They’re easier to advertise to.

They generate more engagement because they get mad faster and argue longer.

They’re the perfect user base for platforms that make money from keeping you scrolling.

Tech companies have accidentally or maybe not so accidentally, created a financial incentive to make everyone dumber.

And it’s working.

We’re watching human intelligence get optimised for engagement metrics in real time, and the results are about as depressing as you’d expect.

I keep thinking about solutions. Education reform? Good luck. Media literacy campaigns? Who’s gonna pay for that? Regulation? Have you met any congress across the main countries? They can barely operate a PDF.

The only thing I can think of, and I’m not even sure this works, is to be aggressively, obviously human in your communication.

To use nuance. To be complex. To refuse to dumb yourself down for whatever flavour of the week bullshit is getting peddled.

Will it reach fewer people? Probably.

Will some of them misunderstand you and get mad? Definitely.

But maybe you’ll find the people whose brains still work. The ones who can still read subtext and appreciate a well placed metaphor. The ones who haven’t been completely lobotomised by their feed.

And yeah, I said lobotomised. Because that’s what it looks like from here. A generation getting their critical thinking surgically removed by apps designed to make them dumber and more reactive.

Except we can’t bring back actual lobotomies to fix it, because apparently that’s “unethical” or whatever.

So here we are. Watching the collective IQ drop in real time. Building technology that makes it worse. And I’ve got fuck all for solutions except “don’t participate in your own intellectual demolition.”

Not exactly inspiring stuff.

But if you’ve read this far and understood that I’m not literally advocating for lobotomies, congratulations. You’re in the minority now.

Welcome to the resistance. There’s dozens of us.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. If someone screenshots this email and gets mad about the lobotomy joke without reading the actual point, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. And I’ll be over here, cackling and also please tag me in your Facebook/Instagram/Twitter post.

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

Everyone’s sprinting.

Hustle culture.

Move fast and break things.

Ship it yesterday.

Grind until you collapse.

Speed speed speed.

That shit is exhausting.

And you know what all of this generally gets you?

Burnout. Shitty work. Mistakes you have to fix later. And the creeping sensation that you’re running full speed in the wrong direction, which always happens.

The thing is slow wins. But slow doesn’t sell. There’s nothing cute or sexy about it.

Being deliberate and intentional will stop you from turning your brain into day old Oatmeal.

I’m not saying deadlines don’t matter.

I’m not some zen monk telling you to abandon all structure and let projects marinate until the sun explodes.

Deadlines are what separate people who ship from people who talk about shipping. Without them, nothing gets done. Ever.

But there’s a universe of difference between having a deadline and letting that deadline turn you into a panicked rat on a wheel.

(Spend a few hours on LinkedIn for a week and you’ll see EXACTLY what I’m talking about)

Slow means you breathe. You step back. You ask yourself if you’re actually headed in the right direction or if you’re just falling forward because movement feels productive.

Sometimes the most important thing you can do is stop, look around, and make sure you’re not building a ladder against the wrong fucking wall.

(I’ve done a lot of this in 2025 and when you realise you messed up. You just need to course correct…)

Slow means better work. Rushed jobs are shit jobs. Always. You know it, I know it, your client knows it even if they’re too polite to say it.

When someone pressures you to cut corners and deliver fast, what they’re really asking for is mediocre work they’ll regret later.

Don’t give them that. Don’t give yourself that.

Slow means you stay sane.

Slow means saying no to artificial urgency. Most “urgent” shit isn’t actually urgent.

And every time you let someone else’s panic dictate your pace, you’re teaching them that you’ll drop everything and scramble.

Stop teaching people that lesson.

The best work, which is the stuff that actually matters, that lasts, that you’re proud of years later, doesn’t come from white knuckling your way through at breakneck speed.

You need to take it at a pace that you can manage, where you get to think and iterate and to catch the mistakes before they become disasters.

To build something solid instead of something held together with duct tape and desperation.

There’s always gonna be a power move that most of the guru’s are against, however…

Being the person who delivers quality work on time without losing their mind in the process.

Being the one who doesn’t burnout every six months and have to rebuild from scratch.

Being the one who’s still standing and still creating, while everyone else is face down in the dirt wondering where the shit hit the fan, will truly set you apart from the hustle culture weirdos…

Deadlines are your framework. They keep you honest and moving forward.

And slow will keep you sane. It’s what keeps the work good and your brain intact.

Work at the speed of sustainable. Not the speed of panic.

On the plus side. I’d like to be around for a few more years, so I don’t want to kill myself by rushing around while creating shitty work.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Next time someone tries to rush you into cutting corners or delivering garbage work faster. You just need to remember that their shitty emergency isn’t your obligation.

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

Part of my plan to take over the world this year involves going full caveman with my phone situation.

I’m talking dumb phones, baby.

The shitty little Nokia bricks that can barely send a text message without setting on fire.

The ones where typing out “meet you at 7” takes forty five button presses and the patience of a monk.

I used to do this back in the day whenever I wanted to drop off the face of the earth and become uncontactable by humans.

I’d swap my smartphone for a phone dumber than a bag of hammers. Just calls and texts. That’s it. No apps. No notifications.

I’m bringing that energy back to 2026.

There’s one small problem though…

The UK is completely nuking its 2G/3G infrastructure this year, which means my beloved vintage Nokia is about to become a very expensive paperweight. (Which is cool cause I still write things in notebooks and on paper like a caveman)

So I need to throw a whopping fifty bucks at a “modern” dumb phone that can actually connect to the 4G/5G networks.

And in the grand scheme of things. Fifty bucks to reclaim my sanity seems like a bargain.

But going dumb has it’s benefits. I mean if you look at the insanity that’s been at play last year and even now as 2026 starts. Dumb has its benefits.

Firstly. You’ll murder your dopamine addiction. No Instagram. No Twitter. No endless scroll of garbage designed by Stanford PhDs whose sole job is making you as addicted as a lab rat pressing a cocaine button. Your brain gets to remember what it’s like to be bored without immediately reaching for what I believe is the digital equivalent of crack.

You’ll fix your TikTok brain. You know that feeling where you can’t focus on anything for longer than eight seconds? Where reading an actual paragraph feels like climbing Everest? Yeah, that’s TikTok brain. It’s rotting your ability to think deeper than a puddle. A dumb phone forces you to sit with your thoughts like a normal human.

You’ll actually think again. Real thinking. The kind where ideas marinate and develop instead of getting interrupted every four minutes by some notification about shit you don’t care about. The kind of thinking that built businesses and wrote novels and created things worth creating. Which believe it or not, is fairly easy to do with what we have at hand. But clowns on social media gotta peddle you different ideas.

