Aella: Sex Work, OnlyFans, Porn, Escorting, Dating, and Human Sexuality | Lex Fridman Podcast #358

But it was really shocking to me that nobody else was doing anything creative with sex work. Like for me it was, it was like breathing. Like you're just doing sex and you're bored and like what do you do? I don't know, let's try something funny. Like it's just the natural progression. And it felt to me like there was almost no competition, like I would just be really creative and like immediately was the top not safe work post on Reddit. Like I didn't even try that hard.

The following is a conversation with Ayla, a sex researcher who does some of the largest human sexuality survey studies in the world on everything from fetishes to relationships. She is fearless in pursuing her curiosity on these topics by asking challenging and fascinating questions and looking for answers in a rigorous, data driven way and writing about it on her blog knowingless.com she's also a sex worker, including OnlyFans and escorting, and is an exceptionally prolific creator of thought provoking Twitter polls. Ayla and I disagree on a bunch of things, but that just made this conversation even more interesting. I like interesting people in the full range of the meaning that the word interesting implies. I'm currently reading on the Road by Jack Kerouac and would be remiss if I didn't mention one of my favorite quotes from that book that feels relevant here. The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. In the middle you see the blue satellite pop and everybody goes, ah, this is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ayla. I feel like this conversation can go anywhere. Is that exciting or terrifying to you?

I think it's more exciting.

The uncertainty. Exciting to you?

Yes.

In conversations in general or just this one?

I think conversations in general. Like is anybody like how the certainty is really exciting? Maybe if the certainty is something new.

I mean, novelty always comes with uncertainty, right? Almost always.

I started trying to think of a counterexample immediately.

You're uncomfortable with generalizations of that kind.

Like always is always a really bold word to use.

But if it's truly novel, that means you don't really understand it's outside your distribution. So therefore it's going to have a bunch of uncertainty. But you don't think of it as uncertainty. You Think about as something new. But it actually also attracts you because there's a lot of uncertainty surround it. Probably like, what is this new thing?

Yeah, like annihilating the mystery. Like that drive.

What about the danger of it?

It's like part I was just thinking of on the drive over because I was like, I'm like a little nervous about doing this podcast. And then I was like feeling into the unpleasantness of it, like the, like the fear of what if something goes terribly wrong. And then I was also feeling into like, how much that feels like part of why it's exciting. Like if I knew that it was going to go great. I don't know.

Did you actually imagine all the possible ways it can go wrong?

Not all of them, but I was like, what if I say something really dumb or you ask me a question and I answer it in a way that makes me sound a lot less capable than I am? I'm really afraid of being perceived as stupid or something. I was also thinking about this on the way over. I'm kind of risk averse in some ways. I don't like driving fast in cars because I was driving very carefully here because the roads are bad. And then I was thinking about I'm very pro risk in other ways. Being really exposed to a wide variety of people who might hate you. And, and I think from the outside that might look fine, but I think the monkey brain is really sensitive to lots of people yelling at you for whatever problems that you seem to have.

So that's the big risk you're taking is putting yourself out there as an intellectual, like through your writing, and then a lot of people yelling at you. Is that, is that the worst embarrassment you can experience?

Pretty bad, yeah. I think. I think the worst embarrassment is if I put something out there that I fail to like, be properly skeptical of in myself. And then people are like, oh, we caught this thing that you didn't catch. I think that's the biggest terror.

Yeah. From looking at your reading and listening to your interviews, you seem to be very defensive and worried about being a good scientist.

Yeah, definitely.

Well, your like, methodology.

Yes.

And funny enough, you get attacked on that methodology, even though, you know, I'm a fan of psychology, like academic psychology, and it's kind of disappointing often how non rigorous their work is, how small the sample size and so on, and how big and ambitious over ambitious the proclamations about results is, especially when the news reports on it. Now you're both the researcher, the scientist and the reporter. Right. So like, that's what you have with the blog, your sample size is often gigantic. The methodology is right there, the data is right there. You provide the data and then you're like raw and honest with your interpretation of the day. Like there's an honesty, authenticity to it. So I don't, it's actually really refreshing. I don't know why people criticize it. I think this is what, this is what psychologists are probably terrified about, being transparent and transparent in that way is because they'll get attacked for their methodology. So they want to cloak it in a sort of layer of authority. Like I'm from this institution, it was peer reviewed, this kind of, all these layers. And I'm also not going to share the data with you and I'm also going to pretend like most psychology studies are not replicable. I'm just going to pretend there's authority to it.

I think it works on a lot of people. Like from the outside you're like, ah, the scientists with the white lab coats with credentials. Those are the people who are like doing science. And like doing science is, you know, you have like fancy terms that other people don't really understand. And to be fair, I, I have a lot to learn. I'm still self teaching, I'm learning through people, learning as I go. I'm definitely not super knowledgeable about this stuff, but a lot of what those people are doing in science is not that hard and a lot of people don't try to learn it because it seems so elevated. And this is one thing that really bothers me. I think everybody can do science. If you just have this aspect of curiosity and you just really want to figure something out, you can go and start asking people questions, doing surveys, writing down the answers and then you can go learn how to at that data in a way that gives you more information about the world. It's very simple and straightforward. If you just approach it humbly and earnestly and you're like, please, let's figure this out together. But people are, I think, self crippled in this because they view this as relegated to the domain of the experts and the fancy scientists. And I think that makes me feel really sad.

You're almost attracted to the questions you're not supposed to ask.

Oh yeah. Also yes. Which might contribute to the controversy.

Not exclusively probably, but you're just not limited by like part of your curiosity. Asking questions that seem common sense. Like what some of the most controversial questions are like around sex. It's like everybody thinks and talks and does sex. I mean it's, it's the driver of human civilization. And yet there's so little, like, rigorous discussion about the, like, the philosophical and the scientific questions around it. It's like it gets really weird to be able to discuss them. It becomes tricky to discuss them.

Yeah, it's supercharged because everybody has a really strong opinion, like whether or not pornography is damaging to society or how sex corresponds to gender or what kind of sexuality is acceptable. Can you have sexual preferences that in themselves are immoral? People get very angry about it.

Well, the sad part is they're not just opinionated, but most of us. Our relationship with sex is, I think, I guess I want to say, not rigorous.

I think it's very difficult to be rigorous about sex. I would consider sexual urges to be kind of elusive to introspection in a way that's a little bit disproportionate to a lot of other things. You could introspect about how I want other people to like me and where my insecurities lie. But sex is one of those black box things. A really common thing is for people to. If you have a fetish, you sort of check back in your childhood to see an event that corresponds to that fetish. And then you develop a narrative like, ah, this event in my childhood must have caused this fetish. And so I think this causes people to be biased towards a concrete, coherent, causative way that events happen or that sexual fetishes happen. This is just one example of why I think it's really hard to be rigorous with introspection because we can't avoid. You just want to tend towards making coherent narratives, which I think is not always the correct way to explain it.

The narratives that are connected to childhood and so on, where they originate. Yeah, I mean, we'll talk about fetishes because you have a lot of really interesting writing on that. Just actually zooming out. I should mention you tweeted. I wrote this down. You tweeted. I do not understand how to have normal conversations with people in person if I'm not on drugs. So I guess let's both agree to not have a normal conversation. I guess assuming you're not on drugs now, or if you are, you don't have to tell us.

I feel like a very small amount of Phenibet, which is a nootropic. Don't know if that counts.

Is that a drug? Well, I guess I'm on caffeine. Yeah. So we're both drugged up.

Good enough to have a normal conversation.

We don't have to. What is normal anyway? What do you think is the primary driver of human civilization? Is it the desire for sex, love, power, or immortality? Like avoiding the fear of death, constructing illusions that make us forget about our terror over mortality. So sex, love, power, death.

Is this a Twitter poll? There's four options.

This is reality. Not everything maps perfectly to a Twitter poll, but in this case, because there's four options and it is a small number of characters, it does, but I'd like to think I'm more interested. You know what I think your Twitter polls are fundamentally interesting. There's something about the brevity of a poll limiting to a set of choices and having an existential crisis and searching for the answer.

