This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us John Del is a writer at Steadermen and Junior Ganymede ; a long-time EXIT man, fourth in a six-generation natalist project, and patriarch of a family of “debt-free tattooless virgins who love Jesus and their Dad.” Basically, he has some extremely important problems figured out , and we wanted to talk about how. Topics: * The myth of “adolescent rebellion” * Homes as center…
July 24, 202626 min
Member Q&A: Orania CEO Joost Strydom
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us Today is Pioneer Day — a perfect occasion to release our extended conversation with Orania CEO Joost Strydom. People discouraged with the political situation in the West will often lament that “there are still libtards in South Africa” — but Orania demonstrates how much can be built even under a regime as corrupt, and incompetent, and openly hostile as S…
July 10, 202631 min
EXIT Q&A: Alex Petkas, Cost of Glory
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us Alex Petkas of The Cost of Glory Podcast and The Classical Society joins us to discuss Lycurgus, the primordial lawgiver of Sparta, and what we can learn from him about the birth (or rebirth) of a nation. Alex’s Presentation (free to listen): * Why Madison invoked Lycurgus in Federalist 38 to defend a Constitution penned behind closed doors * Lycurgus’ sacrificial leader…
May 29, 202637 min
Why Great Men Crave Volatility (feat. Ben Wilson)
Ben Wilson runs the How To Take Over The World podcast. He is also an OG EXIT Man , and my co-founder at Constitutional Action — which began over steaks at the Utah Valley EXIT meetup. Ben’s podcast focuses on great men of history, and the lessons we can draw from their lives in achieving our own ambitions. EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here: Too often, the study of history devolves into materialist analysis — human outcomes unfolding deterministically, according to iron physical and economic laws. It locks analytical thinkers into the belief that nothing can change, nothing can be done , that individual human agency is irrelevant. Like so many things, history can be either a tool that makes you powerful, or an excuse that makes you weaker. Ben has spent years gathering practical insight from history as the biography of heroes and villains — asking in every episode, “How did this extraordinary man find solutions to the problems of his time? What did he see that no one else saw? What did he do that no one else was doing?” In this podcast, we discuss the opportunities that lie in volatility. Ben uses the examples of Napoleon, Alexander Hamilton, and John D. Rockefeller to illustrate: * Why great men crave volatility : because it shatters moribund hierarchies and opens the way for new growth * How great men use volatility : how they exploit new frontiers and patiently prepare for opportunities * How great men survive volatility : how they measure risk, maintain discipline, and choose when to strike We also discuss our plans for Constitutional Action: why we have to build now for the political and social changes that we can all see coming, and why Constitutional Action is the way to contest the regime’s legitimacy . EXIT News * Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT) * This week (5/26) we heard from EXIT man Nick on Boomer Whispering — how to find common ground and build what we need to build with our boomers (we love our boomers, we have the best boomers) in politics and business. * Next week (6/2) we will have our Investment Showcase , with EXIT men presenting startups and projects for which they are seeking investment. (EXIT makes no endorsement of any of these projects, presentations are for educational and entertainment purposes only, everyone must do their own research and risk assessment.) * The following week (6/9) we will hear from Kevin Daley and Davis Hunt on political action in Nashville . Davis is the founder of Pamphleteer, and has organized excellent events to connect aligned people, including the Erik Prince Q&A with IM-1776 . * EXIT Member Events (see group chat for details): * 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event * 6/4: San Francisco Meetup * 6/5: Stanford Meetup * 6/6: North Bay Meetup * 6/6: Utah Valley Meetup * 6/12: Nashville Meetup * 6/13: Houston Meetup * 6/13: Budapest Meetup * 6/15: Dallas Meetup * 6/19: Atlanta Meetup * 6/19: Denver Meetup * 6/20: Columbus Meetup * 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event * 6/27: St. Louis Meetup Subscriber Events (RSVP below): 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
May 22, 202643 min
Fellow Creators the Creator Seeks
The Free State Party invited me to speak at their event in Manchester, New Hampshire this week. It was a chance to pitch what we’re doing and why to a crowd that was values-aligned, but not steeped in exactly the same memetic environment. The “elevator pitch” for this thing is difficult, because you have to question so many premises and dispute so many definitions. I could feel that they liked certain things that I was saying, but I was not quite establishing the connective tissue that made it all hang together: Managerialism [“what is that”], and therefore natalism [“what is that”], and therefore Great Houses [“what is that”], and therefore fraternity [“what is that”], and therefore entrepreneurship [“oh, ok”]. People recognize that family formation has collapsed, politics are out of control, they don’t live in the country they thought they did. It’s a relatively short walk from there to “liberalism as runaway civilizational entropy”. But then to point to “where it all went wrong,” and what can be built that will survive the crisis, you have to cover some pretty difficult ground. It’s not enough to say “we have to go back to 1950” (or 1650, or 600 BC) — that can’t be done. In order to build for the future, you have to think about what civilization is doing , and why it has gone awry, and what is worth trying to save as we pass through this catastrophic historical bottleneck. Preparing for the Free State Party event was a great exercise, because it forced me to re-examine the chain of thought that brought us here — but because I hadn’t accurately mapped out the conceptual distance between us ahead of time, I don’t think I was able to communicate to that room exactly what I intended. So the above podcast is my attempt to do that plumbing a little more carefully. I still don’t have a pithy, 30-second pitch that gets people nodding along — and maybe that’s just not possible for this — but the essence is that we have to rebuild the engine of civilization, starting with family and fraternity. The prompt they gave me was to discuss “iteration”: which is distinct from replication . Our goal cannot be to rewind and replicate some prior civilization — nor can you replicate your own genetics or attitudes or worldview with any fidelity (and it would not be worth doing if you could.) Instead, you have to cultivate people who cultivate themselves — fellow creators. (This is the actual meaning of the word “culture” — yet another term that has to be redefined.) You have to recognize the children you raise, not as extensions of yourself, but as conscious, embodied expressions of what you love and value: works of living art. And then you have to build the economic, cultural, and political machinery that allows them to build families that reflect their highest loves and ideals (which, again, will not be — and should not be — exactly your own. The art is to beget artists.) This deliberate approach to life and culture — life as art — is a matter of survival, because family formation has become an expensive and increasingly unusual “lifestyle choice”. You have to supply some compelling vision, or your children simply won’t do it. In other words: your family (and humanity at large) is going to consciously orient toward a shared vision of glory and beauty, or it is going to end. EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next. EXIT News * Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT) * This Tuesday (5/19), we had our Member Q&A with Joost Strydom, CEO of Orania . A deeply inspiring discussion of the community they have built, against all odds, in South Africa. Full recording coming soon. * Next week (5/26) we will hear from EXIT man Nick on Boomer Whispering — how to find common ground and build what we need to build with our boomers (we love our boomers, we have the best boomers) in politics and business. * The following week (6/2) we will have our Investment Showcase , with EXIT men presenting startups and projects for which they are seeking investment. (EXIT makes no endorsement of any of these projects, presentations are for educational and entertainment purposes only, everyone must do their own research and risk assessment.) * Events * 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event * 6/5: San Jose Meetup * 6/6: San Francisco Lunch * 6/19: Denver Meetup * 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event Links to EXIT cocktail hours in San Francisco (6/5) and Denver (6/19) available to supporting subscribers here . EXIT cocktail hours are the best way to get to know the guys in your area, and decide if full membership in 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
May 14, 202614 min
We Have to Prove It (Constitutional Action, American Fork Veterans' Hall, 4/30/2026)
Below is my speech from Constitutional Action at the American Fork Veterans’ Hall, April 30th. At last month’s meeting, we presented a historical model for what is happening in Utah, & how we got here — and I made the case that we need a state government willing to defend its citizens and their rights under the Constitution, instead of using the letter of the law as an excuse to ignore the spirit. The question that I hope it raised in your minds is, how do we get there? Can we get there? I’m here tonight to tell you that we can. EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here: I suspect most of you are here because, like me, you feel like you’re going a little bit crazy. You grew up in a state that was arguably the most cohesive and functional place, in a much more cohesive and functional country. Now, you’re watching as the Republican state government sells your home out from under you in a hundred procedural ways. The Republican state legislature and governor appointed a single “expert” (who happened to be a radical leftist activist) to assess the performance of every judge in the state. This year, through the Better Boundaries initiative, Republicans have handed one of those leftist judges the authority to unilaterally redraw our Congressional districts, creating a radical socialist seat in Salt Lake City. That seat was just won at the Democratic state convention by Liban Mohamed, thanks to a Somali ethnic political machine that the Republican Party willfully imported, along with tens of thousands of “refugees” and hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, all protected by de facto sanctuary policies. After decades of work by Republican lawmakers, Salt Lake City is as violent, depraved, and dysfunctional as any blue state capital, with the flag of the big gay empire hanging from every parapet — and every year, the tumor spreads further into the suburbs. The Utah Board of Higher Education, hand-picked by the Republican governor, runs the leftist indoctrination factory where Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The State Board of Education — which is elected by the voters and is 88% Republican — employs the same insane Bolshevik teachers as every other public school system in America. Again, this is the third most Republican state in the country — effectively a one-party state — and they are consciously, deliberately, systematically working to replicate the squalor and corruption of San Francisco or Minneapolis. Maybe ordinary liberals in the 90s could not have anticipated how bad it would get — but how perverse would you have to be to walk into this with your eyes open? Supporting newsletter subscribers receive access to our full library of paywalled member Q&As, and invites to local EXIT cocktail hours. You can also subscribe for free to get EXIT updates in your inbox. But when you try to explain this to your friends and neighbors, they have no idea what you’re talking about. The people who are doing this are world-class at evading responsibility, maintaining a stable decline, and keeping up appearances. The trajectory of our state looks dramatic if you can remember what life was like ten years ago — but that’s just not how the median voter operates. They’ll say, sure, Salt Lake County is a mess, but all cities are liberal — you can always move another 15 minutes out into the suburbs. Sure, the schools are bad, but you can apply for a charter school. Sure, there’s a drug problem, but not for you and me, not for our kids, right? Sure, houses are getting unaffordable, but that’s a pretty cool deal if you refinanced at 2.9% five years ago. Nothing a little conservative personal responsibility can’t solve. It’s not that bad, you can fly above it. Maybe you should get offline and touch grass. And even if you convince your friend that these problems are real, what are they supposed to do? Are we supposed to vote for Republicans harder? And then you get into a much trickier conversation. At a certain point you have to acknowledge that actually, the Republicans are the ones doing this to us. Why? Because the Republican Party’s purpose is to slowly fail. In frontier America, including in the Utah territory, the federal government employed Indian Agents. These agents were sent to establish official relations with the local Indians — to create a formal channel that the Indians were supposed to follow if they had a grievance with the settlers or the government. Of course, the intent of federal policy was always to move in and expropriate the Indians — but the Indian Agent’s job was to create the illusion of a diplomatic process — to continually make promises they couldn’t keep, to vent political energy, to prevent alternative constituencies from forming. Today, that’s the Republican Party’s job: to negotiate the terms of your surrender. The party recruits ambitious men who want a career in politics. They ensure that those careers depend on the national party infrastructure, the donor networks, and the consultant class. These are people who like making friends, and making money, and being taken out to lunch. It is extremely cozy — for now — to be a Utah Republican politician who does not make waves. And not only that, the media will fawn over you, and tell you what a hero you are for abetting the rape of your country. Now, the Plains Indians were in an impossible situation, hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned — but our puzzle is, Heritage Americans are still more than half