Piotr Pachota should give me money

...and so should The Boy Reading This

This will be a quickie because my flight just got delayed and I’m currently stuck at the airport amidst a horde of poops who are severely triggering my sensory issues.

TL;DR — You boys need to stop calling people “grifters” the moment they try to monetize their platform or use it to promote their business. Also, you, the reader should become a paid sub to The Walt Right—for entirely selfish reasons.

Keep reading and I’ll explain.

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First some context.

When I started my Substack last year I immediately deployed a thoughtful and canny monetization strategy and in doing so nabbed an Orange Check (for 101 paid subs) only two months after deciding to make a serious push for it:

Note this was in spite of having a relatively small account in terms of total followers—my paid conversion rate was simply insane because A) I was putting out a ton of high quality content at the time; and B) I knew what to monetize and what not to.

Then in June I started The Tortuga Society, and immediately started making so much more from that revenue stream than from my normie paywall it made sense to get lazy about monetization. At first I simply used Founding Subs as an entry fee, and then once we launched our external website I basically stopped monetizing altogether:

As part of this pivot I also abandoned my initial strategy of rapid horizontal growth for one of sustained vertical growth through Walt Right Superfans via Tortuga. This coincided with my blog becoming a lot more artistic and experimental—I adopted a more literary style, returned to my roots as a lyricist, began writing very candidly about my personal life, started saying “nigger,” and so on.

And obviously such posts were heavily interspersed with others shilling Tortuga and proffering evidence that Cap’n Walt is not, in fact, a grifter, but overall my publication actually became a lot less hookery during this period, as the tight and focused marketing to my Thousand True Fans subsidized a dramatically less strategic and mediated approach overall.

But there were also tradeoffs, like my free sub growth rate collapsing after I began speaking in such a raw and unfiltered way. But the problem wasn’t that new followers weren’t coming in so much as that existing followers started unsubscribing in droves. If it weren’t for my insane churn rate my total follower count would be just over 9k:

Total Follower Count (Current)

Total Follower Count (Lifetime)

Anyway I’m only like 20% telling you guys all this to brag—my objective is to drive home that for over six months now Cap’n Walt has barely monetized anything at all.’

Overall the strategy has been optimized around sustainably churning out mountains of diverse and innovative content that never loses that distinctive WB sizzle, with the goal of cultivating a relentless (and often ruthless) authenticity that engenders intense personal loyalty and ingroup sentiment in my beloved Waltheads.

And that strategy has been an amazing success when it comes to growing Tortuga—our ranks have swelled to 140 men and counting, several of whom are older guys who are already relatively established in life and mostly there to participate in a high quality curated space exclusively for Walt Right Gigachads.

But it’s also had a significant drawback in that it makes it almost impossible to grab that next level of Orange Check—the opaque variant currently enjoyed by Dr. Hanania and by my reckoning literally no one else in our circles.

Now lots of you will dismiss this distinction as a silly / superficial status designation, because you have Asperger’s Syndrome and zero understanding of how normies think. But I can attest that after I earned my first check last May I benefited in all sorts of useful ways: potential podcast guests from outside my bubble automatically took me far more seriously; my haters began acting a lot more visibly butthurt and low status; it became vastly easier to procure nudes and feet pics from all your favorite art hoes; Chris Best was forced to take me seriously when I stood up for a sweet Indian boy… The list goes on and on.

And that’s why I started monetizing again—currently I have exactly 266 paid subs (down from a high of approximately 300 in August), but I’d really like to increase that number to 1001 by EOY so I can evolve into the Charizard of Racist Substack

The money doesn’t matter to me and I’ll always charge guys the minimum amount. Hell if you buy an annual just DM me and I’ll literally venmo the payment back to you once it hits my account, because now that our staffing firm is up and running I doubt I’ll even bother factoring paywall revenue into my financial projections going forward.

I literally just want the Check.

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So here comes the sales pitch—how the hell does this benefit you?

• For those of you who support my overall project, having this feather in my cap will make it vastly easier to accomplish our collective goals. It will enable me to make certain plays and access figures in the mainstream who won’t engage with me at the current juncture and probably wouldn’t regardless of how rich I get with Tortuga (because beyond a certain point the Vaishya status hierarchy yields sharply diminishing returns and you’re forced to play the Brahmin game).

• It doesn’t only help me—I’ve famously taken advantage of a strange design choice in Substack’s Orange Check system to hand out checks to my entire inner circle, many of whom you probably also read. If you enjoy the writings of Kryptogal, Lirpa, Ancient, Bingo, or any of the other writers I’ve checked, then helping me obtain this designation will also amplify their voice and lend them credibility. This isn’t about building Walt’s Narc Cult—it’s about building *Our* Narc Cult.

• That aforementioned inner circle is also always expanding, and if your shit’s good there’s a decent chance I’ll enfeoff you, the reader, with your own Orange Check that you yourself can leverage to procure podcast guests / art hoe nudes. Obviously if that happens then upgrading the check can only benefit all of us.

• As mentioned I’ll literally refund you in venmo if the $50 actually matters to you.

• Unless you’re a teenager $50 (or $5 / month) really shouldn’t matter to you, and in any event is clearly worth the volume and quality of content I put out

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And now we reach the namesake of this article—my dear friend

Piotr Pachota

, who appeared on my podcast a few weeks back and is also notable for writing that fantastic Dangerous Women essay I cited in Women Don’t Have Agency.

