Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: I'm shaking the dust off a little bit today.
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.
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.
Speaker: But I realized recently that I haven't actually put everything all in one place, even for the guys in the group.
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.
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.
Speaker: I think most folks understand it has something to do with cancel culture, so to speak.
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.
Speaker: Literally nothing else matters.
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.
Speaker: All over the world, embrace of Western culture is basically associated with demographic catastrophe.
Speaker: And partly that's because our culture is dominated and built around the interests of childless careerist strivers.
Speaker: a class of people in academia, in corporate America, in politics, in entertainment, who have no vested interest in keeping the wheels on.
Speaker: We could talk at length about why that's the case.
Speaker: I think it just has to do with the scale of our society.
Speaker: Every market has become a global market, the market for attention in particular.
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.
Speaker: Basically, just the public discourse has become a very fast paced game.
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.
Speaker: Which, by definition, excludes all of the smartest and sanest people in the society.
Speaker: Anybody who's...
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.
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
Speaker: that have the loudest megaphone are not patriarchs with seven kids.
Speaker: You see a lot of power couples.
Speaker: You see a lot of single, childless women.
Speaker: You see way more gay guys than you would expect.
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.
Speaker: The people who can sort of be a public nuisance because they don't have...
Speaker: you know, the reputation of their family to think about or a community that they care deeply about.
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.
Speaker: I mean, there's nothing to constrain it.
Speaker: They don't even have to pretend.
Speaker: And so it's not so much a problem that there are mechanisms of social opprobrium, mechanisms whereby you can be punished for
Speaker: saying or doing bad things, that's a part of life and it can be a healthy thing.
Speaker: That's really not what we're up against.
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.
Speaker: Or at minimum, the most short-sighted, the people who have the least understanding of what is required to keep society functioning.
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.
Speaker: Partly that's the case because our present censorship regime is so weighted toward measures that hurt people with responsibilities the hardest.
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 of the things that they were saying.
Speaker: And, you know, God bless them.
Speaker: I'm glad they were able to get away with that.
Speaker: But the problem with having nothing to lose is, well, once you win, suddenly you have something to lose.
Speaker: And the tactics that got you to that point won't get you over the next hill.
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.
Speaker: So ultimately, there's a responsible mainstream that is keeping their heads down and their mouths shut.
Speaker: And there's an irresponsible fringe that doesn't really know where to go next.
Speaker: And there's a book that I love called Days of Rage by Brian Burrow.
Speaker: It's about the weather underground and the Black Liberation Army in the early 70s.
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.
Speaker: Virtually all of these...
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.
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
Speaker: from voicing any kind of controversial opinion according to the Overton window that they've set.
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.
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.
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?
Speaker: I mean, that was basically the story of 2020, but it was also the story of...
Speaker: the 1920s through the 1940s.
Speaker: Everything FDR did was ostensibly to create a liberal stopgap against communist revolution in America.
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.
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.
Speaker: And so if there's a hint of dissent among the gainfully employed professional managerial class, it has to be stomped out immediately.
Speaker: And most of these people make a reasonable calculation.
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.
Speaker: And these are the smartest, healthiest, sanest people in the country.
Speaker: These are the people who should be defining the discourse.
Speaker: These are the people who understand the problems the best.
Speaker: And it would be one thing if it was just accepting rule by a hostile foreign power.
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.
Speaker: And so ultimately what's at stake is, are you going to have grandchildren?
Speaker: If this process is allowed to continue, if these people and their interests and their values continue to go unchallenged,
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.
Speaker: And a lot of our friends, in an effort to be optimistic,
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.
Speaker: And it makes me think of the Oʻo bird in Hawaii.
Speaker: Some of you may have heard this.
Speaker: There's an audio recording of this bird, a male, the last of its species,
Speaker: performing a mating call for a female that isn't there.
Speaker: There are no more female OOs.
Speaker: And I think about that bird's parents.
Speaker: In one sense, they're the most successful OO birds ever to live.
Speaker: They survived when all of the others died out.
Speaker: They made it.
Speaker: And maybe there's a sense in which they really were the best.
Speaker: Maybe they really survived because they were the strongest or the quickest or the cleverest.
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.
Speaker: But it didn't matter in the end.
Speaker: And, you know, they're birds.
Speaker: They didn't have a plan.