the country, and the overwhelming majority in Utah. They’re way more than half the police and armed forces. Our Indian Agents tend to be local boys — and from what I’ve seen, we’re not sending our best. Nothing about this feels inevitable. How did they convince us to do this to ourselves? Anti-Soviet dissidents in the Eastern Bloc faced the same confusion. The Soviets repressed the population with military force, but the actual officers and bureaucrats, the functionaries of the regime in East Germany were mostly East Germans; Poles in Poland, Hungarians in Hungary. In his essay, Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel talks about the greengrocer who hangs his “Workers of the World Unite” poster in the shop window — not because he’s a committed Communist, but because it’s simply what you do — and if you didn’t do it, it would be noticed. Do you remember the black square thing, during BLM? That whole operation was designed around the scrolling grid of an Instagram feed — the whole grid was supposed to be blacked out, so that if anyone was saying anything else, it would stick out, and you could mob them and berate them for not complying. According to Havel, the greengrocer is not expressing a political opinion. What he’s saying is: “I, the greengrocer, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” If that doesn’t sound like Utah. It’s stunning how much of Havel’s essay, written in the Brezhnev era of the declining Soviet Union, maps to what we experience today, from the hypocritical language of human rights, to the judicial corruption, to the underhanded methods of punishing dissent — by threatening your job or your education, encouraging petty harassment, and so forth. It’s almost one-for-one — except instead of being conquered by Soviet tanks, we somehow voted for this. How did they convince us to do this to ourselves? Well, we talked a bit about how that happened last month — how the federal conquest of Utah created an institutional anxiety to conform — a tyranny of the people, by the people. But the question now is, how do you break people of that? You’ve tried talking to your friends and neighbors, and you’ve seen how that has gone. It’s easy to get discouraged. But go read Havel’s essay. Havel was a playwright — he ran little gatherings smaller than this one, under a far more heavy-handed regime, with a much more openly corrupt political and legal system — and he won. Havel was the first elected president of Czechoslovakia. I’ve spent the last five years — since we started EXIT — studying any parallel movement that I thought might have anything to teach us. How did Havel go from being an underground essayist, running little reading groups and secret university classes, to taking the Presidency almost unopposed in 1989? How did Lech Walesa go from being an electrician in an illegal trade union, to executing a 12-million-man general strike that crippled the Soviet government and ended the occupation of Poland? How did the Founding Fathers go from anon poasters to fielding a conventional army and beating down the most powerful empire on the planet? Some of you are anon poasters. Maybe you’ve been talking about politics on the internet for a long time, and from here that kind of victory may seem far away. It feels like ideas don’t matter — it doesn’t matter how clear it is, or how right you are — your grandma is still going to vote for Spencer Cox, and Spencer Cox (or someone just like him, he’s not the point, there’s a thousand of them) is going to make sure that your dispossession is orderly, quiet, and complete. But if your model of victory is that your grandma needs to get redpilled, you need to understand: that’s just not what politics is — neither transformative politics, nor even ordinary get-out-the-vote politics. It’s not that ideas don’t matter, or that poasting never leads to power: in fact, almost all parallel movements start with poasting. The Founding Fathers had their pamphleteering, the Soviet dissidents had samizdat, the Ayatollah smuggled cassette tapes. But the Founding Fathers didn’t win by getting the median American colonist to read their essays on political theory. They won by mobilizing an energetic and dedicated minority to contest the regime’s legitimacy, and then contest its sovereignty — and that’s what politics is. Each of these parallel movements began by building fraternal, economic, and social institutions among a small group of like-minded people, to replace the public square that repression had hollowed out. They formed book clubs, neighborhood watches, mutual aid societies, trade unions, underground universities — they got to know and trust each other by building things that they knew their community needed. That’s what EXIT is doing as a fraternal organization, and Constitutional Action is the logical next step. You don’t break the greengrocer’s habit of obedience by getting him to read your Substack. You break his habit of obedience by showing him an alternative way of life, by proving to him that he does not have to lie. That’s what it means to contest the regime’s legitimacy — you contest its status as the default, because the greengrocer, or your grandma, is always going to do the default thing. And the methods that a movement uses to contest legitimacy are, by definition, moral, lawful, and popular. They have to be, because that’s what legitimacy is . You have to demonstrate, by doing what the regime purports to do, and promises to do, that all its compromises, all its hypocrisies, all its excuses for inaction, are lies. President Bukele didn’t just call the Right in El Salvador cowards and hypocrites — he proved that they were cowards and hypocrites by doing in a matter of months what they said could never be done. They said that attacking El Salvador’s crime and gang problem would be too unpopular, it would collapse the economy, it would trigger international sanctions, it would start a civil war. Bukele showed the world that those politicians weren’t letting it happen because they were prudent or high-minded or pragmatic — and they sure as hell weren’t thinking about the rights of their citizens — they were just on the take. And now he is the most popular head of state in the world by far. But he couldn’t just say it — he had to prove it. Lech Walesa was able to mobilize 12 million Polish workers because he showed them what it looked like when an institution actually organized and empowered workers — and by doing that, he showed them just how fraudulent the communists were. He broke the back of the regime’s legitimacy — but not just with a criticism. He had to show them. I don’t know if you’ve read your county’s Republican Party platform, but it’s actually pretty good. In Havel’s words: ”If an outside observer who knew nothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only its laws, he would be utterly incapable of understanding what we were complaining about.” The Republican Party claims to believe in states resisting Federal power in accordance with the Tenth Amendment. They claim to believe in self-defense, traditional marriage, secure elections, public safety, and parents rights in education. They claim to oppose illegal immigration, birthright citizenship, and benefits for illegal aliens. Now — you live in a state completely controlled by these people, from top to bottom — but they tell you that the reason you can’t have literally anything that they claim to want is that your Republican