EXIT Podcast

This week we had a Q&A with Catherine Pakaluk, professor of economics at The Catholic University of America and author of Hannah’s Children, a study of women with six or more children — what makes them different, how they understand the decision to raise a large family, and what they can teach us about the causes of demographic decline.

Topics:

* What causes some people to maintain a firm connection between marriage and children?

* Why are secular Israelis the only secular population in a developed country that are maintaining replacement fertility?

* How does mortality salience affect people’s desire for large families?

* What percentage of large families are needed to create a “halo effect” that drives higher fertility in the general population?

* How important is mentorship from older women in guiding young women to start families?

* How to balance large family with other ambitions?

* How can we change the way female employment is structured to incentivize family creation?

* How do people with large families get their own children excited to raise families?

EXIT News

* Natal Conference is officially sold out. See you this weekend in Austin!

* NatalCon Agenda (ticket-holders, check Luma for location details):

* Thursday:

* Final virtual meet-&-greet for ticket-holders this Thursday, 3/27 at 7PM.

* Friday:

* In-person pre-event mixer with Jack Posobiec and other speakers on Fri 3:30PM.

* Dinner and Reception from 6:00PM - 9:30PM

* Saturday:

* Lunch at 11:00AM

* Conference from 12:30PM to 6:00PM

* Dinner from 7:00PM to 9:00PM

* After-party from 9:30M to 11:30PM

* Sunday:

* Brunch at 10:00AM

* On tonight’s full-group call (3/25) we’ll be discussing preparedness in the Trump Administration. The honeymoon is over, markets are volatile, shadowy quasi-state violence is back — it’s time to adjust our threat model.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

Last week the EXIT guys had an open-ended Q&A with Dan Hess (More Births) about his quantitative research on birth rate decline.

* Areas of volatility/opportunity

* Potential corporate policies that could support families

* Reactions to the demographic collapse “red pill”

* Political consequences of differential rates of abortion

* “If you could get an executive order signed, what would you write”

We’re having a second virtual meet-and-greet for NatalCon ticketholders this Thursday night, March 20th, at 7PM Central. The following NatalCon 2025 speakers will be present:

* ​Peachy Keenan

* ​Razib Khan

* ​Lyman Stone

* ​Yuri Bezmenov

* ​Robin Hanson

* ​Jessica Flanigan

* ​Alex Petkas

* ​Malcolm Collins

These pre-events are a great way to get the lay of the land and make the most of your time at NatalCon, so if you’re planning to come, don’t wait to get your ticket. Get to know the speakers and other attendees, ask questions of the organizers, and make new friends.

​If you haven't signed up yet, the first ten signups can use offer code MEET&GREET30 for 30% off your ticket.

EXIT News

* On Monday night, we concluded the first round of our six month Business Incubator — congrats to contest winners Social CrossTabs on the unanimous first-place decision from our investor-judges. Very impressive presentations from each of our four finalist teams.

* On last week’s full group call, we heard from Catherine Pakaluk, author of Hannah’s Children on the kind of women who want to have babies, and where our guys can find them.

* We will have a NatalCon virtual meet-and-greet for ticket-holders on Thursday, March 13th. If you’re planning to attend, please get your tickets ASAP so that you can participate — get to know the speakers and attendees so that you can get the most out of the in-person event.

* EXIT Houston meetup 6:30PM, Friday March 21st. Members can check in with the #texas channel for details.

* EXIT Salt Lake City meetup 12:00PM, Friday March 21st. Members can check in with the #utah channel for details.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

Recently we invited Lomez (of Office Hours with Lomez) to a Q&A with EXIT guys to discuss his work at Passage Press and what he learned from his many years among the libtards as a lecturer in the English department at UC Irvine.

[First 30 minutes are free — full hour recording available for paid subscribers]

Questions/Topics:

* Life in a “post-apocalyptic” culture, intellectually and aesthetically disconnected from the heights of the past

* How to rebuild in the void

* How to make better use of craft in writing by learning and internalizing the beats of a good pulp novel

* Is patronage actually workable? Is it not happening because the talent is inadequate, because funders lack vision, or something else?

