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56 - You Have One Year
4.3k Plays1 year ago
- On the "entrepreneurial temperament"
- Acceleration and deterritorialization
- What we can learn from the techbros
- What to do when you have no idea what to do
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Transcript
Introduction to the Exit Podcast
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett.
Entrepreneurial Insights with Charles Haywood
00:00:20
Speaker
This week on our member call, we had a Q&A with Charles Haywood about how he built his shampoo empire.
00:00:26
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.
00:00:37
Speaker
And one thing that kept popping up was this notion of an entrepreneurial temperament.
00:00:41
Speaker
That there's a certain type of person who does entrepreneurship and a certain type of person who does not.
00:00:46
Speaker
And it has something to do with confidence and initiative and decisiveness and risk appetite.
00:00:52
Speaker
And Haywood seems to believe in that really strongly.
00:00:54
Speaker
You either have it or you don't.
00:00:55
Speaker
Will you or won't you?
00:00:56
Speaker
And for some of us, that's a very healthy, bracing, energizing message.
00:01:01
Speaker
Like coffee's for closers.
00:01:03
Speaker
There's maybe even an analogy to be drawn to the Puritan work ethic.
00:01:07
Speaker
Like you're either elect or you're not.
00:01:09
Speaker
And the exoteric message is there's nothing you can do about that.
00:01:12
Speaker
But the esoteric message is prove it.
00:01:15
Speaker
Prove that you're elect.
Personal Reflections on Entrepreneurship
00:01:17
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.
00:01:26
Speaker
Maybe he's right.
00:01:28
Speaker
And there's another type of guy who goes, screw that guy, I'll show him.
00:01:31
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.
00:01:40
Speaker
There was this time in business school when I was talking to a Navy SEAL.
00:01:47
Speaker
And that's an interesting experience if you've never had it.
00:01:49
Speaker
These guys tend to be very normal height, normal build.
00:01:54
Speaker
Some of them are really smart.
00:01:55
Speaker
Some of them are kind of dumb.
00:01:57
Speaker
But what distinguishes all of them that I've met is they have these like
00:02:02
Speaker
Weirdly empty eyes like a shark's eyes.
00:02:04
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.
00:02:20
Speaker
So I'm telling him this story.
00:02:22
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.
00:02:36
Speaker
And one of my teachers heard this, this lady, and she says, oh, Kevin, you're a lover, not a fighter.
00:02:41
Speaker
And I basically said, oh, okay, I guess so.
00:02:45
Speaker
And that was the end of it.
00:02:47
Speaker
I basically never really thought about it again.
00:02:49
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.
00:02:58
Speaker
And he didn't say it like it was a flex.
00:03:00
Speaker
He didn't say it like he wanted to hurt my feelings or didn't want to hurt my feelings.
00:03:04
Speaker
He just said it.
00:03:05
Speaker
And it got me thinking about why I was there in that MBA class in the first place.
00:03:09
Speaker
Well, I was there because I had done everything up to that point to optimize for safety.
00:03:14
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.
00:03:22
Speaker
And then I figured I would get the degree and...
00:03:24
Speaker
Get a job, some job, somewhere.
00:03:27
Speaker
And maybe I'm creating a bit of an unfair impression of myself.
00:03:30
Speaker
I liked economics because I would read these stories of industrialists and capitalists and merchants who found new markets.
00:03:38
Speaker
They found new ways of building things, new ways of marketing things.
00:03:42
Speaker
And I was fascinated by that, but it didn't seem accessible to me in any meaningful way.
00:03:47
Speaker
It felt like something that was for somebody else.
00:03:49
Speaker
Somebody more practical, somebody more responsible, somebody more...
00:03:53
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.
00:03:59
Speaker
And that was never me, not even close.
Debunking Myths in Entrepreneurship
00:04:01
Speaker
And I hear exactly the same kind of talk out of my guys who are in these W-2s.
00:04:06
Speaker
It's like you think of entrepreneurship as either the kind of thing that happens to somebody else or it's like lightning.
00:04:12
Speaker
Like one day God will just blast you with the idea and
00:04:16
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.
00:04:22
Speaker
And that's not totally wrong.
00:04:23
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.