Speaker: They didn't do this on purpose.
Speaker: But for human beings, to deliberately plan to do what the OO bird did is basically inexcusable.
Speaker: It's not a solution.
Speaker: And that's why this thing is not just about having children, but about having grandchildren.
Speaker: It's about creating circumstances in which your culture can iterate, can repeat itself without whatever idiosyncrasies of talent or luck that
Speaker: you may have that allow you to find a mate.
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.
Speaker: And as our kids get older, we start to meditate on that.
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
Speaker: that that superiority will be passed down to my children.
Speaker: And therefore, because I reproduced, our line is fated to survive.
Speaker: That's not obvious to me.
Speaker: It's not obvious to me that I didn't just get lucky.
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.
Speaker: to have the love of a woman, to have children.
Speaker: So yeah, this is not about cancel culture, and it's not about ducking out into the woods.
Speaker: This is about building 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.
Speaker: But that does involve exit, and I'll explain what I mean by that.
Speaker: There's a concept in political economy that
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.
Speaker: One is voice and the other is exit.
Speaker: Now, the power of voice is what you grow up hearing about with respect to citizens being involved in politics.
Speaker: That's writing your congressman.
Speaker: That's voting.
Speaker: That's protesting.
Speaker: In a business context, that can be talking to your boss, talking to HR.
Speaker: as a customer that's submitting a customer complaint, proposing a new idea.
Speaker: And basically where voice is effective, everyone would prefer voice because voice is constructive.
Speaker: Voice is high resolution.
Speaker: You learn a lot.
Speaker: You can learn a lot from feedback if you want to.
Speaker: And all the institution can learn from exit is that people aren't happy.
Speaker: So when you start losing customers or employees or when people start lashing together rafts out of tires to escape Cuba, you may have some theories about what is causing that, about what problem is generating that discontent.
Speaker: But they're really just theories.
Speaker: Basically, exit is an indication that the mechanisms of voice have failed.
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.
Speaker: So there's a sense in which that's pessimistic, right?
Speaker: It means that there's been a failure.
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.
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.
Speaker: But the optimism of exit is that
Speaker: There are still all kinds of actions you can take to affect change.
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.
Speaker: Probably the most straightforward way to articulate that is the labor strike.
Speaker: Now, when factory employees are preparing to strike, they are gathering financial resources.
Speaker: They are coordinating together in one sense to prepare to quit their jobs, right?
Speaker: They have to prepare not only for a temporary loss of income, but they have to prepare for the risk of
Speaker: that the employer will be able to call their bluff and replace them.
Speaker: So in order to successfully prosecute a labor strike, the union members need three things.
Speaker: They need to be coordinated.
Speaker: It doesn't make a difference if you just quit your job by yourself.
Speaker: One employee is easily replaceable.
Speaker: Number two, they need to be prepared to survive the period of exit.
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.
Speaker: And number three, they need credible and desirable alternatives in the event that the employer does cut them off and replace them.
Speaker: They can't afford to be bluffing.
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.
Speaker: And the fact is, if you're an auto worker, exit is not an alternative to retaking the institutions.
Speaker: to gaining power in those institutions.
Speaker: It's the only means by which you can gain power in those institutions.
Speaker: Being willing and able to exit is a prerequisite.
Speaker: You know, factory work is maybe a little rarefied for my audience.
Speaker: Let's put this in terms that are a little closer to home.
Speaker: The project manager at Amazon
Speaker: He's making a comfortable salary.
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?
Speaker: And that if he were to surrender that job, he'd be abandoning some tactically significant position?
Speaker: The only power that that person derives from that position is his salary.
Speaker: He has absolutely not a prayer of moving the needle on any of the institutional cultural problems that
Speaker: that we would be frustrated with Amazon about.
Speaker: And you saw that with the vaccine mandates.
Speaker: August and September 2021 were consecutive record-breaking months for employee turnover in the United States.
Speaker: And almost immediately thereafter, the corporate vaccine mandate regime collapsed.
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.
Speaker: No, they just said, I'm going to find a job where I don't have to do this.
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.
Speaker: Now, that's not get woke, go broke, right?
Speaker: Obviously, the levers of power are rigged such that it's not as simple as a boycott or even a general strike.
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.
Speaker: They would.
