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EXIT Podcast #39: EXIT
1.4k Plays2 years ago
It's been just over a year; a good time to take stock of what we've accomplished, and what's next.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Overview of Exit Podcast
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:18
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett.
00:00:20
Speaker
I'm shaking the dust off a little bit today.
00:00:22
Speaker
One of the things about being on Twitter all the time is you really get used to taking for granted that everybody knows what you're talking about and sort of imperiously expecting them to keep up.
00:00:32
Speaker
And I realized that I've talked about what we do at Exit in bits and pieces, various tweets, a couple of these newsletters.
00:00:40
Speaker
But I realized recently that I haven't actually put everything all in one place, even for the guys in the group.
00:00:46
Speaker
And so last week I put together a little presentation for them about what I see as the big picture vision of Exit, why all of the various calls that we have hang together into a single mission.
00:00:59
Speaker
And I thought, you know, I should probably articulate this for folks outside who may be intrigued by the concept, but not exactly sure how we're executing it or why.
Critique of Western Culture
00:01:07
Speaker
I think most folks understand it has something to do with cancel culture, so to speak.
00:01:11
Speaker
But really, people getting fired from their jobs for things they say on Twitter is a tiny component of this much bigger problem, which is that Western culture is failing at its most basic task, which is the formation of healthy families.
00:01:25
Speaker
Literally nothing else matters.
00:01:27
Speaker
If the culture were happy, which it isn't, and prosperous, which it increasingly isn't, and produced beautiful art or science, which it doesn't, even if it did all those things, it wouldn't matter if that culture just deletes itself genetically.
00:01:44
Speaker
All over the world, embrace of Western culture is basically associated with demographic catastrophe.
Public Discourse Challenges
00:01:52
Speaker
And partly that's because our culture is dominated and built around the interests of childless careerist strivers.
00:02:01
Speaker
a class of people in academia, in corporate America, in politics, in entertainment, who have no vested interest in keeping the wheels on.
00:02:12
Speaker
We could talk at length about why that's the case.
00:02:14
Speaker
I think it just has to do with the scale of our society.
00:02:17
Speaker
Every market has become a global market, the market for attention in particular.
00:02:21
Speaker
And the characters that rise to the top of that kind of a hierarchy are the people who are the most morally flexible, the most physically mobile or rootless, the people with the least commitments to compete with their professional responsibilities.
00:02:36
Speaker
Basically, just the public discourse has become a very fast paced game.
Mainstream vs. Fringe Elements
00:02:40
Speaker
In which people who are not monomaniacal, people who are not obsessive, people who have moral compunctions have a really hard time keeping up.
00:02:50
Speaker
Which, by definition, excludes all of the smartest and sanest people in the society.
00:02:57
Speaker
Anybody who's...
00:02:58
Speaker
attention span and vision extends beyond the next quarter is going to have a harder time competing in the day-to-day knife fight of providing rapid return, rapid virality.
00:03:12
Speaker
Like you may have noticed that even on the so-called trad con right-wing circuit or scene or whatever you want to call it, the folks that run those spaces are
00:03:25
Speaker
that have the loudest megaphone are not patriarchs with seven kids.
00:03:29
Speaker
You see a lot of power couples.
00:03:32
Speaker
You see a lot of single, childless women.
00:03:35
Speaker
You see way more gay guys than you would expect.
00:03:38
Speaker
And, you know, maybe there's a conspiratorial, controlled opposition argument that could be made, but I think it has more to do with the fact that these are the people who will sleep under their desks, and these are the people who will say whatever they need to say.
00:03:48
Speaker
The people who can sort of be a public nuisance because they don't have...
00:03:53
Speaker
you know, the reputation of their family to think about or a community that they care deeply about.
Power Dynamics & Dissent
00:03:59
Speaker
And of course, that issue of people without stake in the game is bad enough on the side of the debate that's supposed to be pro-family, but it's way, way worse on the left.
00:04:09
Speaker
I mean, there's nothing to constrain it.
00:04:11
Speaker
They don't even have to pretend.
00:04:13
Speaker
And so it's not so much a problem that there are mechanisms of social opprobrium, mechanisms whereby you can be punished for
00:04:22
Speaker
saying or doing bad things, that's a part of life and it can be a healthy thing.
00:04:29
Speaker
That's really not what we're up against.
00:04:30
Speaker
What we're up against is the fact that the worst people on planet earth are suddenly in charge of those levers of power.
00:04:38
Speaker
Or at minimum, the most short-sighted, the people who have the least understanding of what is required to keep society functioning.
00:04:49
Speaker
And all the people who do have an intuitive grip on what that takes, because they're living it, they're trying to do it, are keeping their heads down and their mouths shut.
00:04:56
Speaker
Partly that's the case because our present censorship regime is so weighted toward measures that hurt people with responsibilities the hardest.
00:05:05
Speaker
Part of the reason why the NEETs, not in employment, education, or training, had such an outsized influence in the run-up to 2016 was because they were the only people who could get away with saying some
Censorship & Mainstream Responsibility
00:05:17
Speaker
of the things that they were saying.
00:05:18
Speaker
And, you know, God bless them.
00:05:19
Speaker
I'm glad they were able to get away with that.
00:05:21
Speaker
But the problem with having nothing to lose is, well, once you win, suddenly you have something to lose.
00:05:27
Speaker
And the tactics that got you to that point won't get you over the next hill.
00:05:30
Speaker
And as much as I like and admire a lot of those guys and the ideas that they put forward, I do think there's a fear of what it would mean to succeed.
00:05:38
Speaker
So ultimately, there's a responsible mainstream that is keeping their heads down and their mouths shut.
00:05:44
Speaker
And there's an irresponsible fringe that doesn't really know where to go next.
00:05:50
Speaker
And there's a book that I love called Days of Rage by Brian Burrow.
Integrating Fringe Elements
00:05:55
Speaker
It's about the weather underground and the Black Liberation Army in the early 70s.
00:05:59
Speaker
And one of the things that you notice about these vanguard communist cells is how seamlessly and shamelessly integrated they are with legal representation, capital, media top cover, academic jobs later on when they've decided to settle down.
00:06:17
Speaker
Virtually all of these...
00:06:20
Speaker
terrorists from the early 70s have worked their way into university positions where they advise some of the most powerful people in the world.
00:06:27
Speaker
And I suspect that's why the current system is so preoccupied with and so effective at cutting off fringe elements from the resources of the more responsible mainstream and preventing the mainstream from offering any kind of moral support to the hardline
00:06:49
Speaker
from voicing any kind of controversial opinion according to the Overton window that they've
Opposition to Ideological Agendas
00:06:54
Speaker
set.
00:06:54
Speaker
Because I think they recognize how effective it can be to have a funnel whereby the energy and the good ideas on the fringes can work their way into positions of institutional power.
00:07:09
Speaker
Not only as a way of energizing the political base, but also as a way of playing good cop, bad cop with your opponents.
00:07:16
Speaker
I mean, how many times the Democrat got elected or a soft socialist policy been enacted with the justification that it's necessary to protect the country from the crazies if they don't get what they want?