00:04:32
Speaker
But like my big five trait conscientiousness has not changed.
00:04:36
Speaker
I'm still absent-minded.
00:04:38
Speaker
I still have a tendency to rabbit hole and get lost chasing my curiosity.
00:04:44
Speaker
I still struggle to organize and prioritize and communicate.
00:04:47
Speaker
But what I've learned that I didn't expect is that those things can be delegated, they can be automated.
00:04:52
Speaker
And if you're put in a situation with enough pain and enough risk, you will figure it out.
00:04:57
Speaker
And so when I hear both the entrepreneur guys and the non-entrepreneur guys say,
00:05:03
Speaker
well, it's just a certain type of person and you have it or you don't.
00:05:06
Speaker
I just, I don't know how to square that with my experience.
00:05:09
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.
00:05:19
Speaker
And like, did something come to me?
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, but when you look at the early iterations of the idea, it wasn't right.
00:05:26
Speaker
We're not doing really any of the things that we were doing then or that we envisioned doing.
00:05:31
Speaker
And did my passion for the subject make it easier to be conscientious and diligent and hardworking?
00:05:37
Speaker
Kind of.
00:05:38
Speaker
More so than before.
00:05:39
Speaker
But what really happened is I got interested in the fact that I sucked at those things.
00:05:44
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.
00:05:57
Speaker
Like, yeah, I'm not performing well at this job because I hate this job.
00:06:01
Speaker
I don't want to be good at it.
00:06:02
Speaker
I don't even want to be the kind of person who's good at a job like this.
00:06:06
Speaker
And what changed when I started a business was not that all those problems went away.
00:06:10
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.
00:06:17
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.
00:06:29
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.
00:06:40
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.
00:06:51
Speaker
Like the edge cases, maybe, but not most of them.
00:06:54
Speaker
Like, I knew guys who owned very lucrative businesses.
00:06:58
Speaker
who I knew for sure did not have access to some secret reserve of cognitive resources that I didn't have.
00:07:05
Speaker
And they weren't more passionate about B2B SaaS or hair salons or bounce houses than I was about my thing.
00:07:13
Speaker
And the way I was thinking about it just changed.
00:07:15
Speaker
I stopped being like, you know, am I this type of guy or that type of guy?
00:07:19
Speaker
And I started saying, how's he doing that?
00:07:22
Speaker
What's the trick?
00:07:23
Speaker
Because he's not a wizard.
00:07:24
Speaker
It's not supernatural.
00:07:25
Speaker
There's not a certain type of guy who can pull a quarter from behind your ear.
00:07:29
Speaker
It's a skill that somebody taught him that he practiced.
00:07:32
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?
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, maybe.
00:07:41
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.
00:07:54
Speaker
And so is there an entrepreneurial temperament?
00:07:56
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.
00:08:19
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.
Evolving Job Market and Societal Expectations
00:08:30
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.
00:08:45
Speaker
Waiting patiently.
00:08:46
Speaker
But I don't think I'm either type of guy, and probably neither are you.
00:08:50
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?
00:08:57
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.
00:09:02
Speaker
The institutions that offered your parents and grandparents security and comfort
00:09:06
Speaker
in exchange for conformity are offering less and less security and demanding more and more conformity.
00:09:12
Speaker
And increasingly, even if you were willing to accept that trade-off, they're just not looking for someone like you.
00:09:17
Speaker
They don't want you.
00:09:18
Speaker
They're looking for a reason to expel you.
00:09:20
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.
00:09:28
Speaker
Because as these institutions select against competence, they're collapsing.
00:09:31
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.
00:09:40
Speaker
I'm more of a Titanic type of a guy.
00:09:43
Speaker
Which brings me to where I'm really going with all this, which is you have one year.
00:09:47
Speaker
We've been sending the libs some scary pictures of Trump with laser eyes to remind them that we're going to win.
00:09:54
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.
00:10:04
Speaker
And maybe 2024.
00:10:04
Speaker
You have at most one year.
00:10:08
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
00:10:36
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.
Preparedness in the Modern World
00:10:43
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.
00:10:53
Speaker
But the guys that I'm seeing adopt this frame of resignation are not stupid.
00:10:57
Speaker
And they're not being lazy or careless.