Speaker: The reason that doesn't happen is the lack of those three resources that we described earlier that make a strike possible.
Speaker: There's no coordination, there's no survivable runway, and there are no credible alternatives.
Speaker: Let's say you're an automotive engineer.
Speaker: We have actually a lot of automotive engineers at exit.
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.
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.
Speaker: There is no anti-woke car company.
Speaker: There is no anti-woke tech company.
Speaker: There is no anti-woke
Speaker: defense contractor for sure.
Speaker: The marketplace of ideas is not supplying anti-woke Fortune 500 companies for some reason.
Speaker: So let's talk for a second about how that happened.
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?
Speaker: How did the market, or even if it's an artificial outcome, how does it survive market forces like that?
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: And it seems like there's an arbitrage opportunity there, right?
Speaker: Like, if you were to found...
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.
Speaker: And given how simple and cost neutral or even cost positive changes like that would be, this ideological cartel seems unbreakable.
Speaker: There are no defectors.
Speaker: Nobody's breaking ranks.
Speaker: That should make us stop and think.
Speaker: Why isn't that happening?
Speaker: Well, you can get an idea if you look at this lawsuit that Tesla faced back in 2021.
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.
Speaker: Now, it turns out upon investigation that most of the people saying the N-word were
Speaker: African-American employees of Tesla.
Speaker: And it's not obvious that the person who sued was targeted in particular for racist abuse.
Speaker: He just observed people failing to comply with some ideological rules.
Speaker: And essentially, because Tesla allowed him to observe the violation of these ideological rules, they're being asked to pay him $137 million.
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?
Speaker: Well, you are going to hire a department of people to ensure that nobody in the organization violates those ideological rules ever again.
Speaker: And that is the birth of the modern Human Resources Department.
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.
Speaker: Now, because those crimes are not explicitly written down anywhere, and because the terms of the debate are constantly changing...
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.
Speaker: No, you actually need a priesthood.
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...
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.
Speaker: So human resources, by definition, has to be not only woke, it's their job to
Speaker: to be maximally woke.
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.
Speaker: Now you can see the genius in this.
Speaker: There are no secret police to kick in your door for criticizing this power structure.
Speaker: This power structure has actually succeeded through the torts process
Speaker: in getting every major corporation to hire and vet their own full-time internal intelligence and informant network.
Speaker: So essentially it's a state-sponsored cartel.
Speaker: That's why it doesn't collapse on its own due to just market pressures.
Speaker: But that doesn't mean it's indestructible.
Speaker: It just means that the ceiling to inspire defectors is higher.
Speaker: the required activation energy to initiate that process is higher.
Speaker: But we can imagine how that would look.
Speaker: And it's in some ways the same process in reverse.
Speaker: Instead of getting the corporations to perform the ideological enforcement on behalf of the security state,
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.
Speaker: It is actually still the case that these are profit-seeking corporations.
Speaker: Those profit incentives are not being ignored, they're being manipulated.
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.
Speaker: What they are doing is seeking profit according to the new calculus imposed by the regulation.
Speaker: And what's beautiful about these faceless, soulless corporate egregores is
Speaker: is that they are incapable of actual solidarity.
Speaker: There is no morale.
Speaker: There is no human entity to say, no, we're going to hold the line.
Speaker: We're going to be brave.
Speaker: We're going to stand up to this.
Speaker: That weakness in these institutions can be exploited by us just as it can by our enemies.
Speaker: But conversely, that means there is no human being to talk to.
Speaker: There is no adult in charge to whom you can submit your argument.
Speaker: The Russians are dealing with that in Ukraine right now.
Speaker: There is no sovereign human being with whom to negotiate over NATO expansion.
Speaker: This is something that's being executed by these decentralized incentive gradients that
Speaker: of just various fiefdoms in the security state instinctively expanding and consuming.
Speaker: In other words, voice is out of the question, hence exit.
Speaker: And I know I've already said this, but I just want to emphasize it.
Speaker: It is exactly not about hiding out and eating roots and berries in the woods.
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.
Speaker: Exit is not the end, exit is the means.
Speaker: You may strike because you hate your job, but you don't strike in order to quit your job.
Speaker: You strike in order to force a negotiation such that you can do your job under better terms.
Speaker: And this is pre-modern, by the way.
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
Speaker: different terms than existed before the rebellion.
