EXIT Podcast

[What follows is a transcript. Please excuse errors.]It’s a great day to talk about the Constitution — because today, apparently, we get to hear whether Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett think that we should have a country.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:They’re ruling today on whether or not a Chinese Communist Party senior official can ejaculate into a cup, have that cup flown to Saipan, impregnate 10 or 20 or 50 surrogates (this is a real thing that happens), have those surrogates give birth on Saipan Island, then immediately fly all 10 or 20 or 50 children back to China as full American citizens. American as you and me.And Justice Jackson has made the elegant argument that if she were to steal a wallet in Japan, that she would be subject to Japanese law, which is, in her words, “in a sense, allegiance.”If you steal a wallet in Japan and you are arrested by the Japanese authorities and sentenced by a Japanese judge, you are essentially Japanese.Amy Coney Barrett says we can’t strike down birthright citizenship for illegal migrants because what if you don’t know who the parents are? How can you prove that they’re not citizens? American citizenship is the default position: everyone’s an American until proven otherwise.Which, of course, these arguments are absurd on their face. It takes like five seconds to figure out how they’re terminally unworkable. But Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson don’t have to win an argument.Paid subscribers receive access to full recordings of EXIT Q&As, and invites to EXIT cocktail hours. Free subscribers receive weekly news and updates via email.Kagan and Barrett and Sotomayor and Jackson — our gay race communists — they’re going to vote against restrictions on immigration no matter what, because they don’t believe America should be a country. To the extent that they have any patriotic feeling toward America whatsoever, it’s as a void of nationhood, as the opposite of a nation.A place where anybody can come and be anything, or just more accurately as a vehicle for communism and Barrett is maybe less ideological, but in terms of her emotional orientation, it all leads to the same place. She may not actively hate and want to destroy America, but any of the things that we could do to protect it are going to make her sad: and if it makes her sad, she’s going to vote against it.So, in practical terms, that’s the state of constitutional law in America.You got four judges who are pretty much always going to vote one way. You got four other judges who are pretty much always going to vote the other way, and the bottom line is just which direction makes Amy Coney Barrett feel less sad.A lot of the criticism around this and other Supreme Court decisions has been that these women are stupid. I don’t necessarily think that’s true — or, at least, I don’t think they need to be stupid to behave the way they’re behaving. I don’t think if you sat them down and had this conversation, and you walked them through the logic of why it’s obviously silly to argue that “stealing a wallet in Japan makes you Japanese,” or “everyone’s an American until proven otherwise,” I don’t think they would be confused by the logic. I don’t think they would be flummoxed.Instead, what’s happening here is they’ve got an object level moral outcome that they think is the right outcome, and there has to be some fig leaf of textual interpretation to get to that moral outcome, so they’re just backing into it. They’re just saying whatever they need to say to get to where they want to go.The problem, if you are a textual constitutionalist like Mike Lee or Thomas Massie or Rand Paul, is that all the proper procedures were followed in putting these women in the chair.You are morally and ideologically committed to a captured process, a process that is in the hands of people who don’t care about it.You have no grounds from inside the frame of your own ideology to criticize that. Particularly if you believe that this construct of procedure and law is what makes Americans Americans, it’s what makes you you, then you’re in a really serious situation — because the people in control of this system don’t just lack respect for that procedure; they lack respect for that identity — and they have a completely different notion, in fact, a hostile notion of what America is and who Americans are.So it’s not just that they disagree with you as a matter of ideology: they feel no kinship with you, and so your ideology requires you to subject yourself essentially to foreign occupation people who regard themselves as foreign to you and hostile to your interests.About a month ago, Ben Wilson from How To Take Over the World Podcast came to the EXIT meetup here in Utah Valley, and I was talking about some of the thoughts I had putting together the Ordeal of Incivility for the podcast last month, and we were talking about how this prob

[This is a transcript — please excuse errors. Full audio recording above.]I’m hearing lately that Utah has Gone Woke.The puppet masters of every institution of power in the Utah conservative establishment are actually secret communists. Governor Spencer Cox is a communist. Also Senator John Curtis, Mitt Romney, the Church, possibly even the Utah Republican electorate itself.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:Friends I know who know these people would laugh at this; not because Mitt Romney and Spencer Cox and John Curtis are all such swell guys, but because it’s just a total misread of where these guys are coming from, who they are, what they care about. But you can see where an outsider would get the idea.Ever since the church sponsored Prop 8 to ban same-sex marriage in California (and won, by the way), Utah has led the way in capitulating on basically every progressive cause they can think of.So you got the Utah DEI Compact, which they signed, and then, uh, recently reversed. You’ve got the Utah Compromise on LGBT discrimination, the Conservative Climate Caucus, which John Curtis runs Disagree Better, which is Spencer Cox’s project (what if we just got along with the communists, has anyone tried getting along with the communists?)All of our state representatives supported the Respect for Marriage Act, which ratifies by an act of Congress what the Supreme Court had already decided at Obergefell. But you saw how with the Dobbs decision, once Roe v Wade was overturned, the states were able to go back to having abortion law. Well, the Respect for Marriage Act basically says you can’t do that. And most recently you’ve got this redistricting fight where several Utah Republican legislators said, “We need an independent, impartial, bipartisan redistricting commission.”And then, on the basis of that ruling, this liberal female judge basically hands over redistricting to this progressive advocacy group called Mormon Women for Ethical Government, which carves out this like D+50, basically overtly communist congressional district in the middle of Salt Lake City.Paid EXIT Newsletter subscribers get full member Q&A recordings and invites to EXIT cocktail hours — or sign up for free to get weekly news and poasts.And then you’ve got KSL and the Deseret News