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Every day, tens of thousands of Americans with irreplaceable engineering and manufacturing expertise are retiring.

Globalization and the zero-interest-rate money printer economy have pulled America’s greatest cognitive talents away from building real things in the real world.

The infinite pool of cheap foreign labor stunts innovation, and makes it very difficult for smart, dynamic people to have the ground-level experience of manufacturing, since they won’t (and shouldn’t) compete for slave wages.

Nate Jebb is the founder of Veritas Professional Services, a business that converts the tribal knowledge of small manufacturing operations into formal procedure, so that these businesses can survive the “silver tsunami” of boomer retirement.

Nate is a descendant of early-20th-century captains of industry, but his great-grandfathers’ empires were spent before he was born, so he had to take a job on the factory floor, where he learned the importance of the embodied experience locked up in these retiring workers’ minds.

EXIT is overwhelmingly composed of smart young guys stuck in the fake-and-gay B2B SaaS economy, who know that it’s a sinking ship, and who are hungry to do something real. Naturally, Nate’s story was fascinating to us.

Veritas’ business model provides a way for smart young guys to get intimate knowledge of manufacturing, without getting stuck trading their time and health for illegal immigrant wages. Definitely a space to watch.

EXIT News

* Tuesday night full-group calls:

* Yesterday (5/13) a well-known anon presented on his process for building community with Amish-style “work parties”, building a wireless ISP business, and growing culinary mushrooms for fun and profit. For opsec reasons this one was not recorded.

* Next Tuesday (5/20) we will hear about an EXIT member’s off-grid, industrial-scale Bitcoin mining operation.

* The following call (5/27) will be a book club on Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.

* Our hot seat to get our man out of Canada was a success — he has a line on a work visa in the States. Ruthless efficiency from the boys, very much appreciate your efforts to help a brother in need.

* The Great Houses series will conclude this Thursday, 5/15.

* Recording of Part 1 (introduction) available here.

* Recording of Part 2 (“You can do what you want, but you can’t call it what you want”) will be released shortly.

* Recording of Part 3 (“The feudal instinct and covenant”) will be released shortly.

* Tomorrow’s call will be Part 4 (“Building families that use — but transcend and outlive — legal institutional structures”)

* Member Meetups:

* EXIT now has monthly meetups in Salt Lake City, Dallas, Austin, Houston, and Seattle. Next on the list: monthly meetups in NYC, DC, and Nashville.

* Houston meetup (5/10) was a success.

* Austin meetup will be Friday, 5/16 through Sunday, 5/18. We will be spending a weekend at an Airbnb south of town. Several of the guys are coming from out of town to check out the area. Cocktail hour on Saturday, 5/17 for EXIT members, Substack subscribers, and guests. Details in the #texas channel.

Q&A: Nate Jebb on capturing boomer knowledge

EXIT Podcast (private feed for joe@hootman.org)