Speaker: Now, whether those are favorable or unfavorable terms depends on how successful the rebellion is.
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.
Speaker: the metaphor that I like to use is Sherwood Forest.
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
Speaker: The authorities at every opportunity.
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.
Speaker: So it's like, you know, yes, best case, we take back our country in total from our enemies.
Speaker: But we could also renegotiate the terms by which we're ruled by these people.
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.
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.
Speaker: So you don't have to settle in your mind which of those is attainable.
Speaker: All right, so enough about why.
Speaker: Let's talk about how.
Speaker: How can we create a critical mass of
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.
Speaker: Now, obviously, what it takes to get there depends on to what extent you're actually planning to defy the security state, right?
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.
Speaker: Even then, it depends.
Speaker: What kind of things would you like to say on Twitter?
Speaker: And that too feeds into the organization question, right?
Speaker: Because I don't actually have a lot in common with a guy who feels tyrannized by like child pornography laws.
Speaker: So it can't be that we're just organizing around free speech absolutism or against cancel culture.
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.
Speaker: So that's why this thing is so much bigger than cancel culture.
Speaker: It's ultimately about do we get to have grandkids?
Speaker: That task bounds the question of exactly how much and what kind of sovereignty are we fighting for?
Speaker: You can't organize without that.
Speaker: That's the shape of the space that we need to carve out.
Speaker: So what's inside that space that we need to create?
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.
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.
Speaker: That's the thing that you can't provide for your kid as a parent.
Speaker: You can't provide them with their future husband or wife, except in the sense that you can expose them to wholesome people.
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.
Speaker: It's also about building a lifestyle that's exemplary for our children.
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.
Speaker: And maybe related to that is the funding of culture production and supporting dissident thinkers.
Speaker: If these conversations can happen, if these cultural...
Speaker: artifacts can be created.
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.
Speaker: It's not all about this repellent coercive force.
Speaker: There's also this compulsive force that we want.
Speaker: the ability to attract and compel and ultimately to move people.
Speaker: So that's why EXIT is a fraternal organization.
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.
Speaker: That's also one reason why this is not a product or a service.
Speaker: It's a fraternity that's hand chosen one by one.
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.
Speaker: The purpose of that is to determine, first of all, that you're oriented toward the same problems that we are.
Speaker: There's not an ideological stress test here.
Speaker: Anyone who's oriented toward these fundamental goals, trying to attack the same problems we are.
Speaker: And probably the biggest thing that I look for in that call is a desire to contribute.
Speaker: I don't know what I did right in the beginning, but we attracted just an incredibly...
Speaker: dedicated group of guys, dedicated to each other.
Speaker: I watch them just go to bat for each other every day.
Speaker: And so it's really important to me that that culture not be betrayed.
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.
Speaker: I really think that's a big driver of who comes into this.
Speaker: So ultimately the goal is just to get these guys in a room
Speaker: get them talking to each other, get them aware of each other's projects and working together.
Speaker: And right now, the way we attack that is through some topical calls.
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.
Speaker: And it's oriented around accountability so that you are there to set quantifiable, concrete goals that
Speaker: that move the ball in that area of your life.
Speaker: So why those topics in particular?
Speaker: Well, basically, these are all dimensions of life that make us more independent, make us more sovereign.
Speaker: And I know there's this big debate about, you know, how dumb it is to send right-wing guys into the trades.
Speaker: But if you've ever met an entrepreneur who runs a trade business,
Speaker: It's incredible the extent to which they run their mouths about politics in public.
Speaker: And it's fine for them because there really is not this strong public appetite to punish thought crime.
Speaker: That's completely made up.
Speaker: It's not real.
Speaker: Nobody cares what their landscaper or their plumber or their electrician thinks about Donald Trump.
Speaker: And the same is basically true of CPAs and digital marketers.
Speaker: It's not a function of being in the trades.
Speaker: It's a function of making your own money.
Speaker: So the purpose of the entrepreneurship call is to move guys in that direction.
Speaker: That can mean helping them develop a business model for a startup.
Speaker: It can also mean helping them negotiate a contract arrangement at work if they're a W-2.
Speaker: It can mean just negotiating for some more work from home time so they have a little more sovereignty over their day.
Speaker: It can mean developing side hustles.
Speaker: Basically finding ways to decouple your economic security from the goodwill of a corporate employer.