00:10:58
Speaker
They're actually thinking about this question all the time.
00:11:00
Speaker
They're being eaten alive by this anxiety for their kids or for their country.
00:11:05
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.
00:11:14
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.
00:11:25
Speaker
I have these great conversations with some of the old folks from church.
00:11:28
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.
00:11:37
Speaker
And I love talking to these old timers because they're incredibly knowledgeable about all that kind of stuff.
00:11:42
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.
00:11:53
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.
00:11:58
Speaker
That's who's going to make it.
00:12:00
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.
00:12:08
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.
00:12:18
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.
00:12:25
Speaker
But those kinds of problems are local and temporary.
00:12:28
Speaker
Your employment situation is going to resolve itself.
00:12:30
Speaker
The insurance company will cover your flooded house.
00:12:33
Speaker
Eventually life will go back to normal.
00:12:35
Speaker
So preparedness on that level is basically a solved problem.
00:12:38
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.
00:12:54
Speaker
It's not terribly complicated or expensive for a middle-class family to do that.
00:12:58
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.
00:13:09
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.
00:13:17
Speaker
And the only things that are big enough to do that at this point are political problems.
00:13:21
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.
00:13:32
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.
00:13:42
Speaker
then what is everybody else doing?
00:13:44
Speaker
What would have to be true about the state of the world?
00:13:46
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.
00:13:54
Speaker
In other words, the economy has so radically simplified that everything else I know how to do is now useless.
00:13:59
Speaker
Maybe I'm still making money, but it's a logistical problem.
00:14:02
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.
00:14:09
Speaker
Or maybe I don't have the Davos pentagram burned into my hand that says I'm allowed to buy potatoes.
00:14:14
Speaker
And those situations are possible, but maybe you can see the problem with this.
00:14:18
Speaker
Pretty much every other economic behavior on Earth is more efficient than farming by hand.
00:14:23
Speaker
So we're not just talking about a world where I have to give up being professionally online.
00:14:27
Speaker
We're talking about a world where there's literally nothing else.
00:14:30
Speaker
The absolute best move for me is the only remaining move, which is to try to farm potatoes.
00:14:36
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.
00:14:47
Speaker
And either way, that means me and my potatoes are unlikely to be left alone.
00:14:51
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.
00:14:57
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.
00:15:05
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.
00:15:15
Speaker
And that's basically the ultimate boomer-doomer-prepper fantasy, right?
00:15:20
Speaker
Defending the homestead.
00:15:22
Speaker
But we talked about this a little bit in the Taliban podcast.
00:15:25
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.
00:15:34
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.
00:15:55
Speaker
Maybe you don't like this thought experiment.
00:15:56
Speaker
It's oversimplified, fair enough.
00:15:58
Speaker
And there are maybe some situations in which knowing how to grow things would be useful as part of a more holistic plan.
00:16:04
Speaker
And I'll get into some historic cases where that kind of know-how has mattered.
00:16:08
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.
Privacy and Surveillance in a Digital Era
00:16:14
Speaker
What actually happens when things break down?
00:16:16
Speaker
Who makes it through and who doesn't?
00:16:18
Speaker
Who actually gains from the chaos and becomes more powerful when the new equilibrium arrives?
00:16:23
Speaker
People talk about the Great Depression, hyperinflation in Argentina or Germany.
00:16:28
Speaker
Sometimes you get economic collapse after a civil war like the fall of the Soviet Union.
00:16:32
Speaker
or the rise of the Soviet Union with the liquidation of the kulaks.
00:16:36
Speaker
In Nazi Germany, you had the reverse, where economic failures triggered political violence.
00:16:40
Speaker
Closer to the present, you could point to the Rhodesian Bush War, the war in the Balkans, the anarcho-tyranny in South Africa.
00:16:46
Speaker
In none of these situations did the state collapse and return homesteaders to a state of primeval sovereignty and self-sufficiency.
00:16:53
Speaker
In fact, having so much of their wealth bound up in a particular geography seems to have made them more vulnerable.
00:16:59
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.
00:17:14
Speaker
I think the boomer-doomer prepper model made more sense in the world these people came up in.
00:17:19
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.