* Telling better stories in everyday life

* How to take over your local cultural organs

* Can art aid in the regeneration of love, eros, and family formation?

Lomez will also join us later this month at NatalCon 2025, where he will speak on “Why you should care much less about your kids”. Use offer code LOMEZ for 10% off your ticket at natalism.org.

EXIT News

* After four months, the EXIT Business Incubator is graduating our first cohort on March 17th, with pitch presentations in front of investor judges who will provide real-world feedback. Their choice of presentation will receive an $1,100 prize.

* The Nashville EXIT guys toured the New Founding real estate development in Gainesboro, TN this week. Report to follow.

* DFW EXIT had a meetup at a climbing gym followed by a cocktail hour.

* I flew in for a Salt Lake City meetup — probably our best-attended yet, with fifteen at the full meetup and ~25 at the cocktail hour.

* Cookout and unconference at a member’s home

* Tour of a mixed-use real estate development under construction by his company

* Dinner at The Gateway

* Cocktail hour with Substack subscribers at a luxury hotel downtown

* NYC EXIT will meet 3/8 — check the #new-england chat for details.

* I will fly out for the Seattle EXIT meetup 3/8 (This Saturday). RSVP link available for subscribers at the bottom of the page here.

* We’re preparing an EXIT real estate meetup after Natal Conference to discuss our build in the Texas Hill Country.

[nothing below the paywall]

Every time I post about demographic decline, I get about a hundred replies insisting that the cause of demographic decline is actually extremely obvious — so obvious that only an imbecile (or a subversive!) would even wonder about it.

“It’s the dating apps, retard” -- or it’s birth control, or it’s women working, or it’s women voting, or it’s mass immigration, or it’s the cost of housing, or it’s the population density, or it’s the propaganda, etc.

Then, if the post really goes viral, I get feminists and libs saying it’s the cost of daycare, or student loans, or the expense of pregnancy, or the critical shortage of Good Men.

But virtually all of these arguments has a conclusive disproof in some modern country, where the commenter’s hobby-horse is not a problem, but birth rates are still well below replacement.

Of course, that’s not to say that none of it matters — everything goes in the pot — but none of these problems, in isolation, explains our predicament.

The most extreme proof of this is Rome and Sparta, whose social pathologies, even at the latest stage, didn’t neatly map to the modern culture war — but they still lost the ability to inspire young citizens to raise families, and were eventually overrun by more vital and fertile peoples.

Alex Petkas is a classicist and founder of the Cost of Glory Podcast — we brought him on to discuss the family structures of ancient Sparta and Rome, their struggles with declining population, and what they did to reverse the trend.

The decline of family formation, in these cases, is something like dying of old age — a confluence of social sicknesses that piles up until the society can no longer perform the basic task of perpetuating itself.

“It is not the one thing.”

With that understanding, “solving the birth rate” is not a narrow policy issue, and it won’t be corrected by tweaking the incentives or nibbling around the edges: it requires transforming our relationship to our families, society, and the state. That’s what we have to come together to do.

Alex will be joining us to deliver a deeper treatment of the subject at NatalCon 2025 — joining 30 other speakers with a wide range of perspective and expertise.

Get your ticket today at natalism.org.

Couples/+1 Tickets

If you’ve been thinking of bringing a spouse or friend to NatalCon, we’re rolling out special plus-one pricing — select “Two Ticket Special” with offer code COSTOFGLORY to get two tickets for $1,620.

We will also have childcare available for both the dinner Friday night, and the full conference on Saturday, so parents with small children can make it a night out.

Ticket holders also receive:

* Free copies of Hannah’s Children by Catherine Pakaluk, Domestic Extremist by Peachy Keenan, Creating Future People by Jonny Anomaly, and The Pragmatist’s Guide series by Malcolm and Simone Collins

* Discounted rooms at the AT&T Conference Center (until rooms are sold out)

* Access to attendee networking directory

* Pre-event virtual meet-and-greet with speakers

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

David Kilcullen is one of the world’s foremost experts in counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare.

