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.

[Above is my keynote address at NatalCon 2025 this weekend. Full recordings of the event soon to come — please be patient as we get them edited. Below is my response to getting DESTROYED with facts and logic by Lomez later that evening.]I’m very proud of the people we brought together and the conversation they generated this weekend at NatalCon 2025.I’m deeply grateful to our speakers, our sponsors, our volunteers, our attendees, and our crew, and I’m excited to do it again.But — to be honest — the speech that resonated most deeply with me was Jonathan Keeperman’s dinner toast, “Why the Natal Conference should be disbanded as soon as possible, why you need to care less about your kids, and why I am not a Pro-Natalist”.It was such a well-argued speech that I felt it deserved a response — and that I could use that response to explain why this issue is worth raising, and why we will continue to organize around it.I agreed with Keeperman, violently, that building your life and identity and ambitions solely around being a parent is a mistake — because it’s an unhappy way to live, because it’s recursive, and because it burdens your children with the responsibility to justify your existence. It’s rarely aspirational, and young people generally opt out.“The truth is that most parents who give up on their ambitions once they have a family, do so not because they have to but because they want to. They may not tell themselves this, but it’s true.Do not use your kids as an excuse to give up on the things you want to do with your life. This, more than anything, is the best lesson you can teach them.”In addition to being exhausting and boring and miserable for your kids, helicopter parenting militates against having grandchildren, which I would argue is the real finish line for a family-oriented individual — a full turn of the wheel.Each additional child means that you have less individual emotional and educational energy to give them — but it also means that each child is less freighted with Mom and Dad’s expectations and neuroses, less pressured to fulfill everything their parents wanted from their children.And this bias toward endless surveillance and steering of children is discouraging exactly the kind of people who are best-equipped to raise healthy, happy, excellent, admirable families.I disagree with the hard determinism implied by Lomez and many other speakers (“everything is genetics, so don’t worry about nurture”). Even from inside their perspective, if nurture didn’t matter, it would be odd to receive so much social and neurochemical reward from doing it.Probably the synthesis is that you should nurture as much as you feel moved to, and not more — but given that genetic determinism assumes that you’re already doing that anyway, in every domain of your life (and can’t help it), it’s hard to see the point of talking about it.But yes, directionally: relax, have more babies, and embody excellence rather than trying to wring it out of your children.As for the second half of Keeperman’s speech: I of course agree with him that raising families is pre-political, and even pre-rational. If you find yourself justifying it or selling it as one way of life among many, or as a vehicle for some other good, you’ve already lost.I also agree very strongly that children cannot be instrumentalized toward political ends. You don’t have kids to fix the economy — you fix the economy because you have kids.Like all political issues, the goal is to remove your position from the domain of the political — to make it the moral and procedural default.But politics is the realm of social conflict — and we don’t actually get to decide whether the things we care about are under attack. People who have and want children have, in fact, become a political constituency, with identifiable (and substantially disfavored) political interests. Family life should be the moral and procedural default, but it isn’t.We may consider that unfortunate. We may consider it insulting, and distasteful, and maybe even spiritually corrosive to have to defend something as basic as the continuation of human life — but the conflict is here. We can either defend those interests, or give them up.“There were slogans, and incentives, and art created to glorify motherhood, and even ‘maternity capital’ programs to properly incentive would-be parents. The results weren’t increased family flourishing, but cynicism, resentment, and ultimately demographic stagnation.Why? Because Soviet life was miserable, and when politics colonizes biology, it corrupts biology’s essential spontaneity, its intuitive, often irrational authenticity. People feel this, and they rightly reject it. They feel they are being manipulated and they do not like it.This was by far the most powerful passage of Keeperman’s talk for me.And if that’s what he opposes — deploying pro-fertility rhetoric to prop up the ugly, unhappy, empty apparatus of Western liberalism — then of course I oppose it too.But I view

This week we had a Q&A with Catherine Pakaluk, professor of economics at The Catholic University of America and author of Hannah’s Children, a study of women with six or more children — what makes them different, how they understand the decision to raise a large family, and what they can teach us about the causes of demographic decline.Topics:* What causes some people to maintain a firm connection between marriage and children?* Why are secular Israelis the only secular population in a developed country that are maintaining replacement fertility?* How does mortality salience affect people’s desire for large families?* What percentage of large families are needed to create a “halo effect” that drives higher fertility in the general population?* How important is mentorship from older women in guiding young women to start families?* How to balance large family with other ambitions?* How can we change the way female employment is structured to incentivize family creation?* How do people with large families get their own children excited to raise families?EXIT News* Natal Conference is officially sold out. See you this weekend in Austin!* NatalCon Agenda (ticket-holders, check Luma for location details):* Thursday:* Final virtual meet-&-greet for ticket-holders this Thursday, 3/27 at 7PM.* Friday:* In-person pre-event mixer with Jack Posobiec and other speakers on Fri 3:30PM.* Dinner and Reception from 6:00PM - 9:30PM* Saturday:* Lunch at 11:00AM* Conference from 12:30PM to 6:00PM* Dinner from 7:00PM to 9:00PM* After-party from 9:30M to 11:30PM* Sunday:* Brunch at 10:00AM* On tonight’s full-group call (3/25) we’ll be discussing preparedness in the Trump Administration. The honeymoon is over, markets are volatile, shadowy quasi-state violence is back — it’s time to adjust our threat model. 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 week the EXIT guys had an open-ended Q&A with Dan Hess (More Births) about his quantitative research on birth rate decline.* Areas of volatility/opportunity* Potential corporate policies that could support families* Reactions to the demographic collapse “red pill”* Political consequences of differential rates of abortion* “If you could get an executive order signed, what would you write”We’re having a second virtual meet-and-greet for NatalCon ticketholders this Thursday night, March 20th, at 7PM Central. The following NatalCon 2025 speakers will be present:* ​Peachy Keenan* ​Razib Khan* ​Lyman Stone* ​Yuri Bezmenov* ​Robin Hanson* ​Jessica Flanigan* ​Alex Petkas* ​Malcolm CollinsThese pre-events are a great way to get the lay of the land and make the most of your time at NatalCon, so if you’re planning to come, don’t wait to get your ticket. Get to know the speakers and other attendees, ask questions of the organizers, and make new friends.​If you haven't signed up yet, the first ten signups can use offer code MEET&GREET30 for 30% off your ticket.EXIT News* On Monday night, we concluded the first round of our six month Business Incubator — congrats to contest winners Social CrossTabs on the unanimous first-place decision from our investor-judges. Very impressive presentations from each of our four finalist teams.* On last week’s full group call, we heard from Catherine Pakaluk, author of Hannah’s Children on the kind of women who want to have babies, and where our guys can find them.* We will have a NatalCon virtual meet-and-greet for ticket-holders on Thursday, March 13th. If you’re planning to attend, please get your tickets ASAP so that you can participate — get to know the speakers and attendees so that you can get the most out of the in-person event.* EXIT Houston meetup 6:30PM, Friday March 21st. Members can check in with the #texas channel for details.* EXIT Salt Lake City meetup 12:00PM, Friday March 21st. Members can check in with the #utah channel for details. 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usRecently we invited Lomez (of Office Hours with Lomez) to a Q&A with EXIT guys to discuss his work at Passage Press and what he learned from his many years among the libtards as a lecturer in the English department at UC Irvine.[First 30 minutes are free — full hour recording available for paid subscribers]Questions/Topics:* Life in a “post-apocalyptic” culture, intellectually and aesthetically disconnected from the heights of the past* How to rebuild in the void* How to make better use of craft in writing by learning and internalizing the beats of a good pulp novel* Is patronage actually workable? Is it not happening because the talent is inadequate, because funders lack vision, or something else?* Telling better stories in everyday life* How to take over your local cultural organs* Can art aid in the regeneration of love, eros, and family formation?Lomez will also join us later this month at NatalCon 2025, where he will speak on “Why you should care much less about your kids”. Use offer code LOMEZ for 10% off your ticket at natalism.org.EXIT News* After four months, the EXIT Business Incubator is graduating our first cohort on March 17th, with pitch presentations in front of investor judges who will provide real-world feedback. Their choice of presentation will receive an $1,100 prize.* The Nashville EXIT guys toured the New Founding real estate development in Gainesboro, TN this week. Report to follow.* DFW EXIT had a meetup at a climbing gym followed by a cocktail hour.* I flew in for a Salt Lake City meetup — probably our best-attended yet, with fifteen at the full meetup and ~25 at the cocktail hour.* Cookout and unconference at a member’s home* Tour of a mixed-use real estate development under construction by his company* Dinner at The Gateway* Cocktail hour with Substack subscribers at a luxury hotel downtown* NYC EXIT will meet 3/8 — check the #new-england chat for details.* I will fly out for the Seattle EXIT meetup 3/8 (This Saturday). RSVP link available for subscribers at the bottom of the page here.* We’re preparing an EXIT real estate meetup after Natal Conference to discuss our build in the Texas Hill Country.[nothing below the paywall]