You won’t become an AI personality cult member.

You know these people…

They lurk around us…

…the ones who’ve made ChatGPT their entire identity. Who’ve replaced actual skills with prompt engineering. Who’ve become the hollow husk of whoever they used to be before they outsourced their brain to a chatbot.

They’re everywhere now, and they’re insufferable. Don’t be them.

You’ll be unreachable, which is a fucking superpower.

The world doesn’t end when you’re not available 24/7.

Actually, the opposite happens. You become more valuable because your time and attention aren’t free for all commodities that anyone can grab whenever they want.

I’m not saying throw your smartphone in a river and go live in a yurt. (The Yurt is a pretty damn cool idea though)

But having a dumb phone as your escape hatch for when you need to actually focus, actually create, actually think without your brain being hijacked by engagement bait and people pretending to be stupid for clicks, seems to be the best thing as we ease into 2026.

Fifty bucks.

That’s what it costs to opt out of the dopamine hamster wheel whenever you want.

Which imho is the best investment you’ll make all year.

Now if you’ll excuse me. I’ve got a Nokia to order and a world to take over.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. If you email me while I’m on dumb phone mode and don’t get a response, now you know why. I’m busy thinking thoughts longer than a tweet and remembering what it feels like to be bored without immediately needing to fix it.

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

There’s this scene in True Romance.

Alabama. Bubblegum popping, Elvis worshipping, sweet as American pie Alabama…

Sitting her ass down across from a mobster who’s about to turn her face into hamburger meat because she knows where the stolen cocaine went.

She could cry. She could beg. She could piss herself and pray.

Instead? She spins the most beautiful bullshit story you’ve ever heard. She’s just a girl from Alabama, fell for the wrong guy, innocent as fresh baked cookies on Christmas morning. She doesn’t know shit about cocaine. She’s practically a Disney princess.

The mobster? He doesn’t buy it. (Obviously not. I mean he’s a mobster…)

But there’s always the bit in movies where it gets interesting.

Although the lesson here is that it doesn’t really matter.

Mainly cause Alabama commits to that story like it’s gospel truth. (Flat earthers anyone?)

She tells it with such wide eyed conviction, such authentic charm, that even while this psychopath is beating her bloody, some tiny corner of his brain wants to believe her.

She makes herself impossible to hate, even when he knows she’s lying through her pretty little teeth.

That’s the marketing lesson everyone’s too scared to tell you.

Your audience isn’t stupid. They know you’re selling. They know you want their money, their email, their precious attention span. They can smell the sales pitch from three miles away.

But if you tell your story with real conviction?

If you show up as an actual goddamn human being with personality and authenticity and charm?

They’ll buy from you anyway.

Not because they’re marks. Because they actually give a shit about you.

Alabama didn’t win that scene with superior tactics. She didn’t out think the mobster. (RIP James Gandolfini)

She won because she was so authentically, undeniably her that even her enemies couldn’t help rooting for her a little.

Your marketing doesn’t need to be polished. If anything. Overly polished marketing now just reeks of AI piss.

It doesn’t need some guru’s seventeen step funnel horseshit. It needs to be human enough that people connect with the beating heart behind the sales page. Your sales page does have a heart right?

And the thing is. These marketing guru’s keep wanting to push people into cosplaying as a faceless brand. (Obviously cause of AI and the AI shit they’re trying to sell you)

What I’m suggesting is you should Start being Alabama. Who is charming, real, impossible to ignore, even when everyone knows exactly what game you’re playing.

And the marketing cliché that reigns supreme?

People don’t buy products. They buy from people they like.

And Alabama? Everyone liked Alabama. Even the guy literally torturing her.

That’s influence. You won’t read that in any Robert Cialdini book. But you’ll learn about it by spending 2 hours watching True Romance.

Plus. It’s 2026. Time to stop being boring and start being unforgettable…

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I should’ve probably written discover instead of learn but hey. Influence innit?

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

My homeboy Mike from Peaceful Profits, aka the only non-ai infected ghostwriting and training place left on the web (Probably) dropped this absolute banger of an email and so in good old fashioned homage. I’ll be sharing some of it here…

Grab a drink. It’s another meaty one and I agree 200% what he is putting down in there.

"There are conversations on the “book” side of Reddit going on right now about whether you should use AI to write your book. 



Some people say it’s okay. 



A quick scroll through pretty much any thread reveals what the other 90% of commenters think: 'Why would I bother reading if they couldn't be bothered writing it' 



As the “upvotes” (the arrows) show there ^^, 82 people agree. 



Here’s a comment from that same thread: 



“A lot of people think “AI” is just conjuring stuff out of thin air…they don't understand that it relies entirely on pre-existing work created by humans.” 



– Reddit user, r/books 



In other words: 



If you’re an expert, and you’ve ever read a book written by someone in your industry and thought: 



“Hmm, I disagree.” 



Or: 



“I’d do things differently.” 



Or: 



“Well, I know from experience that’s just plain wrong.” 



…Then writing your book with AI will make it impossible to add anything new to your industry’s thinking. 



Which also means: 



It will be impossible for YOU to stand out amongst your industry’s sea of experts. 



That has always mattered in the world of books, but it’ll matter a whole lot more going into 2026. That’s because our second prediction for the year is: 



Prediction #2: Thought Leadership Will Matter More Than “Information Dumping." 



As an example, let’s take two imaginary books. 



The first, “Ten Ways To Lose Weight”, was written in an afternoon by AI. 



The second, “The 5 Day Diet”, was written by an actual dietician with 2 decades of industry experience. 



Which is more likely to sell? 



While there are no guarantees, our experience from working with over 1500 authors has shown us time and again that it’ll be the second option, The 5-Day Diet. 



Why? 



Because The 5 Day Diet tells the reader promises a system, a set of step-by-step instructions, and a new idea they’ve never tried before. 



The author is exercising (no pun intended) their thought leadership in a way that makes it easy for the reader to get results. 



It tells them what to do and what to not to do, and importantly, why. 



You can jump onto ChatGPT and ask for it to create a weight loss plan for you…but would you really trust it? 



Would you trust it against the dietician who has 20 years of experience under their belt? 



Would you trust it to give you a plan that’s safe, effective, and useful…rather than some random approach spat out by a computer just to make you happy? 



Judging by the commentary online, most people wouldn’t. 



The fact is: 



Books Built Around A Framework Almost Always Do Better Than Those Without One. 



So what exactly is a “framework”? 



It’s a structured way of solving a problem that makes it the obvious approach for your audience to take. 



It makes your approach feel intentional, tested, and hard to replace. 



