Son Set in the Manosphere: Ben Davidson on DarkHorse
Bret Weinstein speaks with Ben Davidson about modern relationship dynamics, masculinity and feminism, and the nature of good and evil from an evolutionary perspective. Find Ben Davidson on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceWeatherNewsS0s and on X at https://x.com/SunWeatherMan. ***** This episode is sponsored by: Branch Basics: Get 15% off Branch Basics with the code DARKHORSE at https://branchbasics.com/darkhorse #branchbasicspod Caraway: Non-toxic, beautiful, light ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast Inside Rail.
I have repeat offender Ben Davidson on the program today.
Now, many of you will be expecting that we will be talking about solar system dynamics.
I am going to have him back to have that discussion because, frankly, we're overdue for an update on that front.
But that's not what today's episode is going to be about.
We are going to talk about relationship dynamics as Ben has been strident on X and elsewhere talking about his current perspective.
It will not come as a surprise to Ben that I find his perspective is a bit off.
And we're going to see if we can make some progress.
In any case, Ben, welcome to Dark Horse.
It is good to be back.
And it's wonderful to see you again, sir.
I will say, before we depart into the relationship dynamics, I do want to say you sent me this marvelous book.
Here, I'll try to hold it.
I wasn't sure if it had gotten there yet, actually.
Yeah, it got to me and it has put a smile on my face every time I've looked at it.
It's marvelous and you do not have to get it on paper.
In fact, you point out on your site that some people prefer it electronically because you can search it.
But in any case, whatever you do, if you're interested in the solar dynamic stuff, which we all should be, it's a great reference and it's really, you know, among other things, you're an excellent teacher.
I've learned a ton from you about our solar system and that is a testament to the high quality way that you convey things.
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All right.
So how do we set the stage here?
You have said some things about your relationship to womankind that, you know, if I was just felt it was a little unfair, I probably would never have said anything.
But I think it's actually wrong.
And beyond that, your work with respect to the science of the solar system is so profoundly important that nothing that you could say about other topics, social human topics, is going to cause me to discount your work because your work is singular and I think it's really important.
But I also think that that means that there's a kind of extra responsibility to be careful in what you think because frankly, a lot of people are paying attention to you on the basis of the high quality and the significance of your work.
And I worry that they may be misled by it.
I don't mean to be putting all of the burden on you, but you are one of a number of people, a number of men, who I think have identified some very troubling dynamics that are real in the mating and dating sphere and may have overextrapolated.
So anyway, I see you as in a similar place as the anonymous account Homath, who is, of course, entertaining and very often on target, but also, I think, deliberately caustic on this set of questions.
I hear a lot of the same rhetoric from Nick Fuentes.
I would say he's of a different generation, but I hear some similar stuff from Stéphane Molyneux.
So anyway, there are a number of you folks in what I would call the manosphere who are reaching some conclusions that I wonder if they're not going to be more harmful than they are insightful.
So anyway, I've said a lot.
I'd like to hear your perspective, how you arrived there, and anything people need to know in order for this conversation to make sense to them.
I would say that there is, as you eloquently put it, a realization that is coming to people.
And perhaps some of us are extrapolating it, seeing something and blowing it up into something bigger than it is.
Where it comes from is less ambiguous, what appears to be a strategic cultural subversion and erosion from within due to multiple factors which are not themselves ambiguous either.
And I can say that my position on dating and mating and where everybody stands right now is a combination of hard truths that I understand, a constant battle to do what I know is right.
I'm really struggling at times there.
And it has, in its simplest terms, set men and women against one another.
And that is bad, certainly.
Oh, I totally agree that A, there's a lot of that, and B, that it is inherently bad.
So I would put it a different way.
Say that the relationship between men and women, the sexual relationship between men and women, has been turned decidedly in the direction of antagonism rather than collaboration.
That there's always been a dynamic amongst men being predatory on women.
And instead of addressing that, what we've done is we've turned up the predatory nature of womankind, maybe arguably as a balancing of the scales, but in any case, it's totally wrong-headed.
It jeopardizes one of the core elements of civilization, which is the sanctity of familial bonds.
So there's obviously a lot to unpack there, but do you also want to say something about what you're I mean, first of all, people should know that you have been married.
You have, I think, three children.
Is that right?
That's correct.
Three children with the same woman.
Correct.
And that you and she are recently divorced.
Correct.
So that's clearly going to play a role.
I take it the divorce was not your idea.
I would say that the decision to actually go with the divorce was not my idea.
We certainly disagreed about whether or not we should stay together as much as possible for the children.
And in the end, I definitely lost that battle.
And you know what?
She has the right to move on with her life in the way that she wants to now.
So I'm doing the same.
But again, that's where I'm finding that it's easier to play the game than do anything else.
So, first of all, I think any straight guy worth his salt can imagine being very hurt by losing the love of their life, even if things were not going well.
And we don't need to, you know, to delve too deeply.
But I guess the point is, I don't think you make it a secret that you're hurt and that part of where you are is coming from that place.
Certainly.
okay so when you say play the game what do you mean um look as outstanding as humanly possible um Understand what is going on when you're actually courting somebody.
It is a mixture of genuine curiosity about the female mind and cold statistics about, hey, look, this is what they tell you to do, but this just doesn't work.
There is zero evidence that this actually moves the needle in any meaningful way, whether your goal is a one-night stand or the love of your life.
And so I would say it's a combination of literally maximizing everything possible to make yourself at the peak of the dating market.
Okay.
So first of all, there's nothing wrong with elevating your status in the dating market as much as you can.
That makes sense no matter what your perspective on mating and dating is.
So kudos to you in that regard.
But when you say that what you are told doesn't work irrespective of whether what you're doing is trying to get laid or trying to find a permanent partner, what do you mean?
I mean, well, first of all, I'll say that The anonymous character known as Homath nails this so unbelievably well.
When a woman tells a man what she is looking for, it is usually only half of the story.
No woman is, you know, I won't generalize that much, but a lot of women like flowers.