and Deseret book and BYU, all of which are owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which is obviously the dominant political and cultural elephant in the room.And all these secondary institutions have the usual cast of journalists and MBAs and academics pumping out basically the same commie corporate Memphis that you’d expect from any secular institution.And so you would not be crazy as an outside observer to conclude, like conquests third law says, that “the behavior of any bureaucratic institution can be best understood by assuming it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”But the puzzle here is that all of this has happened while the state has maintained ironclad Republican dominance — and, in fact, explicitly growing support for Donald Trump.The state went 21 points up for Trump in 2024, which was a wider margin in 2020, which was itself wider than in 2016.Utah may not be the reddest state, the most MAGA state — but it actually is one of the most Republican and least Democrat states in the Union. Only Wyoming and Idaho have a higher proportion of registered Republican voters, and only Wyoming, Alaska, and Idaho have fewer registered Democrats.And so the narrative that you sometimes hear, both inside and outside the state, is that Utah is this rock ribbed, red-blooded MAGA Republican electorate, and it’s just this thin layer of traitors, this again, cabal of communist infiltrators, who’ve been playing the long game their whole lives, and now they’re finally in control.But what’s weird about it is that all of these secret communist infiltrators are actually still doing pretty okay with their voters. Who again, in terms of their party affiliation, in terms of their stance on the issues, are about as Republican as it gets.Governor Spencer Cox, who’s the DEI compact guy and the disagree better guy, his overall approval rating is in the 50s, and his approval rating with Utah Republicans is in the high 60s, low 70s.He’s actually having trouble with Democrats and Independents (who are overwhelmingly secular) because he’s going too MAGA, he’s too hard line.But the weirdest part is that, among latter day saint voters in particular, Mike Lee, John Curtis, and Mitt Romney have the exact same approval rating, 57%.Now, if you’re an online right wing guy and you know who these people are, you’re thinking we are in the middle of a (possibly doomed) life and death struggle for control of America’s institutions, maybe for the future of Western civilization, and Mike Lee and Mitt Romney are very obviously on opposite sides. But apparently Latter-day Saint voters

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usJoshua Sheats lives and does business in the US. He believes the 21st century will prove to be another American Century — and after living and traveling all over the world, has concluded that America’s economic freedom and institutional reliability are, if not unique, at least unusual.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and bui…

Last month, the EXIT guys had an excellent conversation with Devon Eriksen, author of Theft of Fire and professional Very Good Poaster.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:We discussed:* The need for science fiction as a prophetic and inspirational tool, driving innovation in technical fields* Devon’s vision for a future humanity that is more powerful and more sophisticated, in contrast to the anti-human apocalyptic trends in publishing* “Woke” media being downstream of the internet’s disruption of traditional media business models that enabled better curation for quality and taste* The importance of auteurs putting their personal reputation and ego on the line to deliver something that they are proud of* A right-wing commentariat that masturbates their audience’s feelings of rage and betrayal rather than helping them build* The need for cultural projects to emerge from organic networks of human taste and personal connection, rather than top-downEvery managerial system that is designed to deliver efficient results at global scale is buckling under the weight of globally democratized communications: what we affectionately call “slop”.Every applicant tracking system at every major corporation is clogged with hundreds of thousands of fake AI applications. X, the Everything App, is overrun with subcons shoveling AI-generated retard bait for a $3 payout. Movies are written for morons on their phones. The illusion of consensus can be effortlessly created with swarms of bots indistinguishable from the median voter (the only voter that matters). The technological tools of mass democracy have already been automated beyond human control. Smart people from every discipline are recognizing this rising tide, and the existential need for human curation: of art, of information, of social networks.The answer to the failure of managerial systems is aristocratic systems: or, if that term is too loaded, we could just say human systems — systems in which individual human judgment (and therefore individual human quality) is a load-bearing structure.By definition these systems don’t scale fast — maybe don’t scale at all. The only way aristocratic systems compete with democratic ones is if the people they produce are overpoweringly effective, so that two can put ten thousand to flight.If we want to build anything that can reach above the tide of slop, we need to be in the business of human cultivation.EXIT is taking a short position in managerial systems, and building the human institutions that will come next. Learn more at exitgroup.usEXIT News* Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:* 1/20: Mikkel Thorup from Expat Money, on acquiring productive assets overseas. Recording of this and our conversation with Joshua Sheats coming soon.* 1/27: Book Club with Johann Kurtz on his book, Leaving a Legacy. (This call will take place at 1PM ET/10AM PT to accommodate Johann’s European time zone.)* On 1/27, we will also have an evening call at 9PM ET to discuss a new EXIT Strategic Leadership Call.* 2/3: Brian Patterson on banking in the Caymans for regular fellas.* Member meetups — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.* 1/24: Utah County meetup: Mobile sauna and cold-plunge on the river — come support Danny’s side hustle.* 1/24: Austin. Cancelled for inclement weather. See chat for rescheduling details.* 1/24: Dallas. Also cancelled. If you are in the Southeast and in need of mutual aid, please contact your file leader and DB immediately.* 1/31: New York City.* 1/31: Ontario (Ice Fishing with Matt G.)* 1/31: Atlanta.* 2/3: Salt Lake City.* 2/7: Washington, DC.* RSVP links for EXIT cocktail hours in New York City (1/31) and Washington, DC (2/7) available here. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