He served for 25 years as an infantry officer in the Australian Army, then with the U.S. State Department, where he was chief strategist in the Counterterrorism Bureau, Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to Multi-National Force Iraq, and Senior Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the U.S. Secretary of State. He has written The Accidental Guerrilla, Counterinsurgency, Out of the Mountains, Blood Year, and The Dragons and the Snakes.

We discuss:

* How Trump’s election has altered the trajectory of the empire. Will he take the reins and strengthen American hegemony, or repudiate it?

* How China’s demographic issues accelerate the timetable for a confrontation with the US over Taiwan — but may also make them less willing to risk a war (70% of the PLA are only-children in a nation with no old-age safety net.)

* How China is carefully monitoring (and encouraging) America’s ongoing immiseration and demoralization through propaganda, trade war, and human and drug trafficking.

* How the Houthis use inexpensive saturation attacks to exhaust US Navy countermeasures and maintain their blockade of the Red Sea.

* Why the Assad regime collapsed over a ten-day period last month — the geopolitical circumstances that gave Hayat Tahrir al-Sham space to act, and what they built while they waited for the right time to strike.

It looks to me like the Trump Administration is attempting to lead a transnational revolution across the various client states of the empire — drying up the flow of money to puppet governments, and forcing the emergence of a looser, more transactional coalition.

It isn’t just that Americans are tired of empire — Trump voters increasingly identify the empire as a foreign occupation, and themselves as a not-particularly-favored client. Besides which, it’s unclear whether a global naval empire could be maintained by any nation, now that $10,000 drones have rendered $2B aircraft carriers obsolete.

What all this means for us is that global supply chains are going away, either through orderly, deliberate industrial policy, or through war and catabolic collapse. The only real question is who’s going to get paid to rebuild the factories, and when.

EXIT has the engineering and operations talent — our project for 2025 is to build a fund that will draw capital into these new enterprises and retrain our guys to build in the real world.

Meanwhile, the societies that cannot inspire their people to raise families will face economic stagnation and collapse — especially China, America, the EU, Japan, and Korea. We are hosting Natal Conference to connect with like-minded people and build the systems that will bring our families through the bottleneck.

The tea leaves aren’t that hard to read here.

There are clear actions you can take to prepare your family and your tribe for what is coming: the most important of which is to connect with like-minded friends are start building.

Join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News:

* On last week’s full-group call (2/11), we heard from Lomez on leadership through art and aesthetics. Recording available soon to paid subscribers.

* Last night (2/18), we had an EXIT State of the Union:

* Discussion of our growing list of expert-led calls in real estate, investing, AI, ham radio, homeschooling, etc.

* Updates on NatalCon planning, member discounts on tickets, and requests for volunteers.

* Details on the new investment fund.

* On next Tuesday’s full-group call (2/25) we will hear from Nate Fischer and Santiago Pliego from New Founding, on their venture fund, talent network, and real estate project in Gainesboro, Tennessee.

* Dallas Meetup was Monday night (2/17) — we met for lunch at EXIT’s space at The Hightower, New Founding’s new co-work, then dinner and cocktails at an undisclosed location. The D/FW guys get together once a month — I will be there at least every quarter.

* Cocktail hour invites for Salt Lake City (3/1) and Seattle (3/8) available here below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area and see if the group is right for you.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

Just after the inauguration, we invited Bog Beef from Good Ol Boyz to our weekly EXIT full-group call to discuss a topic of mutual interest: the power of patronage.

Patronage is just a word for the default state of human organization, where people are in control instead of systems, and power flows from relationships rather than the manipulation of procedural outcomes.

20th century “political science” was an extension of the Enlightenment project to rationalize and systematize government — to deliver it from the corruption of human influence.