They like being taken out on nice dates.
They don't want you to text, I'm here.
They want you to go knock on their door and walk them down to the vehicle.
They want you to open the door for them, things like that.
Except one guy can do these things and he's a creep or he gets reported to HR and the other guy gets the date because it's not about that.
It is just about the guy.
It is just the same words, the same actions from a guy she is interested in play very, very differently if the person delivering them has absolutely no appeal to that female.
And so therefore, one could look at the more interesting male doing this and succeeding and say, oh, see, he did what she said and it worked.
But that's the wrong way to look at it.
It's that the person that she was interested in behaved in a way that pleased her.
She didn't want that from the other one.
And so this is a critical, a critically important thing for men to understand.
Now, this is for the relationships that are best for men psychologically, the ones that make them want to be traditionally masculine in the way that the Tate brothers have actually been talking about in a good way recently.
Protection, provide, you know, charge into the burning building kind of stuff.
You know, be the stoic rock on the shore.
And no matter how much the storm sends waves inward, crashing, crashing, the next morning at sunrise, you're still there, same as you were last night when the storm began.
And so that becomes really impossible if you are a beta simp in a relationship and you are essentially being emasculated and owned by the female.
It can work via a certain level of masculine feminine polarity, but it's not going to be fantastic.
It's going to, the very nature of the relationship is going to diminish the man's testosterone level.
It's not ideal.
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All right.
I want to respond to a couple things.
First of all, You will hear insightful women comics, for example, joke that it really sucks to be sexually harassed by an ugly guy, right?
I mean, I've heard almost that exact line.
And the basic point, yeah, I mean, it mirrors what you're saying, which is that the very same behavior may be considered over the line if it comes from somebody who is not desirable and tolerated, maybe even encouraged, if the guy in question is desirable.
Now, on the one hand, there's something wrong with that.
To the extent that there are rules and there should be rules, those rules ought to apply.
You know, the guy who's not desirable should not be held to some legal standard that's different than the guy who's handsome.
Obviously, that's wrong.
But let's just say, I think there are sort of two threads that need to be disentangled.
One is women are not perfectly straightforward, nor would you expect them to be.
I don't think men are perfectly straightforward, but the fact is the job that women are assigned by biology is one that is not served by being perfectly straightforward.
Okay, so let's just say that I'll unpack that in a second.
But evolutionarily speaking, you would imagine that women would be a bit hard for us males to read.
That said, the mixture of that with what I would call nth wave feminism, and just so my cards are on the table, I am on board with the idea of feminism to the extent that it means meritocracy should apply in a sex-neutral way.
If you're up to the job, the fact that you're female, you know, with a few exceptions, shouldn't count against you.
An exception might be, you could certainly make an argument for the battlefield being a place where it's not in the national interest to have, you know, women in the infantry.
I'm not making that argument, but I certainly think that argument is viable.
But in any case, I would love to see a world in which you just simply were entitled to do whatever you were qualified to do, and your sex didn't matter if you were capable of getting over the bar.
But nth wave feminism, however many waves in we are, has taken reality and turned it on its head so many times that nobody knows which way is up.
You know, women tend to think that, you know, equality means being as slutty as men would like to be, right?
Is it wise to have a world of women seeking to be as slutty as men would be if women didn't hold them to account?
No, that's a lousy world.
But nonetheless, that's sort of where we've landed.
So my argument is that the not straightforwardness of women is inherent.
It's evolutionary, and it has a meaning that we can understand, and that it interacts very badly with nth wave feminism, where it turns into an antagonistic characteristic.
In other words, you would expect evolutionarily women to view mating and dating as a long-term collaborative question, right?
Because the only way women reproduce is by investing in offspring, they have an interest in finding partners who are willing to shoulder their share of that burden.
But that's collaborative.
Is this person up to the challenge of collaborating on a relationship that is nurturing to children?
That's the fundamental question that women have faced since, frankly, before they were women, before, you know, even in our pre-human incarnation, that's a question.
So, so basically, I would argue, women have adopted a male-like approach where they are very frequently antagonistic in a mating and dating context, and that that is interacting badly with the lack of straightforwardness.
How am I doing so far?
I think that that's probably got something to do with it.
And interestingly, it mirrors the whole girl punching the guy in the shoulder that she has a crush on in second grade because that level of thinking that we're talking about with the not straightforwardness mixed with the nth wave feminism, it really is, again, what HomeMath talks about, a drop in consciousness level down to almost a childlike form.
Where if you're not with me in every way, you're against me.
Disagreement means you hate me, you want to erase me kind of stuff.
It's a very childish view of the world that I also think is a very selfish one that is like children as well.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not angry about the lack of straightforwardness.
I think it's interesting when men get mad at women for being women.
It's a feature, not a bug, to quote Fort Worth Playboy.
It's just that when you start to see certain truths, which become self-evident if you actually think about it, and you can hear somebody get, you know,
communicating it to you in a way that you can understand, there is an amount of normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance that has to be overcome there because it is a punch to the psyche.
There is no comparing anything in the world to the punch to the psyche you get from going from about a five or a six guy to being an eight or a nine guy.
There's absolutely nothing as demoralizing and blackpilling as that because I really feel like I'm just literally reading from the book of Homath right now.
But the way he said it makes a lot of sense.
I spent my whole life thinking women were difficult, that they were innocent, that they were pure, and that they weren't looking to literally be worse than the worst frat boy I knew in college.
And when I moved up to a higher level, I found out how wrong that was.
I have seen what their nature is.
I have seen what they hide from most men, and they have opened their mouths, and I have heard what is in their heads, and it is about as blackpilling as you could possibly imagine.
Okay.
There are like a dozen things there that we should talk about.
One of them is you are inherently dealing with the women who have elected to remain in that pool rather than the ones who have exited it by signing up with some partner permanently.
So there's a selection bias in favor of something, right?
Let's just black box it for the moment.
Let's go back to the lack of straightforwardness.
