EXIT Podcast

In this episode I give my take on this year’s Natal Conference, why we started it, what we learned from producing it, and what’s coming next.

Meetups

In preparation for NatalCon 2024, we are hosting EXIT/NatalCon meetups every month, in locations all over the country. EXIT members, NatalCon ticketholders, and paid newsletter subscribers get in free, with your plus-one.

Day One Video Download

The day-one video session will be available for download early next week.

Pre-orders for 2024

Natal Conference 2024 will be held in Austin TX next December. Exact dates TBD, but subscribe here or at natalism.org for a pre-order discount.

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BAP’s dissertation argues an ostensibly narrow point: that Socrates had it coming.

The execution of Socrates is usually characterized as the persecution of an innocent free-thinker, but BAP says that Socrates (and the teaching of philosophy as such) had radicalized the Athenian youth toward antinomian tyranny — the throwing-off of all law and custom in favor of “the justice of nature”, that might makes right.

He traces this back to the philosopher’s discovery of nature as a concept — that there are unchangeable realities (and hierarchies) in the physical world that are outside the purview of law, or custom, or even the gods.

The discovery of nature, in turn, emerged as a consequence of an aristocratic breeding program: a quest by conquering minorities to hone themselves, as individuals, into the most physically and psychologically dangerous human specimens. BAP explores the Greeks’ obsession with blood, heredity, nature, and the trial of one’s nature in the agon, the contest.

He argues that such a breeding program could only emerge in a warrior aristocracy, ruling an unrelated subject population by force, and experiencing “the pathos of distance”: a feeling of isolation from the customs and beliefs that govern the herd.

As the breeding program progresses, it begins to generate characters of such strength, will, cunning, and aloofness that they become dangerous to the integrity of their own societies.

This consummates in the person of the philosopher (who breaks free of the society’s customs psychologically) and the tyrant (who breaks free physically).

As the warrior culture buckles under the strain of its own success, and the conflicts between the dangerous men it has created, the discipline of the breeding program begins to fail, leading to a “tropical proliferation of human types” — extremely refined and competent human specimens flying off in thousands of directions, pursuing all sorts of objectives.

It is precisely in this moment of aristocratic decadence and collapse that genius and high culture are produced, as the aristocratic genius, bred for war, seeks out creative and psychological frontiers.

The aristocratic warrior culture no longer meaningfully addresses the concerns of the aristocracy — and so, in an effort to save it, the philosopher abstracts and radicalizes its principles. But this only accelerates the collapse, as it extends the pathos of distance from the weaklings and slaves among the common folk, to everything that is weak and slavish within the aristocracy.

The tyrant becomes a kind of radical “hyper-aristocrat”, treating the ruling class itself with the predatory contempt that had previously been deployed outward, toward the matriarchal communism of the peasants.

During Socrates’ lifetime, Greece was threatened by a series of tyrants, many of whom he had personally tutored. This led to the execution of Socrates, but also a general persecution of philosophers and philosophy as such.

In BAP’s view, Plato’s later invention of “moral philosophy” — the use of philosophy to encourage justice, temperance, and prosociality — was a ruse intended to end the persecution and enthrone philosophers as the arbiters of convention and morality, displacing the priests.

This preserved the practice of philosophy and the knowledge of nature for centuries — until Christianity embraced this public-facing Platonic morality and radicalized it, abandoning the concept of nature in favor of moralizing egalitarianism. And so, in BAP’s view, the career of Platonic Christianity has been a long, slow slide back to the totalitarian matriarchal democracy of the longhouse.

Why does this matter?

BAP’s understanding of our current state of cultural decay is based on two premises:

* Excellence is the only thing that justifies human existence. “Mere life” — ordinary life, survival and comfort for its own sake — is of no value, and possibly even negative value.

* Excellence is purely a matter of biological material — it is inborn and cannot be taught.

I disagree with his maximalism on these points, but surely excellence matters. I don’t want to live in a world without beauty and brilliance and heroism and strength. And I don’t believe excellence is entirely a question of biology and heredity, but obviously those things count for something.

And if we agree that far, then we’ve got the same problem: our culture is at war with excellence. Not just a particular category of excellent people, but with excellence as such — with the idea that anything is better or worse than anything else.

The way we form families, our de facto breeding regime (and it is a ‘regime’, defined by culture and policy) is a catastrophe — a system as cruel and as sterile as the Spartans’, but with the effect of degrading health and vitality, rather than improving it.

But I don’t believe that waiting for the collapse and preparing our bodies for the Thunderdome is a complete solution. If Plato had just waited for Athenian society to collapse so he could join a warband, his project would have failed entirely.

Instead, he leaned into his society’s new complexity, searching out unguarded doors and looking for power that could be taken without resistance. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with EXIT.

Also: being a Trad Dad isn’t everything, but you can’t have aristocratic breeding if you don’t breed. As far as I can tell, demographic collapse is the immediate and comprehensive threat to the survival of human excellence. I wanted to bring together smart and capable families to find solutions, which is why I started the Natal Conference.

