The internet is real life.
Today marks the five-year anniversary of EXIT.
EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:
On the first week of August 2021, I was in my sixth year working an extremely fake job at a defense contractor.
I had just finished an even-faker-than-normal COVID MBA. The main thing I got out of it was a manufacturing logistics class that genuinely made me a little bit better at Starcraft.
I had spent almost my entire “career” tweeting, because there was nothing to do.
I worked for a while on the facility that held the F-35 production line: it’s a mile long, and I would just walk and tweet — keeping up a brisk pace so it looked like I was on my way somewhere — back and forth, for my entire 9/80 workday.
There was a period of about eight months in which I knew that I was going to be doxxed, and that there was basically no way I wasn’t going to get fired.
I knew, in the abstract, that I was going to lose my job, and probably that whole “career path” — and maybe corporate employment in general — but I remember that time as kind of dreamlike. What was there to do about it? Nothing.
I had no marketable skills or experience. None of the credentials I had accumulated were relevant to any real-world outcome that anyone would pay money for — it only mattered inside the world from which I was about to be expelled.
I supposed I could delete all my tweets and hope the bad guys would leave me alone — but posting felt like only remotely real thing I did all day, the only thing to which anyone organically responded. And anyway, they weren’t going to leave me alone.
When I finally got doxxed, on the evening of August 1, 2021, things came into focus.
The job had been extremely fake, but the money was real — the groceries were real, the house was real, my kids’ health insurance was real.
Enraging the Libtards had always felt like a game, because they are ridiculous people — but their animosity was very real. They posted my address, and pictures of my house, and my wife and kids.
They crowed about how I would lose the house, and maybe my family. They left me schizophrenic, heavy-breathing voice mails. We stashed a handgun on top of the refrigerator.
I spent that week not really eating or sleeping, trying frantically to take stock of any conceivable productive assets, and wishing I had taken the question seriously sooner.
It turned out that I had been right: the internet is real life.
Dozens of people reached out with offers to help — either with a job, or a connection, or with material encouragement to start a business (“start selling something, and I will buy it”).
Some of these were online friends I had known pseudonymously for years, but most were strangers. They cared about me on a human level — but really they recognized that this problem was coming for them, too.
The systems that mediated our access to the material world — the games that determine whether you “get” to have an education, a job, a mortgage, health insurance, etc. — had become totally game-like: abstract, unreal, arbitrary.
The detachment of these systems from reality means two things:
They grow increasingly dysfunctional as “success in playing the game” stops being a signal of competence in producing any real-world outcome.
Your place inside these systems becomes increasingly tenuous — when the rules are unmoored from any material reality, they can be changed on you at any time.
In August of 2021, the country was just beginning to emerge from COVID and the BLM riots, and we were in the thick of the corporate vaccine mandate rollout.
We had learned that the entire global economy could be stopped on command for months with no break in the system’s stride. Lies that had killed and immiserated millions could be exposed with no consequences. Nothing Matters; Nothing Ever Happens.
We didn’t have any clear theoretical explanation for how this was possible, or even any words to describe it, except “fake and gay”.
We just knew that it was extremely fake and gay.
All you can do, under those conditions, is to build an Exit.
You have to figure out how to create value in the real world, where competence matters and your access is not adjudicated from moment to moment by people who hate you.
This doesn’t mean abandoning your fake-and-gay job/skills/assets, and running away to eat roots and berries in the woods: it means the careful transmutation of all those resources into things that will remain productive as the fake-and-gay system declines.
When friends suggested a “subscription community” to address this problem together, I groaned — but the problem was real, and the goodwill and confidence of my friends was real. 75 guys signed up in the first two weeks; they were willing to walk with me for a while, and work on a solution with me. That was what I had.
And goodwill is a rapidly perishing asset. If I didn’t quickly turn it into something that was worth doing apart from their desire to see me “get back on my feet”, I would end up both broke, and humiliated among the only people whose good opinion still meant anything to me.
So I have spent the last five years working to make this thing real.
For the first year, I called every guy in the group every thirty days to take inventory of needs and resources, and to understand what he wanted to accomplish with his membership.
Since then, EXIT connections have directly raised millions of dollars in investment and sponsorship for member projects. Startup teams created within EXIT are comfortably in the tens of millions. (We have to be careful about discussing specifics, but the guys can keep me honest.)
We have placed dozens of guys in better jobs, or helped them reskill, or start a business. EXIT members have launched civic action projects in ten states; we have monthly in-person meetups in a dozen cities.
But none of that is exactly what EXIT is. EXIT is a fraternity, not a startup incubator or investment fund or political action committee. Fraternity is the goal — values-aligned men who have built shared history and trust, who place bets on one another and see those bets pay off over time.
But these are some of the concrete, legible artifacts of that shared history.
As I take stock of what has worked over the last five years, I’m realizing that I still underrate how Real the internet is.
Like everything else, EXIT is unequal: some guys contribute more and get more out of it than others.
Some of EXIT’s Top Guys live close to each other, and they’ve been able to build remarkable things together IRL — but a surprising number are in rural Middle America, or in foreign countries where we are unlikely to have critical mass for a long time.
My leading theory is that these far-flung guys recognize that “no one is coming to save them” in their little town, so they’re aggressive about using the weekly EXIT calls to skill up, build professional relationships, and hold themselves accountable — and it turns out that you can get an enormous amount done over Zoom.