politicians are just that principled, that committed to civic virtue. Of course that’s a joke — but we have to prove it. So Constitutional Action is developing candidates for office who will act within their constitutional authority, to demonstrate what is possible in this state. Anti-communists in Eastern Europe had the idea of life in America, or Munich, or Paris, they had smuggled Japanese electronics and Led Zeppelin albums, to prove that life could be different. This was a mixed blessing, because it also meant that many people who wanted freedom and vitality simply left the country. But freedom-loving people all over the nation are watching Utah right now — because for us, there is no Munich or Paris — there is nowhere to run. If we cannot hold the line in Utah, we cannot hold the line anywhere. But this is also our opportunity. We can make Salt Lake City the most beautiful, vital, free city in the country — the example of what is possible to the whole nation. And we can do it by restoring the principles that made America the City on the Hill in the first place. And in the meantime, we will do the work as citizens. Friends who are watching Utah right now are ready to publicize corruption as we expose it. We will clean up the squalor that the state refuses to clean up, and help the people they refuse to help — and we will document what we find, and ask them publicly, in city council meetings and town halls, why they refuse to help. We want the people to see — and, just as important, we want you to see — the people with names and faces who are suffering in your state — and the people, with names and faces, who are inviting and intensifying that suffering — sometimes for money, sometimes for much less. We will make them look us in the eye. We will use state public records law to obtain information that Utah Republicans don’t want publicized, about exactly who is being arrested in our state and who is being released, and for what crimes. We will investigate fraudulent refugee and homeless initiatives connected to elected officials in the state, and expose the channels by which Utah Republicans get paid to betray their people. We will monitor public schools and libraries to ensure that they act in harmony with the intent of state law, and we will hold administrators publicly accountable when they cover for abusive and anti-American teachers. We will phone bank and knock doors to oppose the retention of corrupt judges, and to ensure that Blake Moore is not allowed to sell his Congressional seat to the radical left and then buy another one. The purpose of all this is to punch a hole in the Republican apparatus of managed decline — To bring state and national attention to incumbents who are used to doing their work in the dark. And into that gap, we send our own people — leaders who will act to solve the problems we expose. We will prove that Utah’s actual values can win, and that our people can govern themselves according to those values — that decline is not inevitable. We will prove, in fact, as the Eastern Europeans did, that it is our enemies who are on borrowed time: that it is the lying — the absurd lying — that cannot go on forever. And when it breaks — as lies always break — we will have built a city, and a state, and a people who point the way for America, as America once did for the world. EXIT News * Upcoming EXIT Group Calls * 5/19: Joost Strydom, CEO of Orania , will join us to discuss how they built a parallel polis in South Africa. (2PM ET/11AM PT) * Please note that this will be an afternoon call , to accommodate Mr. Strydom’s time zone. At the regular time (9PM ET/6PM PT) we will have a postgame members-only conversation, and discuss the establishment of the EXIT HQ/Clubhouse in Utah Valley . * 5/26: Nick Weil will discuss the art of the Boomer Whisperer * 6/2: Investment Showcase — an opportunity for EXIT entrepreneurs to give a report on their progress. (If you’d like to be included in the showcase, please reach out ASAP.) * Events * 5/16: Washington, DC Meetup * 5/16: Sandy, UT Hike * 5/18: New York City Meetup * 5/18: Dallas Meetup * 5/19: Manchester, NH Meetup and speaking event with Free State Party * 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event * 6/5: San Jose Meetup * 6/6: San Francisco Lunch * 6/19: Denver Meetup * 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event Below the paywall here : Cocktail hour invites for supporting subscribers in: * Washington DC (5/16) * Dallas (5/18) * New York City (5/18) * Boston (5/19) * San Francisco (6/5) * Denver (6/19) EXIT cocktail hours are the best way to get to know the guys in your area, and decide if full membership in 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
May 1, 202632 min
John Carter of Mars: Canada's descent into post-national gangsterism
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us John Carter joins us to discuss: * Prospects for Alberta secession * Bilingualism as gibs for Quebec in federal govt * Why Poilievre was crushed by Mark Carney * Chinese money laundering in China through banks and casinos * How the occupational class sells the commons to India, China * Emergent identity groups forming as geographic borders evaporate * The blockbusting of Canada * The role of fraternities and mutual aid societies in post-Westphalian society EXIT News: * Weekly Calls: * This week (4/28), we heard from Alex Petkas on lessons from the founding of Sparta and Rome . Recording coming soon. * Next week (5/5), we will discuss values-aligned venture capital . * Constitutional Action meeting in American Fork was a great success — we filled up the veterans’ hall with about 100 people. Video soon to come. * We will meet again Saturday, May 30th for a neighborhood beautification project in Utah Valley. Sign up here to join Constitutional Action and receive updates. * Huge thanks to our volunteers, who have already begun assisting with logistics, security, A/V, web design, legal, and more. * Below the paywall , invites for EXIT subscriber cocktail hours in: * Washington, DC (5/16) * New York, NY (5/18) * Boston, MA (5/19) — JCB speaking at a Free State Party event in Manchester, NH. * San Francisco (6/5) * Denver (6/19)
April 16, 202628 min
Q&A: Johann Kurtz on reconnecting wealth, vision, and ambition (Re-release)
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us (Note: We posted this recording last week in error and withdrew it. This is a re-release to ensure that subscribers receive a working link in their inbox.) Johann Kurtz is the author of Leaving a Legacy and the Becoming Noble Substack. His work, like EXIT’s, is the restoration of the multigenerational family as a sovereign institution — a Great House. He has left his tech job in London and relocated to Romania to write and consult for high-net-worth families full-time. In this Q&A, we discuss: * Johann’s relocation to Romania, and Eastern Europe as a place to build * How his experience in the elite tech world colors his new project * Why there seems to be so little imagination and ambition among the wealthy * Categories of patronage that are still alive in high-net-worth circles * Strategies that have worked in reactivating patronage relationships The West is in the political and cultural doldrums because wealth has become totally decoupled from vision and ambition . The skills, temperament, and worldview that create great wealth seem almost anticorrelated with the will to change the world. As the world becomes more volatile, much of this fake wealth and status will either evaporate or change hands . We have to build institutions that capture as many of these existing streams of wealth and power as possible, and convert them into something that will matter on the other side. Next week, we will discuss Becoming a Pillar of Your Community: power is built by becoming indispensable to real people with names and faces. To join us on the call, apply here: Below the paywall , Invites for paid subscribers to attend EXIT events in: * Columbus, OH (4/18) * Dallas, TX (4/20) * Chattanooga, TN (4/24) * American Fork, UT (4/30) — Constitutional Action Speaking Event * Washington, DC (5/16) * New York, NY (5/18) * Boston, MA (5/19) * San Francisco (6/5) * Denver (6/27)
