My name in print again, two years later

When I saw my name in The Guardian for the first time, I couldn’t eat or sleep for two weeks.

The news broke on a Monday. Tuesday afternoon I was asked to leave the office, and on Wednesday morning I was fired.

I started googling around for “reputation management” services: $10,000 for the most basic package.

Couldn’t find a lawyer interested in my situation, and I knew I needed to be prepared for a minimum $50,000 commitment if I wanted to take it to court — a drop in the bucket for my employer, and catastrophic for me.

I could try to con my way into another corporate job, but I would always live with the fear of being found out again.

At minimum, I would have to give up talking politics altogether, forever — and even that might not be enough.

I had five kids, a mortgage, and six-figure student debt — no income, no health insurance, and no prospects. It was terrifying.

I called my friend Tanner Guzy for advice, and I remember uttering the following words:

• “I don’t know what I could do that anybody would pay for”

• “I’m not a ‘grindset’ guy — I don’t think I have the temperament to own a business”

• “I can’t think of anything I care about enough to put in the kind of hours that entrepreneurs have to work”

I had no idea at the time that I would hear some version of those three sentences almost every day for the next two years.

Tanner started by walking me through my assets and my obsessions. What connected the things I cared about most, the things I had to offer the world? (This is still the process that I use for guys who “don’t know what anyone would pay them to do”.)

First, my experience had taught me a few things about the Western system of ideological control.

The Cathedral, “the Regime”, the Blob — whatever you want to call the force that keeps the NGOs, the antifa goblins, the Fortune 500, and our corpselike political class marching in perfect lockstep all the time.

I had some ideas about the vulnerabilities in that system, and how we could get around it.

I didn’t know exactly what it would look like, but I knew that we would never be free unless we changed our relationship with corporate employers — that was our enemies’ only explicit, legal channel to punish dissident speech.

Responsible, normal people would have to reclaim control of the discourse, and that can’t happen as long as the price of speaking up is losing your mortgage and your health insurance.

It’s not about abandoning the corporate world altogether — but if we have no ability to provide for ourselves outside that world, we have no leverage to change it from within. We will always back down and accept what we’re given.

Second, I knew that I had attracted a remarkable group of guys who wanted to help me — but who also wanted to fight this battle, for themselves, for their kids, and for the country.

My friends said they would back my play, whatever it was — and two weeks after announcing the group, we had seventy guys in the group.

They came from every domain of expertise you could want; and more importantly, they were chomping at the bit to build. They wanted to launch projects, to share expertise, to get together.

I didn’t know enough to lead a group like this, but it didn’t matter — I found the experts I needed and built my business inside the group, just like everybody else.

We started with accountability calls for our individual side hustles and startups, then monthly networking meetups, then group projects.

Since that time, we’ve made tens of thousands of professional connections and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in startup capital for our guys. We’ve launched a boot camp, funded a movie, incubated dozens of small partnerships.

This week, my name was in the Guardian again — but this time, it was just another Monday.

My social and economic survival is no longer dependent on the good opinion of spiteful mutants in Portland.

Now, I work for those seventy guys who bought into EXIT, sight-unseen — who set me free, and made it all possible — and the hundreds who have joined since.

Now my life is about returning the favor: helping them build a life where they can push back confidently too — not just online but in their neighborhoods, their workplaces, their schools.

And individual businesses are just the beginning.

We’re building outside this system not only because it’s oppressive, but because it’s failing. EXIT is not just about making life in the regime more tolerable, but taking a short position — setting ourselves up to succeed as it declines.

The failures of faceless managerial society are clearer every day. What comes next will be built on human judgment — real relationships of trust and loyalty between human beings. We are building those bonds now, because we will need them later.

If you want to take a short position in this system, and start building for what’s next, join us at exitgroup.us.