Instead of saying “here are ten things you could try…” 



A framework says: 



“Here’s the method I use, here’s the order it works in, and here’s why this works better than the alternatives.” 



Deep down, what people are looking for is someone who has “figured it out”...whatever “it” might be. 



Weight loss. 



Marketing. 



Life. 



The reader isn’t looking to be lectured to or have their brains filled with facts. They want someone who can say, “do you have this problem? Here’s how I solved it, and here’s how you can too.” 



…And nothing says, “I figured it out” more than a book built around a framework. 



Here’s How To Find Your Book’s Framework… 



First: Look at the process you follow, the order you do things in, and the mistakes you help people avoid… 



Then: Ask yourself where people usually get stuck, confused, or frustrated (and how you’ve learned to work around those roadblocks…) 



Finally: Give that approach an “un-Google-able” name that makes it unmistakably yours, something that no one else can lay claim to. 



That way, the only way that people can learn about your approach is to go right to the source. 



Keep in mind: 



You’re not just “making up” an approach and giving it a fancy name. 



Instead, you’re codifying the knowledge that’s already in your head into something tangible that your readers can learn, apply, and benefit from. 



And when they do, your book’s success becomes inevitable. 



That ties into our third and final prediction about book marketing for 2026 (and how you can use it to turn one book sale into 100 more). 



More in our next email. 



To your success, 



The Peaceful Profits Team" 

The TL;DR version:

AI generated bullshit is going to be bullshit either way and make you look like a complete ass going into 2026 if you’re trying to use it to share your thought leadership (God, I hate that phrase) and there is a framework you need to follow if you want to get something non-fiction out into the world that absolutely slaps and gives people results/hope etc.

Go give Mike and the crew some love and if you ever want to have something professionally written. You can either pay me an obscene amount of money to do it for you, or a less obscene amount of money to Mike and his team because they are awesome.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Go give ’em some love.

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

With all of the AI fuckery being forced into our faces over the last few years.

Trust from a consumer point of view is waaaay down. I mean down down. Like lower than the lowest limbo stick down or whatever the professional term for it is called.

Anyways. So towards the back end of 2025 when I was recovering from being sick. I came across an ad on FB and it looked pretty damn convincing. Quality information that I’d like to buy so I can level up some concepts I was learning and in turn, I’d also be able to build something cool that’ll win back a lot more time for me.

As soon as the first payment went through and the product was delivered. I KNEW it was gonna be an absolute suck fest. The customer service email delivered the product via some really shitty Gmail email address. The documents were riddled with typos and definitely some AI pasted bullshit.

The thing is. Everything looked professional on the website side of things. Incredibly convincing and spot on, but the back end delivery and results were just absolutely ass.

Don’t get me started on the customer services and whatever else. All I can say is that paying £1000 for this was definitely not on the cards. If it was a neatly typed up Google docs delivered all pretty then hell yeah I’d pay the price, but this was just meh.

The point is though. Going into 2026…

Only seek quality.

Quality products, services, food, friendships etc.

2026 is the year or quality.

That’s it.

And in prime fashion I’ll be starting the year off with a bit of AI bullying…

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Here is the AI bullying and honestly it’s hilarious that this is happening in every aspect of “The real world” – I honestly think we live in a simulation atm…

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

Hell yeah…

New year.

Same doomscroll impulse sneaking up and trying to drag you under…

I get it.

You open your phone and it’s immediate chaos again. I mean we’re only 6 days in and things look like they’re starting off wild.

The news alerts are now screaming about whatever fresh hell just dropped (Venezuela anyone?)

The rage merchants are out in full swing trying to monetise your anxiety.

I’m sure the social media platforms have tightened up their algorithm fed catastrophe porn, which is designed to keep you paralysed and clicking to a new level ready for this year.

Although, I’m not saying ignore the world.

But I am saying this with my whole chest and keyboard.

You don’t owe the news cycle your entire nervous system.

2026 can be different.

Not because the world suddenly became less of a shitshow. It didn’t.

Step 1 is to turn the news off completely…

Not forever. Just enough to remember what your own thoughts sound like when they’re not drowned out by someone else’s manufactured outrage.

Check in once a day if you need to. Then close the tab. Delete the app. Whatever it takes.

The world will keep spinning. The crises will still be there. But you’ll actually have the mental bandwidth to do something useful instead of drowning in ambient panic.

And then? Build something.

Your email list. Your audience. That hobby you keep saying you’ll get back to. The business idea living rent free in your head.

Whatever it is. Just start the damn thing.

Not because hustle culture says you should. Not because some LinkedIn motivational vampire told you to “rise and grind.”

Cause like I’ve said in previous emails: Creation is the antidote to consumption.

When you’re building something even if it’s something just for you.

You’re not stuck in passive mode anymore. Even though it’s fun to watch the world burn.

You’re making something new and new shit is cool.

And believe it or not. That’s the type of thing that matters.

Remember this: The negativity wants you to suck…

It wants you scrolling, seething, sharing the latest nightmare because engagement is currency and your outrage pays someone else’s rent.

Fuck that.

Take that energy and redirect it. Channel it into something that compounds. Things like your writing, your craft, your weird little corner of the internet where people actually give a shit about what you’re doing.

Grow your list. I’d rather have a handful of people who want to hear from me instead of them also getting screwed by all of the noise.

The trick is to feed your audience. Not slop. Not recycled takes, but the stuff only you can say in the way only you can say it.

Work on your hobby. The thing that makes you feel like yourself again.

Build your business. Even if it’s just a side thing. Even if it starts messy.

And don’t allow any of those woo woo shit lords tell you that you’re being “Toxically positive!”

I’m not telling you to manifest abundance or whatever the wellness grifters are selling this week.

I’m saying the world is dark enough without you volunteering to be a full time documentarian of its collapse.

You can care about things and still protect your energy.

You can stay informed without being consumed.

And you can spend 2026 building instead of just bearing witness.

So yeah. Start here.

Less doomscrolling. More creating.

Less panic. More progress.

The news will still be there tomorrow.

The thing you’ve neglected last year won’t build itself.

So before I vanish off to bed, I’m telling you to;

Get after it.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. If you built something in 2025 that you’re proud of, even something small. Reply and tell me about it. I want to know what you made when the world tried to convince you to just scroll instead and get sucked into the latest TikTok trend…

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

I think my brain must’ve collapsed cause I couldn’t even math properly yesterday.

Although I did get some interesting responses to the previous email and it looks like you enjoy these types of write ups.

So without further ado. The next 8, not 7 and how we can re-frame and flip these “laws” for our own creative gain…

3) Gullibility.