00:07:28
Speaker
I mean, that was basically the story of 2020, but it was also the story of...
00:07:32
Speaker
the 1920s through the 1940s.
00:07:34
Speaker
Everything FDR did was ostensibly to create a liberal stopgap against communist revolution in America.
00:07:41
Speaker
And then you read the Venona decrypts and it turns out that like every other advisor in his cabinet was a KGB agent actively pursuing Soviet policy and communicating with Soviet handlers.
00:07:52
Speaker
So anyway, it's very important to them to keep any kind of real opposition to their ideological program cut off from the levers of power.
Cultural Survival & Continuity
00:08:02
Speaker
And so if there's a hint of dissent among the gainfully employed professional managerial class, it has to be stomped out immediately.
00:08:11
Speaker
And most of these people make a reasonable calculation.
00:08:15
Speaker
that the impact as one voice that they could have on the debate is so minimal in comparison with the cost that they would incur by being blackballed from their industry and making the news that they stay quiet.
00:08:28
Speaker
And these are the smartest, healthiest, sanest people in the country.
00:08:33
Speaker
These are the people who should be defining the discourse.
00:08:36
Speaker
These are the people who understand the problems the best.
00:08:38
Speaker
And it would be one thing if it was just accepting rule by a hostile foreign power.
00:08:44
Speaker
But this is a regime, or it's not even a regime, it's a machine, an egregore, that is mindlessly, instinctively pulling apart and subverting every institution that allows us to form healthy families.
00:08:59
Speaker
And so ultimately what's at stake is, are you going to have grandchildren?
00:09:03
Speaker
If this process is allowed to continue, if these people and their interests and their values continue to go unchallenged,
00:09:11
Speaker
then all of the people and all of the values and all of the ideas that created Western culture, all of these things that we think are beautiful, will go extinct.
Building Sovereignty & Cultural Space
00:09:21
Speaker
And a lot of our friends, in an effort to be optimistic,
00:09:26
Speaker
and take initiative will say, well, I'll just run off with my wife and kids into the woods and we'll go carry the fire and we'll keep this thing alive.
00:09:41
Speaker
And it makes me think of the Oสปo bird in Hawaii.
00:09:45
Speaker
Some of you may have heard this.
00:09:46
Speaker
There's an audio recording of this bird, a male, the last of its species,
00:09:52
Speaker
performing a mating call for a female that isn't there.
00:09:57
Speaker
There are no more female OOs.
00:09:59
Speaker
And I think about that bird's parents.
00:10:01
Speaker
In one sense, they're the most successful OO birds ever to live.
00:10:06
Speaker
They survived when all of the others died out.
00:10:10
Speaker
They made it.
00:10:11
Speaker
And maybe there's a sense in which they really were the best.
00:10:14
Speaker
Maybe they really survived because they were the strongest or the quickest or the cleverest.
00:10:18
Speaker
It's more likely they were just lucky, hidden deeper in some rainforest canyon, out of reach, the way that a lot of our people would like to be.
00:10:28
Speaker
But it didn't matter in the end.
00:10:30
Speaker
And, you know, they're birds.
00:10:31
Speaker
They didn't have a plan.
00:10:33
Speaker
They didn't do this on purpose.
00:10:35
Speaker
But for human beings, to deliberately plan to do what the OO bird did is basically inexcusable.
00:10:43
Speaker
It's not a solution.
00:10:44
Speaker
And that's why this thing is not just about having children, but about having grandchildren.
00:10:49
Speaker
It's about creating circumstances in which your culture can iterate, can repeat itself without whatever idiosyncrasies of talent or luck that
00:11:02
Speaker
you may have that allow you to find a mate.
00:11:06
Speaker
And I think there are a lot of us that are in that situation where, for whatever reason, we've succeeded in producing a family in an environment where that's absolutely not guaranteed.
00:11:17
Speaker
And as our kids get older, we start to meditate on that.
00:11:22
Speaker
And we think, you know, do I believe so hard in the superiority of my phenotype that that's why I was able to succeed when so many around me have failed, such that I'm totally confident
00:11:35
Speaker
that that superiority will be passed down to my children.
00:11:38
Speaker
And therefore, because I reproduced, our line is fated to survive.
00:11:46
Speaker
That's not obvious to me.
00:11:47
Speaker
It's not obvious to me that I didn't just get lucky.
00:11:50
Speaker
And I don't want my kids to grow up in a world where they have to be as lucky as I have been, or else they don't get to partake in the most basic of human experiences.
00:12:02
Speaker
to have the love of a woman, to have children.
00:12:06
Speaker
So yeah, this is not about cancel culture, and it's not about ducking out into the woods.
00:12:11
Speaker
This is about building
Exit and Voice as Change Mechanisms
00:12:13
Speaker
the sovereignty and creating the space such that we can take back the culture and turn it into something that our children can survive in.
00:12:24
Speaker
But that does involve exit, and I'll explain what I mean by that.
00:12:28
Speaker
There's a concept in political economy that
00:12:32
Speaker
That if you're a member of a community or an organization and you detect a problem, you have two powers that you can exercise in order to affect change.
00:12:43
Speaker
One is voice and the other is exit.
00:12:46
Speaker
Now, the power of voice is what you grow up hearing about with respect to citizens being involved in politics.
00:12:55
Speaker
That's writing your congressman.
00:12:57
Speaker
That's voting.
00:12:59
Speaker
That's protesting.
00:13:02
Speaker
In a business context, that can be talking to your boss, talking to HR.
00:13:07
Speaker
as a customer that's submitting a customer complaint, proposing a new idea.
00:13:12
Speaker
And basically where voice is effective, everyone would prefer voice because voice is constructive.
00:13:19
Speaker
Voice is high resolution.
00:13:23
Speaker
You learn a lot.
00:13:24
Speaker
You can learn a lot from feedback if you want to.
00:13:30
Speaker
And all the institution can learn from exit is that people aren't happy.
00:13:34
Speaker
So when you start losing customers or employees or when people start lashing together rafts out of tires
Labor Strikes & Exit Strategies
00:13:43
Speaker
to escape Cuba, you may have some theories about what is causing that, about what problem is generating that discontent.
00:13:53
Speaker
But they're really just theories.
00:13:55
Speaker
Basically, exit is an indication that the mechanisms of voice have failed.
00:14:02
Speaker
That the people who make the decisions are either unable or unwilling to receive feedback, or there's just an irreconcilable conflict between the discontented people and the people in power.
00:14:16
Speaker
So there's a sense in which that's pessimistic, right?
00:14:19
Speaker
It means that there's been a failure.
00:14:21
Speaker
But you hear so many people discuss the mechanisms of voice failing as if that forecloses all change, that there's nothing we can do.
00:14:30
Speaker
Well, they'll just rig the election or they'll make whatever laws they want or the Soros DA won't prosecute the criminals, whatever the institutional failure of the day is.
00:14:42
Speaker
But the optimism of exit is that
00:14:45
Speaker
There are still all kinds of actions you can take to affect change.