Last Christmas, I wrote an article titled George Bailey and the Miracle of Kingship:It’s my take on it’s a Wonderful Life, which is my favorite Christmas movie, and it’s one that many of you seemed to get a lot out of.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:In the process of writing it, talking about it, hearing your comments, and developing thoughts at EXIT over the last year, a lot of the ideas that we drew out of this movie feel increasingly relevant to the mission of Exit, so I thought I’d revisit it.So, like I did for The Feudal Instinct, this will be a “director’s cut.” I’m going to read the article, but I’m also going to add some elaboration and commentary of things we’ve been developing since last year.So here goes:[This post assumes you’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life. If you haven’t, definitely watch it tonight.]Mr. Potter is basically right about George Bailey.You can’t run a lending business like a charity ward, particularly one owned by other people for whom you act as a fiduciary agent.If George Bailey gave away money to anyone who asked, he would bankrupt the building and loan.No matter how much profit Bailey selflessly chooses to leave on the table, it isn’t enough to build infinite houses for free.And that’s the first clue as to what is really happening here: George Bailey doesn’t bankrupt the Building & Loan.In fact, he somehow pulls it through the Great Depression (which, in the real world, sank Building and Loan Associations as a category — more on that later) and his large family lives simply but comfortably.Which means that, somewhere off camera, someone at the Bailey B&L is denying loans, foreclosing on deadbeats, and repossessing properties.It may be done very patiently, compassionately, judiciously — but it’s happening. A lending institution exists to make exactly these decisions — they have no other function.We see George make a lot of decisions that aren’t “strictly business” — but he also isn’t giving everything away. So what is he really up to?George Bailey conspicuously gives (the B&L’s) money to the people he thinks deserve it, and who he believes to be good for it.Some of these choices are pretty sensible from the outside (like Ernie Bishop, his taxi driver buddy) — but others are harder to justify (like Violet Bick, who wants the money so she can skip out on a bad reputation).In Potter’s words: “if you shoot pool with some employee around here, you can come and borrow money”.Needless to say, any one of the informal, personal favors that Potter observes in the Bailey Building and Loan — virtually every decision we see Bailey make in his capacity as the president of the B&L — would likely land him in serious trouble today, even without the crisis caused by Uncle Billy’s nepo-hire incompetence.Potter’s objections are, of course, self-interested — but they’re also a reasonably forthright representation of Yankee business norms, as critiqued by an Italian immigrant (writer/director Frank Capra).From Potter’s perspective (which is the prevailing perspective at every company you’ve ever worked at, as well as their regulators), agents responsible for other people’s investments ought to be impartial and procedural, and perform their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns.As seen through this lens, George Bailey is essentially a gangster, using other people’s money to hand out favors to his friends and build a personal patronage network.The film clearly admires George for his leniency to debtors and disregard for profit, but that too is a way of acquiring personal influence at the shareholders’ expense.A lot of people in Bedford Falls owe George Bailey a favor — and the heartwarming climax of the movie is when that favor is called in, and his friends receive him into everlasting habitations.Of course, that’s a reference to the parable of the unjust steward, where a steward is about to be fired by his rich master for mismanaging his funds.The steward says, “Well, I’m about to lose everything. I’m too weak to dig and too proud to beg. So here’s what I’ll do: I’ll go to everybody who owes my master money, and I’ll use my authority to drastically write down their debt — and then when I’m thrown out of the stewardship, I’ll have all these friends and they’ll take care of me.”And that’s essentially what George Bailey is doing throughout the film: he’s using his authority over other people’s money to acquire influence.Whether you think that’s appropriate behavior or not largely depends on whether you think of him as an employee who’s responsible to act in the interest of his employers (the investors) — or a king, responsible to act in the interest of his subjects.From the film’s perspective, George Bailey is clearly the rightful heir to the throne of Bedford Falls, and it’s exactly his unaccountable sovereign power that allows him to save the realm.You don’t hear about Building & Loan associations

Patri Friedman is the founder of Pronomos, the leading venture capital firm investing in charter cities, startup societies, and other “future governance” projects — the institutions that will update and supplant the Westphalian system. We recorded a members-only Q&A with him on the project of carving out autonomy and creating new states.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the personal, human institutions that come next. Learn more here:As we discuss on the call, the task has two components:* Land. Someone has to establish the relationships, agreements, legal frameworks, and public infrastructure for autonomous communities.* People. Someone has to build the communities themselves — groups of people with a shared vision that is sufficiently compelling, and drawing a population of sufficient scale, to draw a critical mass to the new polity.Patri is primarily focused on the land — supporting projects like Prospera, which has established significant practical autonomy on an island off the coast of Honduras.As we discuss on the call, the problem with a “land-first” approach is drawing committed people to the project once you’ve laid the groundwork.Experiments with “special economic zones” and alternative governance have to be conducted in out-of-the-way places, usually in developing countries for whom relatively modest economic incentives are meaningful.Digital nomads are almost always the first to support these projects — and obviously you don’t want to dismiss or alienate early supporters — but such people are defined by their disinterest in planting roots and embarking on the long, difficult work of founding a new community.Articles are never paywalled. Subscribe for free full articles and weekly EXIT news in your inbox. Paid subscribers get access to recorded calls and invites to in-person EXIT cocktail hours.