Feb. 26, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:33:02
4013 Identity Politics | Cassie Jaye and Stefan Molyneux
While pondering ideas for her next documentary project, “The Red Pill” director Cassie Jaye is exploring new topics and different ideas. Cassie Jaye joins Stefan Molyneux to ask him about identity politics, abortion and many other highly controversial topics!Cassie Jaye is the founder of Jaye Bird Productions and the director of the award-winning documentaries “Daddy I Do” (which examined the Abstinence-Only Movement versus Comprehensive Sex Education) and “The Right to Love: An American Family” (which followed one family’s activism fighting for same-sex marriage rights in California). Her latest project “The Red Pill” which examines the Men’s Rights Movement and gender equality.The Red Pill Movie: http://www.theredpillmovie.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/Cassie_JayeYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well here with Cassie J. Back with Cassie J, I would say.
She is the founder of J, with an E, Bird Productions, and the director of the award-winning documentaries Daddy I Do, which examined the abstinence-only movement versus comprehensive sex education, and The Right to Love, an American family which followed one family's activism fighting for same-sex marriage rights in California.
Her latest project, dare I say her most controversial project, was or is called The Red Pill.
Which examines the men's rights movement and gender equality.
You can find out more about it at theredpillmovie.com and follow Cassie's excellent Twitter account at twitter.com forward slash Cassie, C-A-S-S-I-E, underbar J-A-Y-E, Cassie J. Thanks, Cassie, for taking the time and laboring through that lengthy introduction.
Thanks for having me back.
So what's on your mind?
What is our topic du jour today?
Well, I actually want to ask a lot of questions to you.
I'm processing a lot of different topics in my head right now looking for my next feature film project and there's something that is really just kind of I'm poking at my side that I can't quite get a handle on or understand.
And I actually want to ask you about it.
I'm not saying this is my next film, but it's something of many topics that I'm bouncing around.
But if it's not, I'll take it extremely personally.
That's all I'm saying. So, no pressure.
So, I don't know why, but for the past, well, three years that I've really been kind of in the spotlight with The Red Pill, There's a term that keeps coming up that I just don't understand, and I know I'm really going to show my naivete here, but identity politics.
I don't quite understand it.
So I guess what I don't understand is, are identity politics grouping people based on their biological differences and then having political movements Around that demographic?
Or is it any identity like a feminist or a gun owner or Christian?
So not necessarily something you're born with, like a skin color or gender.
Could you clarify that for me?
I can clarify it as far as I see it.
That doesn't necessarily mean that this is the way everyone sees it, of course.
But I will say this.
The most important word in the phrase identity politics is the word politics.
And there's a reason why it's attached.
And I'm always drawn back in my thinking, Cassie, to the wars of religion in Europe that kind of erupted after the Reformation, sort of 15th, 16th, 17th century.
We had 300 years of religious warfare back and forth across Europe, largely because the monopoly of the Catholic Church had been broken as Christianity fragmented or, you could say, individualized into a variety of sex.
The Calvinists, the Lutherans, the Spengalians, the Protestants.
Yay! That's the way I was raised.
And so what happened was these religious groups...
All fought to gain control of the power of the state because the state had the power to command belief.
In other words, it was a real win-lose.
Like if the Calvinists got control of the government, then the Calvinists could use the power of the state to promote Calvinism and to persecute those who came from different religions.
This went on and cost untold numbers of lives.
This went on for hundreds of years off and on.
And eventually people just said, okay...
I think it's time to separate church and state, because when the church and the state were separated, then people could pursue their individual belief systems and attempt to proselytize or to convert other people through the word rather than the sword, and things became a whole lot calmer in that realm.
When the state has the power to benefit particular groups at the expense of other groups, Then groups vie for control of that for two reasons.
Obviously, A, because they want the power of the state to promote their own perspectives or their own interests.
And B, they know that if they don't get that power, it's going to be used against them.
And so, to me, the politics part is really important.
Because the question is, why do people want these identities?
Now, we're all kind of tribal in a way.
We like people who think like ourselves and so on.
But I don't find that a fundamental driver in human society.
There was lots of back and forth in the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, lots of disagreements, lots of arguments, and it was a very fertile period in terms of the growth of philosophy and science and so on.
I think that we do have tribal elements within us, but the West benefits when there's individualism.
So how do we benefit from individualism?
Well, we benefit from individualism under the free market, of course, because we rise and fall based on our own talents and work and so on.
But if the government has the power to benefit groups, then you kind of have to join a group or you're doomed.
Because as an individualist, when the government has the power to benefit groups, well, you won't have a loud enough voice to compete with the groups.
So when the government has the power to benefit genders or ethnicities or belief systems or religions or you name it, Then what happens is people not only feel the strong urge to join a group...
But also they feel the strong urge to categorize other people by those groups.
And the fundamental driver is state power.
It is the power of law.
It is the power of gaining resources and money and power and so on, which is only handed out to the group and not to the individual.
So when the government has the power to benefit and harm groups, human beings then form into these antagonistic groups.
And I think that is one of the reasons why, as the government gained the power, To allocate resources based on gender, on ethnicity, on race, on a variety of cultural markers, that's when it gained this power significantly in the 1960s, and then what happened was People said, oh wow, so if I identify as part of this group, and I can get people to believe that I'm a victim, the government will give me a lot of money.
And I hate to sort of, you know, it seems kind of weird, these big intellectual movements are just about dollars marching across the political landscape.
But it seems that that's kind of how it worked.
When the government began tinkering, well, it always tinkered in terms of race.
Slavery was a government program.
The horrors of Jim Crow was a government program.
Segregation was a government program.
And then, of course, in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act, it wasn't like the government said, we're not going to run race relations anymore.
They then continued to jig race relations with things like affirmative action and set-asides and preferential loans and housing projects and so on.
And the same thing with gender.
You know, not giving the vote to women was a government program, and then giving the vote to women was another government program, although at least it equalized things.
But then you started in the 1960s to get things like, you know, equal pay for work of equal value, where the government was now negotiating on behalf of women because they're so strong and empowered.
Women can negotiate for themselves, but, you know, for some reason, some of them wanted to run to the state.
And I won't go on and on, although I have been known to, but I will say that when the government...
Whatever you subsidize, you get more of.
And whatever you tax, you get less of.
And you get less individualism when being an individualist, i.e.
not joining a group, not being a victim, not playing the victim card or the victim narrative, or the identity politics game, the individual gets taxed.
He does not gain or she does not gain from that.
Whereas the victimized group, the oppressed group, they get a huge amount of resources and preferential treatment thrown at them.
And so you get the rise of identity politics when people are well-paid for playing the identity politics game, and individualism declines as it gets taxed to pay for all of this social engineering.
Oh, wow. Okay.
I have a lot of questions now.
No, no. That's it.
I answered everything, and there's no doubt in anyone's mind about anything.
Okay. Well, this is interesting because I've always, well, not always, but I've recently been thinking, right, it's not a zero-sum game to care about one group.
So if we care about men's issues, it's not taking away something from women's rights.
If we care about women's rights, it's not taking away from men's rights.
But then I know from doing the red pill that in some cases, the feminist movement, actually in many cases, the feminist movement has harmed women.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just want to touch on that, and I'll be brief.
But our capacity for caring is not a zero-sum game.
Like, if I love my daughter, it's not like I'm stealing love from my wife.
You know, I don't have a fixed amount of love in my heart.
And, you know, the more people around who you can love, the bigger your heart grows.
You know, the Grinch grows three sizes in someone.
So we, in terms of affection and care and concern and support, that is not a zero-sum game.
But government dollars, they're a zero-sum game.
And that's the problem, right?
Government dollars are, in fact, a negative-sum game because you take government dollars, are taken out of the economy, taken from individual taxpayers by coercion, and they either go to a men's group or they go to a women's group.
And so, unfortunately, you're right.
I mean, I care about women's issues.
I'm a father to a daughter and a husband to a wife, and I have female friends I love and I want them to do well.
I'm concerned about men's issues as a man who cares about men.
And so one doesn't take away from the other.
But when it comes to the allocation of government dollars, it is win-lose.
And sadly, it's become the case that the best way to win these days is not just to promote your own cause, but to denigrate everyone else's.
And the same thing happened under religion.
Ours is the truth path to heaven.
Everybody else leads to hell.
Yeah. So I guess it's a case-by-case basis then because, for instance, examples I'm thinking in my head is that if we're voting to add some more services to public school systems than people who put their kids or never have kids but put their kids in private schools are now paying more tax dollars for the public school system.
I mean, you could argue that everyone benefits by smarter kids.
But versus, like, Gay marriage, I, you know, I made a film about marriage equality.
And, you know, I really didn't think that allowing gay people to get married or same-sex couples to get married would harm anyone else.
It would actually help the economy.
But I could see that, you know, religious...
Right, so people who say that, you know, it's a tradition that was really for them, for their religion, then they felt like something was being taken away by changing the definition of marriage.