00:14:49
Speaker
And the beauty of it is that in making the situation better for yourself, you can often make things better for the entire system.
00:14:58
Speaker
Probably the most straightforward way to articulate that is the labor strike.
00:15:02
Speaker
Now, when factory employees are preparing to strike, they are gathering financial resources.
00:15:09
Speaker
They are coordinating together in one sense to prepare to quit their jobs, right?
00:15:16
Speaker
They have to prepare not only for a temporary loss of income, but they have to prepare for the risk of
00:15:23
Speaker
that the employer will be able to call their bluff and replace them.
00:15:28
Speaker
So in order to successfully prosecute a labor strike, the union members need three things.
00:15:35
Speaker
They need to be coordinated.
00:15:37
Speaker
It doesn't make a difference if you just quit your job by yourself.
00:15:40
Speaker
One employee is easily replaceable.
00:15:42
Speaker
Number two, they need to be prepared to survive the period of exit.
00:15:48
Speaker
They need to have whatever runway, whatever provisions they need to hold out and make sure that it hurts the employer more than it hurts them.
00:15:58
Speaker
And number three, they need credible and desirable alternatives in the event
Corporate Ideological Alignment
00:16:04
Speaker
that the employer does cut them off and replace them.
00:16:06
Speaker
They can't afford to be bluffing.
00:16:08
Speaker
And there's a really stupid take on this concept that floats around on right-wing Twitter, which is that exit is somehow an alternative to retaking the institutions.
00:16:18
Speaker
And the fact is, if you're an auto worker, exit is not an alternative to retaking the institutions.
00:16:24
Speaker
to gaining power in those institutions.
00:16:26
Speaker
It's the only means by which you can gain power in those institutions.
00:16:31
Speaker
Being willing and able to exit is a prerequisite.
00:16:34
Speaker
You know, factory work is maybe a little rarefied for my audience.
00:16:37
Speaker
Let's put this in terms that are a little closer to home.
00:16:41
Speaker
The project manager at Amazon
00:16:44
Speaker
He's making a comfortable salary.
00:16:47
Speaker
Is anyone going to seriously make a case that by staying in that job, he's holding on to some kind of institutional power?
00:16:55
Speaker
And that if he were to surrender that job, he'd be abandoning some tactically significant position?
00:17:01
Speaker
The only power that that person derives from that position is his salary.
00:17:06
Speaker
He has absolutely not a prayer of moving the needle on any of the institutional cultural problems that
00:17:14
Speaker
that we would be frustrated with Amazon about.
00:17:17
Speaker
And you saw that with the vaccine mandates.
00:17:20
Speaker
August and September 2021 were consecutive record-breaking months for employee turnover in the United States.
00:17:30
Speaker
And almost immediately thereafter, the corporate vaccine mandate regime collapsed.
00:17:36
Speaker
And they didn't have to say like, oh, we're going to live in a no-vax commune and we're going to build entirely separate institutions for ourselves such that we never have to get vaccinated.
00:17:49
Speaker
No, they just said, I'm going to find a job where I don't have to do this.
00:17:53
Speaker
And as it turns out, if enough people do that, the institution has to make some hard decisions about how much it's willing to bleed for this thing.
00:18:02
Speaker
Now, that's not get woke, go broke, right?
00:18:06
Speaker
Obviously, the levers of power are rigged such that it's not as simple as a boycott or even a general strike.
00:18:15
Speaker
Now, obviously, in theory, if every, let's say every Trump voter quit their jobs at every Fortune 500 company, things would change in this country immediately.
00:18:27
Speaker
They would.
00:18:28
Speaker
The reason that doesn't happen is the lack of those three resources that we described earlier that make a strike possible.
00:18:36
Speaker
There's no coordination, there's no survivable runway, and there are no credible alternatives.
00:18:42
Speaker
Let's say you're an automotive engineer.
00:18:45
Speaker
We have actually a lot of automotive engineers at exit.
00:18:48
Speaker
And you say, well, I'm going to take my knowledge of internal combustion engines, and I'm going to go take that to the anti-woke car company.
00:18:56
Speaker
It's even funnier if you imagine it being the defense industry or the tech industry or any of these other remunerative, important sectors of the economy.
00:19:07
Speaker
There is no anti-woke car company.
00:19:09
Speaker
There is no anti-woke tech company.
00:19:10
Speaker
There is no anti-woke
00:19:12
Speaker
defense contractor for sure.
Role of Human Resources
00:19:15
Speaker
The marketplace of ideas is not supplying anti-woke Fortune 500 companies for some reason.
00:19:22
Speaker
So let's talk for a second about how that happened.
00:19:24
Speaker
How is it possible that every single major corporation in the United States and in the West is so far to the left culturally of virtually every American employee and every American consumer?
00:19:40
Speaker
How did the market, or even if it's an artificial outcome, how does it survive market forces like that?
00:19:47
Speaker
We're clearly dealing with a cartel, an ideological cartel, that is able to constrain the behavior of both its employees and its consumers in the face of seemingly pretty significant headwinds.
00:20:02
Speaker
I mean, I've had conversations with some very, very bright people who have a clear, revealed preference to work at an anti-woke or non-woke corporation.
00:20:11
Speaker
And in fact, many of these guys, even if they were willing to tolerate working at a woke corporation, the corporation wasn't willing to tolerate them, despite the fact that they were, by all accounts, very productive and competent employees.
00:20:26
Speaker
And it seems like there's an arbitrage opportunity there, right?
00:20:29
Speaker
Like, if you were to found...
00:20:32
Speaker
a non-woke or anti-woke tech company, for instance, you'd probably be able to attract some talent that is disgusted by what's happening at Facebook and Google and Microsoft and Amazon who would probably be willing to work for less just to not have to deal with all that.
00:20:50
Speaker
And given how simple and cost neutral or even cost positive changes like that would be, this ideological cartel seems unbreakable.
00:21:03
Speaker
There are no defectors.
00:21:05
Speaker
Nobody's breaking ranks.
00:21:06
Speaker
That should make us stop and think.
00:21:08
Speaker
Why isn't that happening?
00:21:10
Speaker
Well, you can get an idea if you look at this lawsuit that Tesla faced back in 2021.
00:21:15
Speaker
A court in San Francisco awarded a guy $137 million because he reported that at Tesla, some people used racial slurs and allegedly drew racist graffiti on the stalls in the bathrooms.
00:21:33
Speaker
Now, it turns out upon investigation that most of the people saying the N-word were
00:21:38
Speaker
African-American employees of Tesla.
00:21:40
Speaker
And it's not obvious that the person who sued was targeted in particular for racist abuse.
00:21:47
Speaker
He just observed people failing to comply with some ideological rules.
00:21:55
Speaker
And essentially, because Tesla allowed him to observe the violation of these ideological rules, they're being asked to pay him $137 million.
00:22:06
Speaker
Now, if you're Elon Musk and you'd like to never have to pay a $137 million ideological fine ever again, what are you going to do?