Every time I post about demographic decline, I get about a hundred replies insisting that the cause of demographic decline is actually extremely obvious — so obvious that only an imbecile (or a subversive!) would even wonder about it.“It’s the dating apps, retard” -- or it’s birth control, or it’s women working, or it’s women voting, or it’s mass immigration, or it’s the cost of housing, or it’s the population density, or it’s the propaganda, etc.Then, if the post really goes viral, I get feminists and libs saying it’s the cost of daycare, or student loans, or the expense of pregnancy, or the critical shortage of Good Men.But virtually all of these arguments has a conclusive disproof in some modern country, where the commenter’s hobby-horse is not a problem, but birth rates are still well below replacement.Of course, that’s not to say that none of it matters — everything goes in the pot — but none of these problems, in isolation, explains our predicament.The most extreme proof of this is Rome and Sparta, whose social pathologies, even at the latest stage, didn’t neatly map to the modern culture war — but they still lost the ability to inspire young citizens to raise families, and were eventually overrun by more vital and fertile peoples.Alex Petkas is a classicist and founder of the Cost of Glory Podcast — we brought him on to discuss the family structures of ancient Sparta and Rome, their struggles with declining population, and what they did to reverse the trend.The decline of family formation, in these cases, is something like dying of old age — a confluence of social sicknesses that piles up until the society can no longer perform the basic task of perpetuating itself.“It is not the one thing.”With that understanding, “solving the birth rate” is not a narrow policy issue, and it won’t be corrected by tweaking the incentives or nibbling around the edges: it requires transforming our relationship to our families, society, and the state. That’s what we have to come together to do.Alex will be joining us to deliver a deeper treatment of the subject at NatalCon 2025 — joining 30 other speakers with a wide range of perspective and expertise.Get your ticket today at natalism.org.Couples/+1 TicketsIf you’ve been thinking of bringing a spouse or friend to NatalCon, we’re rolling out special plus-one pricing — select “Two Ticket Special” with offer code COSTOFGLORY to get two tickets for $1,620.We will also have childcare available for both the dinner Friday night, and the full conference on Saturday, so parents with small children can make it a night out.Ticket holders also receive:* Free copies of Hannah’s Children by Catherine Pakaluk, Domestic Extremist by Peachy Keenan, Creating Future People by Jonny Anomaly, and The Pragmatist’s Guide series by Malcolm and Simone Collins* Discounted rooms at the AT&T Conference Center (until rooms are sold out)* Access to attendee networking directory* Pre-event virtual meet-and-greet with speakers 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