00:17:25
Speaker
And if you're imagining a major economic collapse or a nuclear war in both of those situations,
00:17:31
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.
00:17:38
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.
00:17:48
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.
00:17:56
Speaker
And if that's what you're imagining, maybe farming potatoes and stockpiling 5-5-6 is the right move.
00:18:01
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.
00:18:08
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.
00:18:17
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.
00:18:27
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.
00:18:34
Speaker
The fact that they're now scrutinizing Venmo transactions above $600 is an indicator of how that targeting capacity has grown.
00:18:41
Speaker
And of course, they've had the capacity to gather that kind of data for years.
00:18:45
Speaker
But the bottleneck was analysis.
00:18:47
Speaker
Until recently, if you wanted to catch a tax cheat, you needed a human being to do the pattern recognition.
00:18:52
Speaker
But now automating that is maybe not trivial, but very accessible.
00:18:56
Speaker
And it's not just the federal government.
00:18:57
Speaker
Reaching out and touching people is just easier, cheaper across the board.
00:19:01
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.
00:19:10
Speaker
And again, this is basically the thesis of David Kilcullen's book, Out of the Mountains.
00:19:14
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,
00:19:31
Speaker
the lone mobile home in the middle of nowhere on a satellite image.
00:19:35
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.
00:19:41
Speaker
If you live in an isolated cave complex in the middle of nowhere, they can drop a bunker buster on you.
00:19:45
Speaker
But if you live in a high-rise in the capital, they can't.
00:19:48
Speaker
And not to recapitulate that whole argument, but basically the same logic applies to preparedness.
00:19:53
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.
00:20:01
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.
00:20:09
Speaker
It's really got to be no stone left on top of another in order for this bug-out scenario to make sense.
00:20:14
Speaker
And if that's the outcome you're preparing for, you have to accept...
00:20:18
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.
00:20:36
Speaker
And I put this question to the guys recently.
00:20:39
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...
00:20:56
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.
00:21:04
Speaker
And maybe I'm narrowing down too closely there, but I think the problem generalizes.
00:21:08
Speaker
I think a lot of our guys are really paralyzed by this anxiety
00:21:14
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
00:21:39
Speaker
that doesn't have this really scary probability of being totally wrong and just getting wiped.
00:21:46
Speaker
Like all these doomsday scenarios have completely divergent, mutually exclusive paths of optimization.
00:21:52
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.
00:22:01
Speaker
And what some guys do is they pick their poison.
00:22:03
Speaker
They pick their one thing that they think is going to be the thing, and they prepare against that.
00:22:09
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...
00:22:21
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.
00:22:29
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.
00:22:37
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?
Adapting to Changing Environments
00:22:45
Speaker
across the broadest scope of possible futures.
00:22:48
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.
00:23:02
Speaker
Most things, most of the time, live in stasis with their environment.
00:23:06
Speaker
Everything is governed by these negative feedback loops that keep things from changing.
00:23:10
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.
00:23:20
Speaker
And the stability of that system is what makes long-term specific adaptation possible.
00:23:25
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.
00:23:39
Speaker
But then there's a catastrophe, there's an accelerant.
00:23:42
Speaker
Something interrupts that system of negative feedback loops and breaks the equilibrium that you biologically or culturally are adapted to.
00:23:51
Speaker
And then your survival has nothing to do with how well adapted you were to the prior context.
00:23:56
Speaker
The prior context is gone.
00:23:57
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.
00:24:07
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.
00:24:15
Speaker
But they still have these hands, these opposable thumbs.
00:24:17
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.
00:24:25
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.
00:24:36
Speaker
Now what's interesting about that theory is that octopuses are pretty bright and they use tools.
00:24:42
Speaker
But they're very much, like other wildlife, governed by negative feedback loops.
00:24:46
Speaker
They firmly exist within their context.
00:24:50
Speaker
They haven't become the kind of accelerant in themselves that humans have become.
00:24:55
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.
00:25:05
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.
00:25:17
Speaker
No system with humans inside it can ever equilibrate.
00:25:20
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.
00:25:36
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.
00:25:44
Speaker
Technological advances accelerate technological advances, which increases the frequency and the magnitude of the disruptions, which in turn makes stable adaptations almost impossible.