Speaker: The tech call is very similar.
Speaker: It's just focused on a particular skill set.
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.
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.
Speaker: Basically, it was just the pill.
Speaker: The pill changed everything.
Speaker: And I think we're experiencing a similar moment today with remote work.
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.
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.
Speaker: And so basically...
Speaker: If you have the chops, you should learn to code at least a little bit.
Speaker: Programming is not where I belong.
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.
Speaker: The preparedness call is similar.
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.
Speaker: And the logic underlying that accusation is that if you're hungry...
Speaker: If you're poor, you're easier to control.
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.
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.
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?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: These power struggles are always questions of will.
Speaker: They're stronger than you.
Speaker: Can they come for you?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But you can make it more expensive.
Speaker: You can make it more of a pain in the ass.
Speaker: If your money's in the bank, they can shut down the bank.
Speaker: If your money's in crypto, they got to come pull your teeth out to get it.
Speaker: And that looks bad.
Speaker: And they got to make up a story why you deserve it.
Speaker: And Alex Jones is going to talk about it and all that.
Speaker: So really, the more prepared you are,
Speaker: the more obnoxious you can get away with being to them.
Speaker: And the type of obnoxious that we're interested in being is, let's say, harder to justify an FBI raid.
Speaker: We're also interested in preparedness because, in large part, exit is taking a short position in the present economic and political system.
Speaker: If you're with us, you recognize that the present course we're on is unsustainable.
Speaker: And something's going to give.
Speaker: And it's not obvious that there will be an orderly, peaceful transition to whatever comes next.
Speaker: So some investment in preparedness is a moral imperative.
Speaker: Because the more materially prepared you are, the more moral optionality you will have
Speaker: when things get desperate.
Speaker: The fitness call too is important for that reason.
Speaker: You'll hear some smart preppers say the most important thing in your bug out bag is your gym membership.
Speaker: Life could get physically demanding within your lifetime.
Speaker: And even if it doesn't, being physically fit is gonna help our boys find and keep women,
Speaker: It's going to help them be aspirational to their own sons.
Speaker: It's going to help them from an endocrine perspective to have children.
Speaker: And just in general, rule number one is be handsome.
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.
Speaker: So every week we get together, we talk about our fitness regimen, how we're keeping to our commitments, how we're improving.
Speaker: We're taking responsibility when we backslide.
Speaker: But the fun part is we do feats of strength.
Speaker: So the guys do handstand pushups or wall sits while they do their update.
Speaker: And the boys really get to know who's capable.
Speaker: They try to test themselves against the strongest guys in the group.
Speaker: There's a spiritual dimension to connecting with your physical limitations, pushing them outward.
Speaker: And content creation is similar.
Speaker: There are discussions that need to happen.
Speaker: There's art that needs to be made.
Speaker: And really, there's never been a better time to be a creative dissident.
Speaker: The competition that you're up against is YA novels and rings of power and just increasingly gay or Marvel movies.
Speaker: There are areas in which our enemies are still extremely strong, but they're absolutely spent in the cultural arena.
Speaker: They have nothing to offer and they know it and everybody else knows it.
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...
Speaker: where the ideas are.
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.
Speaker: And so I want to expand that sphere.
Speaker: I want to create an environment where guys with talent and with good things to say can be discovered.
Speaker: And guys who want to make a pile of money and patronize great art can do that.
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.
Speaker: So that's the stuff that we're doing.
Speaker: What impact is it having?
Speaker: Well, the projects that the guys are working on are diverse enough that it's hard to like settle on KPIs.
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.
Speaker: I don't really know how else to quantify it.
Speaker: But by that standard, we're on track.
Speaker: So a couple stories.
Speaker: We had a math professor who joined up after being doxxed and fired.
Speaker: And basically, academia was inaccessible to him at that point.
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.
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.
Speaker: It's not Python.
Speaker: That's not exciting to him.
Speaker: Let's try machine learning.
Speaker: We don't like that.
Speaker: He eventually settled on Erbit.
Speaker: And to be clear, he taught himself.
Speaker: This was his achievement.
Speaker: But the group was there to answer questions, to hold him accountable, to redirect.
Speaker: A huge part of what can happen on these calls is
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.
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.