David Kilcullen is one of the world’s foremost experts in counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare.He served for 25 years as an infantry officer in the Australian Army, then with the U.S. State Department, where he was chief strategist in the Counterterrorism Bureau, Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to Multi-National Force Iraq, and Senior Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the U.S. Secretary of State. He has written The Accidental Guerrilla, Counterinsurgency, Out of the Mountains, Blood Year, and The Dragons and the Snakes.We discuss:* How Trump’s election has altered the trajectory of the empire. Will he take the reins and strengthen American hegemony, or repudiate it?* How China’s demographic issues accelerate the timetable for a confrontation with the US over Taiwan — but may also make them less willing to risk a war (70% of the PLA are only-children in a nation with no old-age safety net.)* How China is carefully monitoring (and encouraging) America’s ongoing immiseration and demoralization through propaganda, trade war, and human and drug trafficking.* How the Houthis use inexpensive saturation attacks to exhaust US Navy countermeasures and maintain their blockade of the Red Sea.* Why the Assad regime collapsed over a ten-day period last month — the geopolitical circumstances that gave Hayat Tahrir al-Sham space to act, and what they built while they waited for the right time to strike.It looks to me like the Trump Administration is attempting to lead a transnational revolution across the various client states of the empire — drying up the flow of money to puppet governments, and forcing the emergence of a looser, more transactional coalition.It isn’t just that Americans are tired of empire — Trump voters increasingly identify the empire as a foreign occupation, and themselves as a not-particularly-favored client. Besides which, it’s unclear whether a global naval empire could be maintained by any nation, now that $10,000 drones have rendered $2B aircraft carriers obsolete.What all this means for us is that global supply chains are going away, either through orderly, deliberate industrial policy, or through war and catabolic collapse. The only real question is who’s going to get paid to rebuild the factories, and when.EXIT has the engineering and operations talent — our project for 2025 is to build a fund that will draw capital into these new enterprises and retrain our guys to build in the real world.Meanwhile, the societies that cannot inspire their people to raise families will face economic stagnation and collapse — especially China, America, the EU, Japan, and Korea. We are hosting Natal Conference to connect with like-minded people and build the systems that will bring our families through the bottleneck.The tea leaves aren’t that hard to read here.There are clear actions you can take to prepare your family and your tribe for what is coming: the most important of which is to connect with like-minded friends are start building.Join us at exitgroup.us.EXIT News:* On last week’s full-group call (2/11), we heard from Lomez on leadership through art and aesthetics. Recording available soon to paid subscribers.* Last night (2/18), we had an EXIT State of the Union:* Discussion of our growing list of expert-led calls in real estate, investing, AI, ham radio, homeschooling, etc.* Updates on NatalCon planning, member discounts on tickets, and requests for volunteers.* Details on the new investment fund.* On next Tuesday’s full-group call (2/25) we will hear from Nate Fischer and Santiago Pliego from New Founding, on their venture fund, talent network, and real estate project in Gainesboro, Tennessee.* Dallas Meetup was Monday night (2/17) — we met for lunch at EXIT’s space at The Hightower, New Founding’s new co-work, then dinner and cocktails at an undisclosed location. The D/FW guys get together once a month — I will be there at least every quarter.* Cocktail hour invites for Salt Lake City (3/1) and Seattle (3/8) available here 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 public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usJust after the inauguration, we invited Bog Beef from Good Ol Boyz to our weekly EXIT full-group call to discuss a topic of mutual interest: the power of patronage.Patronage is just a word for the default state of human organization, where people are in control instead of systems, and power flows from relationships rather than the manipulation of procedural outcomes.20th century “political science” was an extension of the Enlightenment project to rationalize and systematize government — to deliver it from the corruption of human influence.Of course, the problem with this approach is the moral hazard: if you make it illegal and illegitimate to rule, people aren’t going to give up power — your ruling class will simply be selected for a nihilistic attitude toward the law.In this Q&A, Bog Beef discusses the importance of the human relationships within the new Trump insurgency, and the history of patronage in American urban political machines.Recognizing the legitimate role of human judgment in politics should completely change how we think about good government. Rather than fine-tuning the procedural systems, we should be focused on identifying and cultivating leaders.EXIT is in the business of cultivation, because we think we should be in charge.We want to expand the scope of our stewardship and our capacity. We want our guys deploying power virtuously, effectively, and confidently. We want to build empires, and cultivate children with the competence and ambition to inherit them.Join us at exitgroup.us.EXIT News* EXIT now has a meeting space at Hightower Dallas, through our friends at New Founding. Big thanks to the D/FW EXIT crew for closing the deal. We’ll hold regular meetups there, in addition to using it as a coworking space. Dallas guys can check the #texas chat for more information.* Tickets for Natal Conference 2025 are on sale now. March 28th and 29th, Austin, Texas. We’ve just added Steve Turley, Lomez, and Cremieux to the lineup. More to come! Use offer code NATALISM for 10% off at checkout.* On last week’s full-group call (1/28), we heard from Indian Bronson on Family Offices, as well as the Late Unpleasantness over H1Bs. Recording will be available for Substack subscribers, once I have edited out IB’s shocking deluge of slurs.* On this week’s call, we are having a Book Club on The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.* Cocktail hour invites for Dallas (2/17), Salt Lake City (3/1), and Seattle (3/8) 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.usThis week, @MarmotRespecter presented to the guys on how to get a tech job in the “worst tech hiring market in 25 years”.Marmot explains how AI is swamping automated systems and eliminating entry-level tech jobs, making it harder and harder to break in — and what our guys can do about it.* What employers are allowed to check about your resume* Who reads your resume, and how* How to sidestep automated systems and get your resume in human hands* How to get people advocating on your behalf internally* Acquiring credentials versus building a portfolio* How to avoid corporate H1B shenanigans* The future of remote work* How wordcels can get into tech companiesMost of what he describes is applicable to any corporate hiring process.There’s a principle in negotiation called “BATNA” — your “best alternative to negotiated agreement”.This describes the worst outcome you can accept in a negotiation before you’re better off walking away.The more appealing your BATNA is, the more leverage you have in the negotiation, because it is comparatively easy for you to walk away (i.e. EXIT).The more work you put into alternative ways of earning money, the more you can afford to push back on your employer. Some ways to build BATNA are entrepreneurship, creating side revenue streams, cutting costs, and developing new marketable skills — but knowing you can go out and get another job in a pinch is another powerful source of leverage.Regardless of your employment situation, if someone else owns the process, the equipment, the network you need to feed, clothe, house, and educate your family, they control you.That’s why EXIT is bigger than any one tactic: you don’t have to quit your job and join the circus, or live on a homestead, or learn to code, or become a plumber.EXIT is about building sovereignty by exerting greater control over of the means of production. We help our guys launch businesses, but we also connect each other with jobs, share useful skills, invest together, etc.Join us at exitgroup.us.Also:JD Vance wants more babies in the United States.SecDef has seven kids. Elon Musk is shilling NatalCon on the timeline.Now that we have permanently resolved all political questions under the aegis of the Living Constitution, Donald John Trump, it’s time to set our sights on the civilizational struggle of our time.The nation or people that will dominate the 21st century will be the one that figures out how to raise families in a technologically progressive society.China can get the right answers to every other social problem, but if they can’t convince their people that the game should go on, they will inevitably decline and recede.The 2020s will be defined by AI, but the 2030s will be defined by demographics — and, for obvious reasons, the moves that will be decisive in 15 years have to be made now.That’s why we’re hosting Natal Conference, March 28th and 29th, in Austin.You should join us if:* You want to meet values-aligned individuals and families* You want to find solutions to the derangement of modern dating* You want to create good conditions for your children to have children* You want to protect your community’s reproductive and endocrine health* You want to find partners or investors for a natalist business or policy initiative* You want to preserve and grow wealth under conditions of demographic declineYour ticket includes:* Pre-event virtual AMA/webinar with selected speakers* Dinner & symposium Friday March 28th at the Bullock Museum of Texas History* Full-day conference Saturday March 29th with breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the AT&T Conference Center (across the street from the Bullock Museum)* Access to (opt-in) attendee directory* Premium access to newsletters and digital copies of books authored by our speakers, including Domestic Extremist by Peachy Keenan, The Pragmatist’s Guide series by Malcolm and Simone Collins, Creating Future People by Jonny Anomaly, and more​Use offer code NATALISM at checkout for 10% off your ticket.See you in Austin.