00:25:54
Speaker
Biological adaptation was too slow to keep the monkeys alive on the savannah, but cultural and technological adaptation could keep them alive.
00:26:03
Speaker
And not only that, but it was a meta-adaptation.
00:26:05
Speaker
It didn't just improve their survivability in one context, it improved their survivability across all contexts.
00:26:11
Speaker
at the price of turning them into this eternal disruption engine and forcing them into competition with each other.
00:26:17
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.
00:26:34
Speaker
And specifically what they're competing over is the compliance and the adoption and the identity of all the people in the system.
00:26:41
Speaker
And so instead of an equilibrium created by ecological niches, you have these artificial competing equilibria of cultural and technological regimes.
Power Structures and Technological Advances
00:26:51
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.
00:27:05
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.
00:27:16
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.
00:27:23
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.
00:27:32
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.
00:27:44
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.
00:27:53
Speaker
And so empires grow and expand and then inevitably fragment and shake loose and the process restarts.
00:28:00
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.
00:28:11
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.
00:28:23
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.
00:28:37
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.
00:28:50
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.
00:28:59
Speaker
and into the cities.
00:29:00
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.
00:29:14
Speaker
Like, it's not obvious that an industrial proletarian factory worker in New York was individually better off than a Kentucky dirt farmer.
00:29:22
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.
00:29:31
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.
00:29:39
Speaker
And this is why acceleration often carries with it the connotation of the black pill, right?
00:29:43
Speaker
It's essentially that not only can you not go back, you can't even stay still.
00:29:47
Speaker
If you tried to fight Napoleon as a neo-feudalist, you'd be a neo-feudalist.
00:29:52
Speaker
A conscious effort to precisely replicate an old paradigm is not the same thing as the paradigm itself, unexamined, undefended, un-fucked.
00:30:00
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.
00:30:08
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.
00:30:20
Speaker
And you can point to a handful of time capsule societies like the Amish or the Hasids.
00:30:25
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.
00:30:39
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.
00:30:50
Speaker
And in fact, the moment they did have something a modern state wanted, in Afghanistan's case Osama bin Laden,
00:30:56
Speaker
Their country was devastated by war for 20 years.
00:30:59
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.
00:31:05
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.
00:31:10
Speaker
As soon as Pennsylvania was in question, you saw all these sort of narrative vulnerabilities start to emerge.
00:31:16
Speaker
And nobody in the media really got serious about it, but you could tell it was kind of a shot across the bow.
00:31:22
Speaker
And it's all pretty easy attack vectors.
00:31:24
Speaker
Crimes that go unreported and unpunished, especially domestic violence, sexual abuse.
00:31:29
Speaker
The Amish want to be self-sufficient and keep things in-house, but that's explicitly at odds with most Americans' moral intuitions.
00:31:38
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.
00:31:47
Speaker
So really the survival of the Amish is a function of them remaining totally non-threatening to the existing power structure.
00:31:53
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.
00:31:59
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.
00:32:07
Speaker
And again, that assumes that everybody else just lets them do that with no resistance.
00:32:11
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.
00:32:17
Speaker
So all this is to say that conservatism and reaction are strictly out-competed by definition.
Inevitability of Change and Resistance
00:32:23
Speaker
We talk a lot about leftists being at war with reality, but that's exactly what this is.
00:32:27
Speaker
It's a war against the structure of reality.
00:32:30
Speaker
You're literally trying to do the 1950s or the 1850s or the 1650s over again and expecting a different result.
00:32:38
Speaker
Now, most of our guys resist this intuition intensely because they hear that and they think, well, there's no hope.
00:32:44
Speaker
And there's a handful of honest leftists like Arthur Chu who take roughly the same view.
00:32:50
Speaker
I read a couple of my favorite of his tweets.
00:32:52
Speaker
He says, the gene pool will get more mixed up and contaminated.
00:32:55
Speaker
People will get softer and gayer and PC-er.
00:32:58
Speaker
Politics and wokeness will subvert and corrupt everything you love.
00:33:01
Speaker
It's an inevitable result of how the world works.
00:33:04
Speaker
The whole Nietzschean arc of history you people badly misunderstand is it doesn't matter how strong you think you are.
