Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: This week on our member call, we had a Q&A with Charles Haywood about how he built his shampoo empire.
Speaker: And he was very gracious, spent 90 minutes just going over anything the guys wanted to ask about how you build that, what he learned, how he would do it differently now, etc.
Speaker: And one thing that kept popping up was this notion of an entrepreneurial temperament.
Speaker: That there's a certain type of person who does entrepreneurship and a certain type of person who does not.
Speaker: And it has something to do with confidence and initiative and decisiveness and risk appetite.
Speaker: And Haywood seems to believe in that really strongly.
Speaker: You either have it or you don't.
Speaker: Will you or won't you?
Speaker: And for some of us, that's a very healthy, bracing, energizing message.
Speaker: Like coffee's for closers.
Speaker: There's maybe even an analogy to be drawn to the Puritan work ethic.
Speaker: Like you're either elect or you're not.
Speaker: And the exoteric message is there's nothing you can do about that.
Speaker: But the esoteric message is prove it.
Speaker: Prove that you're elect.
Speaker: And if somebody's successful, somebody who's made it, tells you you don't have it in you, you're not the type, there does seem to be a certain type of person who goes, well, maybe I don't have what it takes.
Speaker: Maybe he's right.
Speaker: And there's another type of guy who goes, screw that guy, I'll show him.
Speaker: Now what's interesting about this to me is that for the first 30 years of my life, I was demonstrably, verifiably the first type of guy.
Speaker: There was this time in business school when I was talking to a Navy SEAL.
Speaker: And that's an interesting experience if you've never had it.
Speaker: These guys tend to be very normal height, normal build.
Speaker: Some of them are really smart.
Speaker: Some of them are kind of dumb.
Speaker: But what distinguishes all of them that I've met is they have these like
Speaker: Weirdly empty eyes like a shark's eyes.
Speaker: Anyway, I'm having a conversation with this guy that I'm sure he's had a bazillion times before where I'm like, oh man, you know, my grandpa served a bunch of my uncles and, you know, I don't really wish I had done it, but at the same time, I regret not doing it, if that makes sense.
Speaker: So I'm telling him this story.
Speaker: I was in high school in the early days of the Iraq war and being from a fairly conservative family with a lot of vets in a fairly conservative state, we were all pretty much bought in on the 9-11 narrative and I wanted to go sign up after graduation.
Speaker: And one of my teachers heard this, this lady, and she says, oh, Kevin, you're a lover, not a fighter.
Speaker: And I basically said, oh, okay, I guess so.
Speaker: And that was the end of it.
Speaker: I basically never really thought about it again.
Speaker: And so this Navy SEAL looks at me with these like scary dead eyes and he goes, yeah, I never would have let anybody tell me who I was like that.
Speaker: And he didn't say it like it was a flex.
Speaker: He didn't say it like he wanted to hurt my feelings or didn't want to hurt my feelings.
Speaker: He just said it.
Speaker: And it got me thinking about why I was there in that MBA class in the first place.
Speaker: Well, I was there because I had done everything up to that point to optimize for safety.
Speaker: I studied economics because it was easy and it was minimally interesting enough that I thought I could survive it and pass my classes.
Speaker: And then I figured I would get the degree and...
Speaker: Get a job, some job, somewhere.
Speaker: And maybe I'm creating a bit of an unfair impression of myself.
Speaker: I liked economics because I would read these stories of industrialists and capitalists and merchants who found new markets.
Speaker: They found new ways of building things, new ways of marketing things.
Speaker: And I was fascinated by that, but it didn't seem accessible to me in any meaningful way.
Speaker: It felt like something that was for somebody else.
Speaker: Somebody more practical, somebody more responsible, somebody more...
Speaker: dynamic or the kind of person who wakes up at 530 in the morning and knows exactly what they're going to do with the day.
Speaker: And that was never me, not even close.
Speaker: And I hear exactly the same kind of talk out of my guys who are in these W-2s.
Speaker: It's like you think of entrepreneurship as either the kind of thing that happens to somebody else or it's like lightning.
Speaker: Like one day God will just blast you with the idea and
Speaker: And then of course you'll find the dynamism and the energy and the responsibility and the initiative because you'll be so passionate.
Speaker: And that's not totally wrong.
Speaker: I definitely figured out how to work hard and show up to things and stick to a calendar once I was doing something that I gave a damn about.
Speaker: But like my big five trait conscientiousness has not changed.
Speaker: I'm still absent-minded.
Speaker: I still have a tendency to rabbit hole and get lost chasing my curiosity.
Speaker: I still struggle to organize and prioritize and communicate.
Speaker: But what I've learned that I didn't expect is that those things can be delegated, they can be automated.
Speaker: And if you're put in a situation with enough pain and enough risk, you will figure it out.
Speaker: And so when I hear both the entrepreneur guys and the non-entrepreneur guys say,
Speaker: well, it's just a certain type of person and you have it or you don't.
Speaker: I just, I don't know how to square that with my experience.
Speaker: It feels to me like the only difference between me and any other discouraged, demoralized, wagey is that somebody pushed me out of the plane.
Speaker: And like, did something come to me?
Speaker: Yeah, but when you look at the early iterations of the idea, it wasn't right.
Speaker: We're not doing really any of the things that we were doing then or that we envisioned doing.
Speaker: And did my passion for the subject make it easier to be conscientious and diligent and hardworking?
Speaker: Kind of.
Speaker: More so than before.
Speaker: But what really happened is I got interested in the fact that I sucked at those things.
Speaker: Like when I was a finance drone and I was zoning out during meetings and sleeping through my alarms and forgetting little things I was supposed to do and getting in trouble all the time, there wasn't any mystery there.
Speaker: Like, yeah, I'm not performing well at this job because I hate this job.
Speaker: I don't want to be good at it.
Speaker: I don't even want to be the kind of person who's good at a job like this.
Speaker: And what changed when I started a business was not that all those problems went away.