Ah, but you see, this conforms to my earlier thesis, Cassie, which is that once the government starts to take things over, you promote just this kind of conflict.
The government, for most significant portions of American history, the government had nothing to do with marriage whatsoever.
The government licensing and government control of the marriage contract was introduced by the Democrats in order to prevent blacks and whites from marrying.
And so once the government starts to take over marriage, then you get this big fight for control over state apparatus.
And of course, if the government wasn't involved in marriage, then people would have very little problem with various forms of marital arrangements.
But once there's tax money involved and there are benefits involved and there are all these laws that are clustered and surrounding marriage, and if the government has the power to grant or not grant a license to marriage, which opens up all the gateway to these benefits and tax breaks or tax liabilities, then marriage becomes a government program.
And once something moves into the public sphere, it becomes a very Bright, shiny, powerful tool that everyone wants to try and get a hold of.
And I think that promotes the conflict more than anything else.
Okay, I'm going to put a sticky tab on everything you just said and watch that later to really try to process all that.
I'd like to move on to another question still within this realm.
I've been hearing identity politics usually used by right or libertarian people pointing the fingers at left, saying feminism, Black Lives Matter.
Those are the examples of identity politics and that the Democrats really run on this platform.
And I've heard that 2020, the next presidential election in the U.S., is going to be really based around that.
But what I've...
I feel like I still and I say I feel I feel I feel like I still see a lot of right-leaning people having identity political kind of like wearing labels on on their chest say on their Twitter feed for their bio it says I am pro-life pro-gun pro I don't know what are the other right ones and then they'd be like anti-feminist anti-antifa So,
isn't that identity politics as well, that you're on the right with pro-life and pro-gun?
I just don't...
I don't see that it's just the left doing it, if people on the right are also wearing those labels.
That's a great question, and I'm probably going to answer it badly, but I'll give a shot anyway.
Because the first thought that comes to my mind, and it feels different, which again, it's not an argument, but it's important.
So let's say that you and I believe that the world is a sphere, and we come across somebody who believes the world is flat.
Well, we have different beliefs, but I don't think that we would put those into the category of identity politics.
And so I think merely—like, I wouldn't say, well, I'm going to categorize, you know, radical feminists in the same way that I would categorize people who like the free market or people who are Catholics and so on.
So merely having similar belief systems and aggregating or proudly proclaiming those similar belief systems, that to me does not smack of identity politics.
And the reason for that is that— Anyone can hold those belief systems, and a lot of those belief systems are really designed to keep government power out of your sphere.
So, you know, you have, of course, the Second Amendment to guarantee the right to bear arms.
So the people who are pro-gun are saying, I don't want the government to come and take my guns.
I want to not have...
Government power involved in what it is that I'm doing.
It's the same thing with people who want smaller government, lower taxes, free market policies, lower tariffs, lower regulations, and so on.
They want the government to stay out of their business.
And so they're more akin to the people who say, ah, here's how I want to put it.
Okay, ah, I have arrived.
Sorry about the intro.
Walk through the doorway into the cathedral.
Okay, so...
Going back to the religious example that I talked about in the past, all of the various religious denominations that were warring with each other to gain control of the power of the state, they were engaged in a form of identity politics because the politics was part of it.
Those who advocated for the separation of church and state We're actually opposing the very fundamental driver of identity politics, which is the state power to compel behavior and transfer funds.
So if you're arguing against that which is the driver of identity politics, I don't think you could then be put into the category of just another identity politics group.
So, how is feminism identity politics then?
Well, again, it depends on how you define feminism, right?
So if feminism is equal rights for men and women, sure.
I mean, that is an equality that I think is great.
There is always the big challenge with feminism, which is that it doesn't seem to want to be subject to the draft.
So, you know, why did men get the vote?
Because they were subject to the draft.
That was sort of the trade. Women got the vote without being subject to the draft.
In fact, Phyllis Schlafly for 10 years was crisscrossing America back and forth fighting against the Equal Rights Amendment by basically making that argument that if the Equal Rights Amendment was passed and became part of the fundamental law of the land, then women would be subject to the draft and they didn't really...
So if you're after equality under the law, who on earth would disagree with that?
That would be perfectly fine.
However, if you are saying that women are oppressed by evil men and the only way to counter that oppression...
Is to take resources from men and give them to women by force.
Well, now what we've done is we've taken government not out of the realm of gender relations, but we have dragged government into the realm very coercively, very forcefully, and very much a win-lose.
We have now dragged government into the realm because now the feminists, a lot of them, are inviting the government in to say, well, we want maternity leave, which has to be paid for by those not taking maternity leave, who are mostly going to be men at one time or another.
We want to have the government force employers to pay us just as much as men, despite the fact that we will often take time off to have kids and whatever.
And so once you drag the government in to do your negotiating for you, And once it becomes a win-lose situation, that is identity politics.
Because you're being paid for having a particular identity.
I wish to have government resources, government favoritism, government power to my benefit because I am a woman.
And therefore, you've taken politics and you've wrapped it into, in this case, a gender construct.
Now, once you say government power should be wrapped around an ethnic construct, well, not even a construct, an ethnic reality, a gender reality, a class reality, then what you've done is you've said, I no longer wish to have equality under the law.
I wish to have special benefits for my My political group, my ethnic or gender group or whatever, I wish to have special benefits based upon the fact that I am this particular identity.
Now, that is the combination of identity and politics.
And those who are saying, no, no, no, no.
I want equality under the law.
I do not want different laws for men and women.
I do not want different laws for blacks or whites or Hispanics.
I don't want different laws for anyone.
I want equality under the law.
I do not want gender relations and race relations and cultural relations and religious relations to be subject to the coercive control of the state, separation of state and gender, separation of state and race, for exactly the same reasons that we needed separation of church and state so we can all just get along without fighting for control over the state apparatus.
But do we need those type of lobbyist groups to fight for rights for certain groups?
Because for me, for example, I am grateful for the work that feminism did for reproductive rights.
Personally, I would never have an abortion now, but I do think that's something that At this moment in time, it may change later, but at this moment in time, I'm glad that that feminist fought for that.
So, I mean, I guess I see some reasons why there should be identity groups that are fighting for certain people's rights and, like, gay rights, for instance, as well.
So don't we need that?
Or you think like the government should not be involved in at all in changing legislation for women or gay people or blacks or.
An excellent question.
Do you mind if I just stall for a minute or two to gather my thoughts?
Yeah, please.
No.
Okay.
So, I mean, let's put aside the whole question of the fetus as a human being.
And let's put that aside for the moment.
And I'm not saying that's unimportant.
But since we're talking about identity politics, how do we lower the temperature on the abortion debate?
Well, there are a number of ways that you can do that.
Number one, stop forcing people to pay for abortions if they find them morally reprehensible.
So people should pay for their own abortions because it's one thing to force someone to pay for someone else's cancer treatment.
There are arguments against that to do with violations of the non-aggression principle.
But I don't think anyone finds it morally horrible that somebody gets cured of cancer, right?
So that's more of a moral argument.
But if someone finds or if someone believes that abortion is the taking of an innocent human life, then it is adding significant insult to significant injury to force that person to pay for someone else's abortion.
So I think that's very, very important.
The amount of destruction and dislocation That the state has wreaked upon the family structure as a whole is incalculable, but very deep and very wide.
And we could do a whole hour on that, but just a couple of things that pop into mind.
I mean, the welfare state where you pay for women to have more children and you only pay them if there's no man in the house.
I mean, that is fundamentally tinkering with the basic building block of human society, which is the family, the nuclear.
And so forcing people to pay for the children of single moms means that the whole marriage contract gets dissolved.
Now, of course, if you're a married woman, And you want to have kids, your likelihood of having an abortion would go down enormously, right?
To me, when you have these kinds of fractious issues, Cassie, the best thing to do is to try and lower their incidence first and foremost, if that makes sense.
So if we can reduce the number of abortions, well, that will help a lot.
And there are ways to reduce the number of abortions by not forcing other people to fund them, by removing violations of persons and property that Dissolve the family at its basis and encourage people to, if they want to, you know, get married in a stable relationship.
That's going to vastly reduce the amount of abortions that will be performed.
And once you get it down to a manageable level...
and once you get it down to the point where people aren't being forced to pay for it, the debate cools to the point where people can be rational about it.
You know, when people are really wound up about particular things, you know what it's like, it's a screaming match on both sides because the stakes are so high.
It's like you can't have rational discussions about things in such a hyped up and hysterical and do or die environment.
I find that to turn the temperature down, which would be to withdraw some of the laws that dissolve the family to stop forcing people to pay for abortions, that will cool things to the point and reduce the prevalence of abortion to the point where people can, I think, be more reasonable about the discussion. - Yeah.
Off of that, two things.
One is I totally see that our incentivizing system is all wrong as far as We are paying women more to have children out of wedlock, and a lot of them also keep under a certain threshold of income to receive those benefits.
I actually had a neighbor A man and woman who were together for, I think, five years and they were planning to get married and they got pregnant.