That's beautiful, that combination.

Well, this one's a big one. Like, what do you think is behind it?

Do you believe that there is one primary driver? Like, do you think that it can be understood in the terms of primary drivers?

Yeah, I think. Well, maybe it's an engineering perspective, like trying to reverse engineer the brain. I don't think we're equipped or understand enough about the mind to get there.

Yeah. Like what's the primary driver of a tree?

Yeah. Well, then it gets the question of what is life? What is a living organism?

Like to self replicate?

Probably that's a very clean simplification. But I think life is more interesting that than just self replication.

Yeah, but it sounds like there's a curiosity in you that you're trying to like poke at. And I don't understand exactly what that curiosity is.

So if I. If I had to dedicate a thousand years to understand one of these topics, which one would be the most fruitful? I guess is the indirect thing I'm asking. No, well, fun. To me, everything is fun. But really? Yeah. I mean, I'm with David Foster Wallace. The key to life is to make sure that everything is unborable or to be unboarable or nothing is boring. Everything is fun. Like everything. I could just literally sit. I honestly. Because I don't think. I don't know where you got that glass, but that glass exists and I forgot it exists. And it was really fun to me to know that now is there.

What about the really unpleasant things? Like if you're in like a deep agony?

Yeah, that's fun.

Okay.

That's fun because it's like. I mean. Yeah. Heartbreak. It's like knowing that I'm capable of that. It, like from, you know, we're all living in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars. So when you're in that gutter for some reason the stars look brighter, right? Like so like whenever you're going through a difficult time or whenever you see maybe other people being shitty to each other, it makes you like really appreciate when they're not. The contrast makes life kind of amazing. I'm reading a bunch of books. One of them is Brave New World where they remove contra, where they remove the ups and downs of life partially through drugs, but over, over sexualization and all that kind of stuff. And I feel like you need that contra. You need the ups and downs of life, the dark, you know, you need the dark to have happiness, to have like a deeply intense feeling of affection towards another thing or a human being. Yeah, yeah. So everything's fun. But fun is also a weird word to define because fun, I think for a lot of people that's why I talk about love a lot. I think love is a better word than fun because fun is like light hearted. Love is more intense. Like I love that glass and the water that's in it because it's freaking awesome. Like somebody made that glass, right? And like not have many mistakes. And like there's a. And the way bends light in interesting ways and the way water bends light in interesting ways. Like I can see part of your arm through that water. That's freaking amazing. Everything is amazing. I'm with the Lego Movie anyway. But if like from a scientific perspective, if I were to investigate sex, I don't know why I put love in there. Let's just narrow it down the Twitter poll. Let's focus on the basics here. Sex, power or death? Immortality. If I were to try to like from a neuroscience neurobiology perspective or reverse engineer through building AI systems that focus on the these kinds of dynamics, exploring the game theoretic aspects of it, exploring the sort of cognitive modeling aspects of it, which one would get me to a deep understanding of the human condition? That's the question. Sex, okay. Nietzsche is the will to power. Freud and the bunch is all about sex and then death. Live just. Liv Burley, brilliant previous guest on this podcast. She just released a video where on her bedside was the book Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, which of course she would have on her bedside. But that the. His whole work is that everything is motivated by our trying to escape the cold, harsh reality that we're going to die and we're terrified of it. One of the gifts and burdens for human beings is that we are cognizant of our own death and that terrifies us. That's the theory. And because of that we do everything we can. We build empires to escape the fact that we're mortal.

Wouldn't this change quite a bit for religious people then who don't believe that they're going to die?

Well, they created religion. The idea there to create myths, religions. You can create religions of all kinds.

Like yeah, but if this is one of the defining things that defines civilization, then we should expect to see massive differences between people who believe we're gonna die and people who don't.

Good. I love it. You think it scientifically here and they have actually answers. There's a whole terror management theory where they do write psychology type papers and they do actual experiments. I can mention how their methodology is interesting. They prime with the discussion of death. They take one certain set of people, they have a conversation with them and another set of people they mention to them before the conversation and see how that affects the nature of the conversation. It's really interesting because death fundamentally alters the nature of the conversation. Just even priming reminding you that you're going to die briefly changes a lot of things.

These kinds of priming papers, usually not replicated. I feel like I've heard a bunch of priming ones that I think you.

Have PTSD over psychology papers. It's not replicated.

I just did a priming experiment on my own and found it didn't have any effect.

But again, can't you just give me a careless statement summarizing an entire scientific discipline of terror management theory? I don't know. People should like. I haven't rigorously looked at how good of it is psychologically. I think it is interesting philosophically the way Freud talked about the subconscious mind. Philosophically, it's an interesting discussion. Then you have to get rigorous with it for sure. But the idea is that like it's not that religious people get rid of the terror of death. This is just one of the popular ways they create an illusion on top of it. That's that idea like a myth that allows that makes it easier for them to forget to escape that terror. But everybody else does different, different methods like you fill your days with. Like capitalism has a whole, is a whole religion of itself, like the rat race for getting more and more material possessions and so on.

Couldn't you argue in the opposite direction? Let's say assume that we're Christians here and we're like, ah, the atheists, you know, everybody has terror of hell and the atheists invent this mythology where actually evolution is true in order to escape their terror of hell. So that doesn't Feel like a persuasive argument to me. But I used to be very, very Christian and I did not have a terror of death. And then I lost my faith and then I had a deep terror of death set in for a few years and it felt very different to me.

So for denial of death, I don't know if he says that it's actually possible without really a lot of work to get to the actual terror. Like I think his claim is that in early, early, early childhood development, that's when the terror is real. And then we aggressively construct systems around it of social interaction to, to sort of construct illusions on top of it. I'm doing a half assed description of this philosophy, but there is like, it is interesting to simplify the human mind into underlying mechanisms that drive it.

Yeah. I was gonna say your thinking seems kind of poetic. Like the way that you're sort of handling these.

Yeah.

These concepts feel like more like aesthetically driven.

I think this theme is going to continue throughout this conversation as we talk about relationships and sex. Yes, for sure. I think so. And I think your thinking seems to be very driven by how can I construct an experiment to test this hypothesis?

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah. But aren't there's some things especially that have to do with the human mind that are really messy, really difficult to understand. There's so many uncertainties and mysteries around that we don't yet have the tools to collect the data. Like one of your favorite tools is, the survey is asking people questions and then figuring out different ways to indirectly get at the truth. Because there's flaws to the survey. You kind of learn about those flaws and you get better and better at asking the right questions and so on. But that's indirect access to the human mind.

But do you think poetic narratives are. I'm not saying poetic narratives are bad. I think it's a cool way of handling concepts, but I'm not sure that they are more rigorous.

No, no, no.

Okay.

No, but they might be the more correct. Like philosophy might be the right way to discuss things that were really far from understanding.

Yeah. I mean, they might be more useful shorthand.

Yeah.

Like morality. I don't think morality makes any sense, but it's really useful shorthand to use when handling concepts a lot of the time.

Right. Like ethics and morality. You could construct studies that ask different questions. Like, you know, just having worked with autonomous vehicles, a lot of the, the trolley problem gets brought up and I don't know, you can construct all kinds of interesting surveys about the trolley problem. But does that really get at some deep moral calculus that humans do? It's sexy because people, like write clickbait articles about it. But does it really get to, like, what you value more? Five grandmas or like three children? Whatever. Like, they construct these arguments of like, if you could steer a train, if you could steer an autonomous car, which do you choo? Yeah. I don't know if it's possible with some of those to construct sometimes the fuzzy area. There's some topics that are fuzzy and will forever be fuzzy given our limited cognitive capabilities.

I don't know. There's a way of looking at things where it's like, for example, the childhood fetish thing that I was talking about. Where do your fetishes come from? You can develop a narrative where it's like, you know what I think this kind of thing is? You're surrounded by feet when you're a child. This causes foot fetishes. And this is kind of a cool narrative. And I think a lot of people's ideas about philosophy follow the same sort of thing. Like, what is the narrative? That is cool. And I think this is useful for meaning making. I'm very pro. Meaning making, like, when you're talking about everything is fun because the contrast or whatever, I very much ascribe to that. I really enjoy that philosophy. I also find everything to be very delightful. And this isn't like a question of truth. Right. We're not like, where is the true delight that we're objectively measuring? This is a frame, a poetic frame that you're using to sort of change the way the light hits the world around you. And that's super useful because it makes you happier or something.