Of course, the problem with this approach is the moral hazard: if you make it illegal and illegitimate to rule, people aren’t going to give up power — your ruling class will simply be selected for a nihilistic attitude toward the law.

In this Q&A, Bog Beef discusses the importance of the human relationships within the new Trump insurgency, and the history of patronage in American urban political machines.

Recognizing the legitimate role of human judgment in politics should completely change how we think about good government. Rather than fine-tuning the procedural systems, we should be focused on identifying and cultivating leaders.

EXIT is in the business of cultivation, because we think we should be in charge.

We want to expand the scope of our stewardship and our capacity. We want our guys deploying power virtuously, effectively, and confidently. We want to build empires, and cultivate children with the competence and ambition to inherit them.

Join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

* EXIT now has a meeting space at Hightower Dallas, through our friends at New Founding. Big thanks to the D/FW EXIT crew for closing the deal. We’ll hold regular meetups there, in addition to using it as a coworking space. Dallas guys can check the #texas chat for more information.

* Tickets for Natal Conference 2025 are on sale now. March 28th and 29th, Austin, Texas. We’ve just added Steve Turley, Lomez, and Cremieux to the lineup. More to come! Use offer code NATALISM for 10% off at checkout.

* On last week’s full-group call (1/28), we heard from Indian Bronson on Family Offices, as well as the Late Unpleasantness over H1Bs. Recording will be available for Substack subscribers, once I have edited out IB’s shocking deluge of slurs.

* On this week’s call, we are having a Book Club on The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.

* Cocktail hour invites for Dallas (2/17), Salt Lake City (3/1), and Seattle (3/8) available to subscribers below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area and see if the group is right for you.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

This week, @MarmotRespecter presented to the guys on how to get a tech job in the “worst tech hiring market in 25 years”.

Marmot explains how AI is swamping automated systems and eliminating entry-level tech jobs, making it harder and harder to break in — and what our guys can do about it.

* What employers are allowed to check about your resume

* Who reads your resume, and how

* How to sidestep automated systems and get your resume in human hands

* How to get people advocating on your behalf internally

* Acquiring credentials versus building a portfolio

* How to avoid corporate H1B shenanigans

* The future of remote work

* How wordcels can get into tech companies

Most of what he describes is applicable to any corporate hiring process.

There’s a principle in negotiation called “BATNA” — your “best alternative to negotiated agreement”.

This describes the worst outcome you can accept in a negotiation before you’re better off walking away.

The more appealing your BATNA is, the more leverage you have in the negotiation, because it is comparatively easy for you to walk away (i.e. EXIT).

The more work you put into alternative ways of earning money, the more you can afford to push back on your employer. Some ways to build BATNA are entrepreneurship, creating side revenue streams, cutting costs, and developing new marketable skills — but knowing you can go out and get another job in a pinch is another powerful source of leverage.

Regardless of your employment situation, if someone else owns the process, the equipment, the network you need to feed, clothe, house, and educate your family, they control you.

That’s why EXIT is bigger than any one tactic: you don’t have to quit your job and join the circus, or live on a homestead, or learn to code, or become a plumber.

EXIT is about building sovereignty by exerting greater control over of the means of production. We help our guys launch businesses, but we also connect each other with jobs, share useful skills, invest together, etc.

Join us at exitgroup.us.

Also:

JD Vance wants more babies in the United States.

SecDef has seven kids. Elon Musk is shilling NatalCon on the timeline.

Now that we have permanently resolved all political questions under the aegis of the Living Constitution, Donald John Trump, it’s time to set our sights on the civilizational struggle of our time.

The nation or people that will dominate the 21st century will be the one that figures out how to raise families in a technologically progressive society.

China can get the right answers to every other social problem, but if they can’t convince their people that the game should go on, they will inevitably decline and recede.

The 2020s will be defined by AI, but the 2030s will be defined by demographics — and, for obvious reasons, the moves that will be decisive in 15 years have to be made now.

That’s why we’re hosting Natal Conference, March 28th and 29th, in Austin.