And they pushed off their wedding to a later date so that they could have the child before they got married to get benefits for that.
And I did a presentation recently where a woman, it was calculated that a woman had to earn about $65,000 in her career to make up for the benefits she was getting for free from the state.
Which was a huge gap, like a chasm she couldn't cross.
And that really does trap women in that kind of poverty, much to the detriment of their children.
Yes. So also, I wanted to ask your thoughts on this, because I do agree to a certain extent that people who don't believe we should have the option to abort a fetus shouldn't have to pay for it in their tax dollars.
But The issue I have with that, where I don't think it's so black and white, is that oftentimes people who really do need the abortion don't have the funds to pay for it.
And so if they were then forced to have the child because they couldn't afford the abortion, now don't we have more children living in poverty?
But you would care about those women, right?
Of course. I would care about those women.
And charity would solve that problem.
So there's a couple of things, I think, to talk about there.
I mean, and this is, you know, I always sound like some Victorian prude face, but, you know, I'm going to just point it out anyway.
You know, one of the big influences in my life was actually a course I took in my half-completed English degree.
I ended up finishing in history.
And it was a course on Victorian novels where I read all the way from, oh my goodness, Daniel Defoe onwards through Samuel Richardson and others and it was really fascinating for me and I really recommend people read Pamela and other books about how these issues were dealt with before a big giant interventionist welfare state and it really is fascinating so the question to me is well what what happens when a woman gets pregnant outside of wedlock and she's broke now once you're there You're not in a place of prevention.
And all you can do is try and figure out how to cure things.
And as a philosopher, I can't cure anything.
I can't. I mean, the analogy I use is like a nutritionist.
Like, you don't phone your nutritionist and say, I'm having shooting chest pains and I can't move my last arm.
He's going to be like, I don't know, maybe if you change your diet 20 years ago, maybe you wouldn't be having a heart attack, but you need to call 911.
Because, right, then you need, I don't know, a surgeon or something, right?
Or somebody to go in there with Drano.
I don't know. I'm not a doctor. Yeah.
So to me, it's all around prevention.
And the way that they used to solve this in the past was, of course, through sexual morality, through chaperones, through, look, if women can make a good, quote, living out of having babies, then they don't need to worry about having a man because they're married to the state and they get their resources from the taxpayers.
In the past, of course, when that wasn't The case, what happened was there was a lot of sexual restraint on the part of women, a lot of like, you know, no touchy till, you know, put a ring on it kind of thing.
And that was very much enforced socially.
And there were chaperones to make sure that kids didn't have premarital sex.
There were chaperones also to make sure that the Me Too stuff couldn't manifest if it was false to have witnesses and so on.
And then, you know, once you got married, it's like, you know, go to town, you know, whatever you want to do, you can do.
And so requiring that commitment prior to the unleashing of all too fecund youthful fertility was very much necessary and society was very much structured around that.
And if a woman had Well, if she got pregnant outside of wedlock, then the man would often be encouraged to marry her, which of course meant that men would be more careful with their own reproduction, because if getting a woman pregnant led to marriage, then they would be much more careful.
Or if the woman, she would go visit her aunt, you know, in Switzerland or something, and then the kid would be put up for adoption.
The studies that I've read, I can't state this conclusively, but the studies that I've read show, I think fairly conclusively, that a child who's put up for adoption does a lot better than a child who's raised by a single mother.
Because being put up for adoption means a two-parent family, which is the best environment for...
A child to grow up in.
So she put the child up for adoption.
Now, if she decided to keep the child, then who would pay for that child?
She's got no husband. So her father and mother and extended family would usually pay for and raise the child.
And sometimes it would be passed off as, you know, an oopsie menopause child of the mom or something like that.
But her reputation would be in tatters.
The parents themselves would have to pay.
And that's why parents took good care of their children's sexual activities and so on, because they were on the hook.
Now the taxpayer, the next generation, the debt slaves to be born, they're on the hook, so people don't care as much.
So as far as women who get pregnant...
It's all about prevention, and society had great ways of working to prevent that in the past.
And if a woman did get pregnant, she could give the child up for adoption.
She could also, as you and I and lots of people would care about her, she could go and get an abortion.
Let's say she couldn't afford it, there would be charities.
But the charities are very interesting, Kathy, because charities...
I'm not enablers.
Like the welfare state is a big enabler.
Oh, you make a mistake, we'll just pay for the next 20 years.
It just enables more and more bad mistakes.
Charities, though, are, and this is another thing that came out of these Victorian novels.
You see this scene all the time.
The woman who's made mistakes has to go up in front of this charity and there's these lines of People behind the desk like Harry Potter wizards, and they keep grilling her on what's happening, how she's going to solve it, how she's not going to...
Because charities got money not based upon just fixing immediate problems, but preventing their recurrence.
The welfare state has no incentive to prevent recurrence.
In fact, they survive and flourish off people remaining poor.
So I do care about women, the condom breaks, you know, something, the pill, you took it at the wrong time of day, or, you know, the IUD slips.
You know, it definitely, unwanted pregnancies can certainly happen.
I think they'll be a lot less common in the future, but they can happen.
But the question is, Would you care about somebody who faced that problem and had no money?
I certainly would. But I wouldn't want to just fire cannons of money at women getting abortions because that lowers their incentive, as incentives matter, as for men and for women.
It lowers their incentive to prevent recurrence.
And so charity is, I don't know, I mean, I'm sure you've tried to help people in your life.
I've tried to help people in my life.
It's really complicated.
Like, it's really challenging.
And I just think firing money at people...
It kind of solves things in the short run, you know, like, oh, I have a headache.
I know, I'll snort cocaine.
It's like, oh, look, my headache's gone, but now I'm addicted to cocaine.
It's really complicated and difficult, and that's why I like sort of voluntary charitable solutions that get involved and work to prevent recurrence rather than just big, giant, money-drip government programs.
That's so interesting. You're really giving me a lot to think about because, you know, I've been a filmmaker for 10 years, and really the first part of My filmmaking career was about sexual education from a feminist perspective.
But I absolutely believe in, you know, prevention is key.
And in a lot of ways, I do feel like what the feminist movement is pushing for right now is like basically Band-Aid problem solving.
And, you know, pharmaceutical. I mean, women don't want to get abortions.
Like, women do not. I mean, whatever we can do as a society to prevent the situation from occurring, where a woman has to remove a fetus from her own womb, that is not a pleasant experience.
And I know women, it haunts them.
And it's not to say that it's not sometimes the best solution in a practical sense, and certainly if there are medical issues.
But man, we shouldn't just say, you know, like, let's just keep firing money at abortions and say we solved the problem.
There's the woman's heart, the woman's sensitivity, and so on.
And the other thing, of course, in terms of equality between the genders, is that the woman has...
All of the rights, really, in a sense, but none of the responsibilities of childbirth.
So, as far as this goes, she can choose to abort the child even if her husband desperately wants the child, but the husband cannot choose, or the boyfriend cannot choose, to dissociate from responsibility for raising the child.
And that, I think, is kind of an imbalance as far as power goes.
Well, and I think if, because this was a proposition by men's rights activists, That they wanted to have like a consent form where you could sign away your responsibility to the child if you would have preferred to have an abortion.
I think that would actually probably raise abortion rates of women because I think there are women that, you know, for not the best reasons, are having children knowing that they would be getting support from the father of the child.
And, you know, something else that's kind of fluttering in my mind.
Oh, but if they had to pay for their own abortions, then they would be more likely to use birth control.
Like, if they're having the child to get, to throw the boyfriend into baby jail for 20 years and get his resources, if they can't do that, then they'll use prevention rather than an abortion.
Right. Something else that's kind of fluttering in my mind is I went down a rabbit hole of learning about baby farming, baby farming in the UK. Really interesting if you start digging into that, but I can't remember her first name, but her last name was Dyer, D-Y-E-R. She's one of the worst serial killers of all time.
A serial killer called Dyer?
Come on. You sure you weren't reading a Bond novel?
Edith Dyer or something. Basically, because abortion wasn't legal or safe, Women would basically go on vacation for a few months, go to basically what's like a nursery where you would then have the child and leave the child with these nannies or nurses and pay them.
I think it was like the equivalent of $50 today or something like that.
And leave their children.
And so what they ended up finding out was that this woman, Dyer, was strangling or killing the children with some kind of solution orally.
And she would hide all the babies' bodies around London, I believe.
And they ended up finding like over 300 dead babies.
And so, you know, when I hear about those kind of stories, obviously that's hundreds of years ago.
But I don't think we should just, you know, remove the option of abortion.
And what I... Well, hang on, hang on.
I'm just going to...
Sorry to interrupt, Jessie, but I'm just going to say this because people are going to think it.
I'm not saying you're saying that, by the way.
No, I don't know. I'm just saying this because people are going to think it, that you seem disproportionately appalled by dead babies, but only after they've left the womb.
You know? It's so funny.
I wanted to talk about identity politics.
We're talking about abortion. Boy, babies being killed.