Speaker: It's not just, oh, I'm a piece of shit, I'm lazy, I'm undisciplined, whatever.
Speaker: I don't really believe in that.
Speaker: I think these guys are smart.
Speaker: And so if they don't hit their markers, there's a reason.
Speaker: And so part of the conversation is, why is that not the thing?
Speaker: And with this guy, we worked through a couple things that weren't the thing.
Speaker: And anyway, long story short, he's making three times what he was making as a math professor.
Speaker: We had another guy who was set to be fired from his web developer job over the VAX mandate.
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.
Speaker: It's really easy to do.
Speaker: You can make a lot of money.
Speaker: You can make more money than you're currently making.
Speaker: And that was really all he needed.
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.
Speaker: And this guy actually...
Speaker: dipped back into corporate employment on a contract basis.
Speaker: So he had one major contract customer
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.
Speaker: So again, it's not necessarily about one particular path or approach that you have to take.
Speaker: It's just about whatever makes you more independent.
Speaker: We had another guy who had already started his own SEO firm and was struggling with the top of his sales funnel.
Speaker: He was actually looking at going back to a W-2.
Speaker: And so we sat him down with some of our sales and marketing guys and
Speaker: And he didn't have to go back to the wage cage.
Speaker: He's on track to double his revenue this year.
Speaker: And actually, he's now become one of our strongest internal employers.
Speaker: He's got this constant appetite for copywriting help.
Speaker: So we send guys to him that are trying to learn that game.
Speaker: So you can see how the network becomes self-nourishing.
Speaker: As these guys succeed, they become resources that can help the other guys succeed.
Speaker: A couple of guys have put together teams to start businesses internally.
Speaker: One of the guys raised $125,000 for a film project.
Speaker: And then, you know, some of the guys are just getting the courage to set up a chicken coop.
Speaker: There's a couple of the guys in the fitness call who've gotten into really good shape.
Speaker: And it's not like there's any secret magic protocol to the way that we do things.
Speaker: It's a very stealable business model.
Speaker: It's just getting guys together to encourage and advise each other.
Speaker: What we have that's not stealable is the caliber of guy that we've found.
Speaker: and the sense of purpose that they have around helping each other.
Speaker: And while the system isn't magic, it works.
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.
Speaker: One of the guys was a lawyer.
Speaker: And I felt, man, I wish that I had a law job just lined up that I could hand this guy.
Speaker: And other people who reached out to me, they were like, oh man, I really wish I knew what to do for you.
Speaker: I really wish I knew how to help you and get your family squared away.
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.
Speaker: But when you get a group of 100, 150, 200 people in a room together, those probabilities flip.
Speaker: And the odds that somebody in that room can help you or they know somebody that can help you, it's almost guaranteed.
Speaker: So the goodwill and the resources are there.
Speaker: It's just a question of making these guys visible to each other.
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.
Speaker: You have to make progress.
Speaker: We had a weight loss competition back in the spring and it was really interesting.
Speaker: There was a guy who was the most steady in reporting what he did.
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
Speaker: I suck.
Speaker: But at the end of the competition, that was the guy who lost all the weight.
Speaker: Just because what gets measured gets done.
Speaker: So one more story.
Speaker: A guy came in with an idea for a boys school.
Speaker: And just to be honest, lots of guys in our circles are thinking about this with varying degrees of seriousness.
Speaker: And I was sort of ready to be like,
Speaker: you know, okay, we'll work on it.
Speaker: We'll see how it goes.
Speaker: This guy is just a machine.
Speaker: He reports in every single week on the progress that he's making.
Speaker: And he's making connections at these homeschooling conferences.
Speaker: He's building a local board of directors.
Speaker: He's compiling the curriculum.
Speaker: He's got the website built.
Speaker: He just kept achieving the
Speaker: over and over and over again on each call.
Speaker: And he's going to be ready to take on his first class in the beginning of 2023.
Speaker: So all of these stories are about these guys' individual lives and individual projects.
Speaker: In the long run, we want to start building things together.
Speaker: The purpose of getting squared away personally and individually is to free us up to become leaders and patrons and culture creators.
Speaker: Which leads me to what's next.
Speaker: We have a couple things in the pipe, one of which is the beginnings of private equity.
Speaker: We have lots of well-capitalized guys in the group.
Speaker: One of our members, just on the basis of personal networking, raised $125,000 for a film project within the group.