Speaker: It's that I was engaged in something that directly ramified to whether or not my kids got to eat and whether I lost my house.
Speaker: and something that I actually believed in in principle and thought could be meaningful to the big picture, but I was still losing track of important things and I was still failing to perform and I was still letting people down.
Speaker: And so the question became interesting to me, not just in this practical, you know, you'd better get interested in this question so you can buy groceries kind of a sense, but actually interesting in the abstract.
Speaker: Like, it isn't the case now, and it certainly hasn't been the case historically, that all entrepreneurs are these, like, efficient, conscientious, type-A STEM robots.
Speaker: Like the edge cases, maybe, but not most of them.
Speaker: Like, I knew guys who owned very lucrative businesses.
Speaker: who I knew for sure did not have access to some secret reserve of cognitive resources that I didn't have.
Speaker: And they weren't more passionate about B2B SaaS or hair salons or bounce houses than I was about my thing.
Speaker: And the way I was thinking about it just changed.
Speaker: I stopped being like, you know, am I this type of guy or that type of guy?
Speaker: And I started saying, how's he doing that?
Speaker: What's the trick?
Speaker: Because he's not a wizard.
Speaker: It's not supernatural.
Speaker: There's not a certain type of guy who can pull a quarter from behind your ear.
Speaker: It's a skill that somebody taught him that he practiced.
Speaker: Now, is there a certain type of guy who is willing to put in the work to learn how to pull the quarter from behind your ear?
Speaker: Yeah, maybe.
Speaker: But if we as a class, as a tribe, were expelled from the productive economy and we all had to go become magicians or starve, all of a sudden, a lot of us would find out that we had what it took to pull quarters out from behind people's ears.
Speaker: And so is there an entrepreneurial temperament?
Speaker: I would say yes, in the sense that during safe times when there are comfortable, reliable, lucrative, abundant wage jobs for the taking, there will be a lot of people, empirically a majority of people, who find that the independence and upside potential of entrepreneurship is not worth the struggle and the volatility and the long nights.
Speaker: And there will be a handful of people for whom the lure of the independence and the upside is so great that they're going to sink or swim as entrepreneurs regardless of what the conditions are like.
Speaker: And conversely, you can look through history, at least 20th century history, and find examples of people, whole classes of people who are so conformist and so passive and so risk averse that even in like the post-Soviet collapse when they haven't been paid for six months, they're still sitting at the desk.
Speaker: Waiting patiently.
Speaker: But I don't think I'm either type of guy, and probably neither are you.
Speaker: For people like you and me, the relevant question is not what type of guy am I, but what type of world am I living in?
Speaker: And with that in mind, and at the risk of stating the obvious, you're not living in the world you grew up in.
Speaker: The institutions that offered your parents and grandparents security and comfort
Speaker: in exchange for conformity are offering less and less security and demanding more and more conformity.
Speaker: And increasingly, even if you were willing to accept that trade-off, they're just not looking for someone like you.
Speaker: They don't want you.
Speaker: They're looking for a reason to expel you.
Speaker: And even if you were willing to take that shit deal, and even if they were willing to offer it to you, their capacity to offer it to you is evaporating.
Speaker: Because as these institutions select against competence, they're collapsing.
Speaker: And so at this point to say, oh, I'm just built to be a cog in a machine, I'm built to be a wagee, is like saying, oh, that lifeboat looks really cold and damp.
Speaker: I'm more of a Titanic type of a guy.
Speaker: Which brings me to where I'm really going with all this, which is you have one year.
Speaker: We've been sending the libs some scary pictures of Trump with laser eyes to remind them that we're going to win.
Speaker: But a Trump victory, even a maximally orderly, uncontested, uncontroversial Trump victory, is not going to change the fact that we're all in for a rough ride in 2025.
Speaker: And maybe 2024.
Speaker: You have at most one year.
Speaker: and you will hear rumors of tech billionaires building compounds in new zealand or beefing up their private security to the point that it's essentially a mercenary company or like biology making this very public relocation to singapore but with the rest of us most of what you see is a kind of resignation a kind of cynicism at its healthiest maybe a kind of gallows humor but ordinary people are not acting as if they believe the world was about to explode
Speaker: even though most of us have actually done the math, and we've also seen smarter people than us do the math, and conclude that it is about to explode.
Speaker: And often when we see everybody doing something that doesn't make a ton of sense, the temptation is to go, well, people are just stupid, or lazy, or short-sighted, or addictive.
Speaker: But the guys that I'm seeing adopt this frame of resignation are not stupid.
Speaker: And they're not being lazy or careless.
Speaker: They're actually thinking about this question all the time.
Speaker: They're being eaten alive by this anxiety for their kids or for their country.
Speaker: They have all the makings of the traditional prepper orientation where you would build bunkers or compounds and fill up barrels of rice and beans and ammunition.
Speaker: But I think we've all realized as we're observing the course of technology and politics that the traditional Cold War boomer model of preparedness looks a little naive these days.
Speaker: I have these great conversations with some of the old folks from church.
Speaker: And the church, you know, we're notorious for preparedness in the sense of canning your own food and buying guns and ammo and having a safe with some gold bars in it.
Speaker: And I love talking to these old timers because they're incredibly knowledgeable about all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: Everything to do with growing potatoes, milking cow, keeping the mold out of your wheat storage, just everything you would need to know if you had to like hunker down in one place and start subsistence farming.
Speaker: And for a long time it was just assumed that that's what we'd all need to do and be ready to do when the balloon goes up.
Speaker: That's who's going to make it.
Speaker: Now interestingly, that's not the church's orientation toward preparedness, which is usually just telling people to stay ready for natural disasters or periods of unemployment.
Speaker: There's a lot of value in being able to take care of yourself and your family in a crisis so that you can take care of other people, or at least so that you're not adding to the pressure on supply chains in an emergency.