I don't think I defined it very well.
But if you think about, my argument will hinge on the fact that birth control opened the door to massive changes in the relationship between men and women that would not have occurred other, had reliable birth control not been invented because it is inherent.
The cost of raising a child is so great in human beings that no woman who had a choice would contemplate doing it without having locked down a partnership.
A woman who could lock down a partnership would be insane not to lock down a partnership because raising a child is not only extremely expensive, but it's very difficult to do well absent that partner, right?
Not only is it too much work, but you need somebody to teach masculine lessons, which a woman is not in a good position to do in general.
So anyway, birth control opens the door to rewriting all of the rules of mating and dating because it craters the obvious costs of engaging in baby-producing behavior.
Correct.
But if we go, if we rewind the tape to a pre-reliable birth control moment in history, then we can see that the asymmetry in the risk that males and females face is profound, right?
A guy who manages to induce a fertile woman to sleep with him with no intention of staying with her is not only going to get, he's likely to produce an offspring at almost no cost to him, but that bargain compared to the investment in a partner is staggering.
In other words, he could invest a lifetime and produce a couple of offspring with a female, or he can invest a night and potentially stick her with the burden of raising that offspring.
And even if it's going to be compromised by being raised as a single parent or by her as a single parent, that it's still, it's just, it's a staggeringly good evolutionary deal, which is why men are not wired to ignore such things, right?
So if women are in the position of facing a spectacular cost for engaging in reckless baby-making behavior, and men are in danger of realizing a spectacular benefit from the very same activity, then women have to figure out who is actually conning them and who isn't.
Who may be conning themselves.
A guy who can convince himself that he's actually interested in a woman long term, but he's really just doing it so that he will be more compelling to her, right?
That's a problem in its own right.
So women have to be structured so that they can out a faker.
They can out somebody who's not up to the challenge, right?
And you see, of course, what that does to female straightforwardness, right?
What is the chase about?
What is the long engagement about?
All of these things drive up the cost of courting in order to make sure that the guy is for real.
So all of the delightful stuff about romance is actually downstream of this asymmetry where females in an ancestral context put men through tests and men actually delight in passing them.
It's not, it's frustrating, but the point is that process is actually super rewarding until you interrupt this with a landscape that has been totally revised by birth control.
yes um obviously birth control is an issue no matter which side you're on um It's not hard to see the merits in both sides of the arguments.
Where my head sticks in what you said was the identification of the mismatched risk between men and women.
And this is where I just completely fall off the politically correct map entirely because I don't care at all.
Yes, that is a risk that exists for women.
Yes, it's much higher for women.
Welcome to being a woman.
This is why you are the more valuable of the sexes.
There's no question a woman is far more valuable than a man.
This is why women and now children and dogs are loved unconditionally and just them.
A man is only loved and valued if he provides.
And that's some might not think that's fair.
And to that, I say, I don't care.
This earth is not fair.
It's nobody promised us fairness when we got here.
There are things that cut one way, things that cut the other way.
It's just how it is.
And simply looking at the reality of it, okay, in this case, we found a way to circumvent it with birth control, but it's come with other problems.
And so I think that that conversation is one that could be had about a thousand different things in the dating and mating world.
I'm not sure that's going to help us get down to why you wanted to talk to me today.
Well, what I want to understand.
So I see somebody that I care about for lots of reasons.
I like you.
I also, as I said up top, find your work so important that A, I hate to see some large number of people who would benefit from it turned off by the fact that your attitude towards women at the moment is abhorrent to many.
So I don't see, you know, that's unfortunate.
How would you characterize my attitude towards women at the moment?
I would categorize your attitude as predatory with a justification.
In other words, I think you, like the other people we've talked about, and I want to come back to the tapes at some point because I would put them in a different category.
But you and the other folks who seem to have arrived in a parallel mindset, I think, are effectively responding to facts on the ground, you know, the way the mating and dating market is structured at the moment.
And you are responding with a kind of realistic, I guess it would be tactical response.
Fine, if women are going to behave in such and such a way, then I'm going to respond accordingly.
And I, you know, I get it.
But it also seems like it accepts the state of play rather than attempting to elucidate why the state of play is no good for women.
It's not good for men.
It's really not good for anybody.
It's especially bad for kids.
I got to tell you, I give pretty much all of them the talk about, hey, look, this is not what you should be doing.
This is not how you should be thinking about this.
Like, this is what needs to be in your head.
Do you understand that you have been psy-oped by like the popular girls who came ahead of you, by the feminists, by the media?
Like, this is not.
I try to give them this talk.
None of them listen.
They want this.
They love this.
They genuinely think this is the greatest thing that has ever happened to them.
There's no convincing them otherwise.
And so.
Well, again, the them you're talking about are the ones that have elected to continue on this path.
So it's a self-selected group.
It's growing bigger every day.
And the group that is choosing to leave, getting smaller every year, the group that is deciding to return, getting bigger every year.
There's no doubt that, you know, marriage down.
Children, down, divorce, way up, not getting married at all, way up.
This is the trend.
They have been psychologically tricked into believing this.
And a lot of it is what we were talking about.
This is cultural subversion, cultural erosion.
This, what's the best way to put it?
These Trojan horses of understanding and tolerance, which are just veiling an attempt to survive and fit in, and which are literally eroding the spine of the West.
And this is the real problem.
Okay.
This is the real problem.
I know the pattern you're talking about.
I agree it is the real problem.
I have some, I have substantial doubt that I understand where it's coming from.
I don't think it's coming from one place.
I think some of it is a kind of organic dysfunction that results from influencer culture making certain things seem appealing and causing a kind of runaway effect.
Could it be a psyop?
You know, is somebody trying to destabilize the West by undermining the family?
Well, we've seen that in a bunch of different places, right?
There's a reason that BLM, which was an attack on civilization, was antinatal to begin with.
So it may be that there is something inducing all of us, frankly, to engage in behavior that's not good for us and that makes the future a lot more bleak.
That said, here's where I'm about to get in trouble.