You should join us if:

* You want to meet values-aligned individuals and families

* You want to find solutions to the derangement of modern dating

* You want to create good conditions for your children to have children

* You want to protect your community’s reproductive and endocrine health

* You want to find partners or investors for a natalist business or policy initiative

* You want to preserve and grow wealth under conditions of demographic decline

Your ticket includes:

* Pre-event virtual AMA/webinar with selected speakers

* Dinner & symposium Friday March 28th at the Bullock Museum of Texas History

* Full-day conference Saturday March 29th with breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the AT&T Conference Center (across the street from the Bullock Museum)

* Access to (opt-in) attendee directory

* Premium access to newsletters and digital copies of books authored by our speakers, including Domestic Extremist by Peachy Keenan, The Pragmatist’s Guide series by Malcolm and Simone Collins, Creating Future People by Jonny Anomaly, and more

​Use offer code NATALISM at checkout for 10% off your ticket.

See you in Austin.

This week, Natal Conference cofounder Drew Gorham and I discuss what has changed on the issue of demographic decline since last year’s conference, and what we have planned for NatalCon 2025.

I introduce some ideas about what is driving demographic decline — it clearly isn’t just wealth, or housing, or feminism, or birth control, or microplastics, or the declining value of child farm labor.

My theory, as I’ve discussed here previously, is that human fertility declines in captivity in much the same way that animal fertility does.

The “breakdown of the family” as “the fundamental unit of society” became a cliche in conservative circles in the 1990s, but the relative political power and independence of the family in pre-modern societies allowed family members to invest in one another, and in the family itself.

It wasn’t that pre-modern people raised kids at an economic loss for 12 years so they could get six years of productive farm work out of them: the family was a little state unto itself, which belonged to you, and to which you belonged, throughout your lifetime.

This is the kind of sovereignty that we talk about at EXIT.

The family was a genuine “us”, independent within its sphere — and having more of “us” made each member more productive, more secure, more influential, etc. Families partook in a common project that was, in many ways, transcendent and selfless; but self-interested enough to incentivize day-to-day cooperation and sacrifice.

I believe that this is basically the way humans are built and meant to live — and as our social structures abstract further and further away from that, raising families makes less and less intuitive sense to ordinary people.

The cultures that survive the demographic bottleneck will be those that find a way to restore this natural mode of human civilization, and make families sovereign again.

Since recording, I also got to listen to Lyman Stone’s turn on Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson (Lyman will be with us at NatalCon 2025.)

It was an excellent review of the research on demographic decline, and raised some interesting questions. Topics I’d like to explore with Lyman at the conference:

* Is alarmism about fertility decline discouraging fertility? I think doomer anxiety is so prevalent that “one more existential problem” probably doesn’t do much — though catastrophism probably doesn’t encourage people to start families. People aren’t going to have kids to save Social Security or boomers’ home values. Discussing the seriousness of the problem is more about drawing the attention and resources of people who wouldn’t care otherwise — but maybe that, too, is of limited utility.

* Do high-intensity parenting norms actually lead to better outcomes for kids? This was a topic of some debate at last year’s NatalCon, with Diana Fleischman taking the hardest line on genetic determinism. I think that if parenting doesn’t matter, it’s pretty weird that all human cultures and the human endocrine system reward it so intensely. The problem with modern parenting is not that it’s high-intensity, but that it’s solitary — each family having to come up with boutique solutions, almost building a little idiosyncratic civilization from the ground up for their children.

* What can be done about the fact that so many conservative families end up raising sterile secular liberals? This is one of the central questions around which EXIT is organized. Exit is a matter of survival because we’re dependent on cultural and economic institutions that are sterilizing our kids. (Usually figuratively.) We’re building businesses and organizing parallel social structures — but we’re always looking for new ways to make our families more resistant to the acid bath of modernity.

If you want to join us for the conference, early-bird tickets are still on sale at natalism.org. Use offer code NATALISM for 10% off.