Our most successful startup teams, most of the job placements, and virtually all of the transformative career changes that EXIT has facilitated, have happened over the internet, across coasts.
Several of our guys have become locally politically influential this way, using the group to build an area study, identify “crowns in the gutter”, and build strategies to claim them.
Long-term, the goal is to scale up 100X, so that every major American city has a dozen or more EXIT guys within 15 minutes of each other, and every EXIT guy has access to barbecues, poker nights, homeschool co-ops, co-works, and local kingmaker political blocs.
But we don’t have to wait for that. The internet is real life.
“The friends we made along the way” are real. Getting on a call with smart friends can help you puzzle out what you’re good for — and then, together, we can figure out how to get the people and things we care about off the various burning platforms that we all occupy.
I know it works because my friends did that for me — before I really believed in it — and now I do it for them.
The State of EXIT, Five Years In:
325 members, with critical mass (>10 members) in Salt Lake City, Houston, New York, Dallas, Austin, Washington DC, Seattle, San Francisco, and Columbus. About 40% of the membership lives in these metros.
15-20 member-led calls per week:
Tuesday night full-group call, where we discuss EXIT goings-on, introduce new guys, and host outside members for Q&As (recent guests include Auron MacIntyre, Joost Strydom, Johann Kurtz, John Carter, Mike Shelby). We typically have 60-80 attendees per week.
Accountability calls: Entrepreneurship, fitness, credential-development calls (ham radio licenses, cybersecurity certifications, etc.), real-time working groups, dating, etc.
Knowledge-sharing calls: AI, tech/crypto, real estate, investing, acquisition entrepreneurship, drones/EWAR, homeschool/fatherhood, etc.
Networking/social calls: Reading groups, history discussions, regional e-meetups, EXIT Bar Association
10-12 meetups per month: Lunch and dinner meetups, speaker series, range days, cultural events, family barbecues, etc.
Leadership Group: We have a small opt-in group of ~25 members who help with strategic initiatives and planning for EXIT at large.
File leaders: Every member is assigned a file leader, who serves as their local point of contact with the group. File leaders ensure that members are informed and know how to make use of the group.
Group chat: Main channel for 1:1 matchmaking, networking and intel-sharing to the full group.
Major initiatives:
Paideia Hackathon. Gathering families for a weekend of learning and building with AI. To be held in Utah Valley, October 17th. Subscribe for updates.
Natal Conference III. Our third national conference on demographic decline, planned for Q1 2027. Goal for this conference will be to bring together aligned families and young people at an accessible price point. Stay tuned for updates at natalism.org.
Constitutional Action. Advocating for Americans to view the Constitution as a spur to righteous action, rather than an excuse for inaction. Speaking and training events to prepare citizens for civic action, as well as beautification and voter-registration events. Learn more at constitutionalaction.org.
EXITville retreat. Annual members-only weekend retreat in Austin, October 9-12. Touring an intentional community outside Austin and learning how these projects come together — financing, marketing, land development, etc.
Investment Syndicate. We are assembling a $30M fund to invest in a portfolio of values-aligned projects. More information soon to come.
If you apply for membership, you’ll be asked to schedule a call with me.
Everyone who comes into the group has an intake conversation to assess alignment and fit, and we either approve your membership or refund your dues.
Once approved, you’ll be introduced to our welcoming committee, who will get you started with 2-3 one-on-one connections right off the bat, and help you figure out which calls and meetups to attend.
You’ll give us a paragraph or two about yourself in the #introductions channel, and then you’ll be assigned your file leader and invited to the monthly New Guy Call, where you’ll be introduced in a room with a mix of 15-20 new and experienced members.
From there, it’s up to you how you want to engage. Just like the gym, you get what you put in — but if you can commit to attend one call a week, we can help you find what you’re looking for.
EXIT News
Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT)
This week (8/4), we heard from Will Tanner of the American Tribune, accomplished writer, EXIT man, and expert on the Rhodesian conflict.
After the call, Friendjamin facilitated an excellent review and discussion of How to Talk to Anyone.
Next week (8/11), we will talk with Sam Paepke, former White House liaison for the Small Business Administration, and now Leadership Development Manager at the Conservative Partnership Institute — an organization dedicated to placing values-aligned people in the Trump Administration, in GOP campaigns, and in conservative think tanks.
After we hear from Mr. Paepke, Greg Treat will give us a status report on the long-awaited EXIT investment fund. We will also have a history call hosted by Thucydides.
The following week (8/18) we will hear from Kaiser Van Lohengrimm, who has written extensively on the value and meaning of America’s founding myths.
After Mr. Van Lohengrimm, we will hear from EXIT man Ryan on the accessibility of federal and state military procurement gibs.
EXIT Member Events (members can check the group chat for details):
8/7, Utah County, UT: EXIT 5th Anniversary Party
8/7, Dallas, TX: Constitutional Action Beautification Event
8/14, Nashville, TN: EXIT member meetup
8/15, Columbus, OH: EXIT member meetup
8/15, Houston, TX: EXIT member meetup
8/17, Dallas, TX: EXIT member meetup
8/21, Atlanta, GA: EXIT member meetup
8/29, Salt Lake City, UT: Constitutional Action Beautification Event
9/12, Seattle, WA: Constitutional Action Beautification Event