Speaker: Or in the minimal case, if you lose your job, having some basic runway can set you up so that you're not desperate and you can be careful about your next move.
Speaker: But those kinds of problems are local and temporary.
Speaker: Your employment situation is going to resolve itself.
Speaker: The insurance company will cover your flooded house.
Speaker: Eventually life will go back to normal.
Speaker: So preparedness on that level is basically a solved problem.
Speaker: If you're just talking about your own life going haywire and not the country or the world, then you just buy a couple of tubs of rice and beans, you buy your hygiene supplies in bulk, you eat the stale granola bars in your go bag every year or so, and you buy new ones, and that pretty much covers it.
Speaker: It's not terribly complicated or expensive for a middle-class family to do that.
Speaker: The only reason you'd need to learn to produce your own food is if what's coming is not just your problem or even a regional problem, but you expect things to get a lot harder for everyone, everywhere in the country, for a long time.
Speaker: And if you live in America and you expect that you need to grow your own food, that means things have gotten way, way worse everywhere else in the world, or at least a lot more chaotic.
Speaker: And the only things that are big enough to do that at this point are political problems.
Speaker: Long-term economic depression, civil war, revolution, invasion, which if there's a war bad enough to get Americans growing potatoes in their backyard, that basically means nuclear exchange.
Speaker: And I've just been thinking, if any of these situations gets bad enough, that the most efficient way for me personally to get my hands on a potato is to grow it myself in my backyard.
Speaker: then what is everybody else doing?
Speaker: What would have to be true about the state of the world?
Speaker: Maybe it means that everything else I could do to earn a living has become so useless that it's less work to grow a potato than to work a job and buy one.
Speaker: In other words, the economy has so radically simplified that everything else I know how to do is now useless.
Speaker: Maybe I'm still making money, but it's a logistical problem.
Speaker: The combines in Idaho have run out of gas, the roads aren't safe, so you can't find a potato in my town at any price.
Speaker: Or maybe I don't have the Davos pentagram burned into my hand that says I'm allowed to buy potatoes.
Speaker: And those situations are possible, but maybe you can see the problem with this.
Speaker: Pretty much every other economic behavior on Earth is more efficient than farming by hand.
Speaker: So we're not just talking about a world where I have to give up being professionally online.
Speaker: We're talking about a world where there's literally nothing else.
Speaker: The absolute best move for me is the only remaining move, which is to try to farm potatoes.
Speaker: But if things have gotten that desperate for me, it either means that the political and economic situation has either become incredibly chaotic in general, or incredibly hostile to me in particular.
Speaker: And either way, that means me and my potatoes are unlikely to be left alone.
Speaker: A situation where I'm farming potatoes is a situation where there's tens of millions of people starving in the richest country in the world.
Speaker: So I've not only got to become a capable potato farmer, I've got to either buy off or fight off whatever organized violence is going on in my area.
Speaker: So now we've got to think about what would have to be true for me as a potato farmer to also have the capacity to provide a credible deterrent to whoever the strongest bad actor is in my town.
Speaker: And that's basically the ultimate boomer-doomer-prepper fantasy, right?
Speaker: Defending the homestead.
Speaker: But we talked about this a little bit in the Taliban podcast.
Speaker: As long as there's drones and GPS satellites and networked communications infrastructure, there's just no way to imagine that scenario being plausible.
Speaker: If the scale of organized violence has collapsed to such a local level that you and your buddies can put up something credible and relevant, like you're so personally mobbed up that you can hold your own against the local gangster, the rogue sheriff, let alone a state or national military, then you're almost certainly mobbed up enough that somebody else is growing the potatoes.
Speaker: Maybe you don't like this thought experiment.
Speaker: It's oversimplified, fair enough.
Speaker: And there are maybe some situations in which knowing how to grow things would be useful as part of a more holistic plan.
Speaker: And I'll get into some historic cases where that kind of know-how has mattered.
Speaker: But I've been looking into the kinds of scenarios that preppers refer to when they're trying to give you evidence for how bad things can get.
Speaker: What actually happens when things break down?
Speaker: Who makes it through and who doesn't?
Speaker: Who actually gains from the chaos and becomes more powerful when the new equilibrium arrives?
Speaker: People talk about the Great Depression, hyperinflation in Argentina or Germany.
Speaker: Sometimes you get economic collapse after a civil war like the fall of the Soviet Union.
Speaker: or the rise of the Soviet Union with the liquidation of the kulaks.
Speaker: In Nazi Germany, you had the reverse, where economic failures triggered political violence.
Speaker: Closer to the present, you could point to the Rhodesian Bush War, the war in the Balkans, the anarcho-tyranny in South Africa.
Speaker: In none of these situations did the state collapse and return homesteaders to a state of primeval sovereignty and self-sufficiency.
Speaker: In fact, having so much of their wealth bound up in a particular geography seems to have made them more vulnerable.
Speaker: If moving to a more peaceful area or even just to a more defensible location requires you to abandon all the capital that you've accumulated over a lifetime and start over, naturally you're going to delay doing that for way too long and people end up getting boiled alive in their own bathtubs.
Speaker: I think the boomer-doomer prepper model made more sense in the world these people came up in.
Speaker: Their parents had grown up in the depression, and the big threat that loomed over their whole lives was a war with the Soviet Union.
Speaker: And if you're imagining a major economic collapse or a nuclear war in both of those situations,
Speaker: You're picturing a society that has lost the ability to actively help you, but is simultaneously totally degraded in its ability to hurt you.
Speaker: So in the case of nuclear war, yes, you're imagining a permanent collapse of the supply chain, but also this massive, instantaneous depopulation of every major urban center.
Speaker: So if you live out in the country, you might need to think about small-scale brigandage, but you can also imagine a situation in which there's almost no organized human threats.
Speaker: And if that's what you're imagining, maybe farming potatoes and stockpiling 5-5-6 is the right move.
Speaker: But now, if you had to list the top 10 existential threats that a person might prep for, nuclear war is probably in the back five.