Ordinarily I’d preface this section by saying Piotr shouldn’t interpret the broadside that follows as a personal attack, but the dude is both incredibly autistic and incredibly Polish so I doubt that would even occur to him. But even if I’m wrong about that the exposure he’ll get from the above paragraph is sure to outweigh any mental anguish I’m about to inflict, so tbh I don’t feel too bad going 1939 on him.

Anyway this is the comment chain I take issue with:

Now it’s evident that on some level Piotr is just being a silly billy here.

But I still find his comments annoying, and here’s why:

• The WBE piece is *exactly* the sort of article that makes sense behind a paywall—not especially substantive or important, but with clear niche appeal to a very specific demo interested in eceleb drama and monetization advice.

• Based on his reasoning it seems Piotr considers literally any entrepreneurial activity to be “grifting.” But Piotr, no offense—not everyone wants to be a fucking wagie. That’s why I got into job stacking in the first place, and then eventually stopped job stacking so I could get rich teaching other guys how to escape the cage.

• The other reason is so I can easily patronize the writers I enjoy without counting pennies like some yenta fishwife. See, lots of writers are on Substack with the aspiration of turning it into a real career, or at least a side gig that takes care of a couple bills. I was able to accomplish that relatively quickly with Tortuga because I’m such a Special Brilliant Boy, but most people are going to take a while to get there, and when you’re just starting out every single paid sub counts—if not for the paycheck then absolutely for your pride. So IMO if you have the money to support someone whose writing you enjoy it’s really a dick move to juice the system and nab their shit for free. But w/e I’m not here to moralize.

• What I WILL do though is roast you for obviously being a little too proud of yourself for figuring out how to bypass a five dollar paywall like some Hasidic Jew on welfare. Bragging about ripping off your fellow Substackers isn’t going to impress anyone, and might even damage your reputation if it weren’t also quite obvious that you’re a bit of a sperg.

• That said… if you ever want to sell a guidebook on how to do it I could definitely get it to sell for like $50. I’m thinking we could split the proceeds 40/40 and then sanitize the scheme by using the remaining 20% to purchase Founding Subs to the best writers in our circles. Then if we market it mostly outside of this sphere it will on aggregate be a benefit to us all and incentivize Chris Best to close the loophole before any damage is done. We can def make this happen so lmk.

• Either way Piotr, you most definitely are not the Worst Reader Ever, because virtually nobody is going to notice you taking $5 out of their pocket. The reason WBE has become “legendary” to use your nomenclature is that the dude is driving around deflowering virgins in his lavender-scented van and then bragging about how he manipulated them into sex, or about how he cuckolded his own friend. He’s very genuinely a virtuoso at conveying status to women without them even realizing what he’s doing, and his obvious contempt for traditional masculine honor norms makes him a hugely compelling villain. And before you insist that “it’s fictional, Walt!”—sorry, no. I genuinely wish it were, but no. The girl was young enough that she deserves her privacy and I won’t be the one to drop the story, but let’s just say that if you’re a girldad like Piotr it really behooves you to take guys like that a hell of a lot more seriously and thoroughly interrogate what makes them compelling to young girls—ESPECIALLY if you’re autistic.

• And frankly, Piotr, that’s the reason it’s annoying to see you balk at throwing me five bucks, or “joke” about me being a grifter even after I dropped an article full of testimonials from prominent Substackers who are also part of Tortuga. You’ve mentioned being inspired by how I write so incisively about status hierarchies, and noted how we started similarly despite ascending in very different ways—does that connection not extend to a sense of personal loyalty toward someone who can represent our “type” to the world in a compelling way while also making normalfag social games somewhat legible to struggling autistic boys?

• If not then again, w/e, I’ll not be a moralist about it. But just from a game theoretic standpoint it’s important that you recognize it’s pedantic ankle biting like this that enables cognitively feminine men who optimize their life around feeding young girls garbage and poop to do so without ever suffering the slightest consequence. Autistic STEMcels just can’t help but break ranks and nitpick at every opportunity, and THAT is why the men you proudly dismiss as “low status” laugh at us while despoiling virgins in the back of a van.

• If you’d rather not live in a world like that you need to build alternate institutions with real muscle that can start to impose masculine honor codes on the world—organizations like the Tortuga Society, or like the Medelink Cartel, which you also instinctively opposed. Without acting in concert in a scalable way guys like us just get fucking shredded by a world that’s ALREADY ruled by the cognitively feminine and will only get more like that as we approach post-scarcity.

Anyway Piotr, I don’t ackchually want your money—if I’m being honest I was meaning to comp you after you came on my pod because I usually do that for people. It must have slipped the noggin. I’ll be sure to flip the switch shortly after this is published so you can enjoy that lunch article, which is really quite good.

But either way I hope there’s no hard feelings, because if old patterns prevail you’re probably already working on the third Dangerous Women essay, and I have every confidence it will be a veritable banger.

Anyway I’ll end this here because I’m about to touch down in Boston—it’s kind of surreal to think

Theon Ultima

and I have been equity partners nearly six months now and this is the very first time I’m meeting him in the flesh.

But to me that’s honestly been one of the purest whitepills of the past year—even in this fucked up asymmetric world real masculine honor still counts for something. Tortuga never would have reached the milestone we’re celebrating tomorrow without a COO I trust to ably manage my inconsistency and ego without repressing my fits of genius. Theon knows how to prune the thorns without clipping any petals, and that more than anything else is why we’ve managed to turn this thing into a viable business.

Anyway, keep an ear to the ground because we have some cool shit coming down the pipeline over the next few weeks. But that’s all from me tonight.

Autistically yours,
Wally B.