A discussion of WWI veteran Ernst Junger's book The Forest Passage, in which he describes many of the problems that our corner of the internet obsesses over to this day: cybernetics, technique, the capture of democratic institutions through mass media, etc.

Author Johann Kurtz relates his experience at major tech companies, and why he thinks dissidents under the value of these companies as a launching point for their ambitions. We discuss: What megacorps know that online dissidents don't Getting into Big Tech without a STEM degree How to prepare for a highly competitive interview Finding friends & allies without revealing your power level The horizons that open up after a few years undercoverYou can read the article that inspired this conversation on Johann's Substack, Becoming Noble.

In this episode, Drew Gorham and I announce the first-ever Natal Conference, December 1-2, 2023 in Austin, TX.We discuss why we believe this is the most important issue of our generation, a few angles we've been studying personally, and what we hope to learn from the conference.You can get your tickets now at natalism.org, sign up for our newsletter, and follow the conference on Twitter.

EXIT member and shaolin.ai founder Zach Martin and I discuss what the machines have planned for us in 2023. What creatives and wordcels need to learn to make money with AI How a large language model like ChatGPT differs from true AI How NLP opens up new frontiers for machine learning & surveillance Why ChatGPT probably isn't the Singularity Launching a business with EXIT

Even among smart dissident types, the default explanation for the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan is basically just “grit” and “sticktuitiveness” and “giving 110%” (plus maybe “asabiyyah”, which is a $10 dissident word for “teamwork”).But if that was the secret sauce, it doesn’t explain why ISIS collapsed under comparatively light military pressure, never to return; or why Al Qaeda is basically a dead meme.Out of the Mountains doesn’t set out to answer that question — it was published in 2013, when Afghanistan was nearly pacified, al Qaeda was still a going concern, and ISIS was the new hotness in Sunni extremism.In fact, Kilcullen’s thesis is that urbanized, internet-savvy, transnational guerrilla movements will be able to access power flows, and it’s a pretty persuasive thesis — but with a decade of hindsight, it turned out to be the comparatively rural, isolated, local movement that defeated the empire. So what happened?The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.This is also, by the way, exactly how the American diplomatic corps conquered the world — by becoming the broker and underwriter of international agreements that even unaligned (or even unfriendly) countries come to depend on. That authority requires global force projection to be credible, of course, but force projection alone is not enough.In this episode, I explore how non-state groups hide within, and eventually capture, the power flows that make a state a state, and what we can learn from it.

Wheelwright is a farmer and well-known poster (twitter.com/ploughmansfolly). We discuss the spiritual value of confronting death and violence on the farm, the partnership between man and beast, building community in declining areas, finding the people you can be tolerant and cooperative with, etc.

Dan Baltic is the host of the New Write Podcast and author of NUTCRANKR, a novel about a persecuted Hero of the West who lances the boil of postmodern degeneracy in a series of epistles published to a porn message board. We discuss the sane normie roots of Cancel Culture, the creative scene on our side of the internet, and what to do about guys like Spencer Grunhauer.

Nima Cheraghi is an EXIT member and Philosopher who is currently translating a memoir from the Baltic Freikorps. We discuss how search engines create selective memory, why capitalism feels increasingly centrally planned, and why academics suck at history, and pretty much everything else.

Great conversation with Clay Martin, Green Beret, preparedness expert, and author of Concrete Jungle, Prairie Fire, Last Son of the War God, and Wrath of the Wendigo.We discuss how to network and prepare without getting Waco'd, how to teach boys what they need to know without getting sued, who you need to know in your local area, and how to be useful in an emergency when you're not a leg-breaker.

John Taylor manages a factory in the US. We discuss what he has learned about the state of American labor - it's both worse and better than you think - and how beef became the symbol of the Rights of Englishmen.