Speaker: Most of the scenarios we're worried about involve no depopulation of the cities, and really no significant degradation of the state's capacity to coerce.
Speaker: It's just become so cheap to monitor and target political enemies that it's almost impossible to imagine states capacity being so degraded that you'd actually be out of harm's way.
Speaker: And it's not even just the targeting of explicit political enemies, it's also just people who have stuff the state might want.
Speaker: The fact that they're now scrutinizing Venmo transactions above $600 is an indicator of how that targeting capacity has grown.
Speaker: And of course, they've had the capacity to gather that kind of data for years.
Speaker: But the bottleneck was analysis.
Speaker: Until recently, if you wanted to catch a tax cheat, you needed a human being to do the pattern recognition.
Speaker: But now automating that is maybe not trivial, but very accessible.
Speaker: And it's not just the federal government.
Speaker: Reaching out and touching people is just easier, cheaper across the board.
Speaker: Which means that for any given collapse scenario that you're imagining, the story you have to tell yourself about how you're going to be left alone requires that collapse to go deeper.
Speaker: And again, this is basically the thesis of David Kilcullen's book, Out of the Mountains.
Speaker: He's making the case that terrorists and militants are going to have to come out of the caves, out of the mountains, out of the distant interior of all these places, and hide out in the cities because it's actually easier to find them when they're the isolated EM signature, the isolated heat signature,
Speaker: the lone mobile home in the middle of nowhere on a satellite image.
Speaker: So instead of running away from the enemy's power centers, they have to snuggle up to the enemy's power centers and hold them hostage.
Speaker: If you live in an isolated cave complex in the middle of nowhere, they can drop a bunker buster on you.
Speaker: But if you live in a high-rise in the capital, they can't.
Speaker: And not to recapitulate that whole argument, but basically the same logic applies to preparedness.
Speaker: If you think things are going to get really bad, either for you or for everybody, then it's just harder and harder to imagine taking security and obscurity.
Speaker: The fact that these surveillance and targeting tools have become so cheap means you're not even thinking about, like, a limited strategic nuclear exchange.
Speaker: It's really got to be no stone left on top of another in order for this bug-out scenario to make sense.
Speaker: And if that's the outcome you're preparing for, you have to accept...
Speaker: that banking all your preparation on a single geographic location marries you to a particular global thermonuclear war scenario in which your post-apocalyptic homestead doesn't require government tractors to come and scrape away four or five feet of irradiated topsoil.
Speaker: And I put this question to the guys recently.
Speaker: In a scenario like that, would you rather have the fully self-sufficient stationary doomsday compound where you might get board wiped depending on which way the fallout blows, or would you rather have maximum mobility, maximum optionality...
Speaker: friends in a lot of places so that you and your family can gather some small fraction of your wealth and get to wherever the pastures are the greenest.
Speaker: And maybe I'm narrowing down too closely there, but I think the problem generalizes.
Speaker: I think a lot of our guys are really paralyzed by this anxiety
Speaker: that maybe it won't be literal nukes, but it's the same kind of phenomenon, something that can just, whatever basket you've got your eggs in, whether it's America or another country or it's dollars or it's Bitcoin or investing in acceleration or investing in catastrophic deceleration, which is basically what the whole homestead prepper thing is, that there's basically no place to put your time, your effort, your attention, your money, that
Speaker: that doesn't have this really scary probability of being totally wrong and just getting wiped.
Speaker: Like all these doomsday scenarios have completely divergent, mutually exclusive paths of optimization.
Speaker: And the odds that we get any one of them is maybe not so great, but the odds that we get none of them and everything's fine, that seems naive to count on that.
Speaker: And what some guys do is they pick their poison.
Speaker: They pick their one thing that they think is going to be the thing, and they prepare against that.
Speaker: And they fight anybody with a different paradigm because partly you're sort of robbing resources from their pet issue, but also just psychologically, the thought that they might be wrong...
Speaker: And preparing in the absolute wrong direction and preparing their friends and their family in the wrong direction is just too terrible to contemplate.
Speaker: And so that got me thinking about all the different ways everything can go to hell, including the possibility that there is no day of reckoning and things just keep getting worse.
Speaker: And I thought, what is the set of actions I could take that would make things better for me and my family and maybe make things better in general, right?
Speaker: across the broadest scope of possible futures.
Speaker: A few months ago there was this thread going around on Twitter from the Passage Prize guys about a concept called de-territorialization, which is a mouthful, but basically it means something like the evaporation of a context, losing your place in the world.
Speaker: Most things, most of the time, live in stasis with their environment.
Speaker: Everything is governed by these negative feedback loops that keep things from changing.
Speaker: The deer have lots of babies, they eat all the leaves off the trees, there's no more leaves to eat, the deer starve, the population crashes back down, and the cycle starts over.
Speaker: And the stability of that system is what makes long-term specific adaptation possible.
Speaker: The fact that your parents and your grandparents and your great-great-great-great-grandparents lived in the same type of environment and faced the same selection pressures means that the selection process that generated you is actually a fit for the environment that you exist in.
Speaker: But then there's a catastrophe, there's an accelerant.
Speaker: Something interrupts that system of negative feedback loops and breaks the equilibrium that you biologically or culturally are adapted to.
Speaker: And then your survival has nothing to do with how well adapted you were to the prior context.
Speaker: The prior context is gone.
Speaker: So the just-so story about the development of human intelligence is that early hominids had these hands that were adapted to gripping and swinging from trees.
Speaker: But eventually global cooling thins out the forests, and so some portion of these monkeys are knocked out of the trees and they have to live on the ground.
Speaker: But they still have these hands, these opposable thumbs.
Speaker: And so the reason they survived, according to this model, is that their old adaptations from their old context just happened to find a place in the new context.
Speaker: Basically in the process of all these monkeys struggling to survive with bodies and brains built for a different context, you get selection for tool use and therefore selection for intelligence.