Yeah. But also gets to the truth or something.

Yeah, I guess. What is truth?

Yet another question. What is truth? You've actually to jump back. You believe that free will is an illusion. So why does it feel like I'm free to make any decision I want?

It's a cool illusion. I think that's probably like where a sense of identity comes from.

It's a fun illusion. Oh.

Like when you, when you really meditate on your sense of identity, for at least for me, it seems like it comes down to the sense of choice. Like, oh, I am doing the thinking. Like, what does it mean to do with thinking? It's like, ah, something in me has exerted agency over having this thought or not having this thought. Like, the sense of self really comes down to choice. And so when I say that, like, free will is an illusion, I also mean there's something like the self is an illusion. Identity is a trick of the light.

But it's a really fun one.

Yeah.

You think a lot about your identity.

I have occasionally.

Yeah. Like, you really struggle with it. You're proud of it. I do, too. It's not. We have different journeys, but.

So I really take a lot of delight in it. I used to be very into, like, deconstructing it. Like, you probably maybe, you know, I did a bunch of, like, way too much jealousy for a while. And at that point, very. No, no. Ego. And now I'm like, very ego. And I really enjoy having a lot of ego.

I actually happen to know, like, everything about you.

Really?

Yeah, like, more than you do. It's interesting.

That's fascinating. Wait, could you. Can you solve my problems?

Yes, all of them. I've did thorough research. Okay, what is consciousness then? I actually wrote that as a qu. What is consciousness? To remind myself. So, like, how does that tie in together free will and identity and all of that?

What is consciousness? Is, like, one of the biggest questions ever. I do think that people often get confused when talking about consciousness because I think people are referring to two separate concepts and often combining them into one thing. We ask the question, is AI going to be conscious? I think this is kind of the wrong question. We can identify signs of consciousness, like, ah, they seem to refer to themselves. But this is not necessarily proof of consciousness in the same way that, like, dream characters acting exactly the way normal human people do in your dream is not evidence that they themselves are conscious. So, like, signs of consciousness are not proof of consciousness. But there is something that we definitely know, which is, like, I currently am conscious. I can tell because. Right. Like, I'm, like, just directly observing my experience. And so there's one kind of consciousness which is I am directly observing my experience and that you cannot replicate it. Like, I cannot observe two experiences. It is necessarily singular and it is necessarily certain. You can make all the arguments you want. I'm still directly observing. It's not a thing that's subject to reason. Whereas our other thing is conscious. This is something that's replicable. You can apply it to multiple people. It's something that's not certain, almost definitionally not certain. We don't actually know if there is an internal experience. So my argument is that when people are talking about other things having experience, they're using a different concept than the thing that they're actually looking at. When they look at their own experience.

I think they're two different things, definitionally not Possible. No. If you understand the mechanism of consciousness, you'll be able to measure it, probably. Right?

Yeah. But what are you measuring? Like, I think there's just like a subtle difference, like when you're asking the question, is this other thing conscious?

Yeah. The easy thing to measure is like a survey. Does this thing appear conscious?

Yeah.

And then the hard thing is, you understand the actual mechanism of how consciousness arises in the physics of the human brain.

We could do that in a dream, presumably, like if you had a very good dream or a very good simulation. But we could then have somebody in a simulation or a dream where they go through and they fully understand. They do all the tests and the tests come back. Exactly. They would expect them to, but from the outside, we're like, well, this is misleading. They're not actually conscious. Your dream characters aren't conscious, Right. Probably.

I don't know. Are you asking? Are you telling?

I'm appealing to an intuition.

But it sounds like you're driving towards the narrative. I don't. You did a poll about men and women and dreams.

Yeah.

There was some kind of difference. I couldn't tell what the difference was, except that more men than women.

Quite a lot more women dream vividly than men.

Oh.

Which I actually found my Chaos survey. So I. I did a survey, maybe, you know, the. I had.

I know everything.

You know. Yes. I'm sorry. So, as you clearly know, I'll try.

Not to talk down to you through this conversation because I know. And I not only know everything, I know how your future looks like.

Really.

And how everything ends. Yeah.

So you could probably win all the prediction markets on my life.

Yeah.

Cool.

So we should also mention that you have, like, prediction markets. You have, like, votes that you. What's the site called again?

Manifold.

Manifold. And one of them was, will I be on the Lex Friedman podcast.

Yeah.

And I voted. I invested everything I own into the. Yes. Is there such thing as insider trading on. There is. That goes against the terms of the.

No. I think insider trading is part of the information. So it's supposed to be.

And then I realized it's actually public information that I voted because, like, I think my face shows up. There's like, damn it. It's gonna influence significant. You could make the fake account. Or I could be lying. Right. I could be. And then dump the stock or whatever.

You know, I tried to manipulate somebody, made a market. Like, is Ayla going to post a poll spelled P O L E on her Twitter, like a photo? And I was like, I'm gonna manipulate this Market. So I like fucked around with it and I voted no and then I accidentally posted a fold photo of a poll without thinking.

It's like self sabotage.

Yeah. I accidentally up my own market.

It doesn't. That's like the reverse of insider trading.

Yeah.

What were we talking about? The women and the men and the difference. The vivid dreams in the markets. I forget what the market. Oh, I guess I can. I can perfectly predict your future. But then it's not fun. I like the romance of unpredictability. And so I. I like to. Even though I know everything, I like to forget everything.

Very Buddhist of you.

Yeah. The river. No man in the river wants, whatever the footsteps, however that goes.

That's one of my favorite questions is if you could press a button and then have all of your wants fulfilled. Anything that you want. So it's such a rapid degree that you don't really experience the want. As the want arises, it then is completed immediately so that you are completely without want. Would you press that back 100% not. Yeah. I didn't think you would.

No, no, no. Because immediately everything stops being fun the first. It's only fun the first time.

But if you want it to be fun.

But like what would be my source of fun? I feel like I would like on day four just to get off, I would need to like do like nuclear war because it'll escalate quickly. I feel like if everything is possible, I assume you mean like something that like is not just normal human things.

Yeah, magical world.

Magical world. And you start escalating really quickly. Like I wonder. I'll probably do like. I want everybody to just fly into the air and hover in the air. Everybody. And then you're like, oh, life is meaningless. Like why does like you, you go. I feel like you get. No, I actually that'd be a really interesting experiment. Like what are the limits? Like are we all capable of becoming psychopaths essentially? Like I like to believe not. There's a very hard limits on that. Like in our own mind. Like a basic compassion. Because I love being compassionate towards other human beings. It's one of the things I think about if you give me power, like a lot of power, like absolute power. And I think that's this. The power you mentioned is the scariest kind of power. Because it's like it's not even power in this normal world. It's like magical power where you lose. It's a dream world power where you like video game power. You don't even think of it as reality. You could just mess with the world. I feel like that's terrifying.

Yeah. Basically be God.

God. Yeah. But without like, I feel like the idea of God wants to like keep things like functioning properly.

But then you'd probably would. If you wanted to keep them functioning properly, then it would rapidly. Like you would never experience a time where you're like, oh no, that was a mistake. Because as soon you like before you even experience that, the world would shift to match it.

Oh, interesting. No, I think I would actually. I take it back. I think I would regret the first time I hurt somebody. See in my visualization it was like a video game where everybody's like npc. Really dumb. No, I think the first time I witnessed pain from anybody, that's when I would stop and I would probably run into that very quickly. Like even just the hovering make a person hover and they're going to be probably really upset with the hovering. Right. And so I'm going to be like, no, don't do that anymore. And then I'll probably go to. Honestly, I'll just return back to my normal life.

Yeah, that's kind of what I feel like. Like if I had the power to do anything, I think I would probably want to have a life very similar to where I am now.