April 10, 202625 min
You Don't Get To Know
This is a transcript. Recording above. Many on the left (and certain factions of the right) have been freaking out over Trump’s latest Genocidal Madman post. He says: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen. WHO KNOWS. We will find out tonight. One of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Iran.” EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here: So there was speculation about whether Trump was going to nuke Tehran, or deploy the space lasers, or demonic UFO zero-point-energy anti-gravity wonder weapons. And of course, nothing happened, because nothing ever happens. But many are still Deeply Concerned about the President’s Rhetoric. The evening after he posted this on Truth Social, it looks like the Iranians, mediated by Pakistan, came to the table and at least in principle agreed to a two-week ceasefire. That will depend on whether or not Bibi wants a ceasefire. We will see how it goes, but the Plan Trusters are saying, “See, Trump was crazy like a fox. He freaked you out, he freaked them out, and that is why everybody came back to the table.” So, during Operation Giant Lance in 1969, President Nixon sent nuclear-armed B-52s to press Soviet airspace for three days. During this time, Kissinger is on the phone with the Kremlin nonstop, warning them that Nixon was drunk and dangerously unstable and his finger was on the button. In the same year, the North Koreans shot down a spy plane and killed 31 American crewmen — a story you probably did not hear about in history class, and that is part of the point I am going to make here. The story is: Nixon is loaded. He is furious. He orders a tactical nuclear strike on the North Koreans. But apparently he is incapacitated enough that Kissinger is able to step in, countermand the order, and let Nixon sleep it off. In the morning, he thinks better of it. There are also accounts that Nixon was basically drunk throughout the entire 1973 Yom Kippur War, which was a three-week period. Some of these stories should probably be understood as damnatio memoriae , a retrospective discrediting of Nixon by his enemies. But it seems to be true that, number one, Nixon really did drink a lot, and number two, he deliberately cultivated his enemies’ belief that he was a volatile and irrational actor. Now, what was different back then is that this whole drama took place with Nixon on the Red Phone, one-on-one with the Kremlin, and the public either never heard about it or heard about it years later. Whereas Trump is playing Drunk Nixon live on the timeline. But in both cases, the strategy only works if the Russians, or the North Koreans, or the Iranians — who study American leaders much more carefully than the median American voter — have good reason to believe in this irrationality. There is no way for the American leader to wink at the voters, or even at his staff, to say, “I am running dread game, everything is going to be okay.” And not only that, but you cannot just deploy this tactic when you need it. Nixon needed to be a guy who drank a lot for this tactic to work. Trump does not drink, but he is definitely mercurial, and in addition to that being a true fact about him, he has also cultivated that as an image. So if you got got by the most recent Genocidal Madman tweet, that is not, in principle, an absurd thing to believe. He is definitely volatile when it is smart to be volatile, but he is also just volatile all the time. I cannot be sure that is what he was doing, or what was going through his head, or whether that was a smart thing to do, or even whether it is a good idea in general. We know various leaders have done it — but, given our information environment, even looking back, it is hard to say a whole lot. For instance, in the 2017 Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man, my button is bigger” thing: we, the public, still do not know — may never know — the exact contours of North Korea’s nuclear program. We have some basic information about what they were doing, the big visible tests, but we do not actually know how they felt about what Trump said, or even really what they did about it. It does seem like they went back to launching test rockets. And even looking back as far as the late sixties and early seventies, it is pretty tough to prove the counterfactual in some of these nuclear standoff situations. We still do not know exactly what the escalation calculus was on either side in 1969 or 1973.We do not really know what Nixon’s real goals were. We do not know actually how drunk he was. Some facts are better corroborated across people with different axes to grind, and maybe that is useful. But that is the point: you just don’t get to know. When this latest thing popped off on February 28th, everybody rushed onto Twitter with the Takes: whether this was righteous or wicked, whether it was prudent or foolish — all of this predicated on: * our respective stockpiles and output of munitions * the escalation ladder * the penetrability of Iran’s underground sites * how resilient their leadership bench was to a decapitation strike * where the KC-135s were * whether the transponders were turned on or off * what we know about Iranian sleeper cells And of course, it was all b******t. Nobody knew anything. If you were closely monitoring the situation, you were anti -informed — the information you received was worse than useless. And it was just bizarre to see so many Based and Redpilled guys talk about this war as if the public ought to know or could know, ought to be consulted or even could be consulted in theory about it. We are all talking about whether or not it is a good idea, and it is like — we do not even know what “it” is. They do not tell us what they plan to do. They do not tell us what their objectives are. They do not tell us whether they think it is likely to succeed, and what justification they have for that belief. They do not tell us what they think we could gain. They do not tell us what they think we could lose. They do not tell us what we might lose if we do not do anything. And that is the top-level strategic summary stuff. They are definitely not going to tell you where the submarines are and where the B-52s are, and how many JDAMs we have got and how many Shaheds they have got, and what about the radars. All that stuff is classified to the gills for the obvious reason that you cannot let the enemy know your mind. You may or may not have a good plan, but if you have a good plan, the very act of consulting the public about it makes it unworkable. None of this is to argue that any of this was prudent or morally justified — just that all of the information that