That's terrible. And the other thing, let me, because you, I mean, I just wanted to point that out.
There's no answer for either of us on this particular topic, but I did want to say, this is going to appall people more than anything else, but I'll say it anyway.
Yay! Appalling people.
The problem is you can't sell babies.
That's the problem. You can't sell babies.
You can kill them in the womb, but you can't sell them because that's wrong.
And it's like you can tax people to kill babies in the womb or kill fetuses in the womb.
But look, you have a market situation here.
Now, before everyone thinks that I'm like the worst guy in the known universe, just give me three minutes, two minutes, one minute.
I sound like I'm on a date.
Anyway, here's the reality.
There is a market opportunity because there are some women who have excess fertility and there are other women who have deficient fertility.
You know, 10% of married couples have significant...
Problems. Having children.
Infertility is actually a big issue, particularly, of course, as women get married later and try and conceive into their 30s and their 40s when it's like, I don't know, they're going to try and pump life juice into a raptor egg or something like that.
Like, it's not good.
And so we have an excess of babies on one side, which is the women who have become pregnant who don't or won't, can't or won't or don't or whatever.
They don't want to raise the baby. And then you have Families, well, moms and dads, or I guess husbands and wives, who desperately want a baby.
And so my question is, what's wrong with the woman having the baby and selling it to the married couple?
You say, oh, well, that's terrible.
Well, you have a life, whereas before you had a pile of body parts in an incinerator, like you had a dead baby or a dead fetus.
Now you have a life baby.
I would prefer that. I would prefer that.
And you get kids into happy homes who are making their parents enormously happy, people who want to become parents.
You have women who are being well compensated for the difficulties and the challenges of being pregnant.
It seems to me like a win-win.
And again, I fully understand it.
What do you mean selling babies?
Like on an auction? You've got ebaby.com?
I mean, I get that. It is something that is tough...
To get over in terms of like, we just don't like the idea of buying and selling human beings.
I completely understand that.
I completely understand that.
But if we sort of look at, just look at yourself, let's say that you as a fetus, your mom was thinking of having an abortion, but somebody could have paid her a few thousand bucks.
To give birth. Would you rather be alive?
I would. I would be like, well, I'd rather be dead because human beings shouldn't be bought and sold.
It's like, I'm just throwing this out there as a market opportunity that would, to some degree, if people said, oh, it's terrible to have an abortion, then pay the woman to have the child.
And that way, we've taken the heat.
Again, we've reduced the temperature so we can start to talk about things more rationally.
For the record, I'm open to entertaining any out there ideas.
So let's entertain this.
Well, I think you can just categorize that one as out there.
But no, it's fair enough. It's fair enough.
And I'm simply focusing on what maximizes human happiness and human life.
I agree with you that if she's considering an abortion, if she could actually sell the child, maybe that would incentivize her, it probably would, to have the child and let it live a happy life with the family.
However, I think where I'd go wrong is when women make a career now out of getting pregnant to Have 15, 16 children to sell.
No, no, but women are already doing that, Cassie.
It's called the welfare state. It's just that the people who are paying for it don't have a choice.
They're being forced to pay for it.
So the idea that women don't have babies to make money, come on.
We know how that works.
For a lot of women, not all. But for a lot of women, it is.
Why would I want to get a low-paying job?
Why would I want to deal with some difficult guy?
I'll just pump out a bunch of kids and get the welfare state to pay for it.
So the idea that it would incentivize women to have children for money, it's like, well, at least this way is voluntary.
Well, I mean, yeah, and she could probably charge a lot more.
I mean, now you're under capitalism where you could be like, well, I'm the healthiest eater and I work out during my pregnancy so I can charge more for my baby.
But in Daddy I Do, I interviewed a single mother of five who was 25 years old.
Single mother of five who was 25 years old.
And she was living in Pahrump, a black woman.
And beautiful.
She was actually an aspiring model and singer and the sweetest soul.
And I really don't want to believe that she was doing it for the welfare system.
Three different fathers, by the way.
And let me just point out, it's not that women sit there with their Excel spreadsheet and calculate sperm-to-money conversion ratios or something like that.
But what I'm saying is that If they're paid for, quote, making bad mistakes, it's not like they make bad mistakes to get money, but they don't fight as hard against making bad mistakes because they're covered if they make bad mistakes.
And that to me is, they're just less concerned.
It's not like women, I don't think women sit there and say, well, I'm going to take this bad boy and this guy's got a tattoo and this guy's, you know, wears motorcycle pants on his head and dances naked in Times Square, so he's going to be the father of my children because that way I'm going to get lots of money.
The old story was the woman said, okay, well, I want to get married.
I want to have kids. We just talk about these women.
It's not all, but I want to get married.
I want to have kids. And there's no big fallback, but there's no welfare state.
So I've really got to choose a good guy.
Now there's this guy.
Man, he's hot.
You know, he's got a scar over his forehead.
He's got, you know, Popeye tattoos on his giant biceps.
He's got... Enough abs to run a Chinese laundry.
I mean, it's incredible what he's got.
But he sleeps with anything that moves and he doesn't have a job, right?
So you gotta grit your teeth and you gotta say, okay, well, this guy, he's a little pear-shaped.
You know, maybe a little thin on top.
Doesn't know how to play ping pong, and I love ping pong.
But he's getting an accounting degree.
He's gonna be solid.
He's gonna be stable. He's gonna be a provider.
This guy... Great sex, bad dad.
This guy, maybe I'll think about this guy when I'm this guy, but good dad and good provider.
And so women would sit there and say, okay, well, lust versus practicality.
And men do the same thing, too.
Men do the same thing where they look at a woman, you know, the hot, crazy spectrum kind of thing, right?
Present company accepted.
But you look at that and you say, well, she's really sexy, but she doesn't have a lot of compassion and empathy.
And, you know, this woman's a little bit more plain Jane.
You know, it's the Ginger Marianne thing.
Oh, you wouldn't know.
You're too young.
But, you know, and so we all have to balance this really sexy with good parent to my child, good provider, good mom kind of stuff.
And that balance used to be informed by the fact that there was no fallback position.
Now, if it's like, well, if this guy knocks me up, he's a bad dad, but I'm not going to end up on the streets.
I'm not going to end up selling my baby.
I'm not going to end up living the rest of my life in my parents' basement while they stare at me for not crossing my legs.
So, it is just a matter of the incentives change things fundamentally.
Like, it's not like everyone in the Soviet Union woke up and said, I'm going to do a terrible job today.
I'm going to go to work at the Soviet factory producing lattice, and I'm just going to do a terrible job.
It's just that there was no incentive.
You didn't get paid more for doing a better job, and you didn't get paid less for doing a bad job, and you couldn't get fired.
It just softens people's incentives and turns them into rational calculators with entirely the wrong set of equations.
I just have a hard time thinking there's that much incentive for women, for a single mother to have a fifth and sixth child.
Because the girl that I interviewed for Daddy I Do, she just got food stamps.
It was barely that much.
She wasn't getting support from the fathers.
I mean, obviously this is one story of many, but I don't think it's that...
Okay, if she knew she wasn't going to get any support for having the next child, because that's what a charity would do.
A charity would say, okay, one, fine.
Mistakes happen. Things happen.
But be really careful, because we're not going to pay for another one.
Right? And she has another one.
They don't pay for it. She's somehow...
And then if she have a third, we're taking away support for the first.
Right? Come on.
People know how to not get pregnant.
They've been doing it for thousands and thousands of years.
In fact, I know their entire Bible stories about how not to get pregnant.
And so, people know how to not get pregnant.
The question is, if she gets more money, she's just going to be less careful.
I'm not saying she's trading the baby for money.
She's just going to be less careful.
Now, if she doesn't know enough to calculate that, Like, if she doesn't care, okay, well, if I have one more child, I'm getting no support whatsoever, and no man's going to want me with five kids by three different guys, and I'm not going to be able to work a job, and I'm going to have no income whatsoever.
If she then makes that mistake, then I would assume that she's probably too mentally deficient to be a parent in any effective way.
Now, what happens with that, I have no idea, but I think that if you're competent enough to be a parent and to raise a child, you've got to be competent enough to not get pregnant again.
Hmm. 18 different kinds of birth control for women.
18? 18 different kinds of birth control for women.
This is not rocket science.
The red pill, yeah. And one of them only costs a dime.
I don't know if you've heard of this one, Cassie.
There's one birth control pill or birth control method which only costs a dime.
What happens is you get a dime, you put it between your knees, and you keep it there.
It's so archaic.
It is, but that was there for a reason.
Okay. Okay.
Wait, where's your offence-o-meter here?
I'm just wondering if...
Were you even red when we...
Was your top even red when we started?
I'm not sure if it's just got offended from the conversation or not.
Okay. If we're bouncing around with different ideas, I've actually had many debates with my now fiancé.
Congratulations, by the way. Thank you.
Four months away. We do not see eye to eye on this.
I think... There should be a license to have a child.
He absolutely disagrees.
He believes it's a human right for anyone to have a child, and if you can't pass that.