Yeah, yeah. I mean there's. It's like with Uber, like it'd be probably more convenient to do certain things. But even then like the struggle, like I got a flat tire, so I have to fix that. I kind of. The flat tire makes everything more beautiful. It's like cool. I could do like a normal manual thing. But also it makes you like appreciate your car, appreciate transportation, appreciate the convenience, the transportation, all of it.

I know some people who would call this a bunch of copium. You're just sort of making do with what you have. We wouldn't go back to Amish times or pre technology in order to make ourselves appreciate things more. And so this seems like a hindsight reasoning, which I can appreciate that argument, but I don't know anyone who uses.

Sorry to interrupt the word copium in their argumentation. I think is sus.

Yeah, is sus. My entire argument is now.

No, I'm just kidding. I'm sorry, go ahead. Sorry I interrupted rudely the flow of thought. But you don't think so in part you disagree with that kind of argument.

Yeah, because I think people have this idea that if you come to accept or find meaning in what you have now, this is sort of at odds with trying to improve it. And I don't find this to be the case. I find the attempt to improve it to also be part of it. I enjoy the fact that there's something problematic going on because now I get the experience of striving to make it go away. And that in itself is where the meaning lies. It's not just that things are bad. It's that things are bad and we're trying to stop it. And also.

Exactly. If you combine that with a sense of optimism that the future can be better. Yeah. That feeds. Feeds into this productive effort of making things better. And it somehow makes the vision of the things that are better more intense. Having experienced shitty things.

Yeah.

So we talked about free will and consciousness and what drives human civilization. Question left unanswered. It's a homework problem for the reader. Okay.

Am I getting, like, a scoreboard at the end?

The amount of questions that successfully versus not like polls. Can we talk about some practical things?

Sure.

So one of the many amazing things. I think of you as a researcher, but you've also been doing research in the field.

Yeah, fieldwork.

Field work.

Jane Goodall of.

Sex work. How did you get. What's the. The short and the long story of how you got into sex work?

How did I get into sex work? Well, I mean, there's a whole, like, childhood thing where I was conservatively homeschooled.

Do you want to actually talk about your childhood? I think it's interesting because you also worked at a factory, so, like, your childhood is really fascinating and difficult, traumatic. So. And you've written about it. There's a lot of ways we can talk about it, but maybe what are the things you remember, the good and the bad of your childhood, of your maybe interaction with your father?

Yeah, my dad probably has narcissistic personality disorder. And so it was very centered on very controlling childhood immensely. So we were homeschooled and pretty isolated from the outside world. Like, we didn't know anybody else who wasn't homeschooled. We went through a program called Growing Kids God's Way, which was very. It was like the kind of program where you're not supposed to pick up babies when they cry, to train them that they can't manipulate the parents because baby crying was viewed as, like, you're teaching them from an early age that they're allowed to make the parents do what the kids want. And we're very against this philosophy. So, you know, that combined with a narcissistic personality disorder. Dad was pretty rough, so.

Controlling.

Super controlling. Yeah.

And developing and feeding the self Critical aspect of your brain?

Yeah, very much. It was, you know, I was like lazy. I was never going to accomplish anything in life. I was going to move out of the house and realize how good I had it at home. You know, the classic stuff. He was very like logical and smart though. And so he would also like teach us logic stuff. I remember some of my earliest memories are him like giving me basic logic puzzles like the dog has three legs. You know, how many dogs have four legs? And I, I would mess up. But he was an evangelist, basically a Christian evangelist. So we did Bible study five nights a week. I memorized, I think 800 verses of the Bible by the time before I became an adult. Yeah, it was very patriarchal also. So I was expected to grow up and become a housewife. Basically. They're like, oh, you can go to college to meet a man and also to get a little bit of education so that you can homeschool your own kids. We were explicitly told that women were subordinate to men in regards to like making decisions when you're married. Our pastor's daughter was not allowed to leave home because she would be outside of the authority of a man. So when she got married, she was allowed to leave because she was never allowed to live in a house where she was not under a hierarchy. This is like the kind of culture that we live in.

So there's a hierarchy and there's a gender aspect to the hierarchy. There's men at the top of that hierarchy.

Men at the top.

Okay. But your own psychology, your own mind. So most of that self critical brain is bad. Right?

It was confusing because he told me that I was smart, but also that I would fail. But I.

But not smart enough, right? Or like smart but not smart enough.

Smart, but like not virtuous or something.

Okay, okay, right. There's always a flaw.

There's always a flaw. I think a lot of it was a lot of the fucked upness of my brain came from feeling like I didn't have the authority to think because it was so carefully suppressed. My ability to express or have any sort of power was just absolutely annihilated systemically, psychologically. They would do psychological torture mechanisms to make sure that I wasn't actually thinking on my own or being able to deviate from anything anybody ever told me to the degree that it's still ingrained in me. I once was a friend, we were traveling and he wanted me to hop a turnstile. It was very late at night, the train was here and I could not physically force myself to do it. He was yelling at me like, come on, do it. I was trying so hard to make my body cross the line, and it was just. It's like, embedded in my physical being to be unable to do stuff like that, which is really annoying.

You're not free to take action in this world.

Yeah, some of them. So that was, I think, the most annoying part of my upbringing.

Would you classify it as, like, suffering at the time?

Yeah, definitely. Well, it's confusing because when I was a child, it was just painful in the sense that things suck, but it was placed in a meaning framework. It is good. It is virtuous to submit to your parents and do what they want. If they tell you to say goodbye to your best friend forever and never talk to them again, you go do that without complaining. And so I would go do something like that, and it would suck. It really was concretely painful, but it was also placed in this narrative where I was fulfilling some sort of greater purpose. And so it's very confusing to refer to it as suffering because there's so many painful things we do today that are placed in the narrative of a greater purpose that I think I would agree with. I go get a medical procedure done, and that sucks. But I'm like, ah, this is helping me in the long run. But say if I got abducted to an alien planet and they're like, by the way, all of those medical procedures you got done, you didn't have to get them done. Those are totally unnecessary, then I might get really upset about it.

Yeah. I wouldn't trust those aliens, though, because they probably want to do different medical procedures. I did. I saw. I saw some. I saw a thumbnail for a video that I'm proud of myself for not clicking on about a man who has claimed that he had sex with aliens. And I was like, thank you for not clicking on that, because I was wondering, because I would probably watch it for, like, 20 minutes and then I should be doing work.

Oh, I see.

So, like, I. And I. And I'm actually happy because I get to imagine what is. All the different possibilities that could have been for that man who had sex.

You'd have, like, a really high, like, resting happiness state.

Yes. Yeah. Probably like a mushroom state. Yeah.

Wow. Do you do mushrooms?

I've done mushrooms before. It was very awesome. Like, more intensely awesome. But. But, like. Like, because I was just looking at nature, it makes nature even more beautiful, I think. But it's already. It's already pretty beautiful. I haven't done mdma. People say that I Should.

It's very nice. Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, but I'm already. Yeah. What did you call it? Resting happiness state?

Yeah. High, resting, happening happiness.

Yeah, that's a good, that's a good way to describe it. But it's not like some of it is genetic that you're able to notice the beauty in the world and some of it is practiced where you realize focusing on the negative things in life, like unproductively is, it's, it just doesn't help your mind flourish. So like you just notice that and it's like, I mean, I think people with like depression learn that or like probably with trauma too is like there's certain triggers. Like if you're, if you suffer from depression, you have to kind of consciously know there's going to be triggers that will spiral, like force you to spiral down. And so just avoid those triggers. Some people have that with diet, with food and so on. So I just don't like whenever there's shitty things happening or shitty people. Unless I can help. Unless, unless I can somehow help. Like why, why focus on it. Yeah. Anyway, back to your upbringing. What, what was the journey of escaping that?

