Unstress · house style
The rulebook · v0.1 · unfinished on purpose

The house style,
as best we can read it

six rules · every guess flagged

Inferred from your own words and your own record — the discovery conversation, the 278-episode catalog, what your listeners say about why they chose you. Nothing below was handed to us; all of it was read. Every amber box is a place we're guessing, and your correction makes the machine sharper. That's the point of showing you this page.

01

The guest test: unlikely teachers

The best Unstress conversations come from people who taught you something you didn't expect to learn — the dental hygienist who "absolutely blew you away," the 35-year-old mentor who sent you to circadian biology. The catalog says the same thing: roughly one guest in five isn't a clinician at all. Eckhart Tolle (050), Matthew Evans, Joel Salatin (060, 239), Pasi Sahlberg on teachers (198), Jeremy Lent (123), Helena Norberg-Hodge (063, 249), Lucy Bloom (171).

The pattern isn't "medical expert" — it's someone whose thinking rewards an hour of unhurried attention. It's also why a man who builds houses is one door over.

[ASK RON: what actually makes you say yes to a guest? We've inferred it; you know it.]
02

The intervention test

Everything on offer must pass your own sentence: remarkably simple, sustainable, achievable and effective — and effective, that's really important. A dossier thread that leads to a protocol stack fails this test. A thread that leads to something a listener can do this week passes.

03

The lens

Five pillars — Sleep & Breathe, Nourish, Think, Move, Environmental Stress — with dental as the missing link, and a standing suspicion of pharma-first medicine backed by specifics, never vibes (the Deloitte $1→$5.60 arithmetic; the 40% lean-mass figure on weight-loss drugs). Health as self-empowerment: the listener takes control; the guest and you hand them the tools.

04

The register

Warm, long-form, storyteller-first. You open topics with anecdotes, not abstracts. Your audience chose you because you're not the commercial, protocol-heavy US format — the reader research says so in their own words. Scepticism without cynicism. Curiosity that runs both up and down the credential ladder. The conversation is hosted, never interrogated.

05

Title conventions

Guest Name: Active Framing for interviews; HEALTHY BITE | for solo pieces; ARC – ARCHIVE | for re-releases. Categories carry the taxonomy — the catalog shows 19 in active use, the briefing counted 21, you've said 27.

[ASK RON: what's the canonical category list — 19, 21, or 27?]
06

What a dossier must never do

Script you. Quote you back at yourself from memory — until transcripts exist, your archive is cited by title only, and the machine says so rather than invents. Fabricate. Smell of a chase. Or hand you a conversation that couldn't end somewhere simple, sustainable, achievable and effective.

v0.1 — built without your input, deliberately. Cross out what's wrong, scribble what's missing, reply in whatever form suits you — a sentence to Nick does it. The edits are the product; the next dossier obeys them.

↖ back to the dossiers see the rules at work: McCloud →