Scepticism should be framed as empowerment. Where it’s usually framed as cyncism.

Side by side comparisons might look like this… “Here’s the narrative / here’s what’s missing”

This is how you can deconstruct persuasion techniques used in ads, politics, and trends so you can show how belief is engineered. This way you can help people trust themselves more and not authorities less out of paranoia.

4) Hysterical

Emotional regulation can be used as form of rebellion.

If you can normalise calm, slowness, reflection.

Think long form content in a shortform world. Art that invites pause rather than reaction (The trance state I mentioned in 4 from the previous email)

You’d name emotions precisely (anger ≠ fear ≠ grief) This will help interrupt the outrage economy by modelling grounded presence, which is easier said than done.

5) Anxious

If we flip it around. It’s a means to be safe. You’ll create emotional refuge. Which means you’ll create predictable rhythms in content. There will be reassurance without false positivity (Which we saw a lot of in 2025) and even if it means naming shared anxieties without amplifying them, It’ll lower baseline anxiety so people can think and choose more freely and feel connected to you and you work because you are like them.

6) Hedonism

This is a tough one because you have to redefine pleasure as nourishment where a lot of our hedonistic traits make a beeline for escape/escapism.

This is where you can showcase slow joy. Like the craft of what you do, writing, painting, making music etc, nature, conversation, embodiment as a whole.

We’d also look at talking openly about addiction cycles without moralising, cause we’ve all been trapped in a place where we allow hedonistic traits to consume us. Instead of making people feel singled out. We’re collectively in this together.

Similar to how you might’ve seen a few spiritual guru’s on Twitter or Instagram aestheticise rest. They don’t do a good job of tackling excess.

This would help people notice when pleasure is medicine vs avoidance. (even though we want to avoid a lot of things and/or people in general lol)

7) Illusion of power

Highlight actual spheres of influence. Personal boundaries. Attention as a finite resource.

We’d look at our own community scale action over grand narratives that everyone else wants us to pursue.

Replace abstract “power” with lived autonomy.

8) Faith in priesthoods

Now religion and philosophy or any fait is a tough nut to crack but if we do believe or follow something specific. If we’re able to demystify it without nihilism, we’ll be on to a winner.

It basically means translating “expert knowledge” into human language. as an example: “Here’s what they don’t explain”

This is where it invites dialogue (Which we never see because of the outrage economy) although framing it this way won’t make it feel like you’re looking for obedience. (You see this mass obedience level of shit in the political space. If you don’t follow X leaning then you’re a heretic. That shit stops growth in every aspect) So if you apply this to any form of faith, religion or world view. At least if those conversations come up. You can connect with the person without coming across as a crazy person.

This will restore discernment without collapsing into anti intellectualism.

9) Scapegoating

From a creative pov this is pretty easy. It’s all about sharing and creating stories that break binary thinking. Yes you’ll have to show how blame simplifies pain but you can make “both/and” emotionally compelling, which will replace moral superiority with shared responsibility.

10) Rewards & punishments

You can expose how incentive systems shape behaviour. Frame it like “Notice what this system rewards”

Highlight people choosing integrity over advantage, which you see a lot of in the online space, like “You have to post 15x a day on Facebook AND Twitter or your audience will forget about you.” (Bullshit) So you can celebrate refusal, rest, opting out of whole industries or spaces as a whole. (I’ve done it and I know of others who have done it too. You don’t have to stay on a platform and become a performative monkey for whatever algorithm is pushing xyz. I’ve ejected myself out of the copywriting space because it’s become so incestuous with its peacocking and chest beating and I’ve found my people)

It’ll help people distinguish survival strategies from values in the grand scheme of things but this all comes down to just you taking it slow to re-frame everything.

Hopefully this all made sense. Or at least gave you a different insight into what makes us magically and weirdly human.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Here’s the link again for the “Altering Individual Identity” page, in case you missed it or decided it was a good idea not to read yesterday’s whole email…

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

Who said we were gonna ease into 2026?

So we’re gonna riff on everyone’s favourite topic, which is cults and their fun little practices and dogmas.

In order to identify a cult you need to know that all of them worship death secretly. They are all deeply evil. However, this evil is hidden from the outside world.

A front of respectability and high moral authority is worn as a mask. Behind every evil act, a high moral purpose is feigned. This is simply the adoption of the principle of “opposite world”

If you want to go down the rabbit hole of “opposite world” google “Altering Individual Identity: a Cultic Approach in MKO 2”

Anyways.

There’s also a slight inversion on cult tactics.

Cults may also be identified by their attack on sane, healthy, moral based value systems. To a psychopath up is down, good is evil and evil good. Abusive behaviour is normalised. Sadism is a sign of “being tough”.

A cult is a protection racket. They’ll “take care” of you, in the sense that the Mafia might use that phrase. Is it good or bad? Well, if you look back at old mob boss times…

You’ll find your answer.

But here’s the fun stuff and I can’t remember where I read and researched it.

Here’s the notes…

All cults have a repetitive superstructural “religion” of control. They all possess a contemptuous view of humans and there’s this theory that us humans are self domesticated.