Speaker: Now what's interesting about that theory is that octopuses are pretty bright and they use tools.
Speaker: But they're very much, like other wildlife, governed by negative feedback loops.
Speaker: They firmly exist within their context.
Speaker: They haven't become the kind of accelerant in themselves that humans have become.
Speaker: And maybe that's because, as solitary predators, they were never meaningfully competing against one another and therefore locked in this intelligence arms race.
Speaker: Every species on Earth has had to confront disruptors and accelerants and either survive or go extinct, and species become invasive and become an accelerant in themselves, but only humans have become this constant accelerant.
Speaker: No system with humans inside it can ever equilibrate.
Speaker: And accelerationism, which gets talked about a lot as if it were just dumerism or just nihilism, like, you know, burn it all down, let's eminentize the eschaton, let's bring it all to an end, pray to the caldera, we can end it now for all time.
Speaker: But really, as I understand it, accelerationism is just the observation that the process of change is accelerating and is going to continue to accelerate.
Speaker: Technological advances accelerate technological advances, which increases the frequency and the magnitude of the disruptions, which in turn makes stable adaptations almost impossible.
Speaker: Biological adaptation was too slow to keep the monkeys alive on the savannah, but cultural and technological adaptation could keep them alive.
Speaker: And not only that, but it was a meta-adaptation.
Speaker: It didn't just improve their survivability in one context, it improved their survivability across all contexts.
Speaker: at the price of turning them into this eternal disruption engine and forcing them into competition with each other.
Speaker: And instead of individual humans competing biologically for survival, it's cultural and technological regimes competing for adoption, which brings us back to that theory of competitive control, where existing regimes are constantly competing with each other and also competing with successor regimes that are waiting in the wings.
Speaker: And specifically what they're competing over is the compliance and the adoption and the identity of all the people in the system.
Speaker: And so instead of an equilibrium created by ecological niches, you have these artificial competing equilibria of cultural and technological regimes.
Speaker: So again, if you think of power structures as providing these bubbles of livable space, an accelerant would be something that pops those bubbles or dramatically shrinks them or makes the world outside much safer or more comfortable so that life inside the bubble is much less attractive.
Speaker: And accelerationism is just saying, look, have you noticed that these bubbles are growing and popping and consuming one another really rapidly, like sort of the pot is being brought to a boil.
Speaker: And these regimes are constantly doing this to each other, so it's like a separate ecosystem layered on top of the biological ecosystem.
Speaker: And for most of human history, the course of acceleration was slow, and these systems could enjoy long periods of equilibrium governed by these negative feedback loops.
Speaker: For centuries, you had more or less the same political model of a warrior elite governing a larger body of people and only being able to scale up through these fractal patterns of individual loyalty and patronage.
Speaker: And those networks can only get so big and so powerful and so abstract before it becomes impossible to know and trust everybody that you would need to help you keep the state together.
Speaker: And so empires grow and expand and then inevitably fragment and shake loose and the process restarts.
Speaker: And maybe you don't think that's a great system or maybe you don't like your place within it, but it is the case that your dad and your grandpa and your great-great-great-grandpa have a really good idea of how to navigate that system.
Speaker: All the tools, all the ideas, all the cultural practices and institutions that they developed have been stress tested for centuries against your exact circumstances, so they definitely work.
Speaker: But once you introduce gunpowder and it's possible for a peasant with a musket to smoke a knight on horseback, all of a sudden the peasantry of Europe is shook loose from the ties that kept them bound to this elite professional warrior class, and that's how you get Napoleon.
Speaker: who was this runaway power system not subject to the constraints of his immediate opponents, and so he just tears through Europe eating everybody's lunch until they figure out how to mobilize the way he did, and that establishes the new equilibrium.
Speaker: But that equilibrium doesn't last very long because industrialization suddenly knocks loose millions of farmers from this settled, static position on the land in the country.
Speaker: and into the cities.
Speaker: And so power shifts, not necessarily from the nobility to the peasants, but from the elites who benefited from having the peasants stable in their old context to the elites who found a way to harness the energy released by having them unstable in the new context.
Speaker: Like, it's not obvious that an industrial proletarian factory worker in New York was individually better off than a Kentucky dirt farmer.
Speaker: The fact that they were useful to, like, the Tammany Hall political machine didn't necessarily ramify to them being any happier, more free, or better off.
Speaker: But they were definitely more powerful in the aggregate, and they made the elites who knew how to harness them much more powerful, which is ultimately why the South lost the Civil War.
Speaker: And this is why acceleration often carries with it the connotation of the black pill, right?
Speaker: It's essentially that not only can you not go back, you can't even stay still.
Speaker: If you tried to fight Napoleon as a neo-feudalist, you'd be a neo-feudalist.
Speaker: A conscious effort to precisely replicate an old paradigm is not the same thing as the paradigm itself, unexamined, undefended, un-fucked.
Speaker: You would have to turn your whole society into a kind of nature preserve in which the new incentives don't obtain, which is this extremely energy-intensive process.
Speaker: So even if the old paradigm hadn't been out-competed fair and square, you definitely can't afford to compete with the new paradigm while you're also maintaining this zoo where the old ways still apply.
Speaker: And you can point to a handful of time capsule societies like the Amish or the Hasids.
Speaker: But both of those groups, for cultural and historical reasons, have the cooperation and the protection of a big, wealthy, modern state to help them maintain their nature preserve, which means they've actually excused themselves from competition.
Speaker: The only other examples you can maybe point to are places like Syria or Afghanistan or North Sentinel Island, places that are so marginal and so remote that they have nothing anybody else wants.
Speaker: And in fact, the moment they did have something a modern state wanted, in Afghanistan's case Osama bin Laden,
Speaker: Their country was devastated by war for 20 years.
Speaker: We've talked at some length about what we might learn from those people, but you certainly wouldn't want to trade places with them, even before the war.