Here's a part of me that is, you know, thankfully I'm not facing the mating and dating market.
I'm very happily married.
I mean, really beyond happily married.
God bless you.
It's a tremendous relief not to deal with what is in an increasingly nonsensical and chaotic world.
I worry about it for my kids a lot.
I spent a lot of time thinking about that.
But nonetheless, the thing that I see when I look into the mating and dating world, the thing that causes me just to throw an error is I hear women saying things about what they're looking for and why that do not add up.
Right?
Like you have run into women who set an absolute height limit and an arbitrarily high one at that, like, oh, I won't date anybody under 6'2.
Right.
Now, here's what I see.
When I see one of these videos where some young woman says, well, I'm setting a standard.
I won't date anybody under 6'2.
I think, look, I get that you like tall.
I get that if you had your druthers, you would want somebody to be over 6'2.
But how has nobody taught you about arbitrage?
If lots of women are saying that they will only date 6'2 and above, that means that the pickings are going to be awfully slim above that height.
And they're going to be lots of undervalued guys.
You know, you might find somebody at six feet who has lots of other characteristics you might want, like they are a good provider and they are nurturing and they have deep empathic capacity without being weak.
I mean, maybe they are insightful.
Maybe they're likely to earn a substantial living because they're clever and they're talking about in general, female, the female delusion scale, about what they're looking for, how many of them are out there and what they can command in the sexual marketplace.
Right.
And right, exactly.
They're delusional about where they stand, right?
Whether or not what they bring to the table is likely to net one of these unicorns, right?
And they seem to be impervious to the most obvious lesson about how to get the maximum of what you might want in a complex environment in which each individual in question is some strange collection of assets and liabilities.
I mean, this used to be obvious.
And somehow, maybe it's just the stuff that we see online because it's funny or something.
But there does seem to be a culture in which maybe what it is, is that young women are broadcasting something, you know, in the same way that male confidence tends to pay back, right?
Confidence tends to cause people to regard you as stronger, more insightful, whatever, and so it tends to pay.
And the female version of this might be, oh, well, I will only date somebody over 6'2.
And the answer is you're saying something about how highly you rank.
And maybe you don't rank anywhere near that high.
And what's more, you've done a bad job of calibrating your scale because you don't realize how few men there are above that height.
You're also broadcasting something about how shallow you are that your desire for a tall mate seems to eliminate anybody irrespective of their other qualities who doesn't reach that level.
Do you know what I think that social media and dating apps and other things like that have revealed to us?
That the civility of civilization has largely been an act.
A lot of it has been the expectation to be civil and be kind and be proper.
And while I'm not even saying that it was a, you know, a sneaky kind of thing, but it was very much a performance.
And if it wasn't for the risks associated with being called somebody who was like that, people would be a little more honest about what they wanted, what excited them, what interested them, what they actually respond to.
But there's that fear of embarrassment, the fear of shame as well.
And so I think that a lot of that is going away, but it's not gone yet.
If you could actually take away the fear of shame and see what's actually going on in here, I don't think you'd have any hope left.
Well, no.
I mean, and now I think I know exactly why I wanted to talk to you about this.
Okay.
How old are you, Ben?
41.
You're 41.
Okay.
So I'm 56.
I'm a bit older than you.
I've seen a little bit longer slice of history.
True.
I'm pretty convinced that if you drill down on your assertion that civilization was an act to begin with, that you'll discover a richer reality.
One, there's an element of it which is arbitrary, right?
The deference that Japanese people inherently approach every conversation with is very different than the brash way that an Italian engages the same kind of interaction.
And it's very strange to interact between cultures when you have a big divide like that, right?
Is one of them civilized and the other not?
No, it's two different sets of rules.
There's presumably a trade-off between them.
They're going to be things that Japanese culture works better for.
They're going to be things that Italian culture works better for.
But in any case, the point is the arbitrary or seemingly arbitrary distinctions between cultures suggest that it's all nonsense, but it ain't.
So, for example, if you look at the way humans dress, there's obviously mostly an aesthetic aspect to it.
You could put on cloth that was every bit as heat trapping or heat shedding and wasn't an absurd color.
It wasn't a consistent color.
You could put on clothing that did the job of clothing just as well.
And the point is it would have a massive impact on people, how people looked at you, right?
If you did it in an arbitrary way.
So there's obviously something about the fact that we look at a guy wearing a suit and we think of him one way.
And if you walked in to the conference room, you know, wearing, you know, the garb that would have been normal in 1320, you'd be like, what?
Is it Halloween?
What, you know, and the point is, well, no, they're both clothing.
One of them's normal now.
One of them was normal then.
So anyway, but the point is, at the end of the day.
I see what you're saying.
I'm not sure that that's what's happening.
People are just not giving up anymore.
People just don't care anymore.
The degeneracy, sin rate, lack of higher genteel behavior.
I went, I had to do ballroom dance and cotillion stuff when I was young.
I hear that's dying.
I know what every single thing on the table is.
I know what you're supposed to use it for.
I know where it goes.
I know which direction it's supposed to face.
We definitely peaked in terms of proper and peaceful as a civilization.
Okay.
Or we need to come back up from this roller coaster-like descent that we are on right now.
Agreed, but compare that to what you said before about civilization having always been an act.
I agree that where we are now is incoherent, to say the very least.
The question is, 300 years ago, if you just decided, oh, fuck it, I don't really care what people think, you know, what fork to use, what I'm supposed to wear, you know, where I'm supposed to curse and where I'm not supposed to curse.
If you just threw out the rules and you did as you saw fit 300 years ago, what happens to you?
I actually don't know.
You suffer badly.
Nobody wants to interact with you.
So you get shunned and you very quickly discover, hey, that wasn't such a clever idea.
And you stop doing it.
Right.
So I think part of what you're discovering is that our world is very tolerant of aberrant behavior.
Bring back shame.
100%.
Bring back shame.
Bring back shame.
All right.
So look, I mean, Heather says that.