you or I would use to make that kind of assessment is not available. And that is fine. A lot of this is entertainment. If you like your unplugged controller, you can keep your unplugged controller. But it got me thinking about how media-managed mass democracy seems to be changing. The last war we officially declared — which is, not coincidentally, the last major war we were able to conclusively win — was World War II. I am going to suggest two reasons why that is the case: why World War II was the last major war, and why, to the extent that subsequent military interventions have been successful, they were successful. First reason is information control, and the second reason is information tempo. In the 1930s, in the run-up to World War II, the Roosevelt administration had either captured or, to some extent, invented the modern apparatus of narrative control through mass media. The public was not consulted about the attack on Pearl Harbor. They had no time to theorize about what FDR knew and when he knew it — which, if they had had that kind of time, some serious doubts may have arisen. But instead, on the front page of every morning newspaper, they were given a single data dump that said: here is what happened, here is what it means to you, here is what is going to be done about it. And from then on, every piece of information they received about the progress and prospects of that war was heavily censored — literally just marketing materials pulled from this curated reserve of facts and stories, or just made stuff up. That was what you got. All you knew was what they told you. Our entry into World War II — actually, just prior to our entry into World War II, 1940 — was when the government inaugurated the military intelligence classification system, which now codifies and in fact guarantees that the public cannot be provided the means to render informed decisions about foreign policy. And of course, as we seem to learn more and more every day, foreign policy and domestic policy in the Empire are not easily separable. As our constitutional conservative autist friends point out, the United States was never intended to be a democracy. The founders recognized that government by plebiscite is not only undesirable but impossible. And so it was a republic, a representative form of government. Various politicians and thinkers have been more or less honest about this, but there has always been a hypocrisy and unreality to this idea of popular sovereignty, because our whole system of government was carefully structured around the recognition that the voter is actually stupid — and very much in the way, actively unhelpful when any actual decisions need to be made. You can understand the structure of the government as basically trying to get as much of the legitimizing function of democratic accountability with as little practical exposure to actual democratic accountability as possible. The representative, at the time, was a latency buffer to give the system time to think. If all these decisions are being made and disseminated on horseback, and your representative has to ride to Washington and go behind a locked door with no recording equipment to make these decisions, then the system is capable of OODA loops that extend across weeks or even months without the possibility of any disruption from the public, or hostile domestic or foreign agitators of the public. So if you are not familiar with that term, an OODA loop is a decision-making model used in the U.S. military. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. The speed with which you are able to * Gather relevant intelligence from your surroundings — that is Observe. * Make sense of that intelligence, those facts, and your relationship to them — that is the Orient step * Decide what to do, and then * Act: do what you have decided to do. The speed with which you can do that, and then iterate — act, then observe the consequences of the action, orient yourself with that, decide again, act again — that is your operational tempo. This framework is used in the military because it is specifically valuable for contested, competitive decision-making environments. If I can get through an OODA loop faster than you can, then I can change the terms of the game, change the environment, so that you are deciding and acting on the basis of out-of-date observations and orientation. That is called “getting inside your OODA loop.” So if you are trying to prosecute a war as a mass democracy, as an elected official, one of the ways your enemy can get inside your OODA loop is by manipulating public opinion — partly because maybe you are worried about the next election, but also conscientious objection, civil disobedience, protests. The reason I lay that out is that communications and transportation technology have sucked all this friction out of the system that was actually load-bearing for that system — particularly a system predicated on the fiction of popular sovereignty. You could draw an analogy to the hypocrisy and fakery around immigration. When Europeans had to take a three-month boat ride to get here, and everyone else it was six months or nine months or not at all, you could afford to say things like, “Oh yeah, we want everybody. Anybody who wants to can come here” — because realistically, who was going to come here was heavily, heavily selected. Now that we have airplanes and literally anybody can come here, one of the biggest political questions of our time is: “okay, did we really mean ‘ anybody’ ”? And all these conversations about freedom of religion that we had between basically Northern European Protestants and a handful of Catholics — we are having to say, okay, does that actually universalize? Does that actually generalize to every conceivable religious belief on planet Earth? All these advances in communications and transportation technology are pulling all this really useful friction out of the system and forcing us to confront — maybe it is not even fair to call it hypocrisy — but just that we came up with an inherently local solution, and maybe some of the Founders thought it would generalize, but it turns out not to generalize. With respect to fighting wars: on horseback, our political system worked. With telegraph and rail and steamships, things got pretty shaky. That is a non-trivial part of what incited the Civil War: Americans got to know each other, especially Northern and Southern Americans. They realized they did not like each other. This dissonance of values and custom, that previously only a handful of rich, highly mobile people had had to confront — well, now you are seeing the bad things going on in Charleston being disseminated almost in real time in Connecticut and Boston. During the war, as much as we talk about how the North had the advantage in rail lines and telegraph lines and logistics, they were also challenged back home by these communication changes. Suddenly the speed and detail with which wartime hardships could be exposed, or tactical decisions could be second-guessed, or diplomatic maneuvering could be criticized — all of those things were suddenly at an order of magnitude higher resolution and crossing the country in a day instead of a matter of weeks. And so Lincoln says, not without justification, “We have got to win this war.” Suspends habeas corpus, locks up a lot of journalists, tells the newspapers what to print, and wins the war. As technology pulls friction, pulls buffer