00:33:10
Speaker
The more unique and heroic and special the strong are, the more the weak outnumber them.
00:33:14
Speaker
The last man beats the first man.
00:33:16
Speaker
That's why he's the last man.
00:33:18
Speaker
You're going to continue to perceive your society degenerating into what you see as entropy and chaos and ruin.
00:33:24
Speaker
I don't have to do anything.
00:33:25
Speaker
Nobody has to do anything.
00:33:26
Speaker
It'll just happen.
00:33:27
Speaker
Your kids will grow up to be more like me than you no matter what you do.
00:33:31
Speaker
And a bunch of our guys fulminated against that and called him ugly and fat and gay.
00:33:35
Speaker
And he said, yeah, I know.
00:33:36
Speaker
Welcome to the future.
00:33:38
Speaker
And I'm going to suggest that he infuriated people because there was a sense in which he was right.
00:33:43
Speaker
The side that resists entropy will absolutely always be outcompeted by the side that leans into the entropy and harnesses it.
00:33:51
Speaker
But the mistake that both he and the right-wingers make...
00:33:55
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.
00:34:06
Speaker
But the fact is, the libs are up against the same volatility and the same uncertainty that we are.
00:34:12
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.
00:34:20
Speaker
And not to get too far afield, but this is a concrete example.
00:34:24
Speaker
Brett Weinstein went on Chris Williamson a couple of months ago to talk about his experience encountering Jeffrey Epstein.
00:34:31
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.
00:34:46
Speaker
But it just seems like nobody really knows what to do about that, including the institutions implicated, the institutions responsible.
00:34:53
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.
00:35:03
Speaker
And that generalizes to 100 much less serious episodes of institutional deceit.
00:35:10
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.
00:35:22
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.
00:35:31
Speaker
If a guy like that could get that close, then it really is anybody's game.
00:35:35
Speaker
Now, does that mean we're going to see a return to fiscal conservatism or traditional family values?
00:35:41
Speaker
Probably not.
00:35:42
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
00:35:48
Speaker
The monkey's opposable thumbs were good for picking up a rock and smashing another monkey's brains in.
00:35:53
Speaker
But the progressive paradigm that we're living under right now is a product of the 1960s and 70s.
00:35:59
Speaker
Essentially, every factual proposition undergirding this worldview has been discredited.
00:36:04
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.
00:36:14
Speaker
And really, the only through line that you can draw between the progressives of that time and the progressives of today
00:36:20
Speaker
is just this unprincipled leaning into entropy.
00:36:23
Speaker
Wherever the power happened to be flowing, wherever there was an opportunity to atomize or commodify or exploit internal tensions, they took it.
00:36:32
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?
00:36:42
Speaker
But again, and this goes back to Arthur Chu's quote about everything getting softer and gayer forever,
00:36:48
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.
00:37:02
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.
00:37:12
Speaker
And so whatever comes next is going to have to find some other source of fuel to burn.
00:37:16
Speaker
And the mistake of the doomers and the nihilists and the Arthur Chews is believing that there isn't any other fuel.
00:37:22
Speaker
And they say, well, entropy is inevitable, but entropy is only inevitable in a closed system on an infinite timescale.
00:37:28
Speaker
Like, yeah, in a couple of billion years, the sun will expand and sterilize the earth.
00:37:32
Speaker
And then however many more trillion years later, you get the heat death of the universe.
00:37:36
Speaker
And like, that's the scale in the sense in which these phenomena are inescapable.
00:37:40
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.
00:37:51
Speaker
There's effectively infinite free energy all around you.
00:37:54
Speaker
There's absolutely nothing inevitable about increasing disorder in the systems we care about.
00:37:59
Speaker
Change is inevitable.
00:38:00
Speaker
Decay and degeneracy and chaos and ruin, those things are not inevitable.
00:38:05
Speaker
And I recognize this is all really abstract, but I actually think that's the point.
00:38:09
Speaker
The concrete details of the situation are too volatile, too fast-moving, too contingent to really orient yourself against them.
00:38:16
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...
00:38:25
Speaker
to have this slow-burning, constant panic and insomnia and stomach problems.
00:38:33
Speaker
And the more I talk to them, I think this is what it's about.