00:22:16
Speaker
Well, you are going to hire a department of people to ensure that nobody in the organization violates those ideological rules ever again.
00:22:28
Speaker
And that is the birth of the modern Human Resources Department.
00:22:33
Speaker
The purpose of the Human Resources Department is to prevent the corporation from being sued for violating any of these nebulous and constantly changing ideological crimes.
00:22:44
Speaker
Now, because those crimes are not explicitly written down anywhere, and because the terms of the debate are constantly changing...
State-Sponsored Corporate Cartel
00:22:53
Speaker
It's not enough to create an employee handbook and just say, these are the rules, and if you violate them, you're out.
00:23:02
Speaker
No, you actually need a priesthood.
00:23:04
Speaker
You need someone who can read the bird entrails and say, these are the rules today, which means they have to be maximally dialed in to...
00:23:19
Speaker
conversations that are happening in academia, conversations that are happening in NGOs that set the tone of what their employees might construe as discrimination.
00:23:30
Speaker
So human resources, by definition, has to be not only woke, it's their job to
00:23:39
Speaker
to be maximally woke.
00:23:41
Speaker
It's their job to be so woke that it would be impossible for any of the weirdos that they happen to scoop up in the hiring net to be ahead of them in any respect that a media outlet, an academic, or an activist judge might interpret to be a problem for that corporation.
00:24:05
Speaker
Now you can see the genius in this.
00:24:08
Speaker
There are no secret police to kick in your door for criticizing this power structure.
00:24:16
Speaker
This power structure has actually succeeded through the torts process
00:24:21
Speaker
in getting every major corporation to hire and vet their own full-time internal intelligence and informant network.
00:24:33
Speaker
So essentially it's a state-sponsored cartel.
00:24:35
Speaker
That's why it doesn't collapse on its own due to just market pressures.
Exit Strategies as Negotiation Tools
00:24:40
Speaker
But that doesn't mean it's indestructible.
00:24:42
Speaker
It just means that the ceiling to inspire defectors is higher.
00:24:49
Speaker
the required activation energy to initiate that process is higher.
00:24:54
Speaker
But we can imagine how that would look.
00:24:56
Speaker
And it's in some ways the same process in reverse.
00:25:00
Speaker
Instead of getting the corporations to perform the ideological enforcement on behalf of the security state,
00:25:09
Speaker
You create a crisis so deep for them that they actually begin to push back in their own interest, but essentially on your behalf, against the security state.
00:25:22
Speaker
It is actually still the case that these are profit-seeking corporations.
00:25:26
Speaker
Those profit incentives are not being ignored, they're being manipulated.
00:25:30
Speaker
When a company faces a regulatory burden that incentivizes it to act in ways that would otherwise be unprofitable, they haven't stopped being a profit-seeking entity.
00:25:41
Speaker
What they are doing is seeking profit according to the new calculus imposed by the regulation.
00:25:48
Speaker
And what's beautiful about these faceless, soulless corporate egregores is
00:25:55
Speaker
is that they are incapable of actual solidarity.
00:25:59
Speaker
There is no morale.
00:26:00
Speaker
There is no human entity to say, no, we're going to hold the line.
00:26:04
Speaker
We're going to be brave.
00:26:05
Speaker
We're going to stand up to this.
00:26:07
Speaker
That weakness in these institutions can be exploited by us just as it can by our enemies.
00:26:11
Speaker
But conversely, that means there is no human being to talk to.
00:26:15
Speaker
There is no adult in charge to whom you can submit your argument.
00:26:22
Speaker
The Russians are dealing with that in Ukraine right now.
00:26:24
Speaker
There is no sovereign human being with whom to negotiate over NATO expansion.
00:26:31
Speaker
This is something that's being executed by these decentralized incentive gradients that
00:26:37
Speaker
of just various fiefdoms in the security state instinctively expanding and consuming.
00:26:44
Speaker
In other words, voice is out of the question, hence exit.
00:26:48
Speaker
And I know I've already said this, but I just want to emphasize it.
Sustainable Cultural Spaces
00:26:52
Speaker
It is exactly not about hiding out and eating roots and berries in the woods.
00:26:58
Speaker
It is about building desirable alternatives such that you are able to negotiate on more equal footing with the power structures that are coercing you.
00:27:10
Speaker
Exit is not the end, exit is the means.
00:27:13
Speaker
You may strike because you hate your job, but you don't strike in order to quit your job.
00:27:17
Speaker
You strike in order to force a negotiation such that you can do your job under better terms.
00:27:22
Speaker
And this is pre-modern, by the way.
00:27:24
Speaker
Peasant rebellions, aristocratic rebellions, even in the cases where they don't lead to an actual upending and replacement of the existing power structure, they very often lead to a renegotiation that is settled on
00:27:40
Speaker
different terms than existed before the rebellion.
00:27:43
Speaker
Now, whether those are favorable or unfavorable terms depends on how successful the rebellion is.
00:27:49
Speaker
And there's a sense in which exit can secure more sovereignty for you before those negotiations are settled, or even if they're never settled.
00:27:57
Speaker
the metaphor that I like to use is Sherwood Forest.
00:28:00
Speaker
Robin Hood and his merry men aren't going to dethrone Prince John, but the fact that they have found a location and a community where they are illegible to the hostile authorities enables them substantial freedom and also just the joy of kind of pantsing
00:28:23
Speaker
The authorities at every opportunity.
00:28:25
Speaker
I mean, that's, that's essentially the running theme of the Robin Hood myth is just that they get to, they get to clown on them anytime they want to with impunity.
00:28:35
Speaker
So it's like, you know, yes, best case, we take back our country in total from our enemies.
00:28:43
Speaker
But we could also renegotiate the terms by which we're ruled by these people.
00:28:48
Speaker
And failing that, we could make ourselves illegible such that even if they have all this power and even if they hate us, they have a lot harder time touching us.
00:28:57
Speaker
And what's great about that is the tactics required to achieve all of those objectives, at least at this stage of the game, are identical.
00:29:04
Speaker
So you don't have to settle in your mind which of those is attainable.
00:29:08
Speaker
All right, so enough about why.
00:29:09
Speaker
Let's talk about how.
00:29:10
Speaker
How can we create a critical mass of
00:29:13
Speaker
of like-minded people who are organized, who can survive the coercion methods that will be deployed against them if they defy the security state, and who have credible alternatives such that if the worst comes to the worst, they actually can move on from these dependencies without social and financial ruin.
00:29:32
Speaker
Now, obviously, what it takes to get there depends on to what extent you're actually planning to defy the security state, right?
00:29:39
Speaker
If you want to be Julian Assange, you've got to make different provisions for yourself than if you want to say no to a medical procedure or say things that you'd like to say on Twitter.
00:29:51
Speaker
Even then, it depends.
00:29:52
Speaker
What kind of things would you like to say on Twitter?
00:29:54
Speaker
And that too feeds into the organization question, right?
00:29:58
Speaker
Because I don't actually have a lot in common with a guy who feels tyrannized by like child pornography laws.