Speaker: And I'd suggest that we even saw the beginning of some trouble in 2020 when it looked like the Amish might become electorally relevant.
Speaker: As soon as Pennsylvania was in question, you saw all these sort of narrative vulnerabilities start to emerge.
Speaker: And nobody in the media really got serious about it, but you could tell it was kind of a shot across the bow.
Speaker: And it's all pretty easy attack vectors.
Speaker: Crimes that go unreported and unpunished, especially domestic violence, sexual abuse.
Speaker: The Amish want to be self-sufficient and keep things in-house, but that's explicitly at odds with most Americans' moral intuitions.
Speaker: It would be really easy for the state to start investigating and insinuating itself into Amish family life specifically, and the mainstream American public would have zero problem with it.
Speaker: So really the survival of the Amish is a function of them remaining totally non-threatening to the existing power structure.
Speaker: The only sense in which that's maybe complicated is in terms of their birth rates, if you're looking at a long enough timeline.
Speaker: But even the most fanciful estimates of their long-term fertility don't put them into even a regionally dominant position until the 22nd century.
Speaker: And again, that assumes that everybody else just lets them do that with no resistance.
Speaker: Like the fact that mice reproduce faster than cats doesn't tell you anything about which of the two is going to inherit the earth.
Speaker: So all this is to say that conservatism and reaction are strictly out-competed by definition.
Speaker: We talk a lot about leftists being at war with reality, but that's exactly what this is.
Speaker: It's a war against the structure of reality.
Speaker: You're literally trying to do the 1950s or the 1850s or the 1650s over again and expecting a different result.
Speaker: Now, most of our guys resist this intuition intensely because they hear that and they think, well, there's no hope.
Speaker: And there's a handful of honest leftists like Arthur Chu who take roughly the same view.
Speaker: I read a couple of my favorite of his tweets.
Speaker: He says, the gene pool will get more mixed up and contaminated.
Speaker: People will get softer and gayer and PC-er.
Speaker: Politics and wokeness will subvert and corrupt everything you love.
Speaker: It's an inevitable result of how the world works.
Speaker: The whole Nietzschean arc of history you people badly misunderstand is it doesn't matter how strong you think you are.
Speaker: The more unique and heroic and special the strong are, the more the weak outnumber them.
Speaker: The last man beats the first man.
Speaker: That's why he's the last man.
Speaker: You're going to continue to perceive your society degenerating into what you see as entropy and chaos and ruin.
Speaker: I don't have to do anything.
Speaker: Nobody has to do anything.
Speaker: It'll just happen.
Speaker: Your kids will grow up to be more like me than you no matter what you do.
Speaker: And a bunch of our guys fulminated against that and called him ugly and fat and gay.
Speaker: And he said, yeah, I know.
Speaker: Welcome to the future.
Speaker: And I'm going to suggest that he infuriated people because there was a sense in which he was right.
Speaker: The side that resists entropy will absolutely always be outcompeted by the side that leans into the entropy and harnesses it.
Speaker: But the mistake that both he and the right-wingers make...
Speaker: is assuming that because we can't go back to an older paradigm, that it's inevitable that we will experience just the eternal, infinite intensification of the new paradigm.
Speaker: But the fact is, the libs are up against the same volatility and the same uncertainty that we are.
Speaker: We often make fun of them for acting so threatened and besieged when they're actually in charge of every institution on the planet, but their situation is extremely precarious.
Speaker: And not to get too far afield, but this is a concrete example.
Speaker: Brett Weinstein went on Chris Williamson a couple of months ago to talk about his experience encountering Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker: And one of the things that's been sort of uncanny or surreal about the Epstein story is that it's become public knowledge that basically every famous person you've ever heard of was implicated in a child prostitution and blackmail ring.
Speaker: But it just seems like nobody really knows what to do about that, including the institutions implicated, the institutions responsible.
Speaker: And Weinstein's theory, which I think is right, is that the Epstein scheme was a pre-internet conspiracy that could not survive the internet.
Speaker: And that generalizes to 100 much less serious episodes of institutional deceit.
Speaker: And like Curtis Yarvin is out here laughing about Project 2025 and saying how absurd it is to believe that an incompetent boomer like Trump could ever challenge the permanent bureaucracy.
Speaker: But the fact that a person like that with a program like that could become so popular is indicative of just how shaky that bureaucracy's grip on power is.
Speaker: If a guy like that could get that close, then it really is anybody's game.
Speaker: Now, does that mean we're going to see a return to fiscal conservatism or traditional family values?
Speaker: Probably not.
Speaker: Or if those things do come back, it's going to be because they're adaptive to the new context, the same way that
Speaker: The monkey's opposable thumbs were good for picking up a rock and smashing another monkey's brains in.
Speaker: But the progressive paradigm that we're living under right now is a product of the 1960s and 70s.
Speaker: Essentially, every factual proposition undergirding this worldview has been discredited.
Speaker: The kids have unconsciously absorbed a lot of its pathologies, but that's not the same as being true believers in the sense that American progressives or Bolsheviks were in the 1920s.
Speaker: And really, the only through line that you can draw between the progressives of that time and the progressives of today
Speaker: is just this unprincipled leaning into entropy.
Speaker: Wherever the power happened to be flowing, wherever there was an opportunity to atomize or commodify or exploit internal tensions, they took it.
Speaker: And you may say, well, if the party that leans into entropy always wins, and these people are totally unprincipled in their commitment to doing that, then they'll just keep winning, right?
Speaker: But again, and this goes back to Arthur Chu's quote about everything getting softer and gayer forever,
Speaker: It assumes that, A, there's an infinite supply of social capital for you to burn, and B, it assumes that the only direction for power to flow in, the only entropy, the only energy that can be released, is social and moral entropy.
Speaker: But they've already run out of the cheap social and moral and institutional capital, the stuff that they could burn off and still keep the lights on and make babies and have a government.