The test is that we could make certain people not be able to procreate, but I do think that we have a responsibility, and there should be some kind of regulation over who's able to have someone's and there should be some kind of regulation over who's able to have someone's What do you think? I would say this.
I don't think the government cares that much about kids.
The problem is, giving the government the power to choose who becomes a parent or not raises the rather important question, okay, how are you qualified?
You know, what statements, you know, I mean, if you go to a Muslim, you're going to get one answer about the best way to raise a child.
You go to, you know, some libertarian homeschooler, you're going to get quite another.
You go to a Christian, he's got to be baptized, and he's got to go to Sunday school.
Like, there's just no way.
And then what's going to happen is, again, you're going to get the government with the power to control the creation of life.
Every single group is going to try and grab a hold of that power and impose its will on others, and there's going to be massive infighting.
And let's say that somebody doesn't get the license.
What do you do? Do you cut out their reproductive organs?
Do you put them on some ungodly regimen of hormones?
I mean, that's not... See, there used to be a great license or a great test for whether you'd be a fit parent.
It used to be completely available to everyone, not centrally enforced, required no legislation, there'd be no lobbyists all over it.
And that wonderful license to have children used to be called marriage and income.
Yeah. That stuff was great.
Man, because if you get to the middle class, you're probably going to be okay, at least as far as having resources.
And getting to the middle class, it's pretty easy, no matter where you start.
I mean, I started broke.
And if you want to get to the middle class, you've just got to do three things.
You know them as well as I do. You've got to finish high school.
You've got to get and keep a job.
For at least a year, and you have to not have a child out of wedlock.
Now, if you can do those things, you got a 98% chance of getting to the middle class.
Easy peasy, nice and easy.
So marriage and an income, marriage being not the government license, but the public social community commitment to stay together no matter what, Marriage and an income used to be the license.
So the question is, why do we need a license now when we had one that functioned very well for thousands and thousands of years?
Well, because this is an example, Cassie, of one government problem or program leading to another government problem or program, which is now we're paying irresponsible people, so to speak, to have babies.
So now we feel like we need a license.
And it's like, well, that used to be there before the welfare state.
So that's a good argument that marriage is the license to parent.
Yeah, because even just I'm planning a wedding right now, and it is freaking expensive.
And I'm just right next to the national average of wedding costs.
So it's not like I'm doing some big royal wedding.
But it is a test to see if you have a stable enough life to...
Round up the money to put it together to have all your family support and also have them have enough, you know, finances to support your marriage if they have to travel to your wedding and get...
I mean, it's very... It is interesting.
You know, I'm finally at a place in my life where I'm able to have a wedding and then I think the next step would be to finally be able to have children now that I have my stuff together.
But yeah, that's interesting.
So... Freedom is the answer.
Whatever the question is, freedom is the answer.
That's my general.
I've got to get that stenciled. I've got Rome on the forehead, so I should just throw that in there.
This is the title for your next documentary.
And you can do it cheaper, right?
I mean, you can elope, you can do that drive-through Elvis wedding in Vegas or whatever.
So you can do it a lot cheaper.
But even knowing that you should get married before having children.
And, you know, the sort of married environment is the best place for children to grow up in.
I mean, children raised by a single mom are over 30 times more likely to be abused by the man in the house.
There's just this basic lion bloodline stuff that goes on, and that is the license.
And if there was some license that could prove, so to take your debate with your fiancé, if he could say, look, if there was a license that already has statistical evidence, reduced the abuse of children by 30 times, or made them 30 times more safe, you'd say... That's pretty good.
That's really, 30 times, not 30%, 30 times.
That's incredible. You'd say, well, okay, if there's a license which reduces child abuse by 30 times from the man, sign me in.
It's like, well, that's called a marriage license.
Yeah. I'm remembering this story that came out recently somewhere in the UK. It was a woman who they found two infant children dead in her home, and she was addicted to ice, which I don't even know what ice is.
But it was a big story maybe just two or three days ago.
You can find the Daily Mail article about it.
But yeah, I see stories like that and obviously I know that there's a lot of abusive women out there and obviously any household with drugs in it where there's children is a bad combination.
So how do we encourage more people to get married before having kids without coming off like Jesus will cry if you don't know.
I understand. That's not going to be a compelling argument for many people.
And it's funny because, and this is a very common way of thinking, and by that I don't mean any disrespect.
I think you're brilliant. But what I mean is that you're like, okay, what levers can we pull and push to make people change their behavior?
And again, freedom. Freedom is the answer.
The way that you get people to get married is you stop subsidizing a lack of marriage.
I mean, you've been an employer, right?
I mean, you work on a documentary, and it's like, my cameraman doesn't show up sometimes, but I pay him anyway.
What could I possibly do to encourage him to show up more?
Well, stop paying him when he doesn't show up, and then he'll show up, you know, if he's going to do it, right?
And so if you want people to get married, just stop subsidizing.
Sexual irresponsibility. You know, there are people who are genuine sex addicts and, you know, the amount of public money that has to be poured into abortions and the welfare state for kids and sexually transmitted diseases and, you know, all this sort of stuff.
I mean, you've got to stop subsidizing bad decisions and taxing good decisions because the only people who have the tax base to pay for single moms are people who aren't single moms.
Single mom's a huge net drain.
I mean, the welfare state is basically the single mother state.
Like, when it was first put in place, single motherhood was very rare.
Like, it was, I think, about 20% of the black population, now up to 77%.
And also, black babies, there's only 50-50 chance that a black baby that is conceived will actually make it past the abortioner's knife, because 50% of black babies are aborted.
It's unbelievably horrible. And I just did a show with the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson on.
There's 77% of black kids growing up outside of wedlock.
That used to be much, much lower.
It used to be like 6% in the white community.
Now it's 30%, 40%, 50% in some locations.
What's changed? We haven't had time enough to evolve radically different brains.
What's changed is you don't get married, you have a kid.
Here's all the money in the known universe.
Now, does it make them rich?
No, of course not. But that doesn't matter because the difference...
I mean, I've been broke. The difference between $30,000 a year and zero is a hell of a lot bigger than the difference between $100,000 and $130,000.
Like, that's binary.
The other one is the gradient. You know, I guess I can go out for dinner once more this month.
But that is like, do I have food or not?
That's like a very, very big difference.
So if you want people to marry more...
You could say, well, let's have a government program that pays people to get married.
It's like, well, that's just going to cost more.
It's going to be corrupt. The definition of marriage is going to be extended.
People are going to cheat it like crazy.
All we have to do is stop subsidizing the bad social effects, particularly for the kids that come out of I'm trying to think of what is the reason that...
Millennials aren't getting married right now.
I know that there is a push for a lot of women in New York to actually go to sperm banks and get pregnant because they've just given up on trying to find a man.
So I know there is definitely a large group of women who are deciding to have children without a father figure.
But otherwise, I don't know if...
I don't know if there are a lot of people that...
I think I'm showing my limited surroundings here because I live in Marin, California.
It's a very white, privileged population here.
So maybe if I was in the outskirts of Chicago, it would be a different picture.
The upper classes are still getting married and their marriages are lasting just as long as they used to.
So it is a particular class-based situation.
And I mean, there are a couple of very brief issues we can touch on.
I mean, I grew up, I was born in the 60s and grew up in the 70s.
And Cassie, it was an ungodly wasteland, literally.
Of divorce, of dysfunctional relationships, of just family courts and lawyers.
And I mean, it was horrifying.
I mean, most of my friends went through this at one time or another.
And we grew up looking at that saying, okay, well, this is what This is what marriage and divorce can do to a father, can do to a husband.
You know, you've got these...
You know, my mom used to make up these lists of like, oh, here's what I'm going to get from him, and she'd call the Lord.
And it was just like, brutal.
Brutal. And of course, I mean, I got her side of it, so I had some sympathy for her, but I mean, you know, I later heard the other side, and it's like, oh, wow, that's...
That's different than what I was led to believe.
And so when you grow up as a man, you grow up and you see this smoking crater where your father used to be after the family courts have gotten through with him.
And why?
Well, you know, 70-80% of divorces are initiated by women.
And the number one cause is not abuse.
It's not he was a drunk. It's not he was a Satanist.
It's not he was a supporter of Hillary Clinton.
Oh, sorry. Just had to get that one in there.
But it was...
Dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction. Now, dissatisfaction, newsflash, it happens.
It happens in life.
I mean, it wasn't like, can you tell me that when you were making your documentaries 100% of the time, it was just glorious?
The only glorious part is the beginning idea, and then everything else is hard work.
I'm trying not to translate that into your marriage.
First date, fantastic.
Next 60 years, a death mill.
But no, there are times, like, how do you know you've done a creative project?
Because you'd rather open a vein than open it up once more time.
Like, it's like, I'm done because I literally can't look at it one more time.
Like, when am I done a book when I'd rather die than reread it?
It's like, I don't care what state it's in, it's done.
And, you know, in all relationships, there are times where you're kind of bored.