And so there are 10 laws of domesticated humans…

1. Cowardice. The domesticated human is above all a grovelling coward. Behind every persuasive act, every recommendation, is a veiled threat of sheer brute force if domesticated humans were to foolishly yearn for any real freedom.
2. Stupidity. The domesticated human is taught to be only as intelligent as is necessary to carry out its allotted task in the social hierarchy/economy.
3. Gullible. Linked to high suggestibility is gullibility. That is, the placing of trust in certain individuals who have done nothing to demonstrate that such trust is deserved, or even a sane thing to do. Naivety is a must. Domesticated humans must never be allowed to grow up, but must be treated as children, forever. This is known as “infantilisation”.
4. Hysterical. Most domesticated humans are incapable of rational thought. They process all decision making through their emotions. Their current emotional state is their sole guide to living. That is to say, domesticated humans are in an ongoing pathological trance state.
5. Anxious. From early childhood, most domesticated humans are in a low level state of anxiety. This anxiety makes them miserable and easy to control. Temporary pleasure (a brief absence of anxiety-pain) may be awarded to domesticated humans who please those who supply their ability to achieve their most basic means of survival. If they are ‘bad’, their anxiety levels can be increased, easily.
6. Hedonism. Because domesticated humans dislike their almost constant state of anxiety, they seek refuge in hedonistic excess. This relieves them for as long as they are absorbed in the hedonistic pursuit of choice (addiction). Sex, so called recreational drugs, food, alcohol, over watching TV, films, excessively playing computer games etc.
7. The illusion of power. All domesticated humans believe they have a degree of control over their lives; the fact is they don’t, because they abdicated their real power to their owners. Domesticated humans do have tremendous power, which they never use. This was even written about by Tacitus.
8. Faith in priesthoods. From ancient times all humans have been manipulated by those who claim knowledge of the “mysteries”. That is, a body of knowledge only known to “the priesthood”, that must be followed uncritically by the “profane”. For fear of x, y, z.
9. Scapegoating. All mystery religions require a scapegoat. That is, a group of people (heretics) upon whom all of society’s ills may be blamed. What the heretics believe and who they are is irrelevant and constantly changing. It is the arbitrary nature of such demonisation which makes the technique so effective. Anxiety is kept high, because anyone could be next in line for the chop. Domesticated humans love scapegoating, it allows them to relinquish all sense of personal responsibility. They get to feel superior to others, if only briefly. This temporary feeling of “feeling good about oneself” is highly addictive to people with usually low self worth.
10. Rewards and punishments. Law has nothing to do with morality or conscience. It has everything to do with obedience. Laws may be wholly immoral and nonsensical. In fact it is best if they are; this increases anxiety and causes no end of physical and mental health problems, which disable the domesticated humans, making them far less likely to rebel. All means of getting essential human needs met, such as food, shelter, and companionship etc. can only be realised if “cult law” is followed. In any human herd there are psychopaths, you simply create a large enough gang of them, train them in rudimentary herd management, give them devices that cause physical harm, and let them hunt “troublemakers”. Quite simple.

Personally I believe these are not truths about what people are. They are descriptions of what prolonged fear, hierarchy, and trauma can do to people.

If we change the conditions, people change.

So how do we re-frame this for good in a marketing and creative/artist sense?

Courage is situational. “Cowardice” is often learned helplessness.

In a creative sense. We need Art that documents ordinary acts of quiet courage. Stories of people who changed when conditions changed. Visual metaphors: cages with open doors no one notices… That goal then would be to help people recognise that fear ≠ character flaw. Courage grows in safety. And safety hasn’t been around properly in the last few years because of all the bullshit going on in the world/news etc.

We flip Stupidity to Undereducation is political. Make intelligence feel accessible and pleasurable. Break complex ideas into beautiful, shareable formats. Teach critical thinking without condescension. Celebrate curiosity over credentials. Reverse shame around “not knowing” and make learning contagious…

I know this is started to become a meaty long email. I’ve also touched on how to flip points 1 and 2 for good in a creative sense.

If you found this interesting. Let me know and I’ll do a part two that finishes off the re-frame of the last 7 and how we can use it for good as an artist/creative.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Here’s the link for “Altering Individual Identity: a Cultic Approach in MKO 2” cause google can be an ass sometimes and spit out random links to AI generated bullshit.

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

Back in 1978. Gary Thuerk inadvertently created email marketing as we know it today.

I mean he sent one email to 393 people and did over $13 million in sales, which is wild.

If you dig back into the internets early days you’ll find ARPANET was what all the cool kids were working on, and by cool, I mean nerds and It was a government funded network that connected universities and military research labs across the country…

Crazy thing is, back then only about 2,600 people on the earth had access to it and a guy named Gary Thuerk was one of them.

He was a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation working out of their Boston office.

Gary needed to sell a new line of computers to potential customers on the West Coast, but they were 3,000 miles away.

And like me, the thought of making 393 individual phone calls sounded absolutely awful (visiting each in person would even worse)

So he grabbed a paper directory and started highlighting names in yellow.

Then he had his colleague type all 393 email addresses into the system one by one while he wrote one message inviting everyone to an in person event.

When he hit send it became the first mass marketing email in history. And just like most marketing emails sent today, the people receiving weren’t fans. ARPANET was supposed to be used for official government business only. An official from the Defense Department called Gary’s message a “flagrant violation” of network policy…

He also got in serious trouble with leadership and was forced to promise he would never do it again. But the crazy thing is the email actually worked…

The email went on to generate over $13 million in computer sales, which roughly works out to roughly $33,000 per recipient from a single email that was sent before the internet even existed.

So our boy Gary Thuerk now holds a Guinness World Record for sending the world’s oldest spam email and is known as the “Father of Spam” in marketing circles. You can thank Gary for all those marketing emails you get in your inbox each and every day. Especially the shitty ones where they try and sell you penis pills and crypto shit coins.

But off the back of that. When you do email right. You build an unwavering following of people who dig what you do, share and sell.

And so it is, like every year for the past how many years…

Email and email marketing is king.

So going into 2026. If you’re not building an email list and emailing it daily. You’re going to be missing out.

So if I can give you any advice going into 2026…

It’s build yo’ damn email list.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Here’s proof that it’s legit and your favourite email marketer who says xyz is first is lying. Gary is the man.

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

That’s right.

Get that Big Hairy Audacious Goal set down on paper so that it can stare you in the face every day while you make it happen.

Jim Collins coined the term and stretched it out over the course of 10-30 years. I mean that’s some next level visionary stuff you’d see someone like Elon Musk write about on the ol’ Twitters…

Although I thought about condensing the 10-30 years down to 1-3 years. Which is wild but if you are willing to sacrifice EVERYTHING for those 1-3 short years, you know you’ll kick it’s ass and drill down fully to realise it all.

Now as much as I’ve said I’m going to write more and publish more and even had conversations about creating “things” to sell to you which contain deeper thoughts and or words.

My Big Hair Audacious Goal is to hit £500k collected via legally moving money around the markets (Aka long/short term trading)

It’s one of those things that I’ve never really spoken about cause a lot of marketers ruined that whole industry back in 2017/18 but hey ho. Things only change if you make the change.

So that’s it really.

Write more. Sell things and use the market to pull out an obscene amount of money.

And the woo woo crowd will always be like “But why do you wanna do that?”

Honestly. I don’t care about money. To me it’s like a video game. It’s a high score at the end of the day and if I can get that and more pulled out of the market. I can give it away and help others do more in life.

I’ve never been keen on the whole gatekeeping of information. Even if I’ve spent years learning/studying and whatever. We’re all here to live our best lives and unfortunately, some people are stuck. Even if it’s not their own fault.

I’ve come from nothing. Built up and lost it all and have luckily managed to keep myself on the straight and narrow. So at the end of the day, if I can help a handful of people kick ass and reclaim their lives. That’s my end goal.

Nothing too massive. Just something right for what I feel is right to spread out into the world.

Do I know how I’m gonna achieve half of it? Hell no.

But I’ve written it down on paper and I’ll work on it until it manifests into reality.