I. Well, I left home like kind of early because my dad and I were not getting along by the time I was a teenager. But I was still Christian for a while and I lost my faith after, I think I moved away and I started having friends that weren't religious or weren't raised in the super conservative environment that I came from. And I think this was not conscious at the time. This was my hindsight story. But I believe that being exposed to a culture in which I had the capacity to believe allowed my brain to actually seriously consider the thought that maybe all of this stuff was untrue. That I'd been taught like 6,000 year old earth and evolution is a lie, macroevolution and all of this stuff. Because when you're immersed in an environment like that, I don't think you actually have a choice. Your brain has to believe these things because this is a survival thing. If you believe this, if you believe the wrong thing, you'll be totally cast out. Even if they're not going to cast you out, you're going to be cast out in communion with others. Because we were always told that you can't trust nonbelievers. Really, they don't have a moral compass, they're gonna screw you over. And so I'm like, oh, I can't be that. Like everybody's gonna outcast me internally. So anyway, I don't Think I actually had the capacity to seriously question my faith, even though I thought that I was questioning it quite hard until I got into an environment where it was safe to do so. And once I started being able to make friends who were not religious, I'm like, oh, if I lose my faith, I'm still gonna have some sort of community. And then at that time, I went through some questioning, and then I lost my faith.

And so in that, given your friends, given your situation, you have. You now have the freedom to think.

Essentially, or at least the ability to think of something that was acceptable in the new culture. Yeah.

Without. I mean, is there a danger of, like, adopting the beliefs of the new culture? So, like, there's some aspect of just being able to think freely, which you weren't able to do when you were growing up, just to think, like, look at the world and wonder how it works, that kind of thing.

I mean, you were. But within certain boundaries, like, there are certain basic assumptions. And as long as you were following those basic assumptions, which is, to be fair, is, like, kind of what we're doing now. Like, we have. Have I gone and done the personal research that, like, evolution is the thing that's going on? Have I looked at, like, the age of the stones? No, I haven't. I'm trusting other people.

Yeah.

Which I think is, like, a fair choice to make given where I'm at right now.

But you're also assuming, like, there's causality in the universe. Time is real.

Yeah.

That, like, that. First of all, the thing that your senses are perceiving is real. You're assuming a lot of things.

Yeah. I think, like, it's better just to become aware of the assumptions you're making, like, as opposed to not making those assumptions at all. Like, you have to assume something. And I did. It's very suspicious. Right. That I went out of this very conservative culture and now. Well, I guess I don't believe things that are super in line with the current culture. I think this is why I feel a little bit safer right now. Because, like, when I was Christian, I believe generally Christian things, but now I believe a bunch of things that, like, people really hate. Like, I get canceled online all the time. I'm like, okay, this is a sign that maybe you're thinking independently if you're, like, able to think things that are completely at odds with the people around you. And to be fair, this is a little bit easier to do when it's, like, general culture, but it's much harder to do with your peer group. Like the people that you trust, your friends, the people whose opinions you respect. Disagreeing with those people is very difficult and I'm not very good at it.

Yeah. I do think that if you establish yourself as a person who can be trusted and is a good human being, you have a lot more freedom to then explore ideas that are different from your peer group. So, like, those seem, if you separate the space of ideas versus some kind of, like, deeper sense of what this person is like, that they're an interesting and trustworthy and good human being.

Well, is there somebody that you respect who you consider significantly smarter than you? And can you imagine believing an idea that you've heard them talk really disdainfully about? How would you feel coming to them being like, I believe this thing that you find to be.

Yeah, I do all the time.

Oh yeah. Maybe braver than me. And to be fair, I support doing this. Like, I try to do this, but I think, like, subconsciously I notice that I don't do it as much. And so I'm suspicious of myself. I'm like, I wonder if I'm hiding to myself actual curiosity about things that might deviate from my peer group because I've noticed that I'm not actually deviating with them as much as I do with the outside world.

Yeah, it's interesting, I mean, because I do see most people I interact with are smarter than me, but I also have this intuitive feeling that dumb people, which I consider myself being, have wisdom. So, like in the disagreement. Actually, I also believe in the power of conversation and in the tension of disagreement. So I think even just disagreeing from a place, from a good place, from a place of like, love and respect for each other, I think I just believe in that. So it's not like individuals, you're disagreeing, you're like working towards arriving at some deeper truth together. Right. Even if the other person is. Is smarter. Maybe that's. Maybe that's how I justify it for myself. I just, I'm also a fan of conversations because, like, I've seen just listening to conversations, it seems like a great conversation more emerges from it than the sum of its parts. Right. Like, somehow two people together can do like, that dance of ideas can somehow create. Create a cool thing. By the way, I enjoyed. I saw a video of you dancing at a bar drunk. It wasn't the bar drunk. It didn't look drunk, but just the dancing. It was like ballroom dancing type of thing.

I was like, yeah, something like that.

I've been doing a bit of tango dancing.

I like It Argentine. Nice.

I like stuff with the body in general, like. Like wrestling or combat. Like, usually when there's a tension, you have to understand the mechanics of how two bodies move when they're in conflict. And dancing is similar.

Like, you have to do, like, rapid thinking. Also, like, rapid, intuitive, physical thinking. And that's my favorite kind of thing. Like, a lot of exercise is really boring to me because you can just do it while your brain's off. But something like ballroom dancing or fusion dancing, you have to constantly be, like, figuring out, like, it's a rapid puzzle. And that's so wonderful.

What's fusion dancing?

That's the video. Fusion dancing is like, if you have any sort of dance background, you can come and you just kind of mix. So you can have, like, people doing ballet with people doing ballroom with people doing blues.

Cool. And then there's an interesting dynamic because there's. I don't know, maybe you can correct me, but there's. That's very meta. There's usually a lead and a follow. I guess most dances have that.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so that. But both have a different. Like, you both have to be quite sensitive to the other human being, but in a different way. Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah.

So I like both that there is that definitive role, but also it's not somehow that one is better than the other. There's an interesting tension between the two.

Yeah, it's good because it's like a basic rule set that allows for a ton of expression. I've recently started to experiment with reverse leading. It's not like back leading. It's like. I don't know, Sometimes I'll.

So you can lead follow. Oh, you can.

When I'm what I'm typically following, I'll, like, occasionally throw in a little lead here and there.

But don't you. But don't you kind of always. Oh, I see. But don't you hit hint at a lead when you're following? Like, don't you just by the dynamics of your movement, you're not perfectly following. I mean, because it is like the lead is listening to your body, right?

Yeah.

So, like, you're kind of both figuring out what you do next.

That's true. I'm a very good follow, though. Okay. So I'm like. I'm like. I'm an invisible follow. You do move.

It's like a. Oh, interesting.

I'm not good at technique.

I didn't know those existed. Like, a perfect follow. So you could. Perfect follow.

I really ideal. I'm not great at Technique. And sometimes I'll fall over, but, like, with the following part, I'm very good at it.

Do you enjoy following?

Yeah. Yeah, it's really nice. Again, it's a very fast, physical puzzle you have to solve. It's like typing. I really like typing. That's why I was inquiring about your keyboard earlier.

Why do you like typing?

Because it's like the very fast. Like, the really rapid response. What's the reaction time? I like things that have very fast reaction times, like games like that.

But typing is not a reaction. Or is it the brain generating words? And then you're like, how's typing a reaction?

Okay. The sensation that I get when I am typing is the kind of thing that I'm trying to point out. So maybe reaction time isn't the quite. I don't know what the term is, but whatever that thing is, like the thing where you have to look at a word and then communicate it into your fingers.

Yeah.

It feels like dancing.

Like you're responding. You're responding to your brain. Your fingers are doing the. Responding to the brain that generated the.

Words, making your body do what your brain wants it to do, but, like, fast and precisely.

Oh, then you might not like this Kinesis keyboard because it makes it easier to do that. You probably like the struggle. Right?

Well, I mean, it looks hard because it looks like it's high depression on the keys.

No. Well. Oh, I see. Yes, more than. More than like a laptop keyboard. But like, that. You don't have to. One of the main things is you don't have to move your fingers at all. So, like. So, like, for example, a lot of people, I think they have a backspace up in the top right corner.

Yeah.

So if you have to make mistakes, which is like. I mean, that's like, so metaphorical. Like, every mistake you have to, like, really hurt yourself for. Because you have to, like, stretch for the backspace.

So there's that poetic narrative again.