00:38:36
Speaker
It's not really about the particulars of the political situation or the economy or any of that.
00:38:41
Speaker
It's much deeper than that.
00:38:43
Speaker
It's a sense that it doesn't matter what I do, it's probably the wrong thing to do.
00:38:48
Speaker
And that's de-territorialization.
00:38:50
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.
00:39:00
Speaker
Or if they do apply, it's like having opposable thumbs so you can swing from vines.
00:39:04
Speaker
Like,
00:39:05
Speaker
The fact that it's meaningfully adaptive is totally accidental.
00:39:08
Speaker
And this goes back to the sense of helplessness.
00:39:10
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.
00:39:21
Speaker
But I actually think that the complaining and the critiquing is on some level a reaching out for direction.
00:39:28
Speaker
It's like a recognition that we don't have any business building right now because we don't know what to build.
00:39:34
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.
00:39:42
Speaker
And so when a guy comes around and he's like, oh, it's super simple.
00:39:45
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.
Strategies for Surviving Uncertainty
00:39:55
Speaker
We're all like, no, it's not simple.
00:39:56
Speaker
Your idea sucks for the following like 15 reasons.
00:40:00
Speaker
That's not an answer.
00:40:01
Speaker
And in tech world, that kind of debate is totally unnecessary.
00:40:04
Speaker
And so, of course, they're like, well, why don't you guys just build?
00:40:07
Speaker
Why don't you guys just ignore this argument?
00:40:10
Speaker
Go build your separate things that you believe in, and whichever one wins will be the one that wins.
00:40:15
Speaker
And that ethos of just build, iterate, compete, may the best idea win, is incredibly effective for engineering, particularly software engineering.
00:40:23
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.
00:40:32
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.
00:40:40
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.
00:40:48
Speaker
Maybe this thing will work on political questions.
00:40:50
Speaker
Maybe it'll even work on metaphysical or spiritual questions.
00:40:53
Speaker
Or even more seductive, maybe metaphysical and spiritual questions are just, like, fake.
00:40:57
Speaker
What if every problem in the world is actually just this specific type of problem that I'm really good at solving?
00:41:03
Speaker
And I'm actually not trying to dunk on this type of guy.
00:41:05
Speaker
I actually find him deeply admirable.
00:41:08
Speaker
And it's precisely because they're not paralyzed by the whys and the wherefores and the what does it all mean.
00:41:13
Speaker
They genuinely see the world as a series of capacity or distribution problems, and they just go solve them.
00:41:19
Speaker
And they make the world incrementally better, and they make their world in particular way better.
00:41:23
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.
00:41:32
Speaker
And they're more right about that the more local you go.
00:41:35
Speaker
Like what's meta-adaptive across all the possible existential crises we might think about?
00:41:41
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.
00:41:52
Speaker
Like there's not a whole lot of collapse scenarios where I like my chances better than I like his chances.
00:41:57
Speaker
And partly that's about his money and the resources and the situational awareness that he can buy with it.
00:42:02
Speaker
But it's also who he knows and the places he knows and who knows him.
00:42:05
Speaker
And so the insight that I would take from the technology brothers...
00:42:08
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.
00:42:19
Speaker
And regardless of what comes next, it'll probably help.
00:42:22
Speaker
Now, where I think there's a gap in the tech guy's thinking is the belief that that globalizes or generalizes.
00:42:28
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.
00:42:42
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.
00:42:53
Speaker
And you can see this, and again, I mean this as a constructive critique,
00:42:57
Speaker
You can see this in how many of them have coalesced around the prospect of radical life extension.
00:43:03
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.
00:43:13
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?
Limitations of Societal Foundations
00:43:21
Speaker
And the bottom line is, even within the frame of engineering, I think it's an insurmountable problem.
00:43:26
Speaker
Vitalist transhumanism is not a viable basis for an alternative society precisely because nobody's willing to die for it.
00:43:33
Speaker
When people ask me about the church as a social technology and they're looking for like, what can we learn?
00:43:38
Speaker
What can we crib?
00:43:39
Speaker
I'll sometimes ask them like, what are you looking for?
00:43:42
Speaker
Like, what do you find appealing?
00:43:45
Speaker
What about this are you actually trying to steal?