I would be one of the first people who would be shamed, though.
I would be for my behavior.
I would be one of the very first people who would be shamed.
Well, look, I'm like, if I'm honest with you, I'm like this close to shaming you because for your own good and for everybody else's good, right?
I'm not going to do it because it's not my role.
But here's the issue.
I think the issue is really a game theory issue.
Okay.
Where you see, you know, it's clear from what you've said that you don't like a world that is without meaningful rules.
You don't like a world in which people have thrown out morals and you're free to do as you want.
You'd prefer a different one.
But I think what you're discovering is that as an individual, there's nothing you can do or very little you can do about the structure of the game.
So you might as well just play it.
Exactly.
I'd say that you've nailed me 100% on that.
All right.
So if that's the case, then this has been my mantra for many years now, which is I don't understand why people who have arrived where you are, most of them aren't as insightful as you are, as conscious of why they've arrived at a conclusion as you are.
But lots of people are dissatisfied with the way things are.
In fact, I think most of them are.
I don't think this is a highly sexually satisfied era.
I think it's a highly free era.
But I don't think people are feeling like they're winning.
I think everybody feels like they're losing.
So why the problem is, let's do the women's side of this because it's easier to see.
A woman who decides, you know what?
I don't want to just be used by a bunch of men while I'm young and then decide to settle down later as my value on the mating and dating market has fallen as a result of the fact that I'm older and have a high body count or whatever, right?
That woman is not in a good position to opt out.
A woman who opts out in a world full of women who don't opt out gets very little attention, right?
Now, it may be that there's a context where that's not true, like maybe church.
That's what I've heard.
Don't know.
But the basic point is, if you're not part of some community that sets its own rules, the game theory does not support you establishing standards of your own because you're in a position to harm yourself with respect to something like male attention.
You're not in a position to cause a cascade of better behavior amongst others.
So what used to make civilization work was the fact that all women were at the same risk of accidentally producing children that they were not in a good position to raise.
So that shared risk caused women to exert a breaking force on sexual behavior.
And men, whether they understood it or not, depended in some sense on the restraint that was imposed by womankind.
But anyway, a woman is not in a position to opt out alone because what she will end up discovering is that the women who are not opting out are sucking up all the attention.
Except maybe for the one guy who is looking for the same thing she's looking for.
That's my question.
And this is my question to all young people.
Look at your peers, figure out whether they're actually happy with this situation.
And if they're not, don't sign up for their rules.
What you want is either to find an individual to opt out with, which I think is a great idea.
I don't know how you find them, but it's a great idea.
Or establish a community of people that sets the rules of engagement at the door.
It says, here's what we're not going to do to each other, right?
Idealistically, this is perfect.
What I run into is that every woman is half in, half out.
Nobody is all in or nobody is all out.
Every single one of them wants that ring.
And the younger ones want the baby bump too.
They also all want to have fun.
If they are going to figure out which one of the thousand matches and likes and date requests they're going to pick from and they're going to go out and spend their night and get ready and do that.
Even if they figure out pretty darn quick that this isn't their future husband, sometimes they just don't care.
In fact, sometimes is the wrong word.
Most of the, almost always, they just don't care.
In fact, they want that.
And they consider it a bad night if they don't get that.
They don't consider the fact, oh, it's all or nothing.
This is my future husband.
No, they want both.
They want that pursuit of that.
And then, oh, nope, shucks, not this time.
Can't win them all.
I can still have some fun tonight.
And that's where we are.
And that one's hard to do math on.
That one's hard to do math on, for real.
It's hard to understand where that plays out long term.
Well, I mean, I think where it plays out is a disaster.
Where it comes from, I fear I know the answer.
I think I've made the argument many times that wisdom is effectively synonymous with delayed gratification.
That everything wise is about foregoing something pleasurable in the present in order to get a bigger reward in the future.
And the more you can delay the future that you're waiting for, the better off you are, right?
So it is that the insight that, you know, embrace the suck, right?
Yeah.
Do that now because the benefit down the road will be worth it, even if at the moment it feels like suffering.
And then the point is, well, you have to learn to enjoy the suffering in order to get to the thing, right?
So I think our entire culture is trained since birth not to learn that lesson.
I would agree.
And so what you're saying about a psyop, which may indeed be a psyop, you know, if the Chinese decided to upend the development of wisdom in the West, it would not be the dumbest attack they could make, right?
It would cause us to become a feeble, feckless enemy.
So maybe it's a psyop, or maybe it's just the result of the fact that the market does not want you to develop wisdom because at some level, saving rather than spending is wise.
And so those who are trying to get you to spend are always trying to unplug your wisdom circuit.
They're trying to get you to embrace the moment, you know, click buy it now, whatever it is.
And so the basic point is, if you really understood how much you're hurting your future self, then, well, you know, at least I'm going to get something out of this date, would not be your thought.
Put yourself in my position.
Yep.
I can't imagine that I'll have another great love like I had.
I can't, you know, it's probable I'm not going to have any more children.
What am I aiming for long term?
I mean, How do I determine if what I'm doing right now is my maximum utility for this?
I think this is now weird for me because I think I know the answer to that question having, I don't want to say found it accidentally, but found it.
I think Heather and I have found something having been told a very wrong story about romance, marriage, all that stuff.
I resent almost everything I was told on this topic.
It all turned out to be wrong.
But I often argue that it almost doesn't matter how broken your starting position is, if you're any good at all at perceiving pattern and moving in a direction of improvement.
If you're really good at that, you'll move really fast.
If you're not so good at it, you'll move slow.
But moving in the right direction is really the thing, right?
And so I think that's sort of, you know, Heather and I followed pattern and moved in the right direction.
And so at some level, I think what you're looking for is something that our culture suggests is not really possible, which is a pair bond that sustains you so well that you don't want for anything outside of it.
And, you know, I remember all of the mythology that I was taught, you know, I mean, even the basics of our culture, you know, what is a bachelor party, right?
A bachelor party is like a funeral for some part of your person.