It's like.

It emanates, like, a lot of your perspective.

Yeah. No, Yeah. I don't. And I see it as a good thing. It's a good. Like a. A romantic element permeates my interpretation of the world. Yes. But you. You left home early. How did you end up working at a factory?

Well, I tried to go to college, but failed. Couldn't afford it.

Did you like it?

I remember it just being really slow. I remember being shocked that the teachers didn't care. Like, I was used to homeschooling.

Yeah.

And. And where? I don't know. Like educate it. Just like it meant something. It felt like the people around me that were teaching me because we had like a mom's group also like directly cared about what I was learning and I would be able to ask questions and they would like really respond.

What's a mom's group?

It was like homeschooling groups are where a bunch of moms who are homeschooling their kids get together and then teach each other's kids.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

And they have different like interests and capabilities and so on and they kind of.

And sometimes if some of the kids are really good at something, you have like the older kids teaching the other ones too. So it was very like everybody kind of figures out what they can good at and they share that skill set with everybody else, which I think was a pretty great setup, honestly. I think my childhood kind of sucked in a lot of ways. But homeschooling was excellent for me, mainly because it just had so much free time. Like, I just did two to three hours of school and then did whatever the fuck I wanted for the rest of the day. And I got to actually pursue skills that are still useful for me to.

This day, even in that constrained environment.

I read fantasy books and I wrote so much, and now I'm writing a lot on my blog.

What kind of fantasy books? Like sci fi type stuff.

Classic. I read Mercedes Lackey and the EE Knight and Ursula Le Guin and I.

Don'T know any of this. What is this? What? What is it? Is it a romantic thing or is it like, is it romance?

All the fantasy books like dragons and.

Oh, dragons. Got it, got it, got it, got it. You didn't mention Tolkien. For the fantasy.

I read. I read Tolkien.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right. Well, it's beautiful. So you. You threw all the dragons. How did you end up in a factory? You try school?

Yeah, yeah, try school. Had to drop off a couple months. So then I was like, well, I'm poor and I was ready to take any job. I was applying for sewer jobs. And then I got a factory. I'm like, oh, let's do it. Because my parents, no financial help at all. They're like, you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, you know? So anyway, I went to work at a factory and that sucked ass. Do not recommend. We had wake up like 4am you know, work on weekends too. Fluorescent lights. It was terrible. And so I did that for about a year and I was like, this is. I was trying to grit my teeth and be like, this is my life. Right. I didn't have high expectations for my life. I was just like, I thought like, if you get a job where you, you don't have to be on your feet all the time, you're living a good life. And then I got another job briefly as a photographer and then they fired me. I think I was 19 at the time.

Fired you for like, I was just.

Too young and really, really bad at interacting with people in the outside world. Like I was pretty well socialized as a homeschooler with other homeschoolers. But in the outside world, especially with all of the like hierarchy, submission stuff beaten into me, like for literally beaten into me, it was very difficult for me to interact with other people who were older than me or had any sort of confidence at all. So they hired me to do photography for people and then I was rapidly turned out that I was bad at this and so they fired me. But at that point I'd left my factory job. I'm like, I can't go back to the factory. So I had some savings and I slept on friends couches and I tried various self employment stuff. I'm like, maybe I can do product photography or something. But it's Idaho, you know, nothing. And if you're like a 19 year old with no experience in the outside world at all, it was really difficult. And so I had a friend recommend that I try becoming a cam girl. So that's how it started.

What's what, what is, what is camming? What is being a cam girl?

Camming is like you talk to the camera live on the computer. Like you live stream, it's kind of like twitch. And then people are typing in the chat like ha, do this stuff and then the people can tip you money and then you can do things in response like, oh, if you tip me 100 tokens, I'll take my shirt off or something like that.

And what site were you using at that time?

My free cams.

My free cams. Is that a popular site?

Yeah, it's pretty popular.

Okay, and how did, what were the next steps? Like, did you enjoy it?

Oh, well, it was the first time I had actual control over my life and I made like actual real money. And so I just exploded into it. I thought about it nonstop. I was streaming all the time. I was like coming up with like new creative things. And the thing is like, I don't know, there's something about public school that I ended up living in a house of cam girls full of other girls who had gone to public school. And I Don't know if how much of it's genetic or just because I'm weird or is it because of our upbringing. But I felt like I was much more fearless and much more weird and creative online than other people were. Not because they weren't awesome people, but because I think public school. I got the impression based on them talking about it that it sort of beats out any sort of deviance from.

You more so than your. Because I got the.

Oh, yeah, we had. Moral deviance was beaten out. But, like, you could do whatever.

Creative deviance.

Creative deviance wasn't so much. Like, I didn't have other kids making fun of me ever. I didn't. I don't think I'd ever heard an insult about my physical appearance as a child or teenager once.

So your father was basically saying you're not good enough was intellectual.

Oh, no, that was like moral failure.

Moral failure?

Yeah. Like, I was not virtuous, not socially virtuous. Like, in various ways. Like, you know, like, you're lazy and mostly the lazy part. I have, like, ADHD or something.

Yeah.

And it was. I was not good at it as a kid either. I would totally forget all the time.

And is there some sexual repression aspect to that? Like, you know how they say that there's. It's not just homeschooling, but just like, Catholic girls and so on. Just because, like, there's moral. You're forbidden to do certain things. Like, there's a kind of liberating feeling of saying, like, basically rediscovering yourself, rediscovering your freedom by doing just diving head in, head first into sexuality, into your own sexuality. Is there some aspect of that?

Yeah, absolutely. To some degree. I think that, like, people kind of model it slightly wrong. Like, I think there's a truth to it. But when I first got out of the house, for me, freedom was like going outside at 2am or like eating chocolate, you know, on days that I previously wasn't allowed to eat chocolate. Like, that was like a really intense expression of rebellion for me. And I think people, like, don't think of this. Like, Like, I got out a lot of my, like, intense rebellion through things that people don't typically consider to be rebellious at all.

Sure.

Like, I wore a bikini.

Yeah.

Insane.

And just like, walked around in it and like, I can do this.

Yeah, basically.

Yeah.

And so, like, this was most of that emotional processing for me. And I took me a couple years from leaving home and all of that conservative culture into doing sex work. In the meantime, I did Try having sex with a lot of people. But this was mainly because I didn't know what the norms were. I didn't really understand. I was just like, okay, take things logically. Take things one step at a time. And I'm like, okay, if the whole previous set about how I'm not supposed to kiss somebody until the altar of marriage, if that's not the way that things are supposed to go, then what is the way things are supposed to go? And I was like, well, if I am aroused, I should go have sex with someone. Right. Is there any reason not to? No. So I went. I just. I would go around asking random people to have sex with me.

Did you have any peer pressure saying, like, that's not good, or that is good, or, like, any. Did you feel any currents of society in any direction, or are you independently just thinking, like, from first principles?

I think. I mean, like, I'm not saying it was a totally clean thing. I'm sure that I was experiencing society telling me this is bad, but you have to know, like, I wasn't watching normal movies when I was a teen. Like, we watched Christian movies. The stuff that we watched was filtered. Like, I watched the Titanic, and I had no idea that Jack and Rose had sex because it was put through a filtered.

Wait, did they?

Yeah, they went and, you know, he painted her naked and.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a scene in a car on the ship.

On the ship?

Yeah, they had, like, storage cars in storage. And there's a hand. I watched it again later.

I was like, I don't remember the sex scene.

Well, maybe. Were you also put through a third version?

Maybe it's the filter. I see. Like, did the couple in the Notebook also have sex? Because maybe for romantic movies, I focus on the romance, maybe. Right. And the sex scenes are always, like, weirdly filmed in these.

Yeah.

Because it's never. I mean, it doesn't. It feels more like romance than sex. I guess that's the main focus of this. Right?

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. Anyway, so they had sex. It's good to know they did. I'll go back and. And watch.

Now you have your own personal filter on your brain.

And once you realize that there are some, like, the foundation of your beliefs were wrong, then everything might be wrong and you're kind of just doing first principles.