00:43:47
Speaker
Because if they wanted the thing for themselves, they could just join the church, right?
00:43:52
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.
00:44:08
Speaker
And these people generally understand, either intuitively or implicitly, that you have to actually believe in it.
00:44:13
Speaker
and they either can't or don't want to believe in it themselves.
00:44:16
Speaker
And that's because what's socially useful about religion is that it moves people to make decisions against their personal interest.
00:44:24
Speaker
And so trying to design a religion with an eye to social optimization, that's the opposite of what a religion is.
00:44:33
Speaker
Unless you're planning to just transparently lie, in which case you will attract really incapable, psychologically broken people.
00:44:40
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.
00:44:48
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.
00:44:57
Speaker
They're not trying to get somebody else bought in on sacrifices they're not willing to make.
00:45:01
Speaker
But the problem is, somebody's got to make sacrifices.
00:45:04
Speaker
Like the terror of death is a really powerful, primal human motivator.
Reactions to Societal Disruption
00:45:10
Speaker
And it's easy to see how you can get a really big tent coordinated around it.
00:45:14
Speaker
But only in this really light touch, rich people having a good time kind of way.
00:45:20
Speaker
So to bring it all back together...
00:45:21
Speaker
We're all reacting differently to this situation of profound dislocation and disruption.
00:45:27
Speaker
You've got some guys who can't figure out what it all means, and they're really terrified by that.
00:45:32
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.
00:45:42
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.
00:45:51
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.
00:46:00
Speaker
The target's just too small and it's moving too fast.
00:46:03
Speaker
At the same time, I feel like I have to bring my brain to the problem.
00:46:06
Speaker
I don't get to throw up my hands.
00:46:10
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.
00:46:19
Speaker
Everything's going to be just fine.
00:46:21
Speaker
Because I actually think it's going to take literal miracles.
00:46:24
Speaker
But in the meantime...
00:46:26
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.
00:46:34
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
Building Resilient Relationships and Investments
00:46:43
Speaker
men.
00:46:43
Speaker
We've got several guys in the group who are
00:46:46
Speaker
former special forces and are now entrepreneurs.
00:46:49
Speaker
And it's like, that's a guy who's going to be useful no matter what happens.
00:46:52
Speaker
And so I'm trying to keep up with those guys and make sure that I'm useful to them.
00:46:55
Speaker
And we're also trying to learn how to build things that are similarly dual purpose.
00:46:59
Speaker
So for instance, you can sell fluoride free, no sodium lauryl sulfate toothpaste for pretty high margins right now.
00:47:09
Speaker
But if the balloon goes up, presumably people are still going to need to brush their teeth.
00:47:14
Speaker
which is maybe not true of like every cloud B2B SaaS solution, right?
00:47:20
Speaker
And what else is like that?
00:47:21
Speaker
What else is dual purpose?
00:47:23
Speaker
Beef, small batch, spare parts, drones.
00:47:27
Speaker
And these are all businesses that could potentially employ some of the guys who are less entrepreneurial, some of their families,
Strategic Relocation and Collaboration
00:47:34
Speaker
right?
00:47:34
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.
00:47:49
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.
00:47:59
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?
00:48:06
Speaker
And I said, yeah, this is just me using the group the way I would want anybody else to use it.
00:48:12
Speaker
I'm looking for guys that I can work with in everyday low stakes ways.
00:48:17
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.
00:48:25
Speaker
My goal for the group as a whole is not for us all to go, you know, build the compound or whatever.
00:48:32
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.
00:48:40
Speaker
And I explicitly don't want us all working on the same project because I want the robustness of a diversity of tactics.
00:48:48
Speaker
Diversity is our strength.
00:48:50
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.
00:49:04
Speaker
Anyway, if you're smart and you want to get to work, check us out at exitgroup.us.
00:49:07
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.
00:49:14
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.
00:49:22
Speaker
That's something we do after the full member meetup.
00:49:24
Speaker
It's hopefully a little bit lower stakes, just like a hotel bar.
00:49:27
Speaker
You can come and go as you please.
00:49:29
Speaker
And you get to know the boys, we get to know you.
00:49:31
Speaker
Hope to hear from you soon and thanks for listening.