00:30:04
Speaker
So it can't be that we're just organizing around free speech absolutism or against cancel culture.
00:30:12
Speaker
Number one, we can't be united by what we oppose, but also what you stand for makes a huge difference in whom you attract around yourself.
00:30:21
Speaker
So that's why this thing is so much bigger than cancel culture.
00:30:23
Speaker
It's ultimately about do we get to have grandkids?
00:30:26
Speaker
That task bounds the question of exactly how much and what kind of sovereignty are we fighting for?
Entrepreneurship & Independence
00:30:35
Speaker
You can't organize without that.
00:30:37
Speaker
That's the shape of the space that we need to carve out.
00:30:39
Speaker
So what's inside that space that we need to create?
00:30:44
Speaker
So far it looks like alternatives to government schools, encouraging people to create single-income families, and making it financially possible for them to create single-income families.
00:30:54
Speaker
Providing our people with geographic mobility so that they can go to places where their kids will have a better life and a better peer group, better potential friends and rivals and mates.
00:31:05
Speaker
That's the thing that you can't provide for your kid as a parent.
00:31:09
Speaker
You can't provide them with their future husband or wife, except in the sense that you can expose them to wholesome people.
00:31:15
Speaker
So geographic mobility, also the resources to create more wholesome spaces, communities where our kids can find those things if they don't already exist.
00:31:26
Speaker
It's also about building a lifestyle that's exemplary for our children.
00:31:31
Speaker
Because ultimately, if we do succeed in having children and raising them according to our values, but they find nothing in us as adults that they want, that they want to replicate and emulate, then they will find those patterns elsewhere and the effort will have been meaningless.
00:31:51
Speaker
And maybe related to that is the funding of culture production and supporting dissident thinkers.
00:31:56
Speaker
If these conversations can happen, if these cultural...
00:32:01
Speaker
artifacts can be created.
00:32:03
Speaker
In other words, if the culture isn't left in the hands of people who have the lifestyle and the values to get their arts funded by the state and entertainment corporations, then we can create a culture that people are drawn to.
00:32:20
Speaker
It's not all about this repellent coercive force.
00:32:23
Speaker
There's also this compulsive force that we want.
00:32:26
Speaker
the ability to attract and compel and ultimately to move people.
00:32:32
Speaker
So that's why EXIT is a fraternal organization.
00:32:35
Speaker
Obviously, we want to get women out of these coercive power structures as well as men, but the solution set to that problem with this orientation toward having grandchildren is quite a bit different for women than it is for men.
00:32:50
Speaker
That's also one reason why this is not a product or a service.
00:32:53
Speaker
It's a fraternity that's hand chosen one by one.
00:32:57
Speaker
You pay your dues and you are invited to schedule a call with me to discuss your background, what value you could provide to the group, and also what you're looking for and you hope to accomplish with us.
00:33:11
Speaker
The purpose of that is to determine, first of all, that you're oriented toward the same problems that we are.
00:33:18
Speaker
There's not an ideological stress test here.
00:33:20
Speaker
Anyone who's oriented toward these fundamental goals, trying to attack the same problems we are.
00:33:26
Speaker
And probably the biggest thing that I look for in that call is a desire to contribute.
00:33:32
Speaker
I don't know what I did right in the beginning, but we attracted just an incredibly...
00:33:36
Speaker
dedicated group of guys, dedicated to each other.
00:33:39
Speaker
I watch them just go to bat for each other every day.
00:33:42
Speaker
And so it's really important to me that that culture not be betrayed.
00:33:48
Speaker
It's maybe a larger point that I could make here about pro-social, agreeable, responsible people who are just tired of having that impulse betrayed.
00:33:59
Speaker
I really think that's a big driver of who comes into this.
00:34:03
Speaker
So ultimately the goal is just to get these guys in a room
00:34:06
Speaker
get them talking to each other, get them aware of each other's projects and working together.
00:34:10
Speaker
And right now, the way we attack that is through some topical calls.
00:34:12
Speaker
We bring the guys together to talk about entrepreneurship, to talk about preparedness, to talk about remote work and tech jobs and crypto, to talk about content creation, talk about fitness.
00:34:24
Speaker
And it's oriented around accountability so that you are there to set quantifiable, concrete goals that
00:34:34
Speaker
that move the ball in that area of your life.
00:34:37
Speaker
So why those topics in particular?
00:34:39
Speaker
Well, basically, these are all dimensions of life that make us more independent, make us more sovereign.
00:34:44
Speaker
And I know there's this big debate about, you know, how dumb it is to send right-wing guys into the trades.
00:34:50
Speaker
But if you've ever met an entrepreneur who runs a trade business,
00:34:54
Speaker
It's incredible the extent to which they run their mouths about politics in public.
00:34:59
Speaker
And it's fine for them because there really is not this strong public appetite to punish thought crime.
00:35:06
Speaker
That's completely made up.
00:35:08
Speaker
It's not real.
00:35:09
Speaker
Nobody cares what their landscaper or their plumber or their electrician thinks about Donald Trump.
00:35:15
Speaker
And the same is basically true of CPAs and digital marketers.
00:35:18
Speaker
It's not a function of being in the trades.
00:35:20
Speaker
It's a function of making your own money.
00:35:22
Speaker
So the purpose of the entrepreneurship call is to move guys in that direction.
00:35:27
Speaker
That can mean helping them develop a business model for a startup.
00:35:30
Speaker
It can also mean helping them negotiate a contract arrangement at work if they're a W-2.
00:35:35
Speaker
It can mean just negotiating for some more work from home time so they have a little more sovereignty over their day.
00:35:42
Speaker
It can mean developing side hustles.
00:35:44
Speaker
Basically finding ways to decouple your economic security from the goodwill of a corporate employer.
Creative Dissidence & Cultural Production
00:35:53
Speaker
The tech call is very similar.
00:35:55
Speaker
It's just focused on a particular skill set.
00:35:57
Speaker
My attitude is if you can learn to code and you don't hate it, you should learn to code because it's one of the most individually portable, transferable, high value economic activities you can engage in.
00:36:13
Speaker
I was having a conversation recently with a friend of mine about the sexual revolution, and he mentioned that some of our guys want to attribute the social changes of the 60s and 70s to conspiracy, but it makes a lot more sense to attribute it to technology.
00:36:28
Speaker
Basically, it was just the pill.
00:36:29
Speaker
The pill changed everything.
00:36:30
Speaker
And I think we're experiencing a similar moment today with remote work.
00:36:35
Speaker
Once Starlink goes up all over the world, your ability to enjoy a first world standard of living from anywhere in the world, meaning specifically any jurisdiction in the world, is going to transform our relationship to the state.
00:36:49
Speaker
And then blockchain technology provides a means of storing and securing the value that you earn without the need for the state's blessing.
00:36:58
Speaker
And so basically...
00:37:00
Speaker
If you have the chops, you should learn to code at least a little bit.
00:37:04
Speaker
Programming is not where I belong.