First principles, basically. And again, like, not totally separate from culture, but also, I think in general, I also have a predisposition to just be like, you know, fuck what culture tells you. Just figure out what's right for you and do it. And so that mixed with, you know, the figuring things out from first principles, I did eventually figure out that I didn't like having casual sex with just anybody quite as much. So I stopped that. But it took me a while to figure that out.

What's the negative of casual sex?

It's just, like, not good. I mean, if you, like, figure out the chemistry you have with someone better, then it can be a lot nicer. But I wasn't doing that. I was just, like, somebody I met, and I'm like, you seem kind of cute. Okay. Like, I didn't bother to try and develop just any chemistry. I mean, I didn't.

Chemistry even outside of sex. Just chemistry. Like human chemistry. Conversation.

Yeah.

Okay.

I would. I would. I'm. It's, like, kind of cringy, but I would, like. I would, like, walk up to guys or send them messages. Like, would you like to have coitus? Is what I would say.

You would say coitus?

I said that.

I mean, it's kind of. It's kind of cute in a way.

I mean, it's a girl asking you to get laid, so they probably didn't care that much. But anyway, I'm saying that I had a lot of rebellion out of my system by the time I started sex work. So for me, maybe. I'm sure it was somehow related because we were extremely sexually repressed growing up. I remember the day I learned I had a vagina, which was absolutely horrifying. Do not recommend figuring out you have another orifice in your body.

But, like, do you want to share the process of you figuring out that you had a vagina?

Because they told me I had a vagina.

Oh. Like, intellectually, like, there was. Somebody said, you have a vagina.

Vagina, yeah.

And that was horrifying to you?

Yeah. I didn't know I had. Because you weren't supposed to ever, like, touch or look at yourself ever. So I never did. It was really disgusting. And so I had no idea that what was going on in my genital region. And so one day my mom sat me down. I think I was like 9 or 10. And she was like, you have a. There's another what? And you're going to bleed out of it is what she told me. Well, you're going to bleed out of it for a while. And I was like, what? The mom didn't know what the word was, but I would have said that if I had known.

When did you first learn the word?

Oh, I think I learned it when I was At a playground, and it was written somewhere, and I read it out loud, and then the kid next to me started giggling.

Did you ever. Did you say again for a while?

No, I think the next time I said, I. I swore the first time. I was 18. Like, intentionally said a swear word when I was 18.

Did it feel good?

I was, like, really nervous. It was, like, nervous. I mean, pretty good.

Yeah.

Pretty good, yeah.

Okay, so. So that's camming. I mean, what are the pros and cons of camming? And how does OnlyFans map into this? Did you switch to OnlyFans at some point?

I did, yeah. I came for, like, five or six years, and I burned out eventually.

What are the good aspects? What are the bad aspects of camming?

Well, the good aspects were it's just your own terms. You get to decide. Everything about it is under your control, which I loved at the time. I was like, I can work when I want, how I want, any sort of expression. I experimented and I was very successful. I was making around $200 an hour, which, for that website at the time was, like, pretty good. I had elaborate routines. I was a mime. I would do, like, dress up as a mime and then dress up a chair, and I would seduce the chair.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

Or, like, was there an artistic element to it? Almost.

Yeah, very much.

I had, like, gnomes for the chair. You had gnomes?

No, I was a mime. You don't.

Oh, sorry. Right, yeah.

Get it straight, dude.

You know, what I really appreciate about you is I'm asking some really dumb questions, and you're answering it in a very intelligent. Your wife. I appreciate that. All right. Did you ask the chair questions? I was in mime, you idiot. Okay, I'm sorry.

It's true.

But there's gnomes on the. Like, big gnomes or small gnomes?

Like lawn gnomes?

Lawn gnomes. And you seduce the lawn gnome on the chair. The gnome is sitting on the chair.

There were some. Yeah, gnomes on the chair. I. I did a photo set which I submitted to Reddit, where I got abducted. I was, like, stripping, taking my clothes off, and then slowly the gnomes surrounded me in the background, then dragged me off. And I did this as a photo set. And I. I mean. I mean, I didn't feel consensual in the photos, but. But it was the intellectual, not consensual. The. It was very successful on Reddit. Basically, it was the top poster in Gone wild and the 11th top post.

Of all time, which I think will probably just Means it's like, it's. It's artistic, it's interesting, it's edgy, it's funny. So it's really, really well done.

But it was really shocking to me that nobody else was doing anything creative with sex work. Like, for me, it was. It was like breathing. Like, you're just doing sex and you're bored and like, what do you do? I don't know. Let's try something funny. Like, it's just the natural progression. And it felt to me like there was almost no competition. Like, I would just be really creative and, like, immediately was the top not safe work post on Reddit. I'm like, well, I didn't even try that hard. And so it's really, it's really shocking to me that other women who are doing this sort of thing.

Is that still a little bit of the case? Like, that there's not as much, like, because I, from my sort of outsider perspective, that seems to be still the case. Like, there's not, like, as you describe it, that's kind of cool. That's like almost like playing, like, having fun with sexuality, almost.

Yeah, that's.

And, yeah, but that does require kind of thinking through. It's almost like a creative project, like a, Like a photography project or something like that. Almost like a little skit movie. It's interesting.

It's this vibe of, like, how can you, like, bring, like, vibrant novelty to whatever you're doing, anything you're doing. And I really like doing this with surveys, too. Like, I've been doing a lot of standard surveys, but I'm also, like, experimenting with novel, creative, artistic surveys. I'm like, how do you ask a question in a way that's like, beautiful and unusual and like a thing that's completely groundbreaking? Like, nobody's ever, like, you always make.

Everything so poetic and romantic is disgusting. No, but, yes. I think you have that engine in your head, I guess, of creativity. Like, yeah. The way you ask questions, which is not trivial to do, like, for it's actually very difficult to do, like, good survey questions. And I mean, we're joking, but like, yeah, almost like poetic, because you have to ask a question in a way that doesn't lead to the answer.

Yes.

Like, you have to. You have to kind of inspire them to think and then indirectly get at the truth. It's an art form, honestly.

Yeah. And also in a way where they don't misinterpret the question because it's amazing how you. Any question you think, oh, this is the clearest question possible. No, you're wrong. It has to be even clearer.

Right. Willingly or unwillingly. Because, like, you also have to defend against that question being criticized later when you publish about it all that. You have to think about all that.

I think this might be my greatest strength. So I'm not very good at statistics. I'm not, like, great at presenting data, but I think probably my greatest strength is, in fact, survey design and question phrasing. Because I have tweeted so many thousands of polls, and every single one, I get people telling me the way that they misinterpreted the poll. So it's like gone through fire. And then again, I'm testing the phrasings all the time. What happens if you slightly shift phrasings? And so I'll do the same question test over time to see how it changes and the way the framing affects the results.

So the good and the bad of the camming. So you said good. The. What was it? I forgot?

The freedom.

The freedom. The freedom to also be creative.

Yeah. And the bad is just. It was exhausting. The site that I was on. The way that it's structured is that you're ranking on the site and thus the amount of people that see you and thus the amount of money you earn is affected by the amount of money that you earn on average, over the last 60 days. So if you're streaming and nobody's tipping you, this means that you're going to be dropping down in the rankings, which is going to make it harder in the future.

Okay. So the rich get richer. And that's like.

Yeah. So it's very high pressure. If you're on. You need to be making money as fast as you can if you want to continue to make money. So that was really stressful. It was very mentally taxing. I would do it for a couple hours and just log off and be completely exhausted because you're just on as hard as you can. And this is why I have a little PTSD around streaming. I've considered twitch streaming, and I try a little bit and I haven't fully integrated the fact that you don't have to be maximally entertaining every single second yet. You can actually just chill out and take it slow and nothing bad happens.

Yeah. Yeah. You can just enjoy silence.

Yeah.

Did you feel lonely doing it? I mean, even just streamers feel lonely.

I moved into a house of cam girls.

Does that make it better or worse?

They're great. I'm still friends with them to this day.

Also, it was like a team, almost like we're in this kind of. Together.

Yeah. So we would, like, work together and, you know, stream together and swap our clothes and stuff. It was great.