Right?
It's your last hurrah, right, before you sign up for this thing that has a million derogatory, you know, terms and, you know, book after book of jokes on the horror of marriage and all of these things.
So if that's what you think it is, then it doesn't successfully compete in the mind with, you know, an endless stream of attractive women who are willing to go to bed with you.
But, you know, if I look at you, Ben as my friend who is on a trajectory that doesn't create something like that for him, my concern is that that gets bleak pretty quick.
Not as bleak as what I'm facing without it.
Oh, no.
I don't mean that.
I mean, not having, I really don't even know what life would be like not to have a partner in the deepest.
But see, a partner is not going to cut it.
Right.
That's okay.
It's the fact that I know what the love of my life was like.
And I won't sit there and be with someone like that knowing that they're second best between my ears.
I wouldn't do that to somebody.
It's why I waited a lot longer to start dating before, you know, compared to her.
Like I waited until I actually was not just getting over something, like I was actually ready to try.
There's not a ton of trying going on out there on either side of the equation, really.
Nobody wants to try.
Nobody wants to put in work.
Nobody wants to be patient.
And the first, I would say 12 to 18 months of my dating life were that, me trying to do it the right way.
Just like the first couple of years of my science was submitting to peer-reviewed journals and doing all the things the right way.
Nothing is working the way it's supposed to be working these days.
And so you just have to adapt and win in any way.
Just the system, the universe, whoever your opponent is is cheating.
They're cheating and they're going to cheat and there's nothing you can do about it.
The best thing you can do is say, okay, go ahead.
I'm going to win anyway.
Like stack the deck.
It just doesn't matter.
I'm going to come out on top.
I don't care what game I'm playing.
I don't care if it's climate science or it's the girl I'm going to get on Friday night.
I don't care.
I'm going to win.
Okay.
That is the only, that's the only way I'm not dying right now.
Yep.
It's all I've got.
And you nailed it.
You nailed it.
Right.
I went through this too with academia.
Right.
You try to do it the right way and then you realize, oh my God, this institution is rotten all the way through.
I'd be a fool to play its game.
I'll play a different game.
Right.
And you're doing very well at that, academically speaking.
You know, you've gone around the system, but what you've really, with the analogy, what you've done is you've crystallized it.
The institution of marriage is no better than the institution of academia at the moment.
Right.
It's equally decrepit.
Okay.
Which I just, I don't disagree with at all.
What shocks me is that all of the dissatisfaction around that truth does not result in a collective understanding of how to fix it.
And maybe this is it.
You know why.
The part you don't want to talk about.
What's that?
The ever-present constant and growing manipulation of what we think.
Oh.
Through the internet, through the media, through the news, and through all of these other things.
And yeah, okay, BLM, sure, China.
There's one you didn't mention either.
And it's a discussion.
And until we are stopped being attacked from the outside, we have no chance of winning our minds back.
They're going to keep losing.
They're going to keep on coming back to the middle.
No, Ben, Ben, the lesson of your own life is exactly the opposite one.
And you just framed it, right?
So what I would argue.
I don't think a lot of people can pull off what I did.
I don't have a lot of faith in people.
Going around the academy?
Going around the academy.
No, what I mean to say is I don't want to talk so much about like the academic stuff.
I'm talking about in terms of being able, like it's not hard to see the way things should be in the dating world.
And it's not even hard to give the right advice out.
Hey, look, this is the way you should do it.
Give these women their out.
Be the one who gives the women the out.
And the issue is that, no, that's not going to be strong enough to overcome the external forces that are driving this in the first place.
They have to be identified and dealt with quickly.
Look, I want to go back to the academic thing.
Okay.
I know because I did something similar in a different subject that the gravitational attraction of doing it through the academy, the journals, et cetera, is overwhelming.
And to anybody inside of that system, the idea that you're going to go do science outside of it sounds ridiculous.
On the other hand, I have your beautiful textbook here.
Okay.
Yeah.
You're going around the system.
I'm also going around the system.
It's the only rational thing to do.
You're really amazing at it.
It's so fun to watch.
It's fun to watch.
I appreciate that.
But the point is all of the people who are insightful are doing this because the system is designed to destroy your creativity, your insight, your drive.
It's just a life-destroying institution.
And the point is, the distinction between the academic version, you've got a broken institution and you have to go around it.
Well, I don't think you could go around it until recently.
Something about the decentralized media has allowed us to go around it.
Yeah.
Right?
You can print your own book.
You can, you know, talk about podcasts here, yeah.
Right.
All of that stuff is possible.
And so it sort of broke the dynamic and allowed people who had something important to do go around their colleagues.
The mating and dating version of this doesn't lend itself to that because of the game theory issue, right?
It doesn't have its equivalent of decentralized media that allows a subculture, you know, everybody's synchronized through, I don't even know what dating apps people use, but everybody's synchronized through Twitter and, is it Hinge?
That's one of them, yeah.
Okay.
So everybody's synchronized by these things, and it basically causes a lowest common denominator kind of behavior to be almost ubiquitous.
And the real question is, can the kind of cleverness that you have shown with respect to galactic dynamics, shall we say,
is there a kind of analog in mating and dating space that begins to bootstrap a way out, a more effective mechanism for interacting that doesn't succumb to the game theory?
Nothing that can stand up against the forces attacking it.
Okay.
That is a pretty hard wall for me once we get to this part of the conversation.
There is, at this point of the conversation, there is no more low-hanging fruit.
There is nothing but the big, ugly elephant in the room.
And it's blocking all the doors out.
Something's got to.
Well, let me just take a stab at where the hidden door is.
I think the problem is that the enemy, whether it's organized or emergent, reaches people so early in the development of their sexual and romantic persona that by the time they start interacting with other people, it's too late.
They've absorbed truisms that aren't true that cause them to go down a road that isn't recoverable.
For a lot of people, that's true.
Yeah.
So I will take one example.
I've been on what used to be a kind of a lonely campaign against pornography.