I didn’t have a “pitch” in mind when I decided to review this book, but basically all of my projects revolve around these primal concerns — I want my kids to be excellent, and I want them to have excellent families of their own. I want them to have access to the best possible mentors, playmates, rivals, and partners — which, in 2023, makes me a dangerous extremist.

Anyway it’s a great book, and you should buy it.

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Oppenheimer is an intimate portrait of a sensitive young man who did nothing wrong.

I could smell that something was off about this movie, so I went home and did some digging, and it turns out Oppenheimer was very obviously a Soviet spy. The problem is that half the academic and political establishment of the United States was in the tank for the Soviets at the time, so the question of what it meant to be a “traitor” was somewhat complicated.

Oppenheimer’s crime was basically that he had Asperger’s and couldn’t lie as effectively as other highly placed American communists. Things that had been perfectly acceptable to say for 15 years under the Roosevelt Administration had become suddenly dangerous to say under Truman and Eisenhower, and he couldn’t handle the pivot.

His fall from grace is depicted as a product of irrational and excessive Cold War paranoia, but it was basically the opposite: he gave away the power to murder billions to one of the most bloody-minded regimes in history, and the American government was too compromised and divided to do anything about it.

This story struck me as relevant to our interests at EXIT for two reasons:

* It’s worth understanding how we got where we are. The institutional power that we’re up against wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t start with George Floyd, or Obama, or the student movement in the 1960s. Marxists have had significant control over elite American institutions for as long as there have been Marxists, and the Cold War was primarily a covert civil war within those institutions, which the anticommunists lost decisively.

* Despite being completely mendacious about the history, the movie is a solid illustration of “manipulation of procedural outcomes” — the ways that nominally impartial processes and “expertise” can be leveraged against the political enemies of the powerful. In this episode, I explain how these processes are deployed against people like us today, and what can be done about it.

The single largest point of vulnerability for American’s freedom of speech and association is corporate employment. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 places the onus on corporate employers (with more than 15 employees) to police their employees’ speech about protected categories of people in any context “relevant to the workplace” — including personal social media activity.

But the good news is that punishing dissent within the W-2 system is so cheap and effective that very little thought has been given to punishing dissent outside it. Once you own your income stream, it becomes orders of magnitude more expensive to guarantee your compliance: requiring either sustained mob action, or lawsuits, or criminal charges, none of which are feasible methods to suppress dissent at scale.

The best defense against this kind of attack, for ordinary people, is simply “don’t be there”. Don’t have an income that can be cut off with a single phone call to your HR representative. Don’t have a two-income household that makes you dependent on ideologically hostile government schools. Ideally, don’t stake your economic survival on any single point of failure.

This summer, four of the EXIT guys have gone full-time on their startups. They started in the accountability calls, workshopping their idea and gathering potential partners. Then they built teams, including software developers, attorneys, accountants, designers, salesmen, and investors. So far, we’ve raised a combined $450,000 across the network to launch these projects.

We have the people and the resources to build the future we want. If you’re ready to get to work, join us today at exitgroup.us.

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Johann Kurtz, author of the Becoming Noble substack, relates his experience in Big Tech, and why he believes dissidents underestimate these companies as a launching point for their ambitions. We discuss:

* What megacorporations know that online dissidents don’t

* Getting into a top tech company without a STEM degree

* Preparing for a highly competitive interview

* Finding friends and allies without revealing your power level

* The horizons that open up after a few years undercover

You can read the article that inspired this conversation here:

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In this episode, Drew Gorham and I announce the first annual Natal Conference, December 1-2, 2023 in Austin, TX.

Declining fertility is the most important issue of our generation — we discuss the economic, political, and cultural consequences of this decline, what may be causing it, what can be done about it, and what we hope to learn from the conference.

You can get your tickets now at natalism.org, sign up for our newsletter, and follow the conference on Twitter.

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EXIT member and shaolin.ai founder Zach Martin and I discuss what the machines have planned for us in 2023.

* What creatives and wordcels need to learn to make money with AI

* How a large language model like ChatGPT differs from true AI

* How NLP opens up new frontiers for machine learning & surveillance

* Why ChatGPT probably isn't the Singularity

* Launching a business with EXIT

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Even among smart dissident types, the default explanation for the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan is basically just “grit” and “sticktuitiveness” and “giving 110%” (plus maybe “asabiyyah”, which is a $10 dissident word for “teamwork”).

But if that was the secret sauce, it doesn’t explain why ISIS collapsed under comparatively light military pressure, never to return; or why Al Qaeda is basically a dead meme.

Out of the Mountains doesn’t set out to answer that question — it was published in 2013, when Afghanistan was nearly pacified, al Qaeda was still a going concern, and ISIS was the new hotness in Sunni extremism.

In fact, Kilcullen’s thesis is that urbanized, internet-savvy, transnational guerrilla movements will be able to access power flows, and it’s a pretty persuasive thesis — but with a decade of hindsight, it turned out to be the comparatively rural, isolated, local movement that defeated the empire. So what happened?

The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.

This is also, by the way, exactly how the American diplomatic corps conquered the world — by becoming the broker and underwriter of international agreements that even unaligned (or even unfriendly) countries come to depend on. That authority requires global force projection to be credible, of course, but force projection alone is not enough.