Stephen Walker.

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

Oh boy. 2025 was a wild year.

And I’m glad we’ve finally dragged it to the back of the dusty ol’ shed, put it on its knees and given it the Mozambique drill. 3 bangs and its gone.

So what does 2026 have in store for us?

Is it the same “New year, new me” that we see pass into the world every year, only to be given up around 19 days into the new year?

I don’t think so. 2025 was different. It pushed a lot of people beyond their breaking point and in some cases, straight down into rock bottom. Mentally, physically and spiritually we were tested.

But we made it out alive.

So what does this mean?

Those silent goals and transitions we’ve all been making. This year it’s time to be loud about it. It’s time to dial it in and focus, cause change is good and pushing us to the next level of where we want to be, will see us truly succeed.

Some of us have books and stories to write or paintings and art to get out into the world and some of us are just venturing into the creative world, even with AI kicking at the door and wanting to be let in. Yet everyone I know is sticking true to themselves.

And that’s the real beauty of being a human. Write who you are, fuck trends, get weird, and especially this year, fuck the machine.

After a little break to close out the year and also not being sick anymore (Although I haven’t had heating and hot water since the 25th of December lol) I’ve made it out on the other side and I’m ready to kick 2026’s ass.

I’ll be writing and publishing more (Picking up an old pen name again)

I’ll be rejecting clients who have crawled back to me after taking on lesser individuals who made AI their whole personality, only to destroy their reputations…

I’ll be sitting strong on the financial charts (If you’ve seen anything in the news over Gold/Silver and the US Dollar) you know big things are coming economically and financially in 2026.

And I’ll be taking care of my health a little more this year as the last month-ish has just shown how bad it can get. (Although I do have some interesting psychological theories surrounding it too)

Other than that. I’m glad to be back. I’m grateful to still be a live and I’m ready for 2026.

I hope you’ve all been well and are also going make 2026 your bitch.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. If you have any ideas, goals etc. Let me know. I’m always interested in hearing the story surrounding it.

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

Little Johnny comes home from school excitedly to finish up for Christmas.

He walks into the kitchen, pacing slowly.

“Mom,” he whispers but you can hear the confusion in his voice.

He sees her sitting there expressionless. He inches closer and waves his little hand in front of her. Not a twitch. Not a blink. Not even a little exhale.

But before he can react. Her head turns and she grabs him by his scrawny little shoulders. A look of horror washes across his face. He can’t do anything to resist.

“Mom?” he says.

“You’ve forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a story and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time…” she says.

“Big Tech is offering you a Faustian bargain. It promises to remove all friction from life, to keep you from having to think or study, and the result is your brain will become pudding, you’ll become incapable of creativity or communication. They want to make you a non-person!” she says. This time more aggressively.

She drops him to the floor and runs out of the front door. Poor little Johnny is trying to process all of the words his mother has just said to him.

Outside there’s a loud crash and people are screaming. A blood curdling shriek echoes back inside of the house.

“I’m sorry Johnny, I didn’t want it to end like this!”

/end

SEE WHAT BIG TECH IS DOING. IT’S DRIVING PEOPLE MAD, INCLUDING ME.

In all honesty though. ‘Tis the season to read books and eat food and snacks and watch real movies (While you still can)

Cause next year is gonna be an absolute clown show. The way things are going to be forced into our lives without any resistance whatsoever will drive you truly bonkers.

Give this to your loved ones and help them prep for 2026. Thank me later.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. By time this lands in your inbox. I would’ve probably been heavily dosed up on lemsip and deep in a coma. So you can thank the medication for my semi-fever-dream type story.

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

A last minute decision was made to rest properly.

It’s nearly Christmas and my chest and cough has come back with a full vengeance.

I have a few days to try and get back to normal and it’s the most annoying and frustrating period of sickness I’ve had in years.

So if you’re celebrating Christmas with family, friends and loved ones.

I hope you have an amazing time.

If you’re solo and just cracking on. I hope you have a great rest too.

I appreciate you for sticking around and reading my shenanigans over the last few years of starting up this here lil’ cult.

All your replies, suggestions, stories and ideas have been amazing.

Love you all.

Stephen Walker.

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

The best movies were made without it.

The best games were made without it.

The best comics were made without it.

The best stories were made without it.

The best songs were made without it.

And now for some reason we really need it, there’s no other way and if we don’t adopt it and make it our whole personality, we’re gonna die…

Which is something you can notice as the quality of all work being created nosedives.

It’s why art and art prices are surging.

It’s why people are going back and watching “The classics”

It’s also why more and more people are opting back in to books that have landed pre 2020.

The uncanny valley vibe being forced into our faces on a day to day basis, by marketers who believe they’re on the cusp of greatness, while also simultaneously leading a life of delulu (as the kids would say) is starting to hit massive proportions.

The beautiful thing though is that there’s such a massive hatred for this generative AI tech and the companies that are forcing it on us, that you’re seeing it bubble up and watching the rejection push through.

Now there is advantages to AI (Actual artificial intelligence) but the generative AI that most of the tech and marketing bros are on their knees for is starting to reverse on them.

I don’t think anyone would’ve every thought that we’d head down a path, where these tools would slowly strip away the things that we did that makes us truly human. (The arts)

But here we are in this weird timeline where the battle is slowly unravelling.

Every day you log in you, see garbage generated by AI infecting your eyes, while actual creatives are pushing back.

It truly does suck that it’s gotten to that part, although it’s a fight worth fighting for, cause before we know it. We’ll be mindless drones scrolling, drooling and saying “Please sir, may I have some more!”

Stephen Walker.

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

By the time you’re reading this.

I might be laying face down in a ditch somewhere in Manchester…

That being said. It’s that time of the year where I am in charge of adults and making sure they don’t unleash a lot of chaos right before everyone winds down for Christmas.

I’ve learnt a little trick over the years.

You can hypnotise people and bring them under your spell if you take them all out for a meal.

They will hopefully do your bidding, as long as the meal is good.

Not one of those corporate pizza parties from hell.

Just a good meal.

Some good vibes.

And genuine connection with fellow meat puppets after this year has honestly slammed people about mentally, spiritually and physically.

Years ago I would’ve been about the whole hustle culture and just went full on into the new year.

But as you get older and wiser you realise that there’s honestly no need to go absolutely batshit and burn yourself out before the new year starts.

So take it slow. Wrap up any work you need to do and take some TLC time for yourself.

Get a new book or a favourite hot drink, get some new shoes or even cut off people who have made things horrible this last year.

It’s all about going into the new year fresh. With love and with positivity.