“Pop-up cities”, conferences, parties, etc. have drawn big crowds, but those crowds never seem to distill down to any permanent presence or community, because the crowds don’t actually have that much in common — certainly not the kind of trust that makes people want to raise children together.If you’ve ever tried to build that kind of bond with other people (psychologically normal people, anyway) you realize that it doesn’t just happen — not even with people you like, who share your politics, etc.But a “people-first” approach has its own challenges.Through EXIT, I’ve found the type of people that I know I could build with, but they live in 50+ cities in 9 countries. They’re surrounded by extended families; they have deep friendships, and so do their wives and kids. They feel attachment and responsibility to the place they live.They’re pillars of the community, builders, investors; they’re in it for the long haul. That’s exactly the kind of person you need to build something new, but its precisely those traits that make them difficult to uproot — and it’s not obvious that we should do that, even if we could.We’ve accomplished a lot over the internet — we’ve launched businesses, run incubators and boot camps, organized conferences, raised millions of dollars — but our families can’t get to know each other on Zoom. Our kids can’t have a remote campout, or a remote boxing class, or a remote first kiss.So we have to learn to build in diaspora.The joke in the Network State space is that many of the guys writing essays about founding new cyberpunk nations have not demonstrated the capacity to pull off a successful dinner party.In order to reach the critical mass that allows for genuine autonomy (things like genuine “special economic zones” or “city states”), we have to start with the basic social rhythms that help like-minded people to find each other and create local relationships.Instead of trying to get our guys to detach from their local communities, we want them to lean into their natural impulse to lift where they stand. We want them to merge their local networks and become part of the load-bearing architecture of their communities.The small wins pay big dividends.The average EXIT guy experiences a massive improvement in his quality of life if he just has a handful of families with compatible values that get together once a month.We’ve gotten that far in Salt Lake, DC, New York, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Seattle, Nashville, Denver, Minneapolis. We’re almost there in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Columbus, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Boston.These small clusters become nucleation points for new professional, civic, and social activities that make our guys stronger. And in the event that their local situation becomes unsustainable, they’ll have enough organizational practice and experience with one another to make an efficient exodus — and they won’t have to do it alone.The only way to get to the epochal, historical moves that we need to make is to bank wins that make sense from where we are right now.We need to connect with all the admirable, excellent, problem-aware guys w

EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to building family empires. Learn more here:This is a “director’s cut” of my speech at the Old Glory Club/Weaving event in Portland this weekend — a few added digressions and elaborations.Skilos asked me to speak on organizing our guys.Just to give you my resume, back in 2021 I started EXIT, which is a fraternity dedicated to building family empires.Today, we have 270 active members.We’ve raised over two million dollars for EXIT startups and projects. We’ve run business incubators, machine-learning boot camps, we crowdfunded a film, we sponsored Coronation Ball, and we organized Natal Conference two years running, which is a national conference on birth rate decline.We have fifteen group calls a week: we talk about entrepreneurship, homeschooling, civic engagement, local intelligence, fitness, tech, real estate, investing — anything that serves the mission.Articles are never paywalled. Subscribe for free full articles and weekly EXIT news in your inbox. Paid subscribers get access to recorded calls and in-person EXIT cocktail hours.We have monthly chapter meetups in Dallas, Austin, Houston, Salt Lake, Seattle, Nashville, Denver, DC, and New York.We have just over 40 file leaders, who are responsible for a file of 7 or 8 other guys. They check in every month or so to assess needs, and let us know how things are going. In cities where we have critical mass, the file leaders organize the monthly meetup.I vet every guy who comes into the group in a 30-minute phone call, but I don’t have any hard algorithm that I use to assess fit, except, “Could I explain to the group in one sentence why this guy belongs here?”We have a chat, and the rule in the chat is, “Keep it Joe Rogan” — which means if you could say it on the Joe Rogan Experience, you can say it in the chat. I have this rule partly for everyone’s security, but also because it frustrates people with Aspergers. Just as a matter of taste, I don’t really want to hear everybody’s manifesto all the time.And it works. EXIT guys are practical, successful, committed, and high-trust. They hire each other, they build together, they take care of each other. They don’t purity-spiral, they don’t blackpill, they don’t jerk off about whose fault everything is. It’s real in a sense that a lot of online right wing stuff just isn’t.There isn’t any special sauce, organizationally — you could replicate the tech in a couple hours, for free.What is unique is our mission, the kind of guy that that mission attracts, and the grounds on which we build relationships.So I want to talk about why we’ve chosen this target of family empires, what it means, how we’re doing it, and why I think it works.The hardest thing about organizing “our guys” is that phrase: it’s always “our guys”, “our side”, “our thing”. We don’t know what to call ourselves, because we don’t know what makes us “us”.Everything about the present political moment in America, and across the liberal West, is just a failure to answer that question, in a dozen different forms.Whether it’s H1Bs, or Mamdani, or dual citizens, or illegal immigration — the common thread is the collapse of the West’s immune system — our inability to distinguish friends from strangers. Try to think of an active conflict that isn’t, at bottom, about this.As far as I can tell, what unites our guys, our thing, is not exactly agreement on where the boundaries should be, but just the conviction that there has to be a boundary somewhere.So we have this very serious problem that we are, in a sense, up against entropy itself. It is always easier to tear down a boundary, and reap the rewards of defection, than it is to assert or defend a boundary — especially when you’ve got no agreement on where the boundary should be.The psychology of Leftism is still utterly dominant, it’s utterly adaptive, and its only weakness, right now, is that some of us can see where it all leads — which is the extinction of ourselves, our culture, everything that we care about in the world.It sterilizes everyone who adopts it, and it consumes every human institution that can’t resist it — which is, so far, 100% of them.That’s what we have in common — “we” are just the set of people who can see that coming. But that isn’t an organizing principle, because we have no idea what to do about it, or what we’d build instead.So this is going to be a kind of good-news, bad-news talk. I’ll give you the bad news first:You do not have a people.All of our arguments about who a “real American” is are pointless, because a people is a cooperative equilibrium.You may believe, for example, that the most natural place to draw the line on “Real America” is the set of people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War, or who settled the frontier — and I would agree with you, that shared history matters, and it makes us distinct from immigrants who came to a settled and already-prosperous country.The problem is that the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War or who

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us[Above is the recording of our discussion with Mike Shelby from Forward Observer, on the broader topic of a “Yellow Revolution” somewhere 2026-2028. Below is a narrower discussion of the role of welfare programs, and the tug-of-war over government assistance, in the coming conflict(s).]If the government shutdown is not resolved next week, 42 million people will lose access to food stamps for the month of November.My timeline is now full of inner-city blacks warning of the consequences if payments fail. Many of these seem to be monetized TikTok rage-bait, but others just describe the same things that I expect to see if the spigot gets cut off all at once. It would be remarkable if 42 million people losing food benefits didn’t lead to a surge in violent crime and civil disorder.Obviously the welfare system has created generations of dependents with a deeply perverse attitude toward the people whose largesse they receive, and that system should be abolished or at least deeply reformed — but it’s also a significant structural component of the US economy.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to building family empires. Learn more here:In general, Nothing Ever Happens because, while an apocalyptic confrontation is brewing, both sides do the math:One side realizes they can’t actually win, some less-confrontational solution is quietly arrived at, and you still have to go to work in the morning.Whatever you think of the food stamp program or its recipients, cutting 42 million people’s monthly income by one-third, with less than two weeks’ notice, would be one hell of a Happening — which would mean that at least one party severely miscalculated their odds of victory.It may not happen next week, but it’s going to happen eventually.The tug-of-war between the Trump Administration and the administrative state won’t stop until something like this settles the question with finality.If it isn’t another government shutdown, the EBT system has documented, open vulnerabilities to cyber-attack, which would be easy to exploit in the event of a serious foreign policy confrontation.And if that doesn’t happen, sooner or later the government’s fiscal problems will either lead to nonpayment of these benefits, or hyperinflation (which amounts to the same thing.)So the consequences of an EBT shutdown are worth examining, because they’re coming one way or another, even if you think this particular standoff will be resolved before the deadline.Articles are never paywalled. Subscribe for free full articles and weekly EXIT news in your inbox. Paid subscribers get access to recorded calls and in-person EXIT cocktail hours.The No Kings protests last week drew an impressive crowd numerically (7 million, by some estimates) — but strained the notion of democratic mobilization as a proxy for warfighting.The crowd was 90% white, 60% female, and the median age was 44. In our recording with Mike Shelby, we discuss how this mobilization is in preparation for a Color Revolution against President Trump, either in 2026 or 2028.But while getting seven million people in the street is a testament to Democrats’ organizational capacity, it’s hard to see how that converts into any sort of hard power.Normies seem to enjoy the “No Kings” framing — but they are, by definition, not serious people, and no actual fighting-age males in the Leftist coalition care about any of that stuff.The political Left is facing the inevitable conclusion of their feminized politics:Nagging and shaming are repellent to all young men capable of violence: so, when nagging and shaming stop working, there is no longer any credible physical backstop to the argument, because all the young men capable of violence have been pushed to one side (or, as with young black men, checked out of the conversation).All the Right has to do is stop caring about the political opinions of gays, grannies, and grandes, and the Left has no more cards to play — which has been the story of the last year or so of American politics.The power of moral blackmail in US partisan politics has absolutely collapsed. It no longer matters how many old people assemble to complain.But the optics of a “bread riot” could change all that.The Left is at its rhetorical best when it reminds people what things were like in the ancien regime (generally either the Great Depression, or Dickensian England): toddlers smeared with coal dust, gaunt farmwives selling their children, bread lines; the working man “owing his soul to the company store”.(Of course, having 13% of the US population on food stamps suggests an economic situation comparable to the Depression — just without the optical problem of poor people physically waiting in lines.)President Trump has, to this point, succeeded in framing the modern American Left as shrill, spoiled, and out of touch — but 42 million people at least rhetorically “going without food” would dramatically change that perceptio

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.Malachi 4:6For the last five months, Greg Treat has run our weekly Great Houses call, in which he has laid out a detailed legal, financial, and interpersonal framework for building a great house — a cohesive, influential family that persists beyond the life of the founding patriarch.In the episode, Greg discusses how this is to be done. The podcast series (available for members) goes into significantly deeper detail on specific financial instruments, business and charitable entities, and contractual relationships that can make a Great House legally enforceable.Below, I’ll explain why we are pursuing this.Everything we do at EXIT is aimed at the restoration of the family as the fundamental social and political unit.The family — particularly, the reciprocal love and obligation between father and son — is the primal emotional circuit of loyalty, sacrifice, and obedience that allows men (especially men of unequal status) to organize and cooperate on grounds that are neither transactional nor coercive.Every bond between social unequals makes use of this instinct at some level of abstraction: a relationship of duty to an inferior is patronage, a responsible class is patrician, a king is pater patriae, a general is a “father to his men”, a nation is bound by birth to a common fatherland, and owes that nation a debt of patriotism.Patriarchy is the instinct that allows men to organize & obey intelligently, rather than crudely following incentives — & leaders that capture this instinct effortlessly overpower armies of slaves & mercenaries.But as technology enables greater social scale, this “us-ness” has to be stretched thin over an ever-larger and more heterogeneous population, from clans to tribes to nations — culminating in a global “civic nation” whose members have nothing meaningful in common. So the filial instinct is diluted and abstracted to nothing, like homeopathic medicine. In a global “civic nation”, the fictive “family” of the state has no outside enemies, so it must turn inward to justify its existence.Instead of defending “us” versus “them”, the global state exists to insinuate itself between the weak and the strong — relentlessly searching for conflicts between unequals that it can stamp out.But inequality and conflict are inescapable characteristics of every human connection — so, of necessity, the state has made itself the enemy of human connection as such.On a recent podcast, Curtis Yarvin contrasted the social role of a chauffeur to that of an Uber driver: the relationship between a chauffeur and his wealthy employer is obviously hierarchical and unequal — a “power dynamic” exists which is not present with an Uber driver, with whom the rider may not even exchange words.A wealthy employer can abuse and exploit a household servant in a personal way that is not possible with a gig worker — but it’s precisely the intimacy of the relationship that creates the capacity for betrayal. So a potentially dangerous human relationship gives way to a safe (and sterile) transaction.As Yarvin notes, even the communists admit that something important has been lost here, even if they can’t articulate exactly how or why.And this is the mission of the global state in every human relationship:* Find examples of the stronger party behaving badly (these are always abundant)* Debase the values or standards that generate the hierarchy, to the benefit of the weaker party* Imply that the hierarchy — and thus the relationship itself — is inherently (or “structurally” or “systemically”) abusive* Abolish the relationship and replace it with a transaction, mediated by the stateThis is why “globalism” is a synonym for “gay race communism”.A global state can only exist to eradicate interpersonal hierarchies — and the only way to eradicate interpersonal hierarchies is to eradicate all human values, all human judgment, and all human relationships. It’s the egalitarianism of a Soviet orphanage — or a mass grave.This process is already complete for nations, traditionally defined: citizenship is a straightforward matter of paperwork and fees.Social, civic, and professional institutions face immense pressure under the postwar civil rights regime to make their requirements algorithmic, credentialist, and impersonal. Most of these institutions, having their lifeblood drained, simply wither away — the only social role left to most people at scale is a nakedly transactional job.Marriage is no longer a binding covenant, and the state pumps enormous energy into breaking the instinctively hierarchical character of marriage. But both men and women find egalitarian, transactional “marriage” so viscerally repulsive in practice that the vestigial legal institution is simply dying.What is left in the wreckage of all these human connections is homo economicus, resentfully doing exactly what he is p

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usOn last night’s EXIT group call, retired Navy veteran and OG EXIT Guy Francis discussed his evacuation from the Augusta area during Hurricane Helene last September, and relief efforts thereafter. Lessons learned:Preparedness isn’t about gear.Francis’ biggest takeaway from the experience is that physical fitness, mobility, and social capital mattered way more than gear. Especially in a city like Augusta, his expensive kit was a security liability as much as a benefit.Most prepper fantasies involve hunkering down to restart civilization, but that’s not even close to the most likely emergency outcome. Pack light, move quick, and get to safety as quickly as possible.Who, not how.Francis’ biggest assets in keeping his family safe and comfortable were a good network and good intelligence. By getting in touch with friends throughout the region, he was able to avoid threats and obstacles, find resources, and make himself useful to others who were in worse shape.The ideal networking situation is to be deeply connected in your local area, and have a broad network that provides optionality and intelligence from outside. We had an extended conversation on the value of an Area Study (more on this later.)Fitness and psychological preparedness.Keeping his family’s morale high was a challenge — Francis plans to do more short-notice camping trips to prepare his children for disruption and discomfort, and require more unplugged time so that they learn to entertain themselves without electronics. Francis also benefited from his MMA and firearms training in being able to interact confidently with unfriendly or untrustworthy strangers. Sustaining a serious injury later taught him not to take basic fitness for granted — the situation would have been much worse without the ability to walk, run, and carry heavy things. (Sometimes these situations are unavoidable — another good reason to cultivate a strong early-warning and local support network.)exitgroup.usEXIT News* On next week’s full-group call (9/2), we’re running a book club on The Forest Passage by Ernst Junger. It’s a quick read, and more important now than when it was written.* New Calls:* Family/Fatherhood and Homeschooling on alternating Thursdays at 7PM ET/4PM PT* Leadership on the second Wednesday of each month at 8PM ET/5PM PT. (This month, 9/10, we will discuss Alexander and Caesar from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.)* Civic Engagement on third Thursdays at 10PM ET/7PM PT.* Several of the guys will be in DC next week for NatCon. Reach out in the #dc channel to coordinate a meetup.* Caught a couple of the guys in Utah Valley this week. Planning a sauna build before it gets cold — check #utah channel for details.* BBQ meetup in Boise September 1. Check #idaho channel to RSVP.* Canyoneering Trip in Zion National Park (10/17-10/18). We should be getting the results from our lottery any day now. Check #meetups and #utah channel for updates.>THERE IS NOTHING BELOW THE PAYWALL

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usAndrew Isker (@BonifaceOption) is a Reformed pastor who has planted a church at New Founding’s community in Gainesboro, Tennessee. He went on Tucker Carlson’s show to discuss his church and the new community a few months ago. We discuss:* Building critical mass for an in-person community* Historical precedents for pioneering new Christian communities* Politic…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us[Part 1][Part 2][Part 3]This presentation and Q&A is the fourth in a four-part series. Because of the strong reception to the series, we have made this a weekly call, which is recorded for EXIT members.Modern societies are allergic to cults and company towns.Partly out of legitimate concern for unaccountable and abusive power — but also because they compete with and make trouble for larger, even-less-accountable institutions.Cults and company towns are defeated because they arouse the jealousy of the Powers that Be — but that’s always easier to do when they also arouse the resentment and moral outrage of the public.All parallel institutions have the same problem: they exist to generate interference with the cultural and material enforcement mechanisms of dominant institutions. If you aren’t trying to scare the hoes at least a little bit, you don’t need a parallel institution.So, if you want to build a robust parallel institution that serves this purpose, there are at least four things to learn from the history of cults and company towns:* How to achieve meaningful cohesion and group sovereignty (the hardest part)* How to avoid their real, structural problems* How to avoid their public-relations problems* How to gain maximum independence while attracting minimum institutional hostilityIn this episode, Greg discusses a model for setting up a network of interrelated “pillar institutions” which create a degree of genuine multipolarity without giving away the cohesion and unity of a strong community.We discuss various economic and cultural institutions that could serve as the kernel for such a community, and what it will take to get started.exitgroup.usEXIT News:* Weekly Group Calls (Tuesdays 9PM ET/6PM PT)* Last week (7/8) we heard from Andrew Isker (Boniface Option) on his exit from Minnesota, planting a church with New Founding in Tennessee, and cooperation between right-wing guys with conflicting religious commitments.* This Tuesday (7/15), we will have a book club on The Outlaws by Ernst von Salomon. Many parallels to our situation over the last five years, and some darker possible futures. Don’t miss this!* On 7/22, the topic is Pioneers — bring stories of your most excellent ancestors, and we will discuss where the frontiers can be found today..3* Member-led Calls* Drone/EWAR call* Great Houses call* “EXIT Bar Association” call. For EXIT JDs only — reach out in #legal for an invite. Goal is to build a shared list of highly aligned lawyers in all 50 states, so everyone has someone to call in another state if needed.* Calls coming soon:* Fatherhood/Home Education: family traditions, discipline, education, cultivation, and homeschool.* Acquisition Entrepreneurship: Finding, valuing, buying, operating, and improving an existing business.* Civic Engagement: Getting involved with your local political and community institutions.* Member meetups* 7/19: Tubing in New Braunfels. Details in #texas channel.* 7/21: DFW meetup at the usual spot. Details in #dfw channel.* 7/26: Nashville meetup — details TBA. See #tennessee channel.* 7/26: Houston meetup — details TBA. See #texas channel.* 8/9: Family retreat in Holland, MI. See #midwest channel or contact Andrew for details.* 10/17-10/18 — Canyoneering trip at Zion National Park. Descending a slot canyon via rappelling, hiking, swimming, scrambling. Expect a 12-hour day, traversing ~13 miles, mostly downhill. No wives or girlfriends, but sons are welcome if they can keep up. Contact Devin for details.* RSVP links for Dallas (7/21) and Nashville (7/26) cocktail hours available to subscribers below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area and see if the group is right for you.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us[Part 1][Part 2]In this episode of the Great Houses series, Greg discusses the “feudal instinct” — a different way of viewing the obligations between employers and employees, or patrons and clients.The feudal instinct is the drive to fulfill one’s obligations within the ordo amoris: the concentric obligations to God, family, community, country, etc. People want to follow leaders and serve patrons who empower them to meet those obligations more fully than they could alone.Other concepts:* Designing jobs and compensation schemes that make employees proud to serve the family* Structuring family members’ education and employment so that the family’s wealth edifies them and draws them closer together, rather than pushing them apart* Attaching conditions to employment that non-aligned people would find burdensome, as a selection method for the people you want in your world* Cultivating peers with jurisdictional separation to reduce attack surface and encourage community stability* Giving clients reliable access to the things they want, that they can’t afford to ownThis recorded presentation and Q&A is the third in a four-part series.EXIT News* Tuesday night full-group calls:* Tonight (5/27), we had our book club on Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein.* Next Tuesday (6/3), we will discuss the Investment Syndicate thesis.* On 6/10, we will discuss the EXIT fitness call and summer competition.* On 6/17, we will showcase the Tech and AI calls.* On 6/24, we will discuss content creation and publishing.* Member Meetups* Nashville, 5/29. See #tennessee channel for details. Cocktail hour invite below.* San Francisco, 6/8. See #bay-area-and-NorCal channel for details.* Seattle, 6/26. See #PNW channel for details.* Finalizing June dates for DC, Atlanta, and SLC meetups this week.* Cocktail hour invite for Nashville meetup (5/29) and Seattle meetup (6/26) available to subscribers below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area and see if the group is right for you.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us[Click here to listen to Part 1]In this episode of our Great House series, we address a simplified model of an illegible but enforceable arrangement of patronage between a wealthy family and their clients — or, “How to start a town without a bank”.Starting from the text of John Winthrop’s sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, we discuss how high-trust communities have created legal vehicles that allow for profitable investment, mentorship, and a reasonable assurance of cultural alignment. “Just don’t call it a loan.”This recorded presentation and Q&A is the second in a four-part series.EXIT Investment SyndicateThis week, we will have the opening call of our first EXIT Investment Syndicate. Ten to twelve investors will pool resources to invest in one man and one project as a group.On this inaugural call (Thursday 5/22 at 7PM ET, and Tuesday 5/27 at 10PM ET), investors will vote on the principles and investment thesis that will drive the selection of a project.The following week (7PM ET Thursday 5/29 and 10PM ET Tuesday 6/3), we will consider EXIT men and projects that accord with our chosen thesis.The goal of this project is to connect the EXIT brothers through shared enterprises, generate returns to shareholders, build capacity among our chosen champions, establish a real-world footprint for the group, and provide the cashflow and procedural knowledge to support future champions and projects.We will send reminders for each of these calls in the #announcements channel on the chat, and via email the morning before. EXIT guys: if you are able and willing to support this project as an investor, please check your email for an invite to the calls, or contact me directly.EXIT News* Tuesday night full-group calls:* On last week’s call (5/13), we heard from an EXIT member on his process for building community with Amish-style “work parties”, building a wireless ISP business, and growing culinary mushrooms for fun and profit. For opsec reasons this one was not recorded.* Last night (5/20), we heard about an EXIT member’s tokenized, industrial-scale Bitcoin mining operation.* Next Tuesday (5/27), we will have our book club on Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein.* Recent EXIT wins* One of our startup teams just won an 8-figure DoD contract* One of our guys just accepted a CEO role at a biotech company* EXIT guys have accepted senior positions in four executive agencies in the Trump Administration* The Hot Seat call to get our man out of Canada was a success — he has secured visa work in the US* Member Meetups* Austin meetup was a success. Spent the weekend at an Airbnb, ate barbecue, toured a 500-acre MAHA intentional community in the hill country, and got to know some of the wives and kids. Huge thanks to Jonathan for putting it together.* New York City, 5/24. See #new-england channel for details.* Nashville, 5/29. See #tennessee channel for details.* San Francisco, 6/8. See #bay-area-and-NorCal channel for details.* Seattle, 6/26. See #PNW channel for details.* Finalizing June dates for DC, Atlanta, and SLC meetups this week.* Cocktail hour invite for Seattle meetup (6/26) available to subscribers below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area and see if the group is right for you.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usEvery day, tens of thousands of Americans with irreplaceable engineering and manufacturing expertise are retiring.Globalization and the zero-interest-rate money printer economy have pulled America’s greatest cognitive talents away from building real things in the real world. The infinite pool of cheap foreign labor stunts innovation, and makes it very difficult for smart, dynamic people to have the ground-level experience of manufacturing, since they won’t (and shouldn’t) compete for slave wages.Nate Jebb is the founder of Veritas Professional Services, a business that converts the tribal knowledge of small manufacturing operations into formal procedure, so that these businesses can survive the “silver tsunami” of boomer retirement.Nate is a descendant of early-20th-century captains of industry, but his great-grandfathers’ empires were spent before he was born, so he had to take a job on the factory floor, where he learned the importance of the embodied experience locked up in these retiring workers’ minds.EXIT is overwhelmingly composed of smart young guys stuck in the fake-and-gay B2B SaaS economy, who know that it’s a sinking ship, and who are hungry to do something real. Naturally, Nate’s story was fascinating to us.Veritas’ business model provides a way for smart young guys to get intimate knowledge of manufacturing, without getting stuck trading their time and health for illegal immigrant wages. Definitely a space to watch.EXIT News* Tuesday night full-group calls:* Yesterday (5/13) a well-known anon presented on his process for building community with Amish-style “work parties”, building a wireless ISP business, and growing culinary mushrooms for fun and profit. For opsec reasons this one was not recorded.* Next Tuesday (5/20) we will hear about an EXIT member’s off-grid, industrial-scale Bitcoin mining operation.* The following call (5/27) will be a book club on Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.* Our hot seat to get our man out of Canada was a success — he has a line on a work visa in the States. Ruthless efficiency from the boys, very much appreciate your efforts to help a brother in need.* The Great Houses series will conclude this Thursday, 5/15.* Recording of Part 1 (introduction) available here.* Recording of Part 2 (“You can do what you want, but you can’t call it what you want”) will be released shortly.* Recording of Part 3 (“The feudal instinct and covenant”) will be released shortly.* Tomorrow’s call will be Part 4 (“Building families that use — but transcend and outlive — legal institutional structures”)* Member Meetups:* EXIT now has monthly meetups in Salt Lake City, Dallas, Austin, Houston, and Seattle. Next on the list: monthly meetups in NYC, DC, and Nashville.* Houston meetup (5/10) was a success.* Austin meetup will be Friday, 5/16 through Sunday, 5/18. We will be spending a weekend at an Airbnb south of town. Several of the guys are coming from out of town to check out the area. Cocktail hour on Saturday, 5/17 for EXIT members, Substack subscribers, and guests. Details in the #texas channel.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usOne of the EXIT guys is an estate planning attorney who helps high-net-worth individuals keep their family empires illegible, enforceable, and aligned.In this call, he introduces the architecture of a mutually-reinforcing family business and family trust, which allows the family to incentivize individual risk-taking to expand the family’s wealth, while insulating the core of the family’s assets.We discuss how to build these structures at varying income levels, the wealthy families that already use them in the wild, and how to use wealth to encourage the moral and spiritual development of the family.This recorded Q&A is an introduction to a four-part series.Coming soon:* You can do what you want, but you can’t call it what you want: Creating durable, enforceable patronage relationships within the modern legal system* John Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity: how to build a town without a bank* What was a loan in the 1600s?* “Just don’t call it a loan”* The feudal instinct and covenant: Reclaiming the natural psychological architecture of patronage* “You are poorer than a peasant”* Salary and ownership are proxies (for what?)* Inheritance is about Rights and Promises* Institutional interests: Building families that use (but transcend and outlive) legal institutional structures* Cults and company towns* Illegibility* ObsolescenceThe first 30 minutes of each presentation will be released free. Full recording for subscribers only.The future is feudal.The impersonal managerial structures of liberalism are collapsing. The people who thrive in these circumstances will be those who rediscover older and more natural modes of human connection.We will not survive materially or spiritually without human judgment and human institutions: we need each other, and our children will need each other. So we study pre-liberal institutions, to see how the same relationships might be reconstituted in our legal and technological environment.Like everything else that matters, it starts with a small group of guys with a will to make it happen.exitgroup.usEXIT News* On last week’s group call (4/29), we had a hot seat for one of the guys who is looking to get out of Canada. The guys are working to get him employed in a friendlier jurisdiction.* This week, we heard from Nate Jebb at Veritas on what he has learned about manufacturing from retiring boomers. This was an incredible call — recording to follow soon.* Third Great House call this Thursday (5/8). Topic: The Feudal Instinct and Covenant. Recording soon to come for subscribers.* Next week will be our quarterly leadership call for EXIT file leaders and facilitators. We’ll have two — Monday, 5/12 at 7PM CT, and Tuesday, 5/13 at 9PM CT. Details in the #leaders chat.* Member meetups:* Salt Lake City members-only lunch meetup this Friday, 5/9. Details in the #utah channel.* Houston meetup this weekend, 5/10. Details in the #texas channel. * Austin meetup will be Friday, 5/16 through Sunday, 5/18. We will be spending a weekend at an Airbnb south of town. Several of the guys are coming from out of town to check out the area. Cocktail hour on Saturday, 5/17 for EXIT members, Substack subscribers, and guests. Details in the #texas channel.