00:37:05
Speaker
It's not necessarily where my strengths are, but it's comforting to know that I can do the job well enough to get paid to do it if I need to.
00:37:13
Speaker
The preparedness call is similar.
00:37:15
Speaker
Lots of people in our circles are talking about the intentional sabotage of economic infrastructure, energy infrastructure, in order to advance some of these ESG goals.
00:37:26
Speaker
And the logic underlying that accusation is that if you're hungry...
00:37:30
Speaker
If you're poor, you're easier to control.
00:37:33
Speaker
And yeah, if you live in hand to mouth and your employer says, get the vaccine or you're fired and you don't know where your kids are going to eat that month, then you're probably going to get the vaccine.
00:37:42
Speaker
But if you're sitting on a year's supply of food and you have some savings and maybe some chickens in the yard, well, then the waterline of what's the worst that can happen to you if you say no rises significantly.
00:37:56
Speaker
Now, in the end, can the enemy go gloves off and raid your house and Waco you and all the other stuff that our guys catastrophize about?
00:38:05
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:06
Speaker
These power struggles are always questions of will.
00:38:09
Speaker
They're stronger than you.
00:38:10
Speaker
Can they come for you?
00:38:11
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:12
Speaker
But you can make it more expensive.
00:38:14
Speaker
You can make it more of a pain in the ass.
00:38:16
Speaker
If your money's in the bank, they can shut down the bank.
00:38:19
Speaker
If your money's in crypto, they got to come pull your teeth out to get it.
00:38:22
Speaker
And that looks bad.
00:38:23
Speaker
And they got to make up a story why you deserve it.
00:38:25
Speaker
And Alex Jones is going to talk about it and all that.
00:38:28
Speaker
So really, the more prepared you are,
00:38:30
Speaker
the more obnoxious you can get away with being to them.
00:38:33
Speaker
And the type of obnoxious that we're interested in being is, let's say, harder to justify an FBI raid.
00:38:39
Speaker
We're also interested in preparedness because, in large part, exit is taking a short position in the present economic and political system.
00:38:49
Speaker
If you're with us, you recognize that the present course we're on is unsustainable.
00:38:54
Speaker
And something's going to give.
00:38:55
Speaker
And it's not obvious that there will be an orderly, peaceful transition to whatever comes next.
00:39:01
Speaker
So some investment in preparedness is a moral imperative.
00:39:05
Speaker
Because the more materially prepared you are, the more moral optionality you will have
00:39:11
Speaker
when things get desperate.
00:39:13
Speaker
The fitness call too is important for that reason.
00:39:15
Speaker
You'll hear some smart preppers say the most important thing in your bug out bag is your gym membership.
00:39:20
Speaker
Life could get physically demanding within your lifetime.
00:39:23
Speaker
And even if it doesn't, being physically fit is gonna help our boys find and keep women,
00:39:27
Speaker
It's going to help them be aspirational to their own sons.
00:39:31
Speaker
It's going to help them from an endocrine perspective to have children.
00:39:34
Speaker
And just in general, rule number one is be handsome.
00:39:37
Speaker
If you're fat and lazy and metabolically inert, you're not going to be up to the physical or the spiritual challenges that we're up against.
00:39:46
Speaker
So every week we get together, we talk about our fitness regimen, how we're keeping to our commitments, how we're improving.
00:39:53
Speaker
We're taking responsibility when we backslide.
00:39:57
Speaker
But the fun part is we do feats of strength.
00:39:59
Speaker
So the guys do handstand pushups or wall sits while they do their update.
00:40:04
Speaker
And the boys really get to know who's capable.
00:40:07
Speaker
They try to test themselves against the strongest guys in the group.
00:40:10
Speaker
There's a spiritual dimension to connecting with your physical limitations, pushing them outward.
00:40:15
Speaker
And content creation is similar.
00:40:17
Speaker
There are discussions that need to happen.
00:40:19
Speaker
There's art that needs to be made.
00:40:21
Speaker
And really, there's never been a better time to be a creative dissident.
Success Stories from Exit Members
00:40:26
Speaker
The competition that you're up against is YA novels and rings of power and just increasingly gay or Marvel movies.
00:40:36
Speaker
There are areas in which our enemies are still extremely strong, but they're absolutely spent in the cultural arena.
00:40:43
Speaker
They have nothing to offer and they know it and everybody else knows it.
00:40:48
Speaker
And this isn't to say that guys like Tucker Carlson are being totally mercenary when they pull some takes from right-wing Twitter, but that's...
00:40:57
Speaker
where the ideas are.
00:40:59
Speaker
This group of people is the only group that is thinking through the ramifications of what's happening in this society because it's the only group of people that doesn't care about the consequences of doing that.
00:41:10
Speaker
And so I want to expand that sphere.
00:41:12
Speaker
I want to create an environment where guys with talent and with good things to say can be discovered.
00:41:18
Speaker
And guys who want to make a pile of money and patronize great art can do that.
00:41:22
Speaker
We are in a position to create these institutions that are legitimately dangerous to the regime and are hard for the regime to attack from within their own self-concept.
00:41:32
Speaker
So that's the stuff that we're doing.
00:41:33
Speaker
What impact is it having?
00:41:35
Speaker
Well, the projects that the guys are working on are diverse enough that it's hard to like settle on KPIs.
00:41:41
Speaker
So I've set a goal to just once a month, I want to have somebody who could say, I joined the group and I use the resources and I accomplished something that was meaningful to me that made it worth doing.
00:41:56
Speaker
I don't really know how else to quantify it.
00:41:59
Speaker
But by that standard, we're on track.
00:42:01
Speaker
So a couple stories.
00:42:02
Speaker
We had a math professor who joined up after being doxxed and fired.
00:42:06
Speaker
And basically, academia was inaccessible to him at that point.
00:42:10
Speaker
And, you know, he's a math professor, so clearly smart, but he didn't know which of his skills or talents were marketable.
00:42:19
Speaker
So we talked through that in a hot seat call and started working with him in the tech call to iterate through, you know, okay, we're learning Python.
00:42:29
Speaker
It's not Python.
00:42:30
Speaker
That's not exciting to him.
00:42:31
Speaker
Let's try machine learning.
00:42:34
Speaker
We don't like that.
00:42:35
Speaker
He eventually settled on Erbit.
00:42:38
Speaker
And to be clear, he taught himself.
00:42:41
Speaker
This was his achievement.
00:42:43
Speaker
But the group was there to answer questions, to hold him accountable, to redirect.
00:42:50
Speaker
A huge part of what can happen on these calls is
00:42:54
Speaker
is if you're alone and you're working on a project like this and you hit a dead end and it gets frustrating, it can be really easy to quit and just go back to whatever the status quo was before.
00:43:06
Speaker
But part of the beauty of taking accountability is you can actually examine why you didn't do what you said you were going to do.
00:43:15
Speaker
It's not just, oh, I'm a piece of shit, I'm lazy, I'm undisciplined, whatever.
00:43:21
Speaker
I don't really believe in that.
00:43:23
Speaker
I think these guys are smart.