out of the system, these competing political directives are now grinding metal on metal. The political promises we have made to legitimize the state grind against the actual practical need for the state to get things done. Lincoln solved that the hard way: the insight that FDR discovered — or that he represented, his team, his philosophy, his government — what they discovered was that this apparatus of narrative generation was actually capturable, and that it was actually cheaper, faster, more efficient to capture that narrative apparatus than it was to fight it and coerce compliance. And so for basically the whole of the 20th century, we had instantaneous, centralized mass communication, which meant that you could have basically rock-solid, in some sense genuine, popular sovereignty. Genuine popular legitimacy. Genuine popular buy-in — because all the raw materials of that public opinion, all they knew was what you told them. And all the discourse, all the terms of every debate, was this very clear one or two or three options that you set up. You sometimes tell your kids, “What vegetable do you want with dinner? Do you want the broccoli or do you want the asparagus?” And apparently it works just about as well with grownups as it does with kids, because for almost a hundred years, Americans really thought of themselves as having these informed opinions and making these choices, doing their duty as a citizen. The problem that had been caused by the speed and the depth of this communications technology was solved by its centralization. And in fact, the state now had more popular legitimacy than ever. But you can draw a pretty clear line from our combat effectiveness and operational constraints in World War II to Vietnam, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and now potentially Iran. The more the public demanded to be involved in the war effort, the less successful it was. This dimension of OODA loops helps you see why some U.S. military interventions seem to work and others do not. For an operation to work now, it has to take place within a single news cycle. Panama, Venezuela, Grenada, Desert Storm — all these things could be presented to the public as basically, “Hey, by the way, we did this and it is over.” Certain dedicated, semi-professional anti-war constituencies are going to be mad about those things, but basically nobody else is, because the news cycle just moves on. This is one reason why the U.S. military and intelligence community have really transformed, doctrinally and structurally, toward this very SOF-heavy, very spook-heavy, cloak-and-dagger, in-and-out, overwhelming-force model of warfighting — because they are trying to extract an entire war’s worth of political outcomes out of a single news cycle. But you can see how that forces the empire to teeter on this very, very tiny balance point. We have got this enormous global apparatus of intelligence and force projection, all built around making sure that problems never get so big that we cannot handle them with a couple of Black Hawks over a weekend — which means we actually have to care what is going on everywhere in the world. We actually have to be paranoid and invasive, because it is actually not that uncommon or that difficult for some foreign power structure somewhere to get irrevocably too big for us to handle that way. We are dominant in that kind of engagement, and it looks like we could probably handle ourselves in a strategic nuclear exchange: but everything in that “messy middle” — the architecture on which our political legitimacy is built just does not support that. And it is not because the voters are directly consulted from moment to moment. It is because the institution cannot lie to the public without lying to itself. The Iraq War is the best example of this. In the run-up and execution of the Iraq War, the DOD could not maintain a clean separation between its public justifications and its internal planning. The institution had to become dumber in order to stay publicly coherent. And as the information environment gets more transparent, more decentralized, this need for coherence with the public story — and so this need to get stupid — gets worse. You can frame all that narrative control and censorship and classification and dirty tricks as a sinister conspiracy to abolish democratic accountability and practice — and certainly it did that — but it is hard to say exactly what the alternatives were. You can say, “I want a democracy where my voice is heard and I am kept informed and the politicians work for me — that also wins wars.” And you just cannot have one. Democracies do not win wars, especially not globally networked, instantaneous, real-time democracies. This certainly is not an endorsement of the war — I think it is going to go badly — but it is a condemnation of spectacle. You should not take a posture with respect to these things that assumes you are a stakeholder in the decision, that they are looking for your consent, that your assessment matters, that the outcome depends on whether enough people believe the right thing. That whole discourse is a malfunctioning control system. I make this point a lot, but in The Forest Passage , Ernst Jünger talks about plebiscites and referenda and elections, and how the real purpose of all the propaganda — the reason they want you to participate in these processes — is not to persuade you of a particular set of facts necessarily, but to get you invested in questions that you cannot personally influence, in which you are not actually involved. Because if all that psychic energy is devoted to the global and the spectacular, and you begin to feel “this is what matters, something must be done about this” — well, the only way to satisfy that psychological need is to pick a team. But I say it is a malfunctioning control system because that narrative ecosystem is so fragmented, so decentralized, so leaderless that letting you play with your unplugged controller no longer gives you this feeling of buy-in. “I am a responsible citizen doing my civic duty to become informed about the events I am going to vote on” — it sort of still matters in the sense that free speech still matters a lot to the architecture of political legitimacy. But for the most part, the Take Economy, particularly on matters of foreign policy where all of the operational details are classified, is just running on inertia. It is spinning on its own internal logic. It is partly a form of entertainment. It is partly a surrogate activity, a form of masturbation. And obviously, I am not trying to pretend I am above either of those things. But the more I become aware of this dynamic, the more I can see what is happening, I am thinking two things: First: this enormous architecture of the empire is just obsolete in a hundred different ways. Its contradictions, its imprecisions — you could call them manufacturing tolerances — there used to be a lot more buffer between the components. Now it is just metal on metal, and it is going to break. And the second thing I am realizing is that I want to convert as much of this fake stuff that I have — including, to some degree, attention in this fake, jerk-off, Take Economy — into something real. Something that is going to matter as all the fake stuff burns off. I want to find the domain of action where I am not playing with an unplugged controller. And that does not mean think small or abandon the political. It just means to