Speaker: And so whatever comes next is going to have to find some other source of fuel to burn.
Speaker: And the mistake of the doomers and the nihilists and the Arthur Chews is believing that there isn't any other fuel.
Speaker: And they say, well, entropy is inevitable, but entropy is only inevitable in a closed system on an infinite timescale.
Speaker: Like, yeah, in a couple of billion years, the sun will expand and sterilize the earth.
Speaker: And then however many more trillion years later, you get the heat death of the universe.
Speaker: And like, that's the scale in the sense in which these phenomena are inescapable.
Speaker: But from a local perspective, from a time-bound perspective, from the perspective of your lifetime, your children's lifetime, your great-grandchildren's lifetime, there's no such thing as a closed system.
Speaker: There's effectively infinite free energy all around you.
Speaker: There's absolutely nothing inevitable about increasing disorder in the systems we care about.
Speaker: Change is inevitable.
Speaker: Decay and degeneracy and chaos and ruin, those things are not inevitable.
Speaker: And I recognize this is all really abstract, but I actually think that's the point.
Speaker: The concrete details of the situation are too volatile, too fast-moving, too contingent to really orient yourself against them.
Speaker: And I feel like I'm encountering guys all the time, not one or two or three guys, like a lot of guys, who've started specifically in the last few years...
Speaker: to have this slow-burning, constant panic and insomnia and stomach problems.
Speaker: And the more I talk to them, I think this is what it's about.
Speaker: It's not really about the particulars of the political situation or the economy or any of that.
Speaker: It's much deeper than that.
Speaker: It's a sense that it doesn't matter what I do, it's probably the wrong thing to do.
Speaker: And that's de-territorialization.
Speaker: Being thrown into a context in which none of your psychic resources, none of your material resources, none of your cultural adaptations apply to the existing scenario.
Speaker: Or if they do apply, it's like having opposable thumbs so you can swing from vines.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: The fact that it's meaningfully adaptive is totally accidental.
Speaker: And this goes back to the sense of helplessness.
Speaker: I've talked to some of these rich guys who are frustrated, as I've been frustrated, with the tendency on the right to just complain and critique instead of building.
Speaker: But I actually think that the complaining and the critiquing is on some level a reaching out for direction.
Speaker: It's like a recognition that we don't have any business building right now because we don't know what to build.
Speaker: And so we're doing all this abstraction and this theory crafting and this infighting because we can all kind of tell that the answers we've come up with so far kind of suck.
Speaker: And so when a guy comes around and he's like, oh, it's super simple.
Speaker: We just need to go back to the 1950s or we just need to build an AI god or we just need to restore our gut microbiome.
Speaker: We're all like, no, it's not simple.
Speaker: Your idea sucks for the following like 15 reasons.
Speaker: That's not an answer.
Speaker: And in tech world, that kind of debate is totally unnecessary.
Speaker: And so, of course, they're like, well, why don't you guys just build?
Speaker: Why don't you guys just ignore this argument?
Speaker: Go build your separate things that you believe in, and whichever one wins will be the one that wins.
Speaker: And that ethos of just build, iterate, compete, may the best idea win, is incredibly effective for engineering, particularly software engineering.
Speaker: Because in that domain, the lag between forming a hypothesis, designing a test, deploying the test, and responding to the output is almost arbitrarily short.
Speaker: And so the best man who wins is the one who executes that process with the greatest alacrity and efficiency and single-mindedness and creativity.
Speaker: And you can see how a guy who succeeded in that domain has created so much value, so much wealth, would be tempted to say, hey, maybe all problems are like this.
Speaker: Maybe this thing will work on political questions.
Speaker: Maybe it'll even work on metaphysical or spiritual questions.
Speaker: Or even more seductive, maybe metaphysical and spiritual questions are just, like, fake.
Speaker: What if every problem in the world is actually just this specific type of problem that I'm really good at solving?
Speaker: And I'm actually not trying to dunk on this type of guy.
Speaker: I actually find him deeply admirable.
Speaker: And it's precisely because they're not paralyzed by the whys and the wherefores and the what does it all mean.
Speaker: They genuinely see the world as a series of capacity or distribution problems, and they just go solve them.
Speaker: And they make the world incrementally better, and they make their world in particular way better.
Speaker: And they can say, not without some justification, that whatever you think the big picture meaning of life is, it's probably better to have more capacity than less.
Speaker: And they're more right about that the more local you go.
Speaker: Like what's meta-adaptive across all the possible existential crises we might think about?
Speaker: I can think of some situations where having money might not directly mean anything, or maybe you have the wrong kind of money, but Mark Zuckerberg's pretty meta-adaptive right now.
Speaker: Like there's not a whole lot of collapse scenarios where I like my chances better than I like his chances.
Speaker: And partly that's about his money and the resources and the situational awareness that he can buy with it.
Speaker: But it's also who he knows and the places he knows and who knows him.
Speaker: And so the insight that I would take from the technology brothers...
Speaker: is that if you don't know for sure what you want to be when you grow up, or you don't know for sure what the future will hold or why you should do this, that, and the other, like if you're indecisive on that score, you can just go make money.
Speaker: And regardless of what comes next, it'll probably help.
Speaker: Now, where I think there's a gap in the tech guy's thinking is the belief that that globalizes or generalizes.
Speaker: The reasons that their model of just go build and iterate and compete is not so far netting them success in these social engineering projects is that people, even more than hardware, are really expensive to run experiments on.
Speaker: And when you're used to deploying an update in a matter of weeks, the idea that you might not learn whether or not the thing you're doing is working or not in a lifetime or two, it's pretty difficult to get your head around.
Speaker: And you can see this, and again, I mean this as a constructive critique,
Speaker: You can see this in how many of them have coalesced around the prospect of radical life extension.
Speaker: It strikes me as just this really obvious effort to sidestep the question of meaning and ensure that absolutely everything, the whole system, is encapsulated under the scope of engineering.