00:43:24
Speaker
And so if they don't hit their markers, there's a reason.
00:43:27
Speaker
And so part of the conversation is, why is that not the thing?
00:43:31
Speaker
And with this guy, we worked through a couple things that weren't the thing.
00:43:37
Speaker
And anyway, long story short, he's making three times what he was making as a math professor.
00:43:41
Speaker
We had another guy who was set to be fired from his web developer job over the VAX mandate.
00:43:50
Speaker
sat him down in the hot seat, and basically a couple of guys in the group just said, we've run independent web design businesses.
00:43:59
Speaker
It's really easy to do.
00:44:00
Speaker
You can make a lot of money.
00:44:01
Speaker
You can make more money than you're currently making.
00:44:03
Speaker
And that was really all he needed.
00:44:05
Speaker
He set up his own LLC, and he was off to the races, and in a couple of months, he was making 25% more than he was making at the corporate job.
00:44:12
Speaker
And this guy actually...
00:44:14
Speaker
dipped back into corporate employment on a contract basis.
00:44:19
Speaker
So he had one major contract customer
00:44:22
Speaker
that made him a lot of his income, but he didn't have to get the VACs and he knows how to get income from other sources now.
00:44:29
Speaker
So again, it's not necessarily about one particular path or approach that you have to take.
00:44:34
Speaker
It's just about whatever makes you more independent.
00:44:36
Speaker
We had another guy who had already started his own SEO firm and was struggling with the top of his sales funnel.
00:44:44
Speaker
He was actually looking at going back to a W-2.
00:44:47
Speaker
And so we sat him down with some of our sales and marketing guys and
00:44:50
Speaker
And he didn't have to go back to the wage cage.
00:44:52
Speaker
He's on track to double his revenue this year.
00:44:54
Speaker
And actually, he's now become one of our strongest internal employers.
00:45:00
Speaker
He's got this constant appetite for copywriting help.
00:45:03
Speaker
So we send guys to him that are trying to learn that game.
00:45:06
Speaker
So you can see how the network becomes self-nourishing.
00:45:09
Speaker
As these guys succeed, they become resources that can help the other guys succeed.
00:45:15
Speaker
A couple of guys have put together teams to start businesses internally.
00:45:19
Speaker
One of the guys raised $125,000 for a film project.
00:45:23
Speaker
And then, you know, some of the guys are just getting the courage to set up a chicken coop.
00:45:28
Speaker
There's a couple of the guys in the fitness call who've gotten into really good shape.
00:45:31
Speaker
And it's not like there's any secret magic protocol to the way that we do things.
00:45:35
Speaker
It's a very stealable business model.
00:45:37
Speaker
It's just getting guys together to encourage and advise each other.
00:45:42
Speaker
What we have that's not stealable is the caliber of guy that we've found.
00:45:46
Speaker
and the sense of purpose that they have around helping each other.
00:45:49
Speaker
And while the system isn't magic, it works.
Future Plans & Initiatives
00:45:52
Speaker
One of the reasons that I started this thing was that I observed the helplessness, not of the people who were being doxxed, but the people who wanted to help them.
00:46:01
Speaker
One of the guys was a lawyer.
00:46:03
Speaker
And I felt, man, I wish that I had a law job just lined up that I could hand this guy.
00:46:10
Speaker
And other people who reached out to me, they were like, oh man, I really wish I knew what to do for you.
00:46:17
Speaker
I really wish I knew how to help you and get your family squared away.
00:46:21
Speaker
And when you're working with these one-to-one connections, the odds that my need will coincide with your resources turns out to be pretty low.
00:46:30
Speaker
But when you get a group of 100, 150, 200 people in a room together, those probabilities flip.
00:46:37
Speaker
And the odds that somebody in that room can help you or they know somebody that can help you, it's almost guaranteed.
00:46:44
Speaker
So the goodwill and the resources are there.
00:46:45
Speaker
It's just a question of making these guys visible to each other.
00:46:48
Speaker
If you will dedicate an hour a week to talk through something that matters to you and commit to a course of action for the following week and take responsibility for it with a group of guys that you respect that you don't want to look like an asshole around, you're going to make progress.
00:47:06
Speaker
You have to make progress.
00:47:08
Speaker
We had a weight loss competition back in the spring and it was really interesting.
00:47:11
Speaker
There was a guy who was the most steady in reporting what he did.
00:47:16
Speaker
And I would say like two out of three times he was coming in to say, you know, there was a football game or there was a birthday party and I ate like crap and
00:47:26
Speaker
I suck.
00:47:27
Speaker
But at the end of the competition, that was the guy who lost all the weight.
00:47:31
Speaker
Just because what gets measured gets done.
00:47:33
Speaker
So one more story.
00:47:34
Speaker
A guy came in with an idea for a boys school.
00:47:37
Speaker
And just to be honest, lots of guys in our circles are thinking about this with varying degrees of seriousness.
00:47:45
Speaker
And I was sort of ready to be like,
00:47:47
Speaker
you know, okay, we'll work on it.
00:47:49
Speaker
We'll see how it goes.
00:47:51
Speaker
This guy is just a machine.
00:47:52
Speaker
He reports in every single week on the progress that he's making.
00:47:58
Speaker
And he's making connections at these homeschooling conferences.
00:48:02
Speaker
He's building a local board of directors.
00:48:05
Speaker
He's compiling the curriculum.
00:48:06
Speaker
He's got the website built.
00:48:08
Speaker
He just kept achieving the
00:48:11
Speaker
over and over and over again on each call.
00:48:14
Speaker
And he's going to be ready to take on his first class in the beginning of 2023.
00:48:18
Speaker
So all of these stories are about these guys' individual lives and individual projects.
00:48:24
Speaker
In the long run, we want to start building things together.
00:48:28
Speaker
The purpose of getting squared away personally and individually is to free us up to become leaders and patrons and culture creators.
00:48:40
Speaker
Which leads me to what's next.
00:48:42
Speaker
We have a couple things in the pipe, one of which is the beginnings of private equity.
00:48:47
Speaker
We have lots of well-capitalized guys in the group.
00:48:51
Speaker
One of our members, just on the basis of personal networking, raised $125,000 for a film project within the group.
00:48:59
Speaker
And that got us thinking, you know, there's lots of good ideas here and there's lots of capital.
00:49:03
Speaker
So we've started some regular investor calls to develop some of these ideas,
00:49:08
Speaker
to the point that our guys could raise money either internally or externally.
00:49:12
Speaker
We're also developing some media competitions similar to Passage Prize.
00:49:15
Speaker
Some of you guys have heard of that.
00:49:17
Speaker
Because I'll hang out in these group chats and I'll hear these guys bat around just incredible ideas.
00:49:22
Speaker
And I remember how much Passage Prize meant to me to just give me a concrete incentive and a deadline to write something.
00:49:29
Speaker
And I don't think I'd written any real fiction in almost a decade, but I was really happy with what I came up with.
00:49:35
Speaker
It didn't win anything, but I'm really glad that that happened.