This week, Natal Conference cofounder Drew Gorham and I discuss what has changed on the issue of demographic decline since last year’s conference, and what we have planned for NatalCon 2025.I introduce some ideas about what is driving demographic decline — it clearly isn’t just wealth, or housing, or feminism, or birth control, or microplastics, or the declining value of child farm labor.My theory, as I’ve discussed here previously, is that human fertility declines in captivity in much the same way that animal fertility does.The “breakdown of the family” as “the fundamental unit of society” became a cliche in conservative circles in the 1990s, but the relative political power and independence of the family in pre-modern societies allowed family members to invest in one another, and in the family itself.It wasn’t that pre-modern people raised kids at an economic loss for 12 years so they could get six years of productive farm work out of them: the family was a little state unto itself, which belonged to you, and to which you belonged, throughout your lifetime.This is the kind of sovereignty that we talk about at EXIT.The family was a genuine “us”, independent within its sphere — and having more of “us” made each member more productive, more secure, more influential, etc. Families partook in a common project that was, in many ways, transcendent and selfless; but self-interested enough to incentivize day-to-day cooperation and sacrifice.I believe that this is basically the way humans are built and meant to live — and as our social structures abstract further and further away from that, raising families makes less and less intuitive sense to ordinary people.The cultures that survive the demographic bottleneck will be those that find a way to restore this natural mode of human civilization, and make families sovereign again.Since recording, I also got to listen to Lyman Stone’s turn on Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson (Lyman will be with us at NatalCon 2025.)It was an excellent review of the research on demographic decline, and raised some interesting questions. Topics I’d like to explore with Lyman at the conference:* Is alarmism about fertility decline discouraging fertility? I think doomer anxiety is so prevalent that “one more existential problem” probably doesn’t do much — though catastrophism probably doesn’t encourage people to start families. People aren’t going to have kids to save Social Security or boomers’ home values. Discussing the seriousness of the problem is more about drawing the attention and resources of people who wouldn’t care otherwise — but maybe that, too, is of limited utility. * Do high-intensity parenting norms actually lead to better outcomes for kids? This was a topic of some debate at last year’s NatalCon, with Diana Fleischman taking the hardest line on genetic determinism. I think that if parenting doesn’t matter, it’s pretty weird that all human cultures and the human endocrine system reward it so intensely. The problem with modern parenting is not that it’s high-intensity, but that it’s solitary — each family having to come up with boutique solutions, almost building a little idiosyncratic civilization from the ground up for their children.* What can be done about the fact that so many conservative families end up raising sterile secular liberals? This is one of the central questions around which EXIT is organized. Exit is a matter of survival because we’re dependent on cultural and economic institutions that are sterilizing our kids. (Usually figuratively.) We’re building businesses and organizing parallel social structures — but we’re always looking for new ways to make our families more resistant to the acid bath of modernity.If you want to join us for the conference, early-bird tickets are still on sale at natalism.org. Use offer code NATALISM for 10% off.EXIT News* On last Tuesday’s full group call (12/10) we had our 2024 Year in Review. (More on this next week.)* On tonight’s full-group call (12/17), we will hear from a former lead technical recruiter at a Fortune 500 company on how to get a tech job. We’ll discuss how to defeat or bypass algorithmic gatekeeping, and how AI is changing the tech job market.* Real estate call is this Thursday (12/19).* EXIT will have a sponsor table at the Coronation Ball, January 19th at the Watergate in Washington, DC. We have two seats left; if you are a member and would like to join us, please DM right away. 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usI asked Tanner Guzy to talk to us about his book, The Appearance of Power, and the role of aesthetics in leadership. That conversation took me down the following rabbithole:“If your kids don’t want to grow up to look like you, you have not set the right example”.If everybody grew up wanting to be like their parents, The Libs would be extinct already — the most secular and progressive Millennials have ~0 fertility, and the most religious and conservative decile have about half the babies.The secular-progressive/gay-race-communist memeplex is essentially a psychological sterility plague — which means, almost by definition, that it should be harshly selecting against whatever traits make a person susceptible to it.In the long run that’s probably happening — but in the short run, religious people are producing atheist children much faster than atheists are dying out.Taking those long- and short-term trends together: the people who make it through the depopulation bottleneck will almost certainly be some flavor of dissenting religion and ideology — but for any given dissenting religious individual or family living today, the odds are not good.Conservatives and religious people are having plenty of children, but not nearly enough grandchildren.There are a few possible explanations for this, but the most compelling one (to me, anyway) is that most young people simply don’t find their parents’ lives aspirational.They don’t want the job, the social life, the recreation, the routine of a conservative suburban family.It isn’t that it’s “too expensive” to raise a family — virtually everyone who has ever had kids has been poorer than the average young American. They simply don’t believe it’s worth it.Some pro-family pundits chalk this up to decadence and ease and selfishness, but I don’t think people were really that much more altruistic 100 years ago — and anyway, things stopped getting easier for ordinary people two generations ago, but the fertility rate is still plummeting.I believe reproduction is genuinely less attractive for young people today than it was for our grandparents when they were young — and for much the same reason reproduction is less attractive to zoo animals.As we are increasingly monitored and constrained, within increasingly controlled and unnatural environments, the appeal of life itself — and especially the appeal to perpetuate it through heroic effort and sacrifice — is weaker.The problem isn’t that young people are being brainwashed by the Liberal Media against having children. Liberalism isn’t directly making people sterile — liberalism and sterility are both psychological adaptations to life in captivity.Liberalism — essentially naive conflict avoidance, egalitarianism, harm avoidance, and pleasure seeking — is the ideology of the zoo animal. It’s what you live for when there’s nothing to live for.Under those conditions, why would you go through the expense and hassle of having children?So they can work a job and pay bills and watch TV too? Maybe if they work really hard they’ll get to justify their life’s suffering (and yours) with a week at a resort with a poolside bar.Of course, there will always be people who are willing to brave the risk and sacrifice of parenthood purely for the sentimental enjoyments of domestic life as such — but, empirically, not most people.This is roughly what is offered to young people by conservative pundits and politicians: the promise that dedicating yourself to domestic life is so intrinsically fulfilling that it needs no justification — that, in fact, you should be willing to bear any cost for the privilege.But the problem with subsuming yourself into the vicarious experience of your children (essentially just pleasure-seeking and harm-avoidance in the third person) is that it offers them nothing to emulate. It fails its own implied standard as a model of a life well-lived.Spending your best consuming years raising kids so that they can be consumers is a prototypical self-licking ice cream cone, and young people are right to reject it.If all you want for your kids is to “have it better than you had it”, the straightforward solution is to make sure they have abundant access to contraception and abortion.If you want your kids to have kids, you have to offer them something better.Manosphere guys used to talk a lot about “initiation rituals”, and they would go into the woods to chant, bang drums, do drugs, sit in buckets of ice, etc.But the reason all that stuff was lame is that there was no world with real danger or adventure on the other side — nothing for which you would need masculinity to be credibly prepared, and therefore no meaningful “manhood” into which to be initiated. There is no way to make such experiences “real” when the rest of your life is fake.The Baby Boom in the US is often attributed to the exuberance of victory and material abundance of the postwar era — but the