Speaker: Because if nobody has to die, then nobody ever closes the book and steps back from it and has to go, what the hell did that mean?
Speaker: And the bottom line is, even within the frame of engineering, I think it's an insurmountable problem.
Speaker: Vitalist transhumanism is not a viable basis for an alternative society precisely because nobody's willing to die for it.
Speaker: When people ask me about the church as a social technology and they're looking for like, what can we learn?
Speaker: What can we crib?
Speaker: I'll sometimes ask them like, what are you looking for?
Speaker: Like, what do you find appealing?
Speaker: What about this are you actually trying to steal?
Speaker: Because if they wanted the thing for themselves, they could just join the church, right?
Speaker: But if you interrogate it a little bit, it comes down to, I want something to deploy for somebody else to make them behave pro-socially or, you know, to put it in more sympathetic terms, maybe I want to give my kids a good reason to be good.
Speaker: And these people generally understand, either intuitively or implicitly, that you have to actually believe in it.
Speaker: and they either can't or don't want to believe in it themselves.
Speaker: And that's because what's socially useful about religion is that it moves people to make decisions against their personal interest.
Speaker: And so trying to design a religion with an eye to social optimization, that's the opposite of what a religion is.
Speaker: Unless you're planning to just transparently lie, in which case you will attract really incapable, psychologically broken people.
Speaker: Now, a lot of these guys would say they're not trying to start a religion, but they are trying to start, like, societies with a guiding ethos.
Speaker: And what I find admirable about these projects is I can tell that the Radical Life Extension guys really believe in Radical Life Extension.
Speaker: They're not trying to get somebody else bought in on sacrifices they're not willing to make.
Speaker: But the problem is, somebody's got to make sacrifices.
Speaker: Like the terror of death is a really powerful, primal human motivator.
Speaker: And it's easy to see how you can get a really big tent coordinated around it.
Speaker: But only in this really light touch, rich people having a good time kind of way.
Speaker: So to bring it all back together...
Speaker: We're all reacting differently to this situation of profound dislocation and disruption.
Speaker: You've got some guys who can't figure out what it all means, and they're really terrified by that.
Speaker: And you've got some other guys who can't figure out what it means, and they don't care, and it's actually probably working out pretty well for them, at least individually, at least in the short run.
Speaker: But we're all recognizing this need to cohere, which means we do need to come together on what it all means, even if just for mercenary technical reasons.
Speaker: And sometimes I feel like I'm talking out both sides of my mouth on this because ultimately I don't think anybody makes it through this without direct contact with God.
Speaker: The target's just too small and it's moving too fast.
Speaker: At the same time, I feel like I have to bring my brain to the problem.
Speaker: I don't get to throw up my hands.
Speaker: And so when I'm working with guys who see the world differently, I don't want them to lose hope, but I also don't want to tell them like, oh yeah, we've got this all figured out.
Speaker: Everything's going to be just fine.
Speaker: Because I actually think it's going to take literal miracles.
Speaker: But in the meantime...
Speaker: after I'm done praying and while I'm waiting for the miracles, I got to just do what seems right and makes sense.
Speaker: And so far, what that means for me and my family is building relationships with the smartest people I can find, especially these like G-Watt Renaissance men.
Speaker: We've got several guys in the group who are
Speaker: former special forces and are now entrepreneurs.
Speaker: And it's like, that's a guy who's going to be useful no matter what happens.
Speaker: And so I'm trying to keep up with those guys and make sure that I'm useful to them.
Speaker: And we're also trying to learn how to build things that are similarly dual purpose.
Speaker: So for instance, you can sell fluoride free, no sodium lauryl sulfate toothpaste for pretty high margins right now.
Speaker: But if the balloon goes up, presumably people are still going to need to brush their teeth.
Speaker: which is maybe not true of like every cloud B2B SaaS solution, right?
Speaker: And what else is like that?
Speaker: What else is dual purpose?
Speaker: Beef, small batch, spare parts, drones.
Speaker: And these are all businesses that could potentially employ some of the guys who are less entrepreneurial, some of their families, right?
Speaker: And with that in mind, kind of the last step, I'm moving my family later this year to Texas, partly to be in a friendlier jurisdiction, partly to be closer to some friends and some potential political allies, and partly to start building this physical capacity.
Speaker: And I and a couple of the guys are also going to check out some overseas locations, see if there's, maybe we get a place to meet that doubles as, you know, a rally point if we had to get out.
Speaker: And I had a guy recently ask me, like, am I allowed to join the group if I'm not down for that whole program?
Speaker: And I said, yeah, this is just me using the group the way I would want anybody else to use it.
Speaker: I'm looking for guys that I can work with in everyday low stakes ways.
Speaker: And I'm also looking for the guys that, you know, I want to raise my kids around or, you know, go all in on a business together.
Speaker: My goal for the group as a whole is not for us all to go, you know, build the compound or whatever.
Speaker: My goal is to create an environment in which you can find who you need to find to build whatever you want to build.
Speaker: And I explicitly don't want us all working on the same project because I want the robustness of a diversity of tactics.
Speaker: Diversity is our strength.
Speaker: And I think just having the biggest group of the smartest people I can find working on as many possible approaches to these problems as possible is the best way to deal with the fact that none of us knows what the hell we're doing.
Speaker: Anyway, if you're smart and you want to get to work, check us out at exitgroup.us.
Speaker: If you want to see what kind of bench we have in your local area, you can check out exitgroup.us slash meetups and look at our member map.
Speaker: And if you think you might like to join up, but you want to like check out who's who first, you can sign up for the weekly newsletter and get invites to the cocktail hours.
Speaker: That's something we do after the full member meetup.
Speaker: It's hopefully a little bit lower stakes, just like a hotel bar.
Speaker: You can come and go as you please.
Speaker: And you get to know the boys, we get to know you.
Speaker: Hope to hear from you soon and thanks for listening.