acknowledge where you really are and what you really have the power to influence. We were having a conversation in the EXIT chat about this latest outrage where the guy who stabbed Iryna Zarutska, after however many dozens of arrests and trials, this time was found not competent. And of course it is wrong and it makes us angry. I have said in detail publicly what I think about all that, how I think we got here. But the question I ask myself when we are expressing anger is always: what are we doing here? What do we hope to accomplish? Are we building capacity or burning capacity? Does this make us stronger or weaker? The Take Economy and discussing these outrages, or discussing the difficult realities of our political situation — including, in the Iran case, our entanglements with Israel — those discussions are good when they lead you to organize, when they inspire productive action. One of the things I hope to accomplish with EXIT is to create that bridge from impotence and rage and demoralization and fantasies about violence to real action and the accumulation of real power. One of the really bad dynamics that emerges in this Take Economy is that, since nobody is doing anything, nobody has any real power, the status game and the way you signal seriousness is paradoxically by how alienating and how unrealistic and how fantastic your take can be. The problem with these fantasies is not that they are extreme, or radical or even, in principle, that they involve force: the problem is that they are fantasies. And the more you indulge them and ruminate on them and insist on them as tribal signifiers, the farther you get from actual power. I do not know if anybody engineered it that way, if that is the explicit design intent of the take economy, but it is super convenient that that is what it does. And so we have this situation where the whole country, but particularly young men, are intensely radicalized in their capacity as consumers and observers of the spectacle. But one of our guys in the civic engagement chat just posted a ballot for the Republican Party primary in his county, and there is no candidate for sheriff . It is a position of enormous political power, basically right up there with the DA in terms of how much it determines what your actual practical rights are in your community. And even a zero-dollar campaign with a handful of volunteers can impose immense costs and force the enemy to deploy resources — but we are just giving it away. One of the guys put together a church beautification and garbage cleanup for a downtown cathedral in his area. He was immediately made chair of a GOP party committee and got a job at the courthouse. All this stuff is lying around. But The Discourse is engineered to keep you talking and thinking about what you feel like doing instead of what you actually can do. You can understand why people want to live there: when you wake up in “the Desert of the Real”, the scope of your actual opportunities can feel painfully small — especially compared with thinking of yourself as a statesman on the Internet. When people say Twitter is like a PvP video game, there is a sense in which that is literally true. And especially as the real world gets more volatile and uncertain and difficult to navigate, the seduction of these surrogate activities gets stronger and stronger. But the way to think about that is that the competition has all the same problems. This fragmentation, this fear, this disorder, this lassitude — it means that a handful of high-morale, high-trust, dedicated, loyal guys who deserve to be in charge can make themselves the only game in town. Jünger published his book in 1950, and you could feel his resignation in the face of these immense abstractions. The concept of the Forest Passage, the thesis of the book, is basically: how do you survive as a human being — how do you keep your soul — in the face of this colossal, superhuman machinery? But the good news for us is that that machinery is failing. All those abstractions no longer command any loyalty from ordinary people. It is all just stasis, inertia, incumbency. While our practical zone of control in the real world may be small, the potential to expand that zone of control — especially for organized people — has never been greater. And the price is just to put down the simulacra, put down the surrogate activities, take stock of your position in the real world, and get organized. That includes political organizing: EXIT guys are doing phone banking, fundraising, door-knocking for aligned candidates here in Utah with the Constitutional Action Society. But it also includes economic organizing: we do an entrepreneurship call, real estate, AI; we have done a machine learning boot camp, a business incubator. It also includes organizing as families — getting our wives and kids together. The social dimension of who your family spends time with, who your kids grow up around, is a massively important point of leverage. So that is how we are taking action. That is how we are organizing for power. We have 325 active guys now. We have monthly meetups in a dozen cities. And it just could not be more obvious to me that this is where the energy is. These are the guys who are going to figure it out. As everything else falls apart, these are the guys who are going to carry the fire. But we need to get a lot bigger. We need to find a lot more of that kind of guy. If you want to get involved, check us out at exitgroup.us . This is a public episode. 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April 7, 202628 min
Q&A: Johann Kurtz on reconnecting wealth, vision, and ambition
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us Johann Kurtz is the author of Leaving a Legacy and the Becoming Noble Substack. His work, like EXIT’s, is the restoration of the multigenerational family as a sovereign institution — a Great House. He has left his tech job in London and relocated to Romania to write and consult for high-net-worth families full-time. In this Q&A, we discuss: * Johann’s relocation to Romania, and Eastern Europe as a place to build * How his experience in the elite tech world colors his new project * Why there seems to be so little imagination and ambition among the wealthy * Categories of patronage that are still alive in high-net-worth circles * Strategies that have worked in reactivating patronage relationships The West is in the political and cultural doldrums because wealth has become totally decoupled from vision and ambition . The skills, temperament, and worldview that create great wealth seem almost anticorrelated with the will to change the world. As the world becomes more volatile, much of this fake wealth and status will either evaporate or change hands . We have to build institutions that capture as many of these existing streams of wealth and power as possible, and convert them into something that will matter on the other side. Next week, we will discuss Becoming a Pillar of Your Community: power is built by becoming indispensable to real people with names and faces. To join us on the call, apply here: Below the paywall , Invites for paid subscribers to attend EXIT events in: * Columbus, OH (4/18) * Dallas, TX (4/20) * Chattanooga, TN (4/24) * American Fork, UT (4/30) — Constitutional Action Speaking Event * Washington, DC (5/16) * New York, NY (5/18) * Boston, MA (5/19) * San Francisco (6/5) * Denver (6/27)
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