It happens, you know, and it's not always the other person's fault.
It's not anyone's fault sometimes.
It just happens. And then you, like, you recommit, and everyone's happy and gets better.
So if you look at this natural ebbs and flows to relationships, and then you say, but if the woman is unhappy, she can...
Say I'm divorcing you.
He's got no recourse. She can drag him through courts.
And she's going to end up in the clutches of lawyers who may, as a strategy, tell her to accuse the man of sexual abuse of the children, of abuse of—you know this system better than I do.
The whole red pill thing talks about that.
That is a very terrifying environment for men to look at getting into, that they have endless responsibilities and no rights.
And their lives can be destroyed if something goes wrong.
And, you know, again, there's ways that you can mitigate that risk, you know.
The other thing, too, is that women want to marry up.
It's one of the oldest stories of humanity and certainly the oldest story of the animal kingdom as a whole, that women want to marry up.
And now that you've got like 60, 65, sometimes 70% of college students being women, well, women want a taller guy.
They want a guy with some income.
They want a guy with at least their own level of education.
And the pool is just diminishing enormously because women are, in a sense, overachieving statistically relative to men.
They've elbowed men aside in a lot of the fields, particularly in the arts and universities.
So... How are they going to marry up?
Now, for the few guys who are at the top of the alpha pyramid, life is good.
You know, life is wonderful.
You know, I'm a combine harvester.
You know, like I've got crop all over the place and it's good to be king.
But for the 80% of men that women think are below average in attractiveness, life ain't good.
And they say, well, I know she doesn't really want to be with me because she keeps going out with all these pretty losers or whoever it is who's unsuitable in the long run.
And if I get married to her, she's already kind of dissatisfied because she's not choosing me because she's got the state to marry if things go wrong.
And if she gets dissatisfied, she can call in this legal airstrike that will last for the next 20 years.
Or, you know, in California, I think it is after 10 years of marriage, you owe alimony for the rest of the woman's life.
The rest of the woman, that is a...
Boy, that's a...
That's a challenging ride to jump into, you know?
It's like, there's no safety straps here.
Why is it spinning? It seems like it's kind of loose.
It's got bolts rattling all over the place.
And so it is alarming, and that's because the government has made marriage a government program.
And what that means is women outlive men, they outvote men, and we have a natural sympathy towards the interests of women.
The Western society in particular, it's like the mirror image of other societies.
It is a white knighting society.
We love to take care of women.
Men propose, women dispose.
Men ask women out, and women say yes or no.
So we really have to care what women like and what women want, because the men who didn't care what women liked and wanted never made it to the top of the Western gene pool, right?
And you combine men's natural deference to the preferences of women with state power.
Well, I've called it a chicktatorship, and I may not be entirely wrong about that.
Thank you for letting me mansplain all of that to you.
I appreciate that.
I'm gonna just... I'm gonna spread to my subway seat a little.
Tape over your mouth.
Yeah, I mean, all the research I've done for the Red Pill definitely shows that the importance of having a present father figure in children's lives for both boys and girls.
And, you know, there's so many different ways that this affects children.
And one way that I'm really starting to see right now is...
Now that I am really stepping into my business role position as the CEO of a production company that's having to hire more employees and really have a big ship running smoothly, it's really testing my business knowledge and my business skills.
Something that I think is very fascinating is that there was a lot I didn't learn because I Didn't have what I would think is a father figure type of role to teach those things to me about how to do your taxes and how to negotiate and how to...
So when I started to realize that...
By the way, I think I've gotten a lot better now.
Actually, my fiancé is a cutthroat negotiator.
He's very good at it and he's taught me well in that department now.
But I... See, you married up?
There you go. So in Hollywood, this is a very big topic right now, and I think it's just going to get even bigger.
Probably the Oscars are going to talk about it again.
I know the Golden Globes made it a big issue for speeches then, which is the gender pay gap between actors and actresses.
And they have this whole Time's Up campaign and And so, you know, the pay gap is very interesting because these are contract positions.
It's not like it's a government job where everyone needs to be paid the same.
It's, you know, you could even compare it to being a home remodeling contractor.
You decide what your rates are.
It's freelance, right? Yeah, it's freelance.
And, uh, and oftentimes it is, you know, agents or managers negotiating those contracts, but sometimes it's not, sometimes it's the actors that really put their foot down.
But, uh, so, you know, one of the big recent stories was Michelle Williams, uh, apparently not being paid or, or only being paid per diem a day, right.
For the reshoots of, uh, I think all the money in the world is the movie title.
And, uh, You know, that was something that her agents negotiated or she negotiated.
And it was a bad negotiation deal, whereas Mark Wahlberg had a better contract that allowed him to charge more for the reshoots.
So when this story came out, everyone was saying that it's wage discrimination against men and women, it's discrimination against women.
And there was a really big support around Michelle Williams and that she was discriminated against just for her gender, which Even the other actors that were doing the reshoots weren't being paid for it.
I think the director even said he wasn't being paid for the reshoots because they wanted to do it to replace Kevin Spacey and so it was more of the cause behind the reshoots.
So anyways... I was talking to my fiancé about this, and I've had to negotiate a lot of contracts, whether it be when I was back in the acting days or now as a filmmaker.
And I even went to...
I don't know if I should share this story, but I'm already going there.
So a couple weeks ago, I went to a filmmaker mixer in town, and I was the only woman there.
And we ended up talking...
What we all charge for our day rate for filming a project.
And I realized I had the second highest rate of all the men there.
And the only one higher than me was a 65-year-old, very famous music video director and commercial director.
And he absolutely deserves his rate.
But, you know, I realized it's just I am unwilling to work for less.
And that's why I charge that.
And, you know, obviously because I'm also in a good position where I don't have to work for $100 a day.
So it's interesting because it really is negotiating skills.
And I do think that men have a leg up in that department.
I don't know if it's because they've just had more experience at it or if men share with other men how to negotiate.
But a lot of my girlfriends do not know how to negotiate.
And also a lot of them do not have fathers, present fathers.
And I don't think that boys who grew up without fathers are particularly good at negotiating either.
So there's that aspect as well.
So there's a couple of things to respond to that.
The first, of course, is that women score higher, significantly higher, on a couple of the big five personality traits.
One is neuroticism. The other is agreeableness.
And agreeableness is kind of one of these Aristotelian mean things, like if you're completely disagreeable, nobody wants to work with you.
If you're too agreeable, people will take advantage of you.
So you can need that middle ground.
And These personality traits are significantly genetic.
Oh, I said the G word.
It is true though. You can't sort of separate those two things out.
So yeah, there are some conditioning things, some socializing things for sure, but there are some genetics.
And there's a reason why in extended family gatherings, the men will fight about politics or sports and the women will go and talk about relationships in the kitchen.
There's exceptions, but this is the general pattern.
So the sort of three...
I think areas where – here are the three things I want to talk about with you.
Porn, fashion, and Uber, right?
Because not necessarily it's the worst movie ever.
This is not going to be the basis combo for your next documentary.
But look, in the porn industry, women are in higher demand than men.
So who gets paid more? Uber, of course, as you know, the way you call an Uber is gender neutral.
You don't even know the gender of who you're calling.
As it turned out, men ended up earning 7% more.
Why? Well, because they seemed to know the city a little bit better.
They drove a little bit faster.
Right or wrongly, I don't know.
Maybe they drove too fast. But there are those particular aspects.
If you look at...
How men choose their educations versus how women choose their educations.
Men will tend to go into petroleum engineering and women will tend to go into more person-facing occupations.
Men take on occupations that are far more risky.
And so there's a risk element to a danger pay, so to speak, like that women want to be in offices and want to be talking to people and so on.
And what they've done, of course, eliminating the gender gap is very, very easy.
All you need to do is you need to take unmarried women with the same level of education who've been in the workforce for the same amount of time as men, and they actually earn slightly more.
So I think that women should be perfectly free to make their own choices.
Of course, freedom is always the answer.
Women should be perfectly free to make their own choices in which occupations they want to go in.
And what they found is that when women have less economic freedom and the country is poorer, They tend to go more into male-dominated fields, engineering, computer science, and so on.
When they get more freedoms and the economy gets better, they pivot, right?
And then they start going into the occupations they really want to go into, which is, you know, nurse, psychologist, you know, the kind of social scientist, social worker, that kind of stuff.
Which may pay less. So I respect that people make different choices.
And it's sort of like saying, well, there's a pay gap between accountants and actors.
It's like, well, that's not really apples to apples now, is it?
Yeah. So yeah, respect the choices that women make.
And of course, the reality is that women will often quit to have babies.
And if they quit to have babies, if they want to be good moms, they're going to be breastfeeding for at least 18 months.
And then they may want to have another kid so that the kids are closer together and will play together.
And then they may have another kid, and they may not be back in the workforce for 10 to 15 years.
I'm sorry that I'm keen on the continuation of the human species, but I think that that's actually very important to do.
None of us are here without it, and there's no civilization if it's not pursued.