I’ll still be sending out emails over the Christmas period, but I’ll probably be in a food coma and they’ll sneak out automatically… (Like this one)

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I know I’ve said in past that I’m not all about the automation life, however a few people have said that I need to stop being full on all the time with the writing. I need to live a little (Go figure lol)

P.P.S This is the greatest Christmas film of all time as it adds a lot of introspection on the times when we’ve wanted to throw in the towel.

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

I felt like I was dying a few weeks ago.

I had what most people would consider the man flu.

Yes it is bad, was bad and is still (kinda) bad but I’m 99% over it now.

For about a month it felt like my whole body was being folded up like a lawn chair.

As much as I had medicine or pills of any sort. I went to the local GP and he deduced that whatever I had caught was viral and there wasn’t much I could do, except for do things that would soothe my throat and take something for the fever, and my body would sort itself out.

So I did that. I drank the gross drinks, I took a few painkillers and nothing. I mean it worked a little but I was still tossing and turning and waking up in the middle of the night, sounding as if I was going to hurl a piece of lung from my chest cavity…

So I did what everyone usually does when they want to make money online…

They go onto google and type “how to make money online!” except this time it wasn’t money it was:

“Please lord how do I stop my throat from feeling like I’ve deep throated a razor blade…”

Low and behold. A crusty old forum which I’ve visited years and years ago, popped up and recommended coconut oil.

Cold pressed, organic coconut oil.

The idea was to take a teaspoon and melt it in your mouth, followed by gargling on it.

(It was gross and okay ladies now I understand…)

But within 10-15 mins. The throat burn was gone and whatever magic it did, it some how managed to take a whole bunch of the gross gunk (I’ll leave out the visceral details) and it made it easier to just cough up this ball of nastiness.

It felt like a snotty exorcism and I felt good.

Who would’ve thought that good old coconut oil would do the trick.

Sore throat, flu-like symptoms, viral tonsilitis or whatever it was that I had…

Poof. Gone within a few minutes.

Obviously I’m going to keep going with this until it clears up, but let me tell you one thing…

These old granny remedies or wives tales. They seem to work like some voodoo black magick.

This is also just my anecdotal experience and shouldn’t be taken as gospel medical advice, but it’s worth looking into if you ever get stuck feeling like you want to rip your throat out.

If you wanna try out some natural remedies, this place should be your go to guide.

Stephen Walker.

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

You want to support the writer in your life?

Great.

Here’s how…

Grab a stake and drive it straight through the heart of the digital vampire currently draining the life out of all of us.

I’m talking about Generative AI.

That soulless content abomination sucking up our creative work like some kind of algorithmic Dyson, hoovering up everything we’ve ever written, painted, composed, or created, then regurgitating it back into the world as flavourless gruel. [Insert “PLEASE SIR, I WANT SOME MORE,” gif]

Here’s what you can do starting now.

Stop posting AI slop.

Just don’t.

Don’t share it, don’t create it, don’t accidentally make it part of your aesthetic because you thought that weird image looked “kinda cool.”

Stop reposting sketchy shit.

If a photo or news story doesn’t pass the smell test. Put it in the bin.

If there’s no reputable link backing it up, leave it alone.

You’re not helping. You’re just feeding the misinformation beast while it wears our collective faces as a mask.

Stop actively using AI anything.

No Sora garbage. No ChatGPT “just to brainstorm.” No Midjourney because you “can’t draw.” None of it.

And for fuck’s sake, stop playing Devil’s Advocate about it like some smug philosophy freshman who just discovered debate club.

Just get on board the FUCK AI train.

Say it loud. Say it with your whole chest.

Tell everyone that AI sucks.

Not just because it’s creatively bankrupt, but because it literally sucks.

It siphons our work, our effort, our entire information environment (and our actual environment, because those server farms guzzle power like it’s going out of style), then files the serial numbers off our art and shoves it back into the world with all the soul scraped out.

There’s no mechanism for any of this to help us pay rent. Or buy groceries. Or afford healthcare.

It’s an artbarf machine.

A content slurry factory puking low value nonsense into the open mouths of people who want to cosplay as creators without doing any of that pesky work.

They ingest the vomit, puke it onto the floor, clap their shitty little hands and go, “Look! I made art!”

It’s horrifying.

Why would you like this? Why would you defend it?

It’s the idolisation of the idea paired with the demonisation of both the creator and the creation.

It ruins us.

So you need to fly that flag. Loud and proud.

HATER-OF-AI.

Wear it like a badge.

If you love the writers, artists, musicians, and creators in your life, if you actually give a damn about what they do, that’s what you’ll do.

You won’t fight us on this.

You’ll just trust.

Stephen Walker.

Also watch this cause it all makes sense…

P.S. The best gift you can give a writer is telling AI to go fuck itself. Everything else is just wrapping paper.

P.P.S. artbarf is my favourite word.

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

The world is on fire even more now and I’m so tired of pretending everything’s fine.



It’s like we just can’t catch a break this year. Things go from bad to worse to Worcestershire sauce levels of unpronounceable disaster and back again.



Every time you think we’ve hit rock bottom, someone hands us a shovel and points downward.



Atrocities in America. Atrocities in Australia. Atrocities everywhere you look, because apparently the human race has no upper limit to the amount of bullshit we can inflict on each other and ourselves.



I don’t even know how to cure all of this. I’m not smart enough to solve global suffering or wise enough to explain why people keep choosing cruelty when kindness is right there, free of charge.



The news cycle is a relentless machine designed to make you feel helpless and angry and overwhelmed.



Every notification is another reason to lose faith in humanity.



Every headline is a reminder that the world is broken and getting more broken by the day.



And as much as I want to throw in the towel. Well, we just have to keep going.



So hug your loved ones close. Make art that matters. Be the light in a world that desperately needs more of it. Create something beautiful in the face of all this ugliness.



This place is exhausting sometimes. It’s okay to admit that. It’s okay to feel overwhelmed by the sheer weight of everything wrong with the world.



Just don’t let it paralyse you. Don’t let the darkness convince you that your small acts of love and creativity don’t matter.



They do. Especially now.



Time to turn off the internet for a bit and come back when things aren’t running out of control.



Stephen Walker.




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

Remember when we used to mock those ridiculous Facebook posts?

“If you were a bread, what bread would you be?” or “Comment your birthday month and I’ll tell you which Disney princess you are!”

We’d roll our eyes at the obvious engagement bait.

We knew it was stupid.

We knew it was manipulative.

And yet… people ate that shit up like free pizza at a college party.

Those posts worked because they tapped into something fundamental…

Our desperate need to be entertained and our even more desperate need to talk about ourselves.

