EXIT Podcast

This is a preview of our full interview with Auron MacIntyre. The full episode is available to paid subscribers at blog.exitgroup.us.

In this episode, we review David Kilcullen’s latest book, The Dragons and the Snakes, which addresses how the empire’s enemies have learned to fight it and win.In the first section, Kilcullen identifies the evolutionary process that has produced the surviving configuration of America’s enemies after 20 years of the GWOT. He discusses how these actors have been shaped by the present technological and cultural terrain — and especially how they have learned to draw power from global-scale economic and cultural power flows without making themselves a global-scale military threat that justifies American intervention.In the second section, he describes the process of vertical escalation, in which a weaker actor can calibrate its aggressive action to stay below a stronger enemy’s threshold of detection, attribution, or response — especially as practiced by Putin’s Russia.The Russians’ conventional military has been gutted by the shock therapy and corruption of the post-Soviet collapse, but they still have nuclear weapons and a very effective intelligence service — so they have learned to calibrate their conflict with the West to make best use of their peer capabilities, while avoiding a conventional war.He also describes how both the Russians and Americans use deniable methods (“election interference”, color revolutions, migrant warfare, etc.) to sow confusion and exploit internal divisions in their enemies’ political systems.Next, Kilcullen outlines the Chinese adoption of horizontal escalation as described in Unrestricted Warfare — in which a weaker actor fights in domains that their stronger opponent does not recognize as military, and may not even perceive as hostile.This method of warfare is also described as a “conceptual envelopment”, because the weaker opponent holds the stronger enemy to a standoff in the conventional military domain (in China’s case, building credible radars, AA systems, hypersonics, etc. in the South China Sea), but they conduct their real advance on the conceptual “flank” — in this case, buying strategically significant real estate and politicians, replacing Western manufacturing, encouraging mass third-world migration, and dumping fentanyl in the American heartland.As with a conventional flanking maneuver, the goal is to roll the enemy up from the rear, and only push through the front when the battle is effectively over.Kilcullen then suggests some possible ways that the empire might arrest or reverse its decline — but a radical renegotiation of American hegemony looks all but inevitable. We discuss what that might mean for us as ordinary citizens, and as targets of the regime’s hostility.The good news is that the most important preparation for what is coming is having useful friends you can trust — and making them is 100% legal. Join us at exitgroup.us.

K9 Reaper is a private security contractor and community safety activist in South Africa.As a zoomer, he has no memory of the Before Times — but he has had a front-row seat as things have gone from bad to worse, particularly since the 2021 riots. Copper thieves who would have fled the scene with their hand tools five years ago are now firing on first responders with automatic rifles.The primary vector of state violence in South Africa is a kind of persecution-by-incompetence, in which white South Africans are shut out of the ever-expanding sphere of government investment while their productive efforts are heavily taxed, expropriated, embezzled, and wasted.The starkest symbol of this process is copper cable theft, in which multibillion-dollar energy infrastructure, painstakingly assembled by highly skilled laborers and engineers over decades, is sabotaged and stripped for a $50 payday at an illegal scrapping camp.As in America, the violence is outsourced via race-baiting propaganda aimed at the criminal underclass. But unlike in the States, South Africans enjoy broad latitude in patrolling their communities and violently subduing criminals — partly because the government needs them to maintain basic order, and partly because the government isn’t really competent to stop them.K9 Reaper notes that South African private security forces number 2.7 million, by far the largest such industry in the world — dwarfing both the South African police (~150,000) and the standing army (~100,000, including reservists).As the South African state receded in competence, private security filled the gap in an entirely legal and non-adversarial way, until eventually their role was integrated into regular law enforcement procedure.This process has unfolded gradually over decades, until one day, despite having no constitutionally guaranteed right to firearms or self defense — and in fact facing extreme racial disprivilege under the law — white South Africans have, in practice, more expansive “2A rights” than Americans.Ethnic enclaves like Orania also became possible on the same terms: not because the South African government is so tolerant and liberal, but because they simply don’t have the juice to do much about it.I wouldn’t trade places with them at this point, but it illustrates how declining states leak power, which always presents opportunity.It can be very depressing to discover that your “constitutional rights” are not self-enforcing. On the other hand, it’s liberating to realize that what matters is the practical question: what are you able to do, and who is going to stop you?Start building with us at exitgroup.us.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry discusses the rallye mondain, a private network of social events held by French aristocratic families to ensure that their children marry well.Follow him on X at pegobry_en - and check out my retrospective writeup on the EXIT blog:https://blog.exitgroup.us/p/57-peg-on-the-french-aristocracys

On the "entrepreneurial temperament" Acceleration and deterritorialization What we can learn from the techbros What to do when you have no idea what to do

Stormy Waters is a partner at a venture capital firm. He came to the EXIT weekly group call to talk to the boys about what VCs look for in a founder or project, how to pitch, etc. He also gave an interesting take on the volatile financial situation in the coming months and years. Had him on the show to elaborate.Follow him on X at @normandodd_knew.