And that's why I do think that we're going to have a pendulum swing back to traditional family roles, hopefully, if we're lucky, right?
That's what I was taught.
But now I start to think, you know, just because something is historical doesn't mean it's archaic or...
Unintellectual in its decision of placing those kind of roles, you could actually look at it as being the most progressive, evolved system that many generations decided, now this family unit works best like this.
And so what we think of as traditional family doesn't have to mean it's backwards.
It could actually be progressive thought from our history.
And it's funny, you know, because this question of...
What was the perfect time?
You know, for some people, it was the 50s.
For some people, it was the 60s.
For nobody was at the 70s, except for people who made polyester outfits.
But I don't think we can go back.
Like, in terms of conservatism or old school values, we can't go back for a couple of reasons.
One, there's the internet, which means ideas spread like wildfire.
Before that, there wasn't, which is why you needed these radically stable institutions that kind of bullied people a lot of times.
The church was pretty harsh in terms of believe or go to hell and all that kind of stuff.
Touch yourself and you're doomed.
It was pretty harsh.
I don't think we can go back to that.
We have a much more skeptical and secular kind of society now.
We're also way wealthier than we were, you know, 100 years ago or 200 years ago.
I mean, there's no – because like we're like, I don't know, hundreds of times wealthier in terms of just basic material goods.
So the same constraints and restrictions don't matter as much.
Like, you know, back in the day in some medieval village, you couldn't train a woman to be a doctor because you only had the resources to train one doctor in the whole town.
And you couldn't train the woman to be the doctor because she'd get pregnant.
Because birth control and marriage, birth control was barely available.
Marriage was pretty much a constant.
And so if you wanted a doctor, you had to train the man.
Otherwise, you'd get no doctor.
And so I just...
I want to point out that I don't think that we're certainly not going back to that level of poverty.
We're not going to that level of religiosity.
I don't think we're going to go back. Plus, you know, the multiculturalism stuff, we're now bumping up against other ideologies and recognizing that there's a lot of subjectivity.
So the absolutism of culture, I don't think we're going to be able to get back to.
And this is why for me it's like philosophy, universal principles, reason, evidence, the science of ethics.
That's where we have to move forward to.
I don't think humanity gets much of a rewind.
Certainly not with the technology we have now.
And generally, the rewind kind of goes too far.
Like, at the end of the Roman Empire, they didn't go back to the beginning of the Roman Empire.
I went halfway back to the Stone Age, and I don't think that there's a rewind possible.
That's why I think we – this is why I do what I do, have to keep pressing on with philosophical principles.
Yeah. Well, okay, this is a good way to tie it back to identity politics.
I have heard, I think her name was Joanna Williams, talk about how the problem with identity politics is we're really, it's driven by subjectivity rather than objectivity and rationality.
So the emotions you feel from how you interpret your thoughts, you have these thoughts and then you have a sensation from those thoughts that Lead to your feelings, your emotions, and you run on that.
You're driven on that. And I do believe that we need to...
Okay, so when I was a feminist, I did have a victimhood mentality that was a chip on my shoulder that I brought this...
Kind of seeing the world through Eeyore's eyes that in every way I was being...
The world was stacked against me.
And I'm sure I brought that into relationships.
I'm sure I brought that into job interviews.
And I'm sure I wasn't a great person to be around all the time.
So I do think that victimhood mentality of feminists is holding them back from...
Really living the best life and have a fulfilling life, whether it's in their relationships or their job.
So I'm trying to think, is the answer then trying to swing people to rationality and objectivity where we're all like, We have to meet in reality.
If we're going to have a multicultural society, which we are, whether we like it or not, then we have to meet in reality.
We have to surrender to facts, reason, and evidence.
There's a reason why scientists from all over the world, from all different cultures and races can get together and have very productive meetings and sessions because they have objectivity as their metric.
Mathematicians, same way. Engineers, same way.
Computer science, they can all work together because there's an objective metric.
By which they can measure their success.
So this radical subjectivism, it just creates massive fragmentation and conflict.
And the thing, this is more of a sort of personal observation because, you know, I did the philosophy thing for a while.
So the personal observation, Cassie, is what I really dislike about identity politics is it really, it plays into and preys upon a fundamental human weakness.
And the fundamental human weakness is this.
We all risk and you fail a lot in life.
If you're trying, if you're not failing, you're not trying.
And if you're not failing enough, you're not trying enough.
I mean, I sort of, I was making this case to my daughter the other day about failure because, you know, she's learning how to lose.
And I said, you know, the best writer, two best writers in the English language are Shakespeare and Dickens.
And only about 20 to 25% of their books and plays are regularly read and produced.
So even the greatest geniuses of all time in the English language have a success rate of 20 to 25%.
That should give you some perspective, right?
I mean, I've done thousands of shows.
This will be one of the number ones, I feel it.
But failure is the natural state, and big success is like, woo, bonus, icing.
So we all fail a lot.
And when we fail, I shouldn't say we, I'll just say fail.
So when I fail, particularly when I was younger, there's this temptation.
And this temptation is, it wasn't my fault.
It wasn't my fault that I failed.
It was someone else's fault.
There's some structure.
There's some nefarious superstructure.
There's some scaffolding of evil that's out there that is preventing me from succeeding.
Because we want to protect our ego.
We want to protect our self-image.
And our self-image, when we try something...
We want to succeed at it.
We don't try, unless we're masochistic, we don't try in order to fail.
So our self-image is, I can do this.
Reality comes back a lot of times and says, you really can't.
You really can't.
You thought you could, but you're wrong.
Now, that is painful, right?
I mean, we don't want something.
Like when I was younger, I'd ask a girl out.
I was never indifferent to her saying no.
I mean, of course you ask a girl out.
She's, theoretically, if one of the girls had said no, I'm just kidding.
It happened. So we all want something and we're going to fail a lot.
And that's a challenge to our ego.
And we do one of two things when we fail.
We say... It wasn't my fault.
There are evil forces at work.
They're out to get me, and I did everything right, but it's somebody else's fault.
This person didn't deliver. This person just didn't like me for no reason.
It was a grant. Or we say, there's something I need to change in what I'm doing, because I didn't get what I wanted.
I need to take ownership. Of course, we know which we should do, but the great human temptation.
Is, you know, the sour grapes.
You know, the fox who tries to get at the grapes and can't get at the grapes and then storms off.
It was sour anyway, right?
I mean, that's...
And what identity politics does is it kind of injects its venom into that underbelly of blame others that we all have when we fail.
So, why am I paid less than a man, you can say.
Well... That's an interesting question.
You know, Jordan Peterson, this famous interview that he had with Kathy Newman, it was interesting because he's actually a psychologist who helps women solve this problem, whereas she's someone who just complains about it.
And I thought that was kind of interesting.
Like, well, I'm actually helping women getting paid more.
All you're doing is making them angry and getting them probably end up being paid less.
So you can say, okay, well, I'm paid less as a woman.
Now I can either say, there's an evil patriarchy that's never going to let me get, and then you're off the hook.
You don't have to challenge yourself.
You don't have to improve. You don't have to admit that there's a big gap between where you want to be and where you are and figure out a way to close it, which is painful.
It's hard. Yeah.
Okay, well- So I just, I don't like that in that fork in the road, you know, self-improvement versus blaming others.
The social justice warriors, the identity politics people, they come and they sell this bitterness and they excuse people and they say it's the fault of the institution, it's the fault of the capitalists, it's the fault of the patriarchy, it's the fault of whatever, right?
Some system, the problem, the reason you're poor is we have money, whatever, right?
And what it does is it paralyzes people and it gets them to squat in this dungeon.
Of resentment and abdicates their responsibility for their own actions and choices.
Now, I'm not saying we're omnipotent and we can just go out and get whatever we want, but there's a balance there.
And I do think sometimes we need to say to people, there are limitations you should be aware of and, you know, negotiate yourself accordingly.
But there are times when we need to say, it's not always the fault of the system or the structure as to why you're not getting what you want.
There may be lots of opportunities for you, but it's going to be a challenge.
And if there are more people encouraging people to step out of this bubble, this prison of victimhood and blame, I think we'll see a lot more success and progress in closing these gaps than just by saying to people, you can't win, don't try, the system's stacked against you, and we'll go and get it for you.
And it's like... How sad is that?
So do you think that we would become a more evolved, civilized society if we all became more, had more humility and looking within ourselves how to improve?
And, you know, I think the biblical saying is don't point out the speck in someone else's eye, look at the log in your own.
Because I... When I was a feminist, I definitely wanted to blame.
And I didn't necessarily take responsibility or accountability for my own actions and not getting the job or not having that relationship work.
I wanted to blame. And I, you know, from the Red Pill, left feminism.
And I do find myself really looking inward and reading a lot of, like, I know it has a bad connotation, but self-help books and just trying to figure out how to, you know, be a Change the way you look at the world to improve your life rather than make the world change for you.
But do you think that's where we should go is to becoming more analytical of our own psyche rather than blaming others?
