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EXIT Newsletter

Whose shall these things be?

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Bennett's Phylactery
Oct 10, 2025
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The Parable of the Dishonest Steward — Joy In Truth

Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.

Luke 16:9

Bitcoin and monetary metals are anti-investments.

You burn up intrinsically useful and productive things (fuel, labor, heavy machinery, computing time) to “freeze” atoms or bits into a static and not-intrinsically-productive configuration.

At scale, if gold, silver, and Bitcoin are mooning relative to the equities market, it means that huge numbers of people are opting out of investment as such.

It means they believe that the macroeconomic conditions are so dire that the best thing to do with their productive assets is to melt them down into a (lossy) long-term storage medium, so that they can efficiently hide them under the mattress and wait for conditions to improve.

In 2000, gold and silver had a combined market cap of less than $1.5 trillion — 4% of global GDP (~$33 trillion).

Today, gold, silver, and BTC have a combined market cap of $32 trillion — 22% of global GDP of ~$111 trillion.

(We shouldn’t overinterpret this relationship, but the point is that a dramatically larger share of the world’s wealth is being shunted into “stores of value” — primarily gold.)

For an individual, gold and bitcoin are “investments” like any other — if you buy in sufficiently early, you’ll receive a wealth transfer — but globally, it’s drastically negative-sum. In a world with healthy, stable currency and capital markets, almost any attempt to deploy capital to actually produce value would be a better macroeconomic investment than Bitcoin or monetary metals.

It’s obviously not the Bitcoiners’ or goldbugs’ fault that things are getting worse — but BTC and gold mooning means that things are going to get way, way worse.

This also means the security situation will change, and not just because things are getting worse.

Today, the vast majority of the world’s wealth is either physically deployed (in real estate, capital equipment, payrolls, etc.), or denominated in US dollars and stored in banks. Banks are so good at limiting the damage from getting your credit card stolen that, in most cases, they’ll just cover your loss.

People and places are physically secure because the things that have economic value are just too difficult to steal. Your economic power is not in your wallet or a safe — it’s in the inflated value of your home, your ability to secure credit, your 401K, etc. In a sense, there’s security in how fake the economy is. The “money” is not big bags of cash in the bank; hence, no bank robberies.

This is also true at the geopolitical level: wealth within the Pax Americana is “stored” in the international agreements that maintain the value of the dollar, proximity to the money printer, the educational infrastructure that develops human capital, the legal frameworks that make investment attractive. To “seize” these things would be to destroy them. There’s nothing to smash and grab.

Every geopolitical upstart is a significant beneficiary (if not dependent) of the Pax Americana — even if they could win a war, they would destroy the value they wanted to capture. America is rich in natural resources, but so is Africa.

But the more that the world’s wealth is lying around in static, movable stores of value, the more there is to gain from violently contesting ownership.

The “retail” investment thesis for Bitcoin and monetary metals is that economic value will drain out of the dollar and the equities market, and into these assets — but with very little consideration for the widespread suffering and physical insecurity that this will imply.

If you believe that holders of these assets will inherit the earth, you basically believe in a future that is populated by 95-99% poor and desperate people, and 1-5% Money Pinatas.

In such a future, being the legal or “rightful” possessors of these assets will mean almost nothing — in fact, all else being equal, holding them may put you in a worse situation than just being broke along with everyone else.

Your personal property rights aren’t just directly protected by the law enforcement apparatus of the global system: they’re protected by the network effects that make property rights stable at scale.

Your property rights are, in fact, a stewardship, which you hold at the mercy of the state — and, like the Unjust Steward, your stewardship is ending.

In The Parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16), a steward is accused of malfeasance, and is about to be put out of his stewardship, so he quickly brings in his master’s debtors and writes down their debts while he has authority to do so, “that, when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.”

In other words, the steward has power under a paradigm which is rapidly coming to an end. He is terribly suited for the world he is entering — “too weak to dig, and too poor to beg”. He has to convert his rapidly dwindling power into resources that will be worth something under the new paradigm.

The unjust steward is not going to get away with simply running off with his master’s stuff. The only resource he can actually take with him is illegible personal loyalties.

And, similarly, a ruined and hungry world isn’t just going to obediently fall in line because you have a legal claim on some internet money.

“Self custody” is not a trivial matter.

A lot of crypto people have “declared independence” in their property rights in the same way that sovereign citizens declare their independence from income tax liability, like Michael Scott “declaring bankruptcy”.

Property rights are backed by violence — and violence gets cheaper every day. “Self custody” means taking responsibility for the full stack of state services that have physically secured your person and property, unnoticed and taken for granted, for your entire life.

It can be done — and, in fact, we will all have to do it — but it can’t be done alone.

All of these de-dollarization hedge assets are good and powerful, but their proper function is to make friends.

As the fiscal crisis in America unwinds, people who have hedged against the dollar will grow wealthier.

For a time, their physical security and property rights will remain stable — but eventually, that time will end.

Those who sit alone on their hoard will find that, like the rich fool in Luke 12, they were just clawing wealth together for some harder man to inherit. Places where this happens — where the virtuous and productive fail to organize — will become outposts of hell, in which power accrues without limit to the most cunning and dangerous predators.

But those who used their rising position to organize and prepare their community — establishing the “green zones” that protected their neighbors from the worst of the trouble — will find that they are received into everlasting habitations.

EXIT is organizing men and their families for what comes next. Join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

  • Weekly Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

    • This week (10/7), we held an EXIT member Q&A with

      Joshua Lisec
      , co-author with Jack Posobiec of Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions. Recording coming soon for Substack subscribers.

    • Next week (10/14), we’ll hear from the host of the

      Granite Mtn. Movie Club
      on how Our Guys engage with popular culture as creators and critics.

    • On 10/21, we will have a member Q&A with

      Mike Shelby
      from Gray Zone Intel on building a local intelligence network.

  • Other Calls:

    • First Community Engagement Call was this Tuesday night. Discussed engineering natural-feeling connections with local leaders, dinners and cocktail hours as an automatic monthly institution, etc.

    • The guys have begun work on a distributed classical education cooperative.

  • Meetups:

    • 10/10: Seattle meetup in collaboration with Legacy Club. Invite link below for Substack subscribers.

    • 10/10: Nashville meetup. Cocktail hour link below for subscribers.

    • 10/17-10/18: Zion Canyoneering Trip. Members only — see #ventures channel for more details.

    • 10/20: DFW meetup. Members only.

    • 10/25: Oklahoma City meetup. Cocktail hour link below for subscribers.

    • 11/8: Portland meetup. I’ll be speaking at Scyldings’ Oregon Weaving event.

    • 11/15: San Diego meetup. Cocktail hour link below for subscribers.

  • EXIT cocktail hours for Seattle (10/10), Nashville (10/10), Oklahoma City (10/25), and San Diego (11/15) below the paywall for Substack subscribers. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

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