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usLast week, we heard from Alex Petkas from the Cost of Glory Podcast. Alex is a former Classics professor from Princeton who is now focused on classical education, especially for men and boys.We discuss:* How are the classics, especially the biographies of great men, are relevant to what we’re trying to accomplish?* What translations are most accurate and accessible?* Can we rebuild the engine of competition and cultivation that produced the greatest Greeks, Romans, and early Americans?* What’s the point of cultivating an energetic and dangerous spirit if there are no non-suicidal outlets for it?* How serious were the Greeks and Romans about their distaste for commerce?* How would a great Classical hero respond if placed in our time and circumstances? Would he self-immolate rather than live under such a system, or would he “play the long game”?* What is Alex’s personal vision for the future of classical education?* How can we get our kids accustomed to playful, proportionate physical and rhetorical violence?* Alex’s thoughts on various Classical scholarsSubstack subscribers get access to the full recording and invites to EXIT cocktail hours, as well as our archive of all prior Q&As.Full members participate in the Q&As, accountability, calls, meetups, and group chat with 225 other individually vetted members.Apply for membership at exitgroup.us.EXIT News* On tonight’s weekly group call (Tuesday, 9PM ET), we will discuss Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient Family. It’s a short but fascinating survey of the primordial religious and family practices of the proto-Indo-Europeans, as pieced together from study of Greek, Roman, and Hindu texts.* Last weekend, we got together in Washington DC for the Steve Sailer Noticing event, as well as a cocktail hour on the roof of the Watergate and a barbecue.* This Friday night (10/18), we will host a cocktail hour in Austin, TX in collaboration with Praxis. Invitation available below the paywall for subscribers. +1s welcome.* The DFW guys will be shooting airsoft on Saturday, 11/2. Members can inquire in the #texas channel.* Meetup in San Francisco, Saturday 11/9. This will be a family meetup, so bring the wife and kids. (Event may be postponed in the event of civil war.) Cocktail hour invite for subscribers below.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usOn last night’s full-group call, we had a members-only Q&A with Conscious Caracal (Ernst Van Zyl), discussing his work with Afriforum, what is working in Orania, and what he sees as the future of the Afrikaner people.Questions:* What has worked and what hasn’t worked in building Afrikaner solidarity and identity?* How do groups like Orania draw lines around…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usOn last Tuesday night’s full group call, we had a members-only Q&A with Auron MacIntyre, discussing his new book The Total State.Questions:* How does Auron’s book compare with Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, and how can we synthesize their respective messages into a positive vision of the future?* Are there coherent alternatives to managerial liberalism at scale?* Should states erect barriers to internal migration, or should we encourage The Big Sort?* How do we navigate the tension between publicizing our associations to gain power, and avoiding the Eye of Sauron?* Do you think there’s hope for deep institutional reform that could reverse the excesses of the Civil Rights Act, immigration amnesty, etc.?* Will the Republican Party remain a relevant force when Trump and the conservaboomers leave the scene?* How did you manage your exit from academia, journalism, etc.?* What do you make of Peter Zeihan’s argument that America’s continental geographic advantages will prevent partition?* What will the future of elections look like in the aftermath of Trump’s renegotiation of electoral and discourse norms?* If you could be an advisor to the major power brokers of the emerging counter-elite (Thiel, Musk, Trump, Vance, Andreessen), what would you guide them toward?* What practical actions can guys like us take to prepare for a potential Harris presidency?My takeaway:Scale and inhuman abstraction are the enemy; but fortunately, the managerial system has scaled way beyond its ability to command the loyalty and cohesion of human beings.As the consensus-generating organs of managerial liberalism get clogged with nakedly unprincipled deceit and slop, the scope of human organization will by necessity get tighter, and new things will be free to grow.The way forward is to build sovereign institutions at human scale, predicated on human judgment and initiative. Get to know your neighbors, learn how to get things people need, become useful to useful people.If you want to build that kind of connection with a network of values-aligned guys, apply for membership at exitgroup.us.EXIT News* On Tuesday night’s full group call (8/27), we’ll hear from Zach at shaolin.ai on how he used EXIT to build his machine-learning education business, the future of AI/ML in general, and how our guys can ride the wave instead of losing their job to it.* Shaolin has wrapped their second 6-month machine learning boot camp cohort. Next class begins in September. EXIT guys get a steep discount — so if you’re a member and you’re considering reskilling, reach out to Zach in the chat.* Nowhere Summit in Ecuador was a great success. Our friends Ben Wilson (How to Take Over the World) and Alex Petkas (Cost of Glory) put together a terrific event along with our Ecuadorian hosts. I spoke on the state as an extension and abstraction of kinship — I’ll release a recording in the next week or so. We will have very exciting IRL collaborations to announce in the near future.* Solid turnout at the Salt Lake City meetup, with 27 members and their families. Big thanks to the fellas who came in from Idaho, Colorado, Las Vegas, Southern California.* Cocktail hour at the Great America hotel downtown* Unconference at a local park* Hiked in the rain up the Battle Creek Trail* Cookout at a member’s house* I’ll be at Network State Conference on September 22 in Singapore, and checking out Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School thereafter. If you’re planning to be there too, hit me up!* Cocktail hour invites for Houston (9/13), Washington, DC (10/11), and San Francisco (11/8) meetups available for paying subscribers. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.

