First, no, this won’t replace this week’s edition. I’ll send that out tomorrow.

Second, if you find prospect of a “philosophy business” repulsive, I want you to consider the following. Our world has been investing in things far less important than honest philosophy in service to the greater good for a very long time. Philosophy deserves investment every bit as much, and I think far more, than AI, productivity apps, tech, and media. It has taken me years to realise this, and to agree to commercialise what I do in an effort to contend with, frankly, the vicious influence of technology and contemporary for-profit media. This is how I’m choosing to commit my life to changing the world.

Cheers.

I’ve been working as a public-facing, self-employed philosopher since 2023. In truth, this isn’t too far off from being unemployed. I’ve always held a job next to my philosophy work. Which has had two effects:

In December of 2025 two things happened.

To facilitate the buyback of the IP, I funded 134 Labs Limited. I chose to do this because I knew about the layoffs coming in January (or, perhaps I didn’t know, but scuttlebutt in a startup has a tendency to have enough truth to it to be taken seriously — at least in my experience) and I suspected I might be on the chopping block.

I approached Ecoteq Ventures, a US-based investment concern, and I began pitching them for an £88K investment to procure a year’s worth of runway for me to, in the seemingly likely event of termination, focus on philosophy full-time while still being able to support my family.

In the end, that investment was decreased to a £55K convertible note, and it took 7-months to materialise. We closed this past Friday ( 🎉 )

I survived the January layoffs, but not the cuts in April. So from April to July 31st, I was, truly, an unemployed philosopher in every sense.

My wife is a part-time nurse (though this is changing as we move to Scotland this month in order for her to pursue a truly excellent opportunity with NHS Scotland), and we were so broke from April to August that we had to go on Universal Credit to cover our bills.

If you’ve never chased a dream, and had the pursuit of that dream walk you right into the benefits line… the amount of shame you can feel, and which I did feel, is difficult to articulate. Perhaps I should quit, perhaps I should just get a job at another IT company, perhaps it’s more important to be financially secure than it is to be of my greatest use.

Very luckily I have a wife that believes what I do is as important as I believe it is, and she went to the mat for our family by picking up extra shifts, slashing the family budget, and teaching us all (even me, who was no stranger to scant living) how to live on a part-time band 5 nurse’s salary in the south of England. Without her, I wouldn’t have made it long enough to be writing this.

I now have £55K to make what I do worth continued investment, and I have a plan that’s been in execution for the last three months to make that happen.

Things around here are going to get a lot more consistent, a lot more high-value, a lot more intentional, and, importantly, a lot more impactful.

The newsletter will remain free, but a special paid IRL version (which is currently being beta tested) will be announced soon. There will also be many new free and paid things added to the portfolio of the work I do.

I understand many of you won’t care to follow along with this, after all you’re not a subscriber of this publication for this sort of thing. But please, if you are interested in following along, follow me on LinkedIn by clicking the above image.

And before I wrap this up, I want to take a moment to highlight something. An investment, chose to invest tens of thousands of pounds in philosophy. Yes, of course, hoping for and expecting a return, but it’s important that you understand they could have invested in almost anything else and had more hope in seeing a return. They’ve take a risk on me. What has happened here is, I think, monumental. Philosophy is getting a shot. Not a shot to sell memento mori coins, or start a resilience clothing brand, but to stand on its own two feet and succeed on its own merits; to succeed on the value of philosophy itself.

And that, I think, is pretty incredible.