You're not so lonely anymore, are you?
No.
Well, it's funny when I started talking about how destructive this stuff was, I got treated like some extreme prude.
And I learned to say the important thing, which is I'm not arguing against erotica.
I'm arguing that you shouldn't let the market dictate what you think sex is about, that the market is betraying you.
It's not the fact that somebody has made erotic pictures or films or whatever.
It's why they made it.
If they made it to get your money, they're not your friend.
So anyway, it was lonely.
It's not lonely anymore because a lot of people have realized how destructive pornography is.
But I raise it for the following reason.
I had to figure out what to say to my sons on this topic when they were young, so young that they hadn't encountered it.
And what I ended up saying was, look, this is extremely dangerous.
You are not only harming yourself, you are robbing your future partner.
You're robbing the person that you're going to spend your life with.
And if you understood that you were robbing them, you would never do it.
And then the other thing I said was, I would rather that you have a serious drug problem than a porn addiction.
It's not that I want you to have a drug problem.
I think that's bad, but we have some idea what to do about it.
And we have no idea what to do with this porn stuff.
It will change who you are and in a terrible way.
So I guess my point is, in this one case, I think I interrupted what inevitably happens to boys otherwise.
And maybe I'm led to understand it just happens to people.
It's happening to women now too, who it wouldn't ordinarily be their instinct.
But you have to get in the road of the enemy, emergent or organized, before it gets a hold of young people in order to get out of this mess.
Maybe that's what I'm hearing from you, is that by the time you try to solve this problem with people in their 20s, it's too late.
I mean, it's the idea of, you know, trying to go door to door convincing someone to become a libertarian.
And it's just you and me going around the entire country.
Or maybe it's, you know, something else we're trying to convince people of.
We could be the best in the world.
We're not going to make a dent.
You know, it's a blip on the radar.
There's something else at play that is too powerful to overcome, that is driving these negative changes that is eroding the spine of the West, that is eroding our culture, that is eroding tradition through this subversion.
It comes through our institutions, through media, through academia these days too now.
And it is such a brutal enemy.
I don't know how you fight without fighting it.
I don't know.
Well, I have one suggestion.
There's one difference with going door to door trying to convince people of an ideological perspective.
The difference is with respect to how we behave towards each other in mating and dating space, you have something to offer.
It's not like, hey, if we can convince enough people, we can win the next election and things will start getting better in, you know, four or five years.
It's you yourself will be better off the whole time if you can learn this counterintuitive thing at the beginning.
So in other words, anything that has that characteristic where the point is actually you will get a quick reward for your discovery of this thing that others can't see has a much better chance of catching on.
And the problem is it probably sounds preposterous.
I think it is true, but it doesn't sound true.
Yeah.
Especially when all of the messaging is alternative to that.
Well, you are right about that.
And I think it is worth treating it as if it's an organized effort.
Because for one thing, that's the only thing that raises your defenses sufficiently.
Yeah, that's a good point.
All right.
Are there more things you want to say?
I don't know if you want to dance across the line or not.
Which line is that?
The people on this planet who share our blood who are really, really fucking shit up, Brett.
The ones who I want to knock the fuck out.
The ones who people like us are not calling out enough.
And I've started recently.
All right.
I think I know where you're going.
It's a secular, very small part of it.
But just because they've got something in common with me doesn't mean I'm going to shy away from being like, these people are the scum of the fucking earth.
And I'll defend that position all day.
Okay, but the problem with what you're saying is these people is very vague.
I know, but we can name them.
It's not that challenging.
Well, no, that's where you're wrong.
It is that challenging because it is a group of people that does not abide by what we imagine our shared moral structure is.
I call them faith.
You have people who are betraying civilization.
And I don't care what population they come from.
Anybody who's doing that is a threat.
I think that that's any Marxist, any communist.
And there are people who are pretending to be what our bloodline is.
I don't think that they're upholding it at all.
I'll go ahead and I'll say it.
I think that they're fake Jewish people.
I don't think that they deserve to be called righteous children of Israel at all.
And there is, I mean, it's amazing.
You look at the most orthodox Jewish people, and they're the exact opposite of these ultra-liberal, secular, Marxist, communist group of people.
And they have to be identified for what they are.
And the attempt to do so cannot just be hacked down with, oh, you're a Nazi.
Oh, you're anti-Semitic, because that's making it worse.
That's creating Nick Fuentes right now.
Yeah, no, it creates the exact problem.
And, you know, I'm reminded of a little piece of game theory from the Me Too movement, right?
There was a, during the heyday of Me Too, there was an intentional conflation of any unwanted male attention with rape.
In fact, I think there was a famous incident where uh um, why am I forgetting his name?
Uh, Goodwill hunting Cuba, Gooding no um.
That's the only thing I think of when I think of Goodwill Hunting.
No, it's Matt Damon.
Um okay, Matt Damon said something to the effect of look, there's a difference between, you know, a pat on the ass and rape, or something like that, and he was derided as a villain for doing that.
So my, my point is, look, don't you dare do that.
Right, pat on the ass may not be okay, but if you jack every infraction up to 11, what you're doing is you're actually letting the people who are committing the very serious infractions off the hook.
Right?
You want to make life better for rapists?
Well then, claim that a pat on the ass is the equivalent.
That's how you make life safe for rapists.
So we can't do that.
And the reason that comes up here is that we have a number of people who are playing a different game.
Frankly, I don't even know what game it is, but I do know that if you point out anything about uh, the noxiousness of their behavior or their claims and you get shouted down with accusations of anti-semitism, that creates a resentment right, a resentment that is not nuanced, that isn't targeted at the right people, it's just sort of general um.
So it you know I made the argument elsewhere that basically, you end up conjuring this demon of Anti-semitic sentiment by using that accusation inappropriately to shout down legitimate criticisms, and I don't know what we do about that um, other than to call it out.
Which do you think?
That this is leftover terror from the Holocaust?
That this universalization of everything is literally just?
We can't even be singled out in any way, shape or form.