The “free iPhone” scams were even more brilliant in their evil simplicity.

“We have 1000s of unboxed iPhones with little dents, so we can’t sell them, might as well give them away! Just like and share!”

Pure engagement farming that got pages to millions of followers before flipping them to sell random dropshipped garbage.

It was all powered by our basic human psychology…

We want to be entertained, we want free stuff, and we want to feel special and the list goes on and on.

Those tactics worked. They just happened to be wielded by scumbags who turned engagement into empty manipulation instead of genuine connection. (Which is ironically the one thing that is lacking so much now, cause people just want to punt their warez)

But what if we used those same psychological triggers for good?

What if we created content that was genuinely engaging without being of the super cheese variety?

Opinion Traps are fun to play with. They work well on Twitter and I see them popping up on FB lately too.

Instead of “What bread are you?” try “Hot take: People who put pineapple on pizza have better taste than people who refuse to try new things. Change my mind.” (Funny thing is. You’ll get the moral high ground police that’ll comment “WELL IT’S NOT A HOT TAKE IF YOU SAID IT’S A HOT TAKE” No shit sherlock, but it got you to engage didn’t it?)

You’re still asking for engagement, but you’re sparking actual conversation about something people have real opinions about.

Plus, you’re subtly positioning yourself as someone who thinks outside conventional wisdom, cause you’re willing to mix it up.

Another one to use is an Experience Exchange

Instead of fake giveaways, try “I’m collecting stories about the worst business advice anyone’s ever given you. I’ll share the best ones (anonymously) in next week’s roundup.”

You’re getting engagement, gathering content for future emails, and creating genuine value by crowdsourcing useful information, plus the fact that you’re allowing people to send you things shows that you genuinely value their opinions etc.

The last one is a Vulnerability Hook

Instead of arbitrary personality tests, try “I spent $10K on a business coach who told me to ‘just believe in myself harder.’ What’s the most expensive lesson you’ve learned the hard way?”

You’re sharing something real about yourself while inviting others to do the same. Natural engagement and not just baiting for clicks.

And as much as I want to slap Gary Vee because of some of his takes. When he said that he attention economy isn’t going anywhere, he was right.

We can either master it ethically or watch the cheesy engagement farmers continue to win by default.

And if you’ve been building your audience properly. You’ll know that they’re smart enough to see through bullshit.

So you might as well them something worth engaging with.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. These were just vague examples but I’m sure you got the gist of it. Whatever niche you’re in. I’m sure you’ve seen the outlandish stuff that passes as content, so at least wrap it in something that makes sense and is a net positive for engagement.

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

Now apparently this is true and even if not. It’s hilarious.

Sometimes the universe presents you with an opportunity to be absolutely, magnificently petty.

And when that moment comes, you have two choices…

Take the high road like a boring adult, or embrace your inner petty demon and create a masterpiece of justified spite.

50 Cent chose option two, and it’s fucking beautiful.

Here’s the quick TL;DR version…

Teairra Mari owed 50 Cent about $30K from some legal bullshit. Instead of just paying up like a normal person, she decided to drop a diss track called “I Ain’t Got It” which basically turning her debt into some weird flex or whatever.

Now, most people would’ve just rolled their eyes and called their lawyers.

Maybe written an angry Instagram post.

But 50? Nah.

50 saw this disrespect and said “hold my champagne.”

He trademarked the phrase “I Ain’t Got It.”

Then he bought the domain name.

Basically ensuring that if Teairra Mari wanted to make any money off her own diss track, she’d have to pay him for the privilege.

Imagine taking someone’s attempted clap-back and turning it into passive income?

The sheer audacity of it is chef’s kiss perfect.

Now I’d imagine every time someone searches for “I Ain’t Got It,” every time someone wants to use that phrase commercially, every time that song gets mentioned our boy 50 cent will win.

Entrepreneurial pettiness should be a whole niche in itself.

The new business model? Disrespect.

Sometimes you can’t take the high road. Sometimes people push you to a point where being the bigger person feels like letting them get away with bullshit.

Sometimes you have to show people that fucking with you comes with consequences they didn’t anticipate.

50 Cent understood the assignment and got paid for it…

Although it is the internet, this could be half true, but it was hilariously entertaining for me to look up on the old Twitter.

Now I need to look for my Grinch-like moment to be petty before the year ends.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Tonight’s agenda though. A bit of fibonnaci study, food and this film, unless I pass out…

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

Let me tell you about the marketing equivalent of putting pineapple on pizza, except worse, because at least that’s consensual…

It’s opting people into your email list without their explicit consent.

I don’t care if they bought something from you five years ago. I don’t care if they downloaded your free PDF about productivity hacks. I don’t care if you think they’d “totally love” your new newsletter about cryptocurrency investing or whatever half baked idea you’re peddling this week.

If they didn’t explicitly opt into THIS list for THIS content, then adding them is a cardinal marketing sin.

Here’s why this pisses me off…

Years ago, I used Substack under a completely different pen name, tied to a burner Twitter account, with a separate email address. It was for writing creative content that had absolutely nothing to do with my current work. People had to actively seek out that content and deliberately subscribe.

That list was sacred. Those subscribers chose to be there for a specific reason.

Now imagine if I decided to migrate that entire audience to my current business newsletter without asking. Just because I had their email addresses doesn’t mean I have permission to bombard them with completely different content they never signed up for.

You’re not being a smart marketer by doing this. Mainly because the rules of changed and ESP and email providers will kick your ass if they ever find out.

Yet I see this shit constantly.

Some entrepreneur decides to pivot from selling yoga mats to teaching Facebook ads, and suddenly everyone who ever bought a yoga mat is getting emails about conversion funnels and pixel tracking.

Or worse…

They buy email lists. They scrape LinkedIn for contact information. They add every business card they collected at a networking event to their “valuable insights” newsletter.

It’s stupid and it’s not marketing.

You’re training people to associate your brand with spam. You’re burning bridges before you even build them. You’re basically announcing to the world that you don’t understand consent, boundaries, or basic human decency.

The worst part? It doesn’t even work.

Unengaged subscribers drag down your deliverability rates. They mark you as spam. They actively hurt your ability to reach people who actually want to hear from you.

So here’s a very simple rule… Don’t do it. Ever. Not to your best customers. Not to your worst enemies. Not even if you think you’re doing them a favour.

Build your lists organically. Ask for permission explicitly. Respect people’s choices.

Cause we all know it gives off “amateur hour” vibes.

I couldn’t imagine spamming people who never asked to hear from me.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK. HONESTLY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. DO NOT GET MAD AT ME IF YOU CLICK IT…

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