Speaker: And that got us thinking, you know, there's lots of good ideas here and there's lots of capital.
Speaker: So we've started some regular investor calls to develop some of these ideas,
Speaker: to the point that our guys could raise money either internally or externally.
Speaker: We're also developing some media competitions similar to Passage Prize.
Speaker: Some of you guys have heard of that.
Speaker: Because I'll hang out in these group chats and I'll hear these guys bat around just incredible ideas.
Speaker: And I remember how much Passage Prize meant to me to just give me a concrete incentive and a deadline to write something.
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.
Speaker: It didn't win anything, but I'm really glad that that happened.
Speaker: And so if we can leverage some of our resources to make that happen for some more people, that'd be really exciting.
Speaker: In the medium term, we're also looking at legal defense and cancellation insurance.
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.
Speaker: Because in fact, a lot of what the regime is doing with respect to employment law is
Speaker: on the books illegal.
Speaker: And obviously there are unfriendly jurisdictions where you wouldn't want to challenge that, but there are some where you could.
Speaker: And the judiciary...
Speaker: is probably the closest thing that we have to neutral to friendly ideological terrain within the institutions.
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.
Speaker: Obviously there's network effects involved there.
Speaker: and it's a complicated problem to solve, but it's something that we think needs to be tackled.
Speaker: And in the long run model, maybe five years out, is physical connection.
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.
Speaker: They have great families.
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.
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...
Speaker: It's personal and urgent to me that we make this happen, as I know it is for many of you.
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.
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.
Speaker: And he talks about how one possible application of a decentralized network union might be anti-cancellation.
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.
Speaker: I'm sure I had read some guys who had read biology.
Speaker: But it just seems really clear to me that this is a concept that somebody is going to have to execute.
Speaker: I had a guy reach out to me and say, watch out for the first mover curse.
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.
Speaker: And my attitude on that is...
Speaker: This just needs to happen.
Speaker: And if somebody does it better, I'll join their thing.
Speaker: But it needs to happen.
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.
Speaker: Distributed, voluntarist polities, where geography no longer determines jurisdiction.
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.
Speaker: And there's two things you can do about that.
Speaker: One of them is you can try to reconnect with your neighborhood.
Speaker: You can try to reconnect with your local congregation at church.
Speaker: And I think you should.
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.
Speaker: You should look for those people and you should cultivate those communities locally if you can.
Speaker: But in addition...
Speaker: Again, there's a technological change happening.
Speaker: People are getting more mobile, not less mobile.
Speaker: People are getting more connected, not less connected.
Speaker: You will not be able to hide out in your Utah suburb.
Speaker: Netflix and Drag Queen Story Hour...
Speaker: And Child Protective Services, frankly, is coming to your Utah suburb.
Speaker: I'm reading a great book right now called Out of the Mountains by David Kilcullen.
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
Speaker: and harder to hide in.
Speaker: It is actually easier to hide in a crowded, squalid third world city than in the mountains of Afghanistan now.
Speaker: And I mentioned that as a metaphor, not to say go live in Bangladesh instead of West Virginia.
Speaker: but to say the old ways of making yourself illegible, the old ways of building community and defending its boundaries are becoming unworkable.
Speaker: And so instead of insisting on the forms that we're accustomed to, we need to be thinking about the function.
Speaker: We need to be thinking about the timeless principles that
Speaker: that can be applied within a new technological environment.
Speaker: And so, yes, I think you do have a moral responsibility to try to connect with your local community.
Speaker: But also look around at your local community.
Speaker: How many of those people have lived there for 10 years?
Speaker: How many of those people do you expect to live there for another 10?
Speaker: The pace of ideological sorting is accelerating.
Speaker: People are moving to be closer to like-minded people.
Speaker: That's just going to happen.
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.
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.
Speaker: We're tactically agnostic.
Speaker: We'll try whatever works.
Speaker: The format, I'm sure, will change over time.
Speaker: But I hope that articulates the vision, what we're trying to accomplish.
Speaker: If you want to learn more, you can DM me at extradeadjcb or at exit underscore org.
Speaker: We also have a newsletter, exitgroup.substack.com.
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.
Speaker: Or you can sign up at exitgroup.us and schedule a call with me.
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.
Speaker: So hit me up.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