EXIT News

* On last Tuesday’s full group call (12/10) we had our 2024 Year in Review. (More on this next week.)

* On tonight’s full-group call (12/17), we will hear from a former lead technical recruiter at a Fortune 500 company on how to get a tech job. We’ll discuss how to defeat or bypass algorithmic gatekeeping, and how AI is changing the tech job market.

* Real estate call is this Thursday (12/19).

* EXIT will have a sponsor table at the Coronation Ball, January 19th at the Watergate in Washington, DC. We have two seats left; if you are a member and would like to join us, please DM right away.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

I asked Tanner Guzy to talk to us about his book, The Appearance of Power, and the role of aesthetics in leadership. That conversation took me down the following rabbithole:

“If your kids don’t want to grow up to look like you, you have not set the right example”.

If everybody grew up wanting to be like their parents, The Libs would be extinct already — the most secular and progressive Millennials have ~0 fertility, and the most religious and conservative decile have about half the babies.

The secular-progressive/gay-race-communist memeplex is essentially a psychological sterility plague — which means, almost by definition, that it should be harshly selecting against whatever traits make a person susceptible to it.

In the long run that’s probably happening — but in the short run, religious people are producing atheist children much faster than atheists are dying out.

Taking those long- and short-term trends together: the people who make it through the depopulation bottleneck will almost certainly be some flavor of dissenting religion and ideology — but for any given dissenting religious individual or family living today, the odds are not good.

Conservatives and religious people are having plenty of children, but not nearly enough grandchildren.

There are a few possible explanations for this, but the most compelling one (to me, anyway) is that most young people simply don’t find their parents’ lives aspirational.

They don’t want the job, the social life, the recreation, the routine of a conservative suburban family.

It isn’t that it’s “too expensive” to raise a family — virtually everyone who has ever had kids has been poorer than the average young American. They simply don’t believe it’s worth it.

Some pro-family pundits chalk this up to decadence and ease and selfishness, but I don’t think people were really that much more altruistic 100 years ago — and anyway, things stopped getting easier for ordinary people two generations ago, but the fertility rate is still plummeting.

I believe reproduction is genuinely less attractive for young people today than it was for our grandparents when they were young — and for much the same reason reproduction is less attractive to zoo animals.

As we are increasingly monitored and constrained, within increasingly controlled and unnatural environments, the appeal of life itself — and especially the appeal to perpetuate it through heroic effort and sacrifice — is weaker.

The problem isn’t that young people are being brainwashed by the Liberal Media against having children. Liberalism isn’t directly making people sterile — liberalism and sterility are both psychological adaptations to life in captivity.

Liberalism — essentially naive conflict avoidance, egalitarianism, harm avoidance, and pleasure seeking — is the ideology of the zoo animal. It’s what you live for when there’s nothing to live for.

Under those conditions, why would you go through the expense and hassle of having children?

So they can work a job and pay bills and watch TV too? Maybe if they work really hard they’ll get to justify their life’s suffering (and yours) with a week at a resort with a poolside bar.

Of course, there will always be people who are willing to brave the risk and sacrifice of parenthood purely for the sentimental enjoyments of domestic life as such — but, empirically, not most people.

This is roughly what is offered to young people by conservative pundits and politicians: the promise that dedicating yourself to domestic life is so intrinsically fulfilling that it needs no justification — that, in fact, you should be willing to bear any cost for the privilege.

But the problem with subsuming yourself into the vicarious experience of your children (essentially just pleasure-seeking and harm-avoidance in the third person) is that it offers them nothing to emulate. It fails its own implied standard as a model of a life well-lived.

Spending your best consuming years raising kids so that they can be consumers is a prototypical self-licking ice cream cone, and young people are right to reject it.

If all you want for your kids is to “have it better than you had it”, the straightforward solution is to make sure they have abundant access to contraception and abortion.

If you want your kids to have kids, you have to offer them something better.

Manosphere guys used to talk a lot about “initiation rituals”, and they would go into the woods to chant, bang drums, do drugs, sit in buckets of ice, etc.