Oh, self-knowledge is key. And listen, self-help books, for the first time I will confess to you and confess to the world itself that I actually went through a bit of a phase with the chicken soup for the soul books.
Oh, you did?
Were you a 13-year-old girl?
I'm telling you. No, it was even before then, before I became a dad.
I just – anyway, so, yeah, self-knowledge is the key.
Self-knowledge, you know, know thyself was the first commandment of philosophy that I think means anything.
And know thyself means be able to separate – We're good to go.
Go and sell it in the free market.
Find out. It may have an intrinsic value, like it's really good, but find out its monetary value.
Submit yourself. You had to find out when you released your movies, does anybody want to watch them?
Kind of an important question, because if they don't, it's a little tough on the old motivation, right?
So, humbling ourselves to a methodology is really challenging.
Scientists have to do it. Mathematicians have to do it.
Engineers just can't go around making stuff up.
Neither can physicists. Why should any of us?
We should always take our...
Cues from the most successful human disciplines.
And the most successful human disciplines are the science and the free market, and medicine being a subset of science.
Science and the free market have done more over the past 200 years than the rest of human history combined.
And human history is 150,000 years.
We're talking a tiny, tiny little slice that has completely transformed the planet.
And multiplied the population beyond what anyone ever thought.
Malthus was writing in the 18th century about how we were all about to starve to death because the population was tipping over like one person per square mile or something like that.
So you look at science and you look at the free market.
These are the two most successful, there's not even a close second, two most successful human disciplines.
And what do they do? They humble you.
Because you may want people to buy your book.
That doesn't make them buy your book.
You may want your scientific conjecture to be true.
That doesn't make it true. You have to submit yourself to the discipline of the market, to voluntary interactions in the free market, and you have to submit yourself to rational consistency in your theory combined with empirical evidence for what you propose.
And that is a very humbling thing, to say the contents of my mind must be infinitely less...
True or infinitely less valid than whatever happens out there in reality and whatever reason dictates.
And it is true in life as it is in science, as it is in the free market, that nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
If you're willing to submit yourself to reason and evidence, you gain extraordinary powers in the world because you are able to not only own your own actions, but We're good to go.
With identity politics, they say they have the evidence, they have the answer as to why some people are rich and why some people are poor.
Exploitation! They say they have the answer as to why women get paid this and that.
It's exploitation and it's like, but where's the evidence?
All you're doing is stimulating resentment and paralyzing people and I think the destruction of human potential.
Based upon that, stimulation of resentment and paralyzing.
Because resentment and paralysis go hand in hand.
You simply cannot get one without the other.
You want self-ownership? You get power.
You get responsibility. But you mean you also get self-blame.
You get guilt. You get all of the, you know, it's the Pandora's box.
So I really, really want to encourage people to think of yourself not in relation to a group, not in relation to an ideology, but in relation to reality, to reason, and to evidence.
Organize your thoughts accordingly, and I think that's as close to superpowers as human beings can possibly get.
I like that. I also, something I've been bouncing, I thought I've been bouncing around in my mind, I saw this in a video on YouTube, Which, of course, always you can trust.
So, the video was about what is the mindset of wealthy people versus poor people.
And the first principle that they brought up was that poor people think of the value of their time, whereas wealthy people think of the value of their output, what they created, what they're creating or distributing to the world.
And I thought that was a really good nugget of information.
If you want to get paid more, just produce more. And then ask for it.
What's called white male privilege is simply nobody gives us any excuses.
In fact, we get, I think, a disproportionate amount of blame.
But it's like nobody said to me, well, the reason why you're not doing well is because of some big external mysterious force.
I mean, I never got any excuses.
It's funny because the sort of white privilege is not being given a shred of white privilege, in a sense, or the male privilege.
The patriarchy is simply that nobody cuts you any excuses.
Nobody cuts you any slack.
And nobody says, well, you're sad that you didn't get more.
Here's more. You're upset.
It's like, no, you got to go out and fight for it.
Nobody ever told me anything different.
So that's kind of what I did.
And it worked. And I want to extend that to everyone else.
Yeah. I do wonder if...
Okay, I'm going to be generalizing.
So forgive me for the next 30 seconds.
But I do wonder if the reason why men are so good in business negotiating scenarios is because...
They take responsibility if they don't get the job or they don't...
There's no industry excusing male failure.
Yeah. As a white man, if my fiance was doing a job interview for some position and he doesn't get it, he doesn't blame anyone else.
He's like, yeah, I just wasn't educated enough or didn't have enough experience, didn't have the right resume, wasn't capable enough if you had to do a test run and you just didn't deliver.
And so I think that accountability is really, you know, then you improve from that.
If you take accountability for not getting that position and then you want to get better, then you are going to be better the next time around.
And I think that the discrimination a lot of white males experience in the workplace, I'm thinking of the story of Scott Adams, the cartoonist of Dilbert and a great writer.
And he was told when he was, I think he was about 16 years in the corporate world, and he said, sorry, no more promotions for white males.
Because we have to hit our diversity quota.
So your career ends here.
Now, he was still a pretty young guy.
So he's like, okay, well, I'm going to go and become a cartoonist then.
So you put all these roadblocks in front of people, this discrimination against white males in a variety of fields.
It's like, okay, well, then more of us will just become entrepreneurs or something else.
And it's like, you know, it...
It is another way of compelling excellence to have barriers that people have to overcome.
And if you make the barriers too high, people can't overcome them and they give up, right?
Like the patriarchy is institutional, it's huge, you can't beat it.
And then what you're tempted to do is the enemy is so high, you need a huge ally, and that always turns out to be the government.
And I also do think that People who are the great minds either today or in history, they lived lives of sacrifice.
They did sacrifice the pleasures of a comfortable, stable life to become Einstein or Elon Musk or someone who really has spent their whole life perfecting what their area of knowledge is.
And if we had diversity quotas to meet and And didn't have the free market.
I don't know if we would have an Elon Musk.
No, I think, and this is quotas and diversity and racially sensitive stuff.
Yeah, racial sensitivity, absolutely.
You know, we all have different stories as ethnicities.
We should listen.
We should talk.
We should communicate.
I'm against these particularly virulent in-group preferences that occur among every ethnicity, We should have conversations about our differences and we should unite under reason and evidence.
But, of course, this idea that you need to hit a certain quota to get this number of blacks into school, but not this number of Asians because there's too many.
I mean, this is terrible social engineering.
And it doesn't solve the problem.
Hitting your quotas Create a huge amount of resentment and frustration.
And again, now we have university applicants or job positions, which are now part of government programs, which is win-lose, which is whoever gets control of the government can now favor their own group at the expense of other groups.
And it's like, did we learn nothing from 300 years of religious warfare?
Can we just stop having the government favor particular groups, have one law that we're all subject to, and then, and only then, I think, can we really begin to get along.
Hmm. All right. I feel like that's good.
I don't know. Yeah, that's good.
I'm not going to top that, you know.
Quiet there. I'm not going to top that.
Well, thanks, Emil. I mean, a really, really great chat.
I mean, anytime you want to, this was certainly enjoyable for me.
And I appreciate these conversations because, of course, I know about them ahead of time, so I get to...
I thought I'd really organize my thoughts about how I want to communicate about stuff, and I've not done a show on identity politics, so I really appreciate the opportunity to mouth off about it, and I hope it was helpful and useful for you as well.
It was. It was.
I'm definitely going to re-watch this.
You know, just to pump up your confidence a bit and put mine down, you really...
I don't know how old you are, but you have plenty of life experience over me, and I do feel like I'm starting from ground zero with learning about philosophy, psychology, history, politics, because my whole beginning life up until I was about I was a very strong-headed Christian.
I went to a private school at one time in Washington State.
I just had very limited experiences.
I was taught creationism.
I was pretty sheltered.
Then I became a feminist.
For about 10 years, that was my world.
I really didn't think outside that.
So, now, since the red pill, I feel like I've emerged from the bomb shelter, and I'm like, oh, there's sunlight.
What is this? So, I just have a lot of questions, and I really appreciate you letting me ask some of my innocent questions.
No, they're great, great questions.
And, you know, I certainly don't have any monopoly on the answers.
I'm 51, in case that happens.
But I got into philosophy when I was about 16.
So, it's been a, what is that, 36 years?
Oh, that's going to make you young.
You know, if my philosophy was a woman, it would have hit the wall some time back ago.
I just wanted to mention that. So I just wanted to remind people, in case you didn't catch my last to chat with Cassie, theredpillmovie.com, I still think about this.
I really do. Like, I still think about the scenes and the images in that very powerful...
And theredpillmovie.com, just set your time aside, get as many people to watch it as possible.
It is an amazing, amazing...
Work of Illumination.
And twitter.com forward slash Cassie J, C-A-S-S-I-E, underbar J-A-Y-E. And of course, the other films, Daddy I Do, and The Right to Love an American Family.
Check those out as well.
A great pleasure. Congratulations, congratulations on your engagement.
It is, marriage is, you know, when it's bad, it's terrible.