00:49:38
Speaker
And so if we can leverage some of our resources to make that happen for some more people, that'd be really exciting.
00:49:45
Speaker
In the medium term, we're also looking at legal defense and cancellation insurance.
00:49:49
Speaker
We want to start pooling resources so that we can not only defend people whose livelihoods and finances are threatened, but also similar to what progressives do, to actually go looking for and even potentially engineering some challenges.
00:50:05
Speaker
Because in fact, a lot of what the regime is doing with respect to employment law is
00:50:10
Speaker
on the books illegal.
00:50:12
Speaker
And obviously there are unfriendly jurisdictions where you wouldn't want to challenge that, but there are some where you could.
00:50:17
Speaker
And the judiciary...
00:50:20
Speaker
is probably the closest thing that we have to neutral to friendly ideological terrain within the institutions.
00:50:27
Speaker
As far as cancellation insurance, we've got a small group of guys working on a project they're calling Pluribus that's intended to be the beginning of an insurance product to help people secure lines of income that might be cut off by being debanked, deplatformed, or losing a job.
00:50:43
Speaker
Obviously there's network effects involved there.
00:50:46
Speaker
and it's a complicated problem to solve, but it's something that we think needs to be tackled.
00:50:50
Speaker
And in the long run model, maybe five years out, is physical connection.
00:50:54
Speaker
We already fly out for meetups once a month, but at least as far as I'm concerned, I want my kids to grow up around these guys' kids.
00:51:02
Speaker
They have great families.
00:51:03
Speaker
I want my wife to be able to spend time with their wives, and I want us to be able to build beautiful, physical things in the real world together.
00:51:12
Speaker
I say within five years because that'll be at the age where it's most important to me that my oldest daughter has good friends, and so...
00:51:21
Speaker
It's personal and urgent to me that we make this happen, as I know it is for many of you.
Vision for a Network State
00:51:25
Speaker
Several months after we got this thing started, a couple of the guys introduced me to a book called The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan.
00:51:32
Speaker
And he articulates the concept of a decentralized network union in which people under ordinary circumstances collaborate on projects and then in case of emergency circle the wagons to protect each other from problems.
00:51:47
Speaker
And he talks about how one possible application of a decentralized network union might be anti-cancellation.
00:51:55
Speaker
And it was just bizarre to see this concept that we had developed over time, an emergent concept that had been already laid out and articulated in minute detail by somebody else whose ideas I had no individual contact with.
00:52:14
Speaker
I'm sure I had read some guys who had read biology.
00:52:18
Speaker
But it just seems really clear to me that this is a concept that somebody is going to have to execute.
00:52:26
Speaker
I had a guy reach out to me and say, watch out for the first mover curse.
00:52:30
Speaker
You don't want to spend all this time and money to solve all these problems and just become the next MySpace and get eaten by Facebook.
00:52:38
Speaker
And my attitude on that is...
00:52:40
Speaker
This just needs to happen.
00:52:41
Speaker
And if somebody does it better, I'll join their thing.
00:52:44
Speaker
But it needs to happen.
00:52:46
Speaker
And where the network state gets a little bit science fiction, not to say far-fetched, but more speculative, is the idea that these decentralized network unions evolve into network states.
00:53:00
Speaker
Distributed, voluntarist polities, where geography no longer determines jurisdiction.
00:53:06
Speaker
And I don't know if it'll go exactly that way, but it does seem clear that people increasingly have more in common with these groups that they're encountering on the internet than they do with their countrymen or even in some cases, people they go to church with.
00:53:22
Speaker
And there's two things you can do about that.
00:53:24
Speaker
One of them is you can try to reconnect with your neighborhood.
00:53:29
Speaker
You can try to reconnect with your local congregation at church.
00:53:32
Speaker
And I think you should.
00:53:34
Speaker
I think you should make every effort to find like-minded, and I don't mean precisely like-minded, but people whose values you share enough that you want to live around them.
00:53:44
Speaker
You should look for those people and you should cultivate those communities locally if you can.
00:53:48
Speaker
But in addition...
00:53:50
Speaker
Again, there's a technological change happening.
00:53:52
Speaker
People are getting more mobile, not less mobile.
00:53:57
Speaker
People are getting more connected, not less connected.
00:53:59
Speaker
You will not be able to hide out in your Utah suburb.
00:54:03
Speaker
Netflix and Drag Queen Story Hour...
00:54:06
Speaker
And Child Protective Services, frankly, is coming to your Utah suburb.
00:54:12
Speaker
I'm reading a great book right now called Out of the Mountains by David Kilcullen.
00:54:16
Speaker
And the thesis of this book is basically that insurgency is going to move from the rural, mountainous, rugged terrain into the cities in part because satellite technology and broadband technology is making those places less remote and
00:54:36
Speaker
and harder to hide in.
00:54:38
Speaker
It is actually easier to hide in a crowded, squalid third world city than in the mountains of Afghanistan now.
00:54:47
Speaker
And I mentioned that as a metaphor, not to say go live in Bangladesh instead of West Virginia.
00:54:54
Speaker
but to say the old ways of making yourself illegible, the old ways of building community and defending its boundaries are becoming unworkable.
00:55:06
Speaker
And so instead of insisting on the forms that we're accustomed to, we need to be thinking about the function.
00:55:13
Speaker
We need to be thinking about the timeless principles that
00:55:18
Speaker
that can be applied within a new technological environment.
00:55:21
Speaker
And so, yes, I think you do have a moral responsibility to try to connect with your local community.
00:55:26
Speaker
But also look around at your local community.
00:55:28
Speaker
How many of those people have lived there for 10 years?
00:55:31
Speaker
How many of those people do you expect to live there for another 10?
00:55:34
Speaker
The pace of ideological sorting is accelerating.
00:55:39
Speaker
People are moving to be closer to like-minded people.
00:55:41
Speaker
That's just going to happen.
00:55:43
Speaker
And the more deliberate you can be about that process, both in terms of where you choose to live and the network you choose to build, the stronger you can be in the new equilibrium.
00:55:52
Speaker
So now I'm just in the business of finding my people and trying to figure out how best to connect them with each other.
00:55:58
Speaker
We're tactically agnostic.
00:56:00
Speaker
We'll try whatever works.
00:56:02
Speaker
The format, I'm sure, will change over time.
00:56:04
Speaker
But I hope that articulates the vision, what we're trying to accomplish.
How to Get Involved with Exit
00:56:08
Speaker
If you want to learn more, you can DM me at extradeadjcb or at exit underscore org.
00:56:14
Speaker
We also have a newsletter, exitgroup.substack.com.
00:56:17
Speaker
You can subscribe there for updates as we grow and also just some thoughts about why we do things the way we do them.
00:56:23
Speaker
Or you can sign up at exitgroup.us and schedule a call with me.
00:56:28
Speaker
We'll talk about what you need, what you want, how to build the kind of life that you want for your family, and how you can contribute to some of these projects that we're working on.
00:56:36
Speaker
So hit me up.
00:56:37
Speaker
Thanks for listening.