In this episode, I explore how non-state groups hide within, and eventually capture, the power flows that make a state a state, and what we can learn from it.

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My conversation with Clay Martin — Green Beret, preparedness expert, and author of Concrete Jungle, Prairie Fire, Last Son of the War God, and Wrath of the Wendigo.

We discuss how to network and prepare without getting Waco'd, how to teach boys what they need to know without getting sued, who you need to know in your local area, and how to be useful in an emergency when you're not a leg-breaker.

Power is always a question of who you know — an extended emergency situation just changes which skills and connections are most valuable. At EXIT, you can find experienced entrepreneurs to help you launch an ecommerce business, or a SOF veteran to teach you how to shoot straight and secure your home. You can learn from experienced crypto developers and investors, or get help planting potatoes and raising chickens. Join us at exitgroup.us.

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Our resident fed @DegreeStudies is back to talk about the Musk Twitter purchase, the RW blackpilling in response to the midterm fiasco, and the desire to lead versus the desire to serve.

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In this episode, I discuss why we started EXIT, who we’ve brought together, and a few of the things we’ve accomplished. A few thoughts:

It’s not about “cancel culture”.

As many progressives have pointed out, people don’t have to like the things you say. “Reading the room” and dealing with social disapproval is part of life — and in a sane society, this can be a healthy thing. The problem is not that these mechanisms of social control exist, but that the worst people on the planet are deciding who is allowed to speak and what they are allowed to say.

In fact, what mainstream conservatives call “cancel culture” is more like an autoimmune disorder, in which the weapons that ordinarily stigmatize socially harmful behavior are turned against themselves, so that the only distinction that is permitted is that it is wrong to acknowledge distinction.

The problem with this autoimmune disorder is not that it’s unfair, or Unconstitutional, but that it’s terminal.

All the cultural infrastructure that produces healthy family life is being methodically dismantled — and “healthy family life” is not merely a nice thing to have: it is the means by which a culture continues, genetically and memetically.

As these institutions collapse, some of us are still getting lucky — meeting the right woman, making a decent living, even raising healthy children — but the odds are looking longer every day for our kids, even with all the advantages we can give them.

If we remain in the grip of this disorder — if we can’t find leverage, if we can’t organize against these forces — we will go extinct. First, our way of life, our religious beliefs, our values, everything that makes us “us”, will be replaced in our children with the homogenized values of Citibank and Netflix and Planned Parenthood — and of course, those values psychologically sterilize everyone who adopts them. In other words:

It’s about whether or not we get to have grandchildren.

If we want grandchildren, we’re going to need alternatives to government schools. We need jobs that can support a homemaker and children. We need to move to better neighborhoods (or build them), so that our children can find good friends, mentors, and mates.

But that’s all defensive; we also need to build a way of life that our children will want to adopt and iterate. That means being personally exemplary, and happy, and jacked, and good-looking; it also means building a career where we aren’t miserable and exhausted, where we don’t have to resentfully mumble taqiyya to stay employed. It means funding culture production, and supporting dissident thinkers, so that as the present consensus rots and collapses, we can be ready to replace it with something beautiful.

It’s not about abandoning the culture, or forfeiting positions of strength.

Only an idiot would tell a factory worker, “You should never strike, you’re giving up all your power in the system!” Organized, strategic Exit — in the form of walkouts, work stoppages, etc. — is the only means by which labor can gain power within the system. And if you think your cultural and institutional leverage is any different as an Amazon project manager, you’re deluding yourself.

The purpose of EXIT (the organization) is to help our guys prosecute Exit (as a strategy). In order to push back in the workplace and the public square, our Exit must be three things:

* Coordinated: One guy quitting his job or shouting into the void won’t make much difference. We need to build the power to act and speak collectively.

* Survivable: To have the courage to push back, our guys need to be financially and socially prepared to weather a short-term adjustment — just like striking workers need to know how they’re going to pay their bills for the duration of the strike.

* Credible: Exit doesn’t have to mean a permanent withdrawal, but we do need credible alternatives to the resources that we’re currently getting from these hostile institutions. We can’t be bluffing.

EXIT’s solution to this problem is something like Balaji Srinivasan’s concept of a “decentralized network union”. Most of the time, we are building infrastructure that makes us stronger: hiring each other, promoting each other’s work, helping each other start businesses, and investing together. But when someone is directly threatened by doxxing or any other method of backdoor ideological policing, we circle the wagons to make sure they are able to weather the storm and get back on their feet.

We are also collaborating on big-picture problems.

EXIT has brought together a deep pool of talent: software developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, attorneys, investors, creatives, executives, etc. — all of whom have recognized that it’s not enough to be individually successful. We are creating teams to build:

* Cancellation insurance

* Legal defense funds

* Investment funds

* Alternative schools

* Preparedness services

* Arts patronage

Members with expertise and passion take point on each of these projects — many of which we expect to spin off into independent businesses. And members who are unsure what they want, or where their talents would be best used, can report for duty on any of these projects and start figuring it out.

If any of these projects interest you — or if you have another big-picture project that would benefit the group — sign up at exitgroup.us.

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