Swap ideas, too.

Swap ideas, yeah.

And actually on a small tangent, maybe a big tangent, what do you think? Because it's the recent controversy of Andrew Tate and that he, I think in the past ran a camming business and he's being accused of sex trafficking. What do you think? Like, from your own experience, what do you understand about Andrew Tate? Is he a good person? Is he a bad person? Is there something shady about his practices or not?

I wish I could answer, but I don't know. I haven't looked into it at all. I've heard people talking about it. I just haven't bothered to go into it. It is well known that, like, when I was doing it back in the day, the Eastern European models had something different going on, though. It was like a trope about, you know, there's the Eastern European models and.

Then there's everybody else that they're what? It's like darker or something like that.

Like, they do studios and they're lower quality, which means what studios are. You go into a warehouse and then they have set up a little things that replicate bedrooms, but they're just stalls. And then you rent out or you pay the studio percentage of your income and you can tell when something looks like a studio. It's a type of background that if you're watching enough, it kind of starts to. You notice the patterns.

So the standards are lower there and the ethical boundaries are a little looser, how people are treated.

I never heard anything about the ethical side. I just knew that it was like, lower quality. The girls seemed like they were less into it and cared less.

How does this all interplay with sex trafficking? So consensual versus non consensual.

I would be shocked if there were never any non consensual camming. I mean, I guess it's like, if it were going to happen, I'm not going to be surprised if it were. In fact, Eastern European models based on this is outdated. I'm just thinking of my stereotypes back when I cammed a lot.

Sure. So some of that is stereotypes versus collecting good data, right?

Yeah. I haven't done data on camgirl.

It's hard. I mean, it's hard. It's even hard to get that data right.

Yeah.

Obviously a really important problem.

There's a method that I'm trying that I really like. I designed a survey type which is like asking people who, you know. Yeah, like who do you, who do you know who's done this? And you tell me like, oh, do you know anybody who's a doctor? Do you know anybody who you know has had cancer or like smokes or.

Personally, you mean?

Yeah, personally.

Just.

Do you know anybody? Yeah. And then if you ask about a whole bunch of things, you can calibrate, rate the responses. So like that's really interesting. If your population, you know, 20% of them know doctors and then you know the actual amount of doctors, then you can tell like how this is corresponding, like what is the visibility of doctors.

So you can reconstruct the graph basically.

Yeah. And, and we can do this with sex trafficking. And of course people are going to be like, well, sex trafficking is not visible people. You don't know those. I'm like, well then we can ask about other non visible things that other people don't know that we do have data for, like homelessness or being in jail or like if you have been like sexually assaulted, A lot of people don't like talking about if they've been sexually assaulted. So you can do a whole bunch of things that are like similarly suppressed in knowledge in some way that we do actually have rates for and then compare that to the graph when we ask people, do you know anybody who's in sex trafficked?

Yeah.

So again, this is not perfect. I'm not saying this is ideal, but.

You can infer things, you can infer things about that graph.

But I'm saying we don't have good ways of measuring sex trafficking right now. Anyway, I did a big deep dive into the research that we have on sex trafficking in the Western world and the actual, like I read the studies and like reports about the studies and it's really pitiful. We have terrible data. There's just vague estimations made from one guy in a basement in the 80s. That's the basis for one big study that a lot of people report on. And so I'm like, okay, the method I'm proposing obviously is not perfect, but the bar is so low at this point.

Well, I wonder also if there's ways to design a survey that gets at the victim. Victims of sex trafficking also, which is they presumably have public access to the Internet. And I wonder how many of them are distinctly aware that they're victims. Like it's asking the question, when you're inside of a toxic relationship, are you inside of a toxic relationship? I mean, if the toxic relationship is truly toxic, sometimes your mind is fucked with. Right? You're not, you don't Even know what's true.

Yeah.

So it's interesting if you can design surveys that people are actively sex trafficking. Yeah. Who could break through that? So basically get data on how many people are getting sex trafficked directly.

Oh, yeah. Like, if you don't frame it, like, if you don't say the word sex trafficking, if you're like, are you just in a situation where you'd.

And maybe through the survey, I mean, that's very meta. But through the survey, help them.

You know, I did this. This is what started my relationship surveys. So I've done a series of relationship surveys, and that was because I knew somebody in a terrible relationship. And I was like, I bet if she took a surve. She answered questions about her relationship and at the end got a score that compared her to everybody else, she'd be like, oh, wait, everybody else has much better relationships than I do. So that's why I started making the relationship surveys was exactly for that reason.

Yeah. That's really, really, really powerful to know that, like, you're not, you're not crazy for thinking this is a bad relationship.

Right. Or I think, like, the actual question is like, could you do better if you broke up? And I think the thing that keeps most people in their relationships is like, this is the best that I can do. Like, this is normal. And if, if it were normal, I would say that they are right. Like, if you live in a culture where everybody is abusing their. Their people in their relationships, then. Yeah. You mean, what are you gonna do? Break up and then just be alone for the rest of your life? Most people don't want to do that.

But now comparing yourself to this, to the average is good to know. To know.

Know what your options are.

At least understand it. Because, you know, being normal is not always. Like, this conversation is not always great. Meaning this, this conversation is anything but normal. Okay. And that was a tangent on a tangent about a niche passion, which is really fascinating that you're playing with those kinds of ideas of survey design. But back to camming. So what were the cons? What were the negatives of camming?

Oh, like the exhaustion of just like live. Like the high pressure thing. That was probably the worst thing.

So not was there. What about the interaction with different people? Like the dynamics of the interaction with the, with the fans?

I guess I had a pretty great time. I mean, it obviously wasn't perfect because it's the Internet, but I don't know, there's, there's. This is the thing that confuses me a lot because a Lot of women that I know complain about being harassed by men quite a lot. They're like, you know, men are always, you know, groping, harassed. You know, you have to be paranoid in the club. People are like, they're always huffing on you, and you're just like, jesus Christ, get away, man. And I do not have this experience. Or like, maybe I do, but I'm interpreting it differently. I don't know. The thing is, I don't know what causes me to have such a different experience from these women that are, like, really feel really hostile towards men. And my guess is if there's some sort of very subtle signaling that we're accidentally doing no fault of our own. I'm not saying this is a virtue. I'm saying maybe it's just genetic. Or the fact that I'm.

That women are doing.

That the women are doing. Yeah. And it might be just something I'm completely accidentally, through no intention happening to signal the thing that is causing men to not view me as a desirable target or, like, a target at all.

What about the flip side? Maybe you're not sensitive to the. The creepy stare.

Yeah, that also might be true.

The dude who's, like, as undressing you with his eyes that, like, in a creepy way that you're just not. You don't, like, worry about it or you're not touched. Like, the fear of that, the anxiety of that, the unpleasantness of that just doesn't hit you.

I think that's also at least part of it. Maybe all of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's. There's some evidence for it. I think often, like, guys will do a thing to me, and I'm just like, that's a thing. Cool. I don't have any negative response whatsoever.

That's. Call back to the tire. It's a thing. This is nice. Yeah, that happened. Was good to know. That can happen.

Like, I once had, like, a homeless guy, like, ask me to come back to my place, baby. And I was like, this is fun.

Yeah.

Like, I'm like, do you want me to. I love asking men, like, are you trying to get me to have sex with you? Just, like, saying it out front. And they'll be like, well, usually they stop for a bit. They're like, well, yeah. I mean, I would like to have sex. And they'll be like, thanks for asking, but I'm not interested in having sex with you. How do you have a good day? And then I walk away. And that's great. I don't know. I Have no issues with that interaction. But like, maybe this is the kind of thing that other women would find to be really offensive.

So you have that conversation and it doesn't turn into like a threatening feel?

No.

Like with a homeless guy?

No, not. I've never had that happen though. But I think there's just something. I think I'm doing something like again, this is kind of accidental. I just am like this always. And I think I just happen to be like this at people and they don't expect it. Like, they don't expect me to be really nice while explicitly asking them what their intentions are. Directly putting my finger on the thing that, oh, you're trying