But the reason all that stuff was lame is that there was no world with real danger or adventure on the other side — nothing for which you would need masculinity to be credibly prepared, and therefore no meaningful “manhood” into which to be initiated.

There is no way to make such experiences “real” when the rest of your life is fake.

The Baby Boom in the US is often attributed to the exuberance of victory and material abundance of the postwar era — but the truth is almost the opposite.

The Baby Boom mostly took place in the middle of the war, all over Europe (both sides) — and the most dramatic increases took place under rationing regimes, bombings, &/or active military occupation.

It wasn’t about availability of housing, or the cost of diapers, or modern medicine, or labor-saving domestic technologies.

It was apparently about throwing humans back into simpler and more familiar and more natural conditions of danger and decision — conditions to which their natural temperaments were suited and mutually complementary, so that they could admire and desire one another.

People will have children again when they are free again — and that’s the throughline between EXIT and Natalism.

If we want our kids to want to perpetuate our culture, we have to live admirable and excellent lives, and surround ourselves with admirable and excellent people. We have to build something sovereign — a society that is really ours, so that it can be really theirs.

Fortunately, the present state of universal captivity and domesticity is self-destructing — so our task is to cultivate the resources, skills, virtues, and freedom of action that will prepare our families for the coming turbulence, and equip us to exercise sovereignty on the other side.

exitgroup.us

EXIT News

* On last week’s group call, one of the guys discussed his veterans’ mental health nonprofit, Sterker showcased the fitness call, and we had an extended conversation of EXIT & the Trump Regime.

* Tonight (11/19) we will be running a book club on Xenophon’s Anabasis, joined by Alex Petkas from Cost of Glory, and Ben Wilson from How to Take Over the World.

* Working groups are back — two-hour blocks to knock out small projects together. Bring something you’ve been putting off, and lets get it done. (Members can check the group calendar or the #announcements channel for the weekly schedule.)

* RSVP link for Dallas EXIT Cocktail Hour (12/7) below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

Last week, we heard from Alex Petkas from the Cost of Glory Podcast. Alex is a former Classics professor from Princeton who is now focused on classical education, especially for men and boys.

We discuss:

* How are the classics, especially the biographies of great men, are relevant to what we’re trying to accomplish?

* What translations are most accurate and accessible?

* Can we rebuild the engine of competition and cultivation that produced the greatest Greeks, Romans, and early Americans?

* What’s the point of cultivating an energetic and dangerous spirit if there are no non-suicidal outlets for it?

* How serious were the Greeks and Romans about their distaste for commerce?

* How would a great Classical hero respond if placed in our time and circumstances? Would he self-immolate rather than live under such a system, or would he “play the long game”?

* What is Alex’s personal vision for the future of classical education?

* How can we get our kids accustomed to playful, proportionate physical and rhetorical violence?

* Alex’s thoughts on various Classical scholars

Substack subscribers get access to the full recording and invites to EXIT cocktail hours, as well as our archive of all prior Q&As.

Full members participate in the Q&As, accountability, calls, meetups, and group chat with 225 other individually vetted members.

Apply for membership at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

* On tonight’s weekly group call (Tuesday, 9PM ET), we will discuss Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient Family. It’s a short but fascinating survey of the primordial religious and family practices of the proto-Indo-Europeans, as pieced together from study of Greek, Roman, and Hindu texts.

* Last weekend, we got together in Washington DC for the Steve Sailer Noticing event, as well as a cocktail hour on the roof of the Watergate and a barbecue.

* This Friday night (10/18), we will host a cocktail hour in Austin, TX in collaboration with Praxis. Invitation available below the paywall for subscribers. +1s welcome.

* The DFW guys will be shooting airsoft on Saturday, 11/2. Members can inquire in the #texas channel.

* Meetup in San Francisco, Saturday 11/9. This will be a family meetup, so bring the wife and kids. (Event may be postponed in the event of civil war.) Cocktail hour invite for subscribers below.