EXIT, Three Years In

Three years ago today, we launched EXIT.

In July of 2021, the Biden Administration ordered all large US employers to implement COVID vaccine and testing mandates.

Millions of small business owners had been kneecapped the previous year by lockdowns and travel restrictions, and told that their businesses didn’t qualify for relief as billions went to PPP “loans” for companies named “Reparations LLC”. They had watched as their churches were shuttered as non-essential, while mobs of thousands gather with the blessing of the government and media to burn down their cities.

But the vaccine mandates in late 2021 were the point when a lot of ordinary, productive, apolitical people realized that there was no way to “keep your head down” enough to be left alone.

Then there were the antifa doxxing rings targeting guys like me, who had been running our mouths with sloppy opsec for years just to stay sane in our cubicle jobs. (Targeting us with the direct connivance of Western intelligence, btw.)

I got doxxed on August 1, 2021, and fired on August 3, and dozens of online friends reached out to ask if there was some way they could help.

I was one of about a dozen guys who had been rolled up by an antifa group out of Utah, specifically targeting conservative Latter-day Saints on Twitter. I remember watching helplessly as my friends, especially those with distinctive names, were permanently cut off from their professional ambitions. Unlike me, some of these guys had jobs they loved and were good at.

I wanted to help my friends — but more than that, I was just disgusted with the whole situation. “Cancellation” was just one small piece of this enormous infrastructure of coercion, this prison that had been built up around normal people while they slept.

Most people don’t say cancelable things on the internet, but tens of millions of people saw ideological incompetence and hysteria spreading through their workplaces. They saw their taxes go to public schools that taught their children racial self-loathing, and deliberately inculcated perversion. They saw the constant drumbeat of state messaging steering them and their families, in particular, toward sterility, alienation, and extinction.

I appreciated the personal concern that people expressed for me in my situation, but I could tell that they felt the same way — they wanted to help me out, but mostly they just couldn’t stand watching these people take scalps anymore, and they wanted to do something about it.

So, instead of taking one of the opportunities that they offered, I asked them if they’d like to work on this problem together.

What kind of outside leverage could we build to push back on these systems of coercion? Which dependencies are our enemies using to extort compliance from us, and what can we do to remove those dependencies?

I had 70 people sign up in the first two weeks, so I knew we were on to something, but I didn’t exactly have a plan. For the first few weeks, we had one call on Tuesday nights, where I basically asked the guys what they needed and how we could help each other.

The most obvious tool was entrepreneurship. If you control the capital you use to earn a living, you’re a much harder target for a mandate or an HR complaint. Because our enemies have had to build these systems of coercion as loopholes and kludges of a robust legal system, it is actually relatively simple (though not easy) to move out of the way of their targeting and enforcement apparatus. People who can earn money from a laptop are especially robust to this kind of coercion, because they can work for anyone in the world, from anywhere in the world.

So we put together some mastermind-format accountability calls, where the guys talked through their efforts to build a business or learn marketable skills. Now we have twelve calls a week on various EXIT-relevant topics: entrepreneurship, tech/crypto, AI, fitness, real estate, marketing, content creation, etc.

Eventually we added meetups, and I started getting on a plane once a month to connect the guys in various cities. So far, we’ve gotten together in 16 cities in the US, and many of our strongest places (especially Dallas, Salt Lake, and Seattle) get together monthly without me.

There’s nothing magic about the format, but the quality of the guys is extraordinary.

There’s an element of serendipity to any network — what any individual gets out of the group is a function of their background, their aspirations, what they put in, etc. But talented, high-agency, values-aligned guys don’t need that much structure. The main thing is just to get them together.

We’ve reached a scale at which you can find pretty much any expertise inside the group. The guys have built dozens of businesses together, many of which now serve the group itself.

One of the benefits of living through a colossal expulsion of the honest, talented, and competent is that these people are wildly underpriced. There are all sorts of crowns in the gutter.

The next phase is to build something together in the real world.

There are hard limits to how well you can get to know someone on a chat room or a Zoom call — and the new institutions we want to build require a common culture and a depth of social trust that can’t be built that way.

So, on September 1, I am moving my family to Austin, Texas, to establish a permanent EXIT headquarters, and pilot a new kind of social club.

The private clubs of the 20th century jettisoned everything that made them timeless and powerful (exclusivity, loyalty, and human cultivation) in favor of a list of old-school recreational amenities (nobody under 40 really plays golf anymore) — and a clientele defined entirely by willingness to pay. The prices keep out the worst social dysfunction, but they don’t generate alignment, or the kind of trust that empires are built on.

But imagine a club where alignment could be expected and demanded — a group vetted by personal human judgment, and oriented toward building the sovereign institutions that our grandchildren will inherit.

A few of the amenities that the guys said they would want:

• Coworking and meeting space

• Dining and cooking space for family get-togethers

• Free weight gym and sparring space

• Steam room, sauna, plunge pools

• A lending library for titles that are “hard to find on Amazon”

• Shared IT infrastructure for starting up crypto and AI projects

• Outdoor grounds for hiking, shooting, fishing, etc.

It starts in Austin, because it has to start somewhere, but a club like this would easily be supportable by our guys in Dallas, Houston, Salt Lake City, Seattle. It’s the clear next step in the process of building alternative institutions — I hear about similar projects launching in New York and LA as well.

If you want to start building with us, join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• On last Tuesday’s full group call, we discussed the happenings in Nashville and what we can learn from the various parallel-economy projects in the works out there.

• If we want to win comprehensively, we’re going to have to take back the cities. Tonight (Tuesday 8/6), we will hear from an EXIT member on the network he has built in Austin through entrepreneurship and nonprofits, and particularly his case that Austin is flippable.

• Several of the guys spent last week hiking the Grand Canyon. We’ll hear about how it went tonight.

• An EXIT member announced last week that, after almost three years of work, his agency business has officially allowed him to jump ship from his W-2. In 2021, he was one of our earliest “hot seat” calls, where the group considered his predicament (facing an urgent vaccine mandate) and helped him work through his options. Very exciting to see him cross this threshold.

• Shaolin AI has successfully wrapped their second 6-month machine learning boot camp cohort. Next class begins in September. EXIT guys get a steep discount, so if you’re a member and you’re considering reskilling, reach out.

• I will be speaking at Nowhere Summit next month in Ecuador, hosted by our friends Ben Wilson (How to Take Over the World) and Alex Petkas (Cost of Glory).

• Cocktail hour invites for Salt Lake City (8/16), Houston (9/13), and Washington, DC (10/11) available 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.