Everything needs to be homogenized, everything needs to be universalized, like it.
Where is this coming from?
I I I don't understand.
I don't understand.
And it's the same thing that when the very first conspiracy theorists said Israel killed Charlie Kirk, what is the only thing Netanyahu could do to make it, to make it look like that had any teeth whatsoever?
Go on, go on tv and talk about we did not kill him.
Oh my god, what who?
Who's your marketing department?
What's happening?
Is this even?
Is this real life, Brett?
No, it's not real life.
But there to your question, where is this coming from?
I think it's coming from a mixture of things right, some of them understandable and some of them diabolical.
Okay, on the one hand, I remember growing.
I don't know how uh Jewish your upbringing was, mine was uh Jewish, but decidedly secular interesting.
Okay um, There was an awful lot of teaching about the Holocaust.
I mean, frankly, I was born 25 years after World War II ended.
You know, as a kid, it felt like ancient history, but it clearly wasn't.
But anyway, the lessons, I think, were important ones, right?
The primary lesson that I got was it can happen anywhere.
And the people who died are the ones who told themselves it wasn't that big a deal and it would pass.
Right.
So that was an important thing to discover.
But the problem is, you know, the kid at the supermarket who knows that if they throw a tantrum, their mother will buy them the candy, right?
And you can just spot them a mile away.
And it's like, somebody needed to nip this behavior in the bud because it's now developed into a parasitic relationship.
Right.
So I guess my point is there is an underlying truth about the danger of anti-Semitism.
And because there is that correct understanding that there is a real danger, it becomes a protected claim.
It's like calling somebody a racist or a misogynist.
Right.
Exactly.
And so once you have, hey, anytime I want to get out of jail-free card, all I got to do is figure out how to wield that thing.
Well, some people won't do it, but others will discover that actually this is carte blanche.
It's like the liability protection for vaccine manufacturers, right?
Once these people have liability protection, what's their incentive to make a safe shot?
Right?
More and more, more and more.
They'll just cram it down our throats.
That's a genius connection right there.
Because that is exactly what it's like.
Yeah.
It's frightening.
So anyway, to circle back, you know, I mean, of course, my blood pressure goes up when I hear you treading across the line now that I know what line it is.
On the other hand, I think we are all of us, you know, who recognize that there is some issue and that there are people abusing claims of anti-Semitism in order to shield their own noxious behavior have not figured out how to address this in public.
And we have to address it.
Maybe we're thinking about this too materialistically.
How much do you believe in good and evil?
Interesting question.
I will tell you this.
Good obviously exists.
I have long argued that we don't have to worry terribly much about evil because amorality is the actual danger.
People who do things without reference to whether they're good.
But evil has to be a step beyond that.
For evil to mean anything, it has to be the intentional destruction of good things.
So I would say it doesn't happen that often.
Every so often you get a defective person, but in general, what you really have to worry about is amoral people.
That said, my experience, the older I get, the more I think I misjudged it and that evil is more common than we think for reasons that are a little bit hard to define.
There do seem to be a substantial number of people who seem to delight in the creation of harm.
And it's hard to grapple with.
It's so foreign to everything that feels natural to most of us.
You have a visceral reaction of not wanting to believe that anything like that's true.
Um yep also, this is kind of what most people who will be watching this program's faith tells them is real.
You know um, I often do wonder if there's more than just relationships and hormones and what's on the television and what's happening with earth's magnetic field and the sun going on.
I really wonder if there's something even bigger going on right now.
Well, I think, go ahead.
No, it's just there's.
It doesn't matter what book I reference or what ancient text I reference where they talk about the culmination or the revealing um, which is the real meaning of the word apocalypse.
It's not necessarily the end of the world.
It's a culmination, an ending and a beginning.
It's a, it's a revelation of all things.
Um, whether I look at society, or I look at the physics of what's happening to the world right now, or psychology and behavior, oh my goodness, this looks exactly like what every ancient culture described would be happening right now.
So uh, I kind of feel like maybe their their discussions about good and evil.
I should try to figure out which part of those is real as well or not.
Well, I think that makes sense.
Either way, I think it is very clear that believing in evil is important.
Whether or not that's shorthand for something that's a little hard to describe, or it's actually just a literal description, it doesn't really matter.
What we can tell is that the texts that we have been handed over such long uh periods of time describe this, and there's a reason that they share that it's an important concept, whether it's a metaphor or it's literal.
Yeah, you're probably right about that.
All right um, this was interesting, Brett.
I I think it was interesting.
I hope people uh will hear it.
Um, I hope people will hear it with the same spirit that I think you uh were willing to have the discussion.
Yeah well, to be perfectly honest, it's i'm.
It may come across as like bragging or flexing sometimes.
I appreciate everyone for listening to my confession and for understanding that there's a lot of me.
That's not well and i'm.
I have major responsibilities and i'm basically trying to do what I have to do so that I can get the rest of this stuff done, and then whatever happens to this guy behind everything else, at the end of the day, doesn't really matter compared to the stuff that I have to do, the responsibilities that I have with this science, with my children, with the ranch and some of The things going on there.
It's, to be honest, I've had to go into a cold, robotic, there is no me type of a thing.
I buried that guy.
I don't visit his grave.
I like that there's not a me.
I like that I just do what I have to do to satisfy certain, check certain boxes so that I can get the job done every day.
And that's about all I've got left, Brett.
Well, I hear you.
I hope you can hear me when I say you're somebody who has brought absolutely unique and important value to the world.
I hear that you're in pain and that you are trying to get stuff that you know to be very important done.
At the same time, you're doing right by your kids.
And all of that tells me you deserve to get to the other side of this and to heal and, I don't know, to find your match and discover that, in fact, that part of your life is not over.
One can always hope.
I really appreciate you having me on, Brett.
It's so wonderful to talk to you all the time.
Anytime.
It's great.
I love talking to you too.
And I'm really looking forward to having you back on to talk about what's up with the solar system because that stuff is fascinating.