In this episode I summarize Natal Conference and discuss why we started it, what we learned from producing it, and what's coming next.

Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy is BAP's dissertation, which has been floating around as a PDF for several years, but which you can now pay to read here: https://amzn.to/3QqB7xKIt is a decent summary of the insights that have made BAP one of the most important ideological figures of this generation.

This week, Christopher Nolan reminds that J Robert Oppenheimer was a sensitive young man who did nothing wrong.

Pluribus is a crowd-funded "cancellation insurance" platform, where users can pledge to support their favorite writers and thinkers in the even that they lose a revenue stream (get fired from a day job, banned from Youtube, etc.)Tyler came to EXIT almost two years ago, looking for a team to help him develop the concept, and last week, Pluribus went live. I interview Tyler about why cancellation insurance is essential to free speech, how he built his team, and why he chose to build it with EXIT.

A discussion of WWI veteran Ernst Junger's book The Forest Passage, in which he describes many of the problems that our corner of the internet obsesses over to this day: cybernetics, technique, the capture of democratic institutions through mass media, etc.

Author Johann Kurtz relates his experience at major tech companies, and why he thinks dissidents under the value of these companies as a launching point for their ambitions. We discuss: What megacorps know that online dissidents don't Getting into Big Tech without a STEM degree How to prepare for a highly competitive interview Finding friends & allies without revealing your power level The horizons that open up after a few years undercoverYou can read the article that inspired this conversation on Johann's Substack, Becoming Noble.

In this episode, Drew Gorham and I announce the first-ever Natal Conference, December 1-2, 2023 in Austin, TX.We discuss why we believe this is the most important issue of our generation, a few angles we've been studying personally, and what we hope to learn from the conference.You can get your tickets now at natalism.org, sign up for our newsletter, and follow the conference on Twitter.

EXIT member and shaolin.ai founder Zach Martin and I discuss what the machines have planned for us in 2023. What creatives and wordcels need to learn to make money with AI How a large language model like ChatGPT differs from true AI How NLP opens up new frontiers for machine learning & surveillance Why ChatGPT probably isn't the Singularity Launching a business with EXIT

Even among smart dissident types, the default explanation for the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan is basically just “grit” and “sticktuitiveness” and “giving 110%” (plus maybe “asabiyyah”, which is a $10 dissident word for “teamwork”).But if that was the secret sauce, it doesn’t explain why ISIS collapsed under comparatively light military pressure, never to return; or why Al Qaeda is basically a dead meme.Out of the Mountains doesn’t set out to answer that question — it was published in 2013, when Afghanistan was nearly pacified, al Qaeda was still a going concern, and ISIS was the new hotness in Sunni extremism.In fact, Kilcullen’s thesis is that urbanized, internet-savvy, transnational guerrilla movements will be able to access power flows, and it’s a pretty persuasive thesis — but with a decade of hindsight, it turned out to be the comparatively rural, isolated, local movement that defeated the empire. So what happened?The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.This is also, by the way, exactly how the American diplomatic corps conquered the world — by becoming the broker and underwriter of international agreements that even unaligned (or even unfriendly) countries come to depend on. That authority requires global force projection to be credible, of course, but force projection alone is not enough.In this episode, I explore how non-state groups hide within, and eventually capture, the power flows that make a state a state, and what we can learn from it.

Wheelwright is a farmer and well-known poster (twitter.com/ploughmansfolly). We discuss the spiritual value of confronting death and violence on the farm, the partnership between man and beast, building community in declining areas, finding the people you can be tolerant and cooperative with, etc.

Dan Baltic is the host of the New Write Podcast and author of NUTCRANKR, a novel about a persecuted Hero of the West who lances the boil of postmodern degeneracy in a series of epistles published to a porn message board. We discuss the sane normie roots of Cancel Culture, the creative scene on our side of the internet, and what to do about guys like Spencer Grunhauer.

Nima Cheraghi is an EXIT member and Philosopher who is currently translating a memoir from the Baltic Freikorps. We discuss how search engines create selective memory, why capitalism feels increasingly centrally planned, and why academics suck at history, and pretty much everything else.

Great conversation with Clay Martin, Green Beret, preparedness expert, and author of Concrete Jungle, Prairie Fire, Last Son of the War God, and Wrath of the Wendigo.We discuss how to network and prepare without getting Waco'd, how to teach boys what they need to know without getting sued, who you need to know in your local area, and how to be useful in an emergency when you're not a leg-breaker.

John Taylor manages a factory in the US. We discuss what he has learned about the state of American labor - it's both worse and better than you think - and how beef became the symbol of the Rights of Englishmen.