The UK government appears to be successfully putting down the protests in the UK, making no concession or even acknowledgement of the protestors’ grievances.People on the Right are very smug about these things when they fail — they love to jump into the Twitter replies and register their satisfaction at being proven right once again.It’s obviously true that the UK is tyrannical and doesn’t care what its people think in principle — but there are people who have been able to make the government care what they think.The prevailing attitude toward politics on the Right is like a Melanesian who realizes that his bamboo airstrip and control tower are failing to summon the Cargo — so he knocks it all over & congratulates himself for being too smart to believe in airplanes.Politics doesn’t work the way you were taught in social studies, but it works — and our side should get a lot more curious about how it works.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.EXIT News* On last night’s full-group call, we discussed raising children in volatile conditions — specifically, how to negotiate their relationship with technology, with families who don’t share our values, and with hate facts.* Next Tuesday night, we will have a member’s only Q&A with Auron MacIntyre on his book, The Total State.* Shaolin AI has successfully wrapped their second 6-month machine learning boot camp cohort. Next class begins in September. EXIT guys get a steep discount, so if you’re a member and you’re considering reskilling, reach out.* I will be speaking at Nowhere Summit next month in Ecuador, hosted by our friends Ben Wilson (How to Take Over the World) and Alex Petkas (Cost of Glory).* Cocktail hour invites for Salt Lake City (8/16), Houston (9/13), and Washington, DC (10/11) available for paying subscribers (no paywall on this post — you can access the RSVP links here). EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us(Note: the “free preview” of this episode is the full version, and the full recording is also available for free on Spotify. EXIT meetup invites behind the paywall.)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.EXIT News* On last Tuesday’s full group call, we discussed preparedness for election shenanigans.* This Tuesday we will have a hot seat and status update from one of the guys who quit his job and launched a healthcare startup last year. He used the group to find sales, IT, legal, and fundraising help, and is coming back to share what he has learned so far.* Side Hustle Summer is officially on as of June 1. Some of the current hustles: book sales, Twitter monetization, paid writing, a consulting product, an online lead-gen tool. If you’d like to participate, check in with DB in the EXIT chat before the week is out.* First planning call for the Grand Canyon hike is this Wednesday night. (Reach out in the chat for details.)* Cocktail hour RSVP links for New York City (6/21) and Columbus (7/19) below the paywall for subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites to the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent via email.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usDavid Kilcullen is among the world’s leading experts in counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare. He served for 25 years as an infantry officer in the Australian Army, then with the U.S. State Department, where he was chief strategist in the Counterterrorism Bureau, Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to Multi-National Force Iraq, and Senior Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the U.S. Secretary of State. He has written The Accidental Guerrilla, Counterinsurgency, Out of the Mountains, Blood Year, and The Dragons and the Snakes.We reviewed Out of the Mountains in EXIT Podcast #46: How Did The Taliban Win?We asked him to join us for a members-only Q&A on Tuesday night to discuss lessons learned from the Global War on Terror by all involved parties, and how the intelligence, information warfare, and enforcement apparatus built during the GWOT is now being turned toward domestic political conflicts in the West. Our Questions:* If there is civil disorder in the US, how does one avoid being either insurgent, counter-insurgent, or victim?* What caused the domestic US “color revolution” to fail where other election corruption challenges have succeeded?* What has changed since the publication of Out of the Mountains twelve years ago?* As you have observed the war in Ukraine, which of your ideas/models have been vindicated, and which have been challenged? * Could Erik Prince’s “East India Company” strategy of long-term deployed special forces and private contractors have stabilized Afghanistan?* Is mass demonstration a viable course when a protest movement does not have the complicity of the media?* What was the impact of the drug trade on the Afghan occupation?* Thoughts on the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine?* Thoughts on the transition of transnational criminal organizations to regular military and police forces?* What are the ingredients for a successful parallel movement?* How can geographically decentralized, network-state-style groups make good use of their distributed character rather than it being a liability?* What do you foresee from the coming sovereign debt and demographic crises in the West?* How is drone warfare evolving in terms of mass production and deployment?* Can/will opposing forces coopt the tactics of the managerial regime of the US?David spent over 90 minutes with us, not all of which is included in this recording — after which we took another hour amongst ourselves breaking down what it all meant.My main takeaway: Be the Good GuysThis is both a matter of optics and reality: many of the “bad guys” in Western foreign policy narratives are unambiguously good guys in the eyes of ordinary people in the countries in which they operate — and their success is very strongly correlated with the extent to which they are able to build and maintain that impression.In some cases this is because they represent various illiberal values that the people share — but it’s also because they do a lot of ordinary work to make themselves useful. They support widows and orphans, rebuild battle-scarred neighborhoods, clean up after natural disasters, haul trash, employ people (in non-combat jobs), resolve disputes, keep records, etc.This is good news for us, because it means that the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do.Instead of directly antagonizing the system (and the ordinary people who still depend on it), start doing the useful, uncontroversial work that the system has abdicated. Some ideas:* Teach regime-disfavored people marketable skills* Build businesses that can employ regime-disfavored people* Become an unimpeachable source of practical information in domains where mainstream sources are no longer trustworthy* Gather a group to join your local volunteer emergency services* Advocate for sanity in your local schoolboard* Build a homeschool co-op* Organize a litter cleanupOrdinary people care about security and good order way more than they care about any ideological program. A dissident movement that stands for increasing entropy, increasing chaos, increasing conflict — even if only in the short run — will struggle to persuade people with mortgages and mouths to feed.Only a movement that makes itself part of the infrastructure of normal life — especially in ways that expose the regime’s hostility to normal life — can begin to change popular intuitions about who the rightful stewards of peace and civilization are.EXIT News* Side Hustle Summer begins this Saturday, June 1. Come to the final planning calls this week and let us know what you want to do this summer.* On Tuesday’s weekly call (5/28) we will be discussing preparedness for election shenanigans. We’ll discuss what we learned from the last election cycle, how this round may be different, and what we can do to secure the people and places we care about.* Marketing call is moving to Thursday nights. This week, we’ll discuss marketing for an AI

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usIn this episode, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry discusses the rallye mondain, a network of parties and dinners that emerged among the French aristocracy in the 1950s, to confront the collapse of arranged marriage.It’s relatively simple: mothers and other relatives monitor their children’s social circles, determine which boys and girls should be connected, and then organize social occasions to make it happen. Invitations are extended privately, and the events have no online presence.Parents spread information about their local rallye by word of mouth: the types of events they organize, the standards of eligibility, the ideological or aesthetic bent of the families involved.The idea that adults should take an active role in crafting their children’s social opportunities isn’t exactly revolutionary, but the received wisdom in the West is that this is an impossible task for parents to execute competently.Most parents take for granted that whatever they place in front of their children will backfire spectacularly and drive them to the opposite extreme out of sheer embarrassment.Which is not a totally unfounded concern: unlike you or I, a cooperative of French aristocratic families can afford to make aesthetic investments, and controls access to an undeniably high-class milieu — but apparently PEG himself still declined his invitation to the rallye as a young man.Another point of difficulty for the rallye is agreeing on how selective to be, and along which axes: some of the families are bluntly concerned with aristocratic lineage; others are gated by income, or aesthetics. Some are elaborate, multi-stage events of training and acculturation; others are just dance parties for rich kids.We relate this to BAP’s thesis (reviewed below) which describes the necessity of existential pressure to force a shared understanding of what constitutes excellence and competence.Once an aristocratic society is liberated from those constraints, individuals and groups fly apart in all directions toward varied definitions of excellence, undisciplined by external reality — and some minority of those trajectories lead somewhere of lasting value — which is his explanation for the phenomenon of “high culture”.From this perspective, the rallye would be the effort of an aristocracy very late in its decline: near exhaustion, groping in a dozen directions, and without the power to generate the life-or-death competitive pressure necessary to ruthlessly demand excellence from the individual or the group.On the whole, it looks like an unusually successful rear-guard action from an elite that is in decline, but still a going concern, with elite privileges to bestow. It’s not obvious that such a program is practicable among ordinary cubicle-dwelling parents who can’t offer their children the same enticements.Until recently, BYU offered a more middle-class selective breeding package.The university did the hard work of selecting the top Latter-day Saint talent from all over the world and dropping them into a PG-13 meat market with other upwardly-mobile, spiritually-aligned Hot Young Singles In Your Area.Young Latter-day Saints with genuine elite potential would often do their undergrad at BYU instead of the Ivy League for several reasons:* No student debt (BYU tuition is going up, but it’s still one-third to one-tenth the cost of its nearest-ranked competitors)* If you don’t intend to drink, BYU offers far more interesting social and cultural opportunities than any comparable school* If you just want to make a lot of money and don’t care about Preftige, BYU is (or was) good enough by itself to get you on a respectable business or engineering track* Latter-day Saints have strong endogamy norms, and BYU is still indisputably the easiest place to make a temple marriage — you attend a student congregation with a throughput of thousands of young singles, and ecclesiastical leadership relentlessly oriented toward getting young men and women married* BYU students are extremely healthy and attractiveSo if you wanted the kind of elite career that could support seven kids on a single income, you’d make a pit stop at BYU to receive your standard-issue blonde waifu and debt-free, good-enough undergraduate diploma — a credible slingshot to a real elite graduate program if you wanted it.I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it one of the most beautiful human creations of the 20th century, in terms of the kind of people it produced and the way of life it offered them.And there’s still a lot to be said for it; but as elite employers and academic institutions make increasingly absurd ideological demands, BYU is struggling to credibly offer upward mobility while maintaining its religious integrity, and the current approach of splitting the difference isn’t working.The Church has signaled willingness to abandon BYU’s accreditation rather than surrender its distinctiveness, which is obviously g

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usHere’s the recording of this week’s members-only Q&A with Johann Kurtz, author of Becoming Noble.We asked him to come on the weekly EXIT full-group call to discuss his thesis that dissidents should use captured elite institutions as a springboard for their ambitions, even if it is impossible to steer or “subvert” them.We discuss:* Finding the joy in watch…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usHere’s the recording of last night’s private Q&A with Clay Martin, former Green Beret and author of Concrete Jungle and Prairie Fire.We cover the following topics:* How to meet and vet the people you want on your A-team* How to control space without triggering hostility from the state* What skills and materials to accumulate* How to teach kids survival skills* Ho…

This week we're talking about:* The “entrepreneurial temperament” and whether it's real (answer: kind of)* Why our guys aren't preparing even though we all expect the world to go to hell* Why the boomer doomer prepper model no longer makes sense* Acceleration and deterritorialization — the increasing impossibility of preparing against one particular future* Looking for meta-adaptations - adaptations that make us better off across all possible outcomes* Why conservatism & reaction are always the losing side by definition* Learning from the technology brothers’ “just build” ethos* Why rebuilding civilization isn't an engineering problem and the technology brothers can't do itLearn more at exitgroup.us 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

This week, Stormy came to the EXIT group call for a little Q&A on venture capital — what his fund looks for in a founder, what they look for in a project, and how to work the network to get your pitch in the right hands.He also presented an interesting model of the various players in the global financial system — that the DNC is (for Epstein reasons) in thrall to the European banks, who need the US to join them in a central-bank digital currency regime in order to stave off the collapse of the European economy.American banks don’t want this, so they’re peeling off for Trump, along with certain constituencies in the Pentagon.A few days after Stormy’s presentation, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon went to Davos and all but endorsed Trump; CNBC reports this as “U.S. executives in Davos see a Trump victory in 2024, and no cause for concern”.So I had Stormy on the podcast to talk more about his theory, and how we ought to prepare ourselves if it holds. Episode also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.Trump wins Iowa CaucusVivek and DeSantis are already out, and Trump has a double-digit lead over Haley in New Hampshire. It doesn’t look like the old GOP has any way to prevent a Trump/Biden race, and the fact that the DNC is burning so much political capital to disqualify Trump in court suggests that his lead is above the margin of fraud.The covert, “soft” instruments of political control are failing, and even if they were inclined to let him back in, Trump has signaled that he’s on a war footing against the managerial class. So it’s going to be an existential struggle, and all that’s left are the hard, coercive instruments of power.Texas Military Department seizes sections of borderThe Texas National Guard expelled Border Patrol from Shelby Pass, where federal agents have been breaking down barriers and openly abetting the traffic of illegal immigrants.They tried a media coup first, alleging that Texas had prevented them from rendering aid to a drowning woman. (Turns out they were lying about that, surprise.)So now it goes to the courts — but again it’s a case where the media and institutional power that would normally settle such questions has collapsed, and it’s unclear what comes next.Houthis blockade the Red Sea on the cheapHouthi rebels have choked off the sea artery between Europe and Asia with speedboats and cheap drones. They can’t stop all traffic, but they don’t have to — the insurance companies are doing it for them.The captain of the USS Eisenhower has steamed confidently on the scene, posting videos of tiny zoomer girls ceremonially taking the helm, and young sailors enjoying caramel macchiato and cookies.The message here is that America’s authority over the sea lanes is utterly uncontested — this barely even qualifies as a police action, and nobody should be concerned. But while the US Navy is indeed very capable of bombing the Houthis, Biden admits that the bombings aren’t actually securing the shipping lane.It’s just too cheap to inflict multibillion-dollar losses on the Empire, even without a direct military confrontation of any kind. This blockade will probably be cleared eventually, but it’s hard to see how it doesn’t spawn imitators.EXIT News* Charles Haywood will be taking questions about how he built his shampoo empire on this week’s full-group call. The call will take place Wednesday, at 8PM ET/5PM PT* One of the guys found a major investor for his startup in the group. Congrats!* We welcomed the owner/founder of a B2B business intelligence platform, a corporate lawyer specializing in on-side startups and investment funds, and a crypto expert who debugs smart contracts* The Utah boys are putting together some mini-hackathons for locals interested in tech projects.* The DFW guys got together for a quick lunch meetup.* One of our veterans did a Q&A on life in the military, how to make the most of the benefits, and who he would still encourage to sign up.* DC meetup is on February 2nd (one week from Friday).* Utah Valley meetup is on March 1st.* Seattle meetup is on March 29th.* This week’s working group calendar below the fold. In our working groups we set aside two-hour blocks to work on our personal exit, keep each other on task, and take accountability for our progress.If you want an invite to any of these events, sign up below — or check us out at exitgroup.us. 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

In this episode I give my take on this year’s Natal Conference, why we started it, what we learned from producing it, and what’s coming next.MeetupsIn preparation for NatalCon 2024, we are hosting EXIT/NatalCon meetups every month, in locations all over the country. EXIT members, NatalCon ticketholders, and paid newsletter subscribers get in free, with your plus-one.Day One Video DownloadThe day-one video session will be available for download early next week.Pre-orders for 2024Natal Conference 2024 will be held in Austin TX next December. Exact dates TBD, but subscribe here or at natalism.org for a pre-order discount. 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

BAP’s dissertation argues an ostensibly narrow point: that Socrates had it coming. The execution of Socrates is usually characterized as the persecution of an innocent free-thinker, but BAP says that Socrates (and the teaching of philosophy as such) had radicalized the Athenian youth toward antinomian tyranny — the throwing-off of all law and custom in favor of “the justice of nature”, that might makes right.He traces this back to the philosopher’s discovery of nature as a concept — that there are unchangeable realities (and hierarchies) in the physical world that are outside the purview of law, or custom, or even the gods.The discovery of nature, in turn, emerged as a consequence of an aristocratic breeding program: a quest by conquering minorities to hone themselves, as individuals, into the most physically and psychologically dangerous human specimens. BAP explores the Greeks’ obsession with blood, heredity, nature, and the trial of one’s nature in the agon, the contest.He argues that such a breeding program could only emerge in a warrior aristocracy, ruling an unrelated subject population by force, and experiencing “the pathos of distance”: a feeling of isolation from the customs and beliefs that govern the herd.As the breeding program progresses, it begins to generate characters of such strength, will, cunning, and aloofness that they become dangerous to the integrity of their own societies.This consummates in the person of the philosopher (who breaks free of the society’s customs psychologically) and the tyrant (who breaks free physically). As the warrior culture buckles under the strain of its own success, and the conflicts between the dangerous men it has created, the discipline of the breeding program begins to fail, leading to a “tropical proliferation of human types” — extremely refined and competent human specimens flying off in thousands of directions, pursuing all sorts of objectives.It is precisely in this moment of aristocratic decadence and collapse that genius and high culture are produced, as the aristocratic genius, bred for war, seeks out creative and psychological frontiers.The aristocratic warrior culture no longer meaningfully addresses the concerns of the aristocracy — and so, in an effort to save it, the philosopher abstracts and radicalizes its principles. But this only accelerates the collapse, as it extends the pathos of distance from the weaklings and slaves among the common folk, to everything that is weak and slavish within the aristocracy.The tyrant becomes a kind of radical “hyper-aristocrat”, treating the ruling class itself with the predatory contempt that had previously been deployed outward, toward the matriarchal communism of the peasants.During Socrates’ lifetime, Greece was threatened by a series of tyrants, many of whom he had personally tutored. This led to the execution of Socrates, but also a general persecution of philosophers and philosophy as such.In BAP’s view, Plato’s later invention of “moral philosophy” — the use of philosophy to encourage justice, temperance, and prosociality — was a ruse intended to end the persecution and enthrone philosophers as the arbiters of convention and morality, displacing the priests.This preserved the practice of philosophy and the knowledge of nature for centuries — until Christianity embraced this public-facing Platonic morality and radicalized it, abandoning the concept of nature in favor of moralizing egalitarianism. And so, in BAP’s view, the career of Platonic Christianity has been a long, slow slide back to the totalitarian matriarchal democracy of the longhouse.Why does this matter?BAP’s understanding of our current state of cultural decay is based on two premises:* Excellence is the only thing that justifies human existence. “Mere life” — ordinary life, survival and comfort for its own sake — is of no value, and possibly even negative value.* Excellence is purely a matter of biological material — it is inborn and cannot be taught.I disagree with his maximalism on these points, but surely excellence matters. I don’t want to live in a world without beauty and brilliance and heroism and strength. And I don’t believe excellence is entirely a question of biology and heredity, but obviously those things count for something.And if we agree that far, then we’ve got the same problem: our culture is at war with excellence. Not just a particular category of excellent people, but with excellence as such — with the idea that anything is better or worse than anything else.The way we form families, our de facto breeding regime (and it is a ‘regime’, defined by culture and policy) is a catastrophe — a system as cruel and as sterile as the Spartans’, but with the effect of degrading health and vitality, rather than improving it.But I don’t believe that waiting for the collapse and preparing our bodies for the Thunderdome is a complete solution. If Plato had just waited for Athenian society to collapse so he could join a warband, his p

Oppenheimer is an intimate portrait of a sensitive young man who did nothing wrong.I could smell that something was off about this movie, so I went home and did some digging, and it turns out Oppenheimer was very obviously a Soviet spy. The problem is that half the academic and political establishment of the United States was in the tank for the Soviets at the time, so the question of what it meant to be a “traitor” was somewhat complicated.Oppenheimer’s crime was basically that he had Asperger’s and couldn’t lie as effectively as other highly placed American communists. Things that had been perfectly acceptable to say for 15 years under the Roosevelt Administration had become suddenly dangerous to say under Truman and Eisenhower, and he couldn’t handle the pivot.His fall from grace is depicted as a product of irrational and excessive Cold War paranoia, but it was basically the opposite: he gave away the power to murder billions to one of the most bloody-minded regimes in history, and the American government was too compromised and divided to do anything about it.This story struck me as relevant to our interests at EXIT for two reasons:* It’s worth understanding how we got where we are. The institutional power that we’re up against wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t start with George Floyd, or Obama, or the student movement in the 1960s. Marxists have had significant control over elite American institutions for as long as there have been Marxists, and the Cold War was primarily a covert civil war within those institutions, which the anticommunists lost decisively.* Despite being completely mendacious about the history, the movie is a solid illustration of “manipulation of procedural outcomes” — the ways that nominally impartial processes and “expertise” can be leveraged against the political enemies of the powerful. In this episode, I explain how these processes are deployed against people like us today, and what can be done about it.The single largest point of vulnerability for American’s freedom of speech and association is corporate employment. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 places the onus on corporate employers (with more than 15 employees) to police their employees’ speech about protected categories of people in any context “relevant to the workplace” — including personal social media activity.But the good news is that punishing dissent within the W-2 system is so cheap and effective that very little thought has been given to punishing dissent outside it. Once you own your income stream, it becomes orders of magnitude more expensive to guarantee your compliance: requiring either sustained mob action, or lawsuits, or criminal charges, none of which are feasible methods to suppress dissent at scale.The best defense against this kind of attack, for ordinary people, is simply “don’t be there”. Don’t have an income that can be cut off with a single phone call to your HR representative. Don’t have a two-income household that makes you dependent on ideologically hostile government schools. Ideally, don’t stake your economic survival on any single point of failure.This summer, four of the EXIT guys have gone full-time on their startups. They started in the accountability calls, workshopping their idea and gathering potential partners. Then they built teams, including software developers, attorneys, accountants, designers, salesmen, and investors. So far, we’ve raised a combined $450,000 across the network to launch these projects.We have the people and the resources to build the future we want. If you’re ready to get to work, join us today at exitgroup.us. 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

Johann Kurtz, author of the Becoming Noble substack, relates his experience in Big Tech, and why he believes dissidents underestimate these companies as a launching point for their ambitions. We discuss:* What megacorporations know that online dissidents don’t* Getting into a top tech company without a STEM degree* Preparing for a highly competitive interview* Finding friends and allies without revealing your power level* The horizons that open up after a few years undercoverYou can read the article that inspired this conversation here: 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

In this episode, Drew Gorham and I announce the first annual Natal Conference, December 1-2, 2023 in Austin, TX.Declining fertility is the most important issue of our generation — we discuss the economic, political, and cultural consequences of this decline, what may be causing it, what can be done about it, 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. 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

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 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

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. 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

My 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.Power is always a question of who you know — an extended emergency situation just changes which skills and connections are most valuable. At EXIT, you can find experienced entrepreneurs to help you launch an ecommerce business, or a SOF veteran to teach you how to shoot straight and secure your home. You can learn from experienced crypto developers and investors, or get help planting potatoes and raising chickens. Join us at exitgroup.us. 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

Our resident fed @DegreeStudies is back to talk about the Musk Twitter purchase, the RW blackpilling in response to the midterm fiasco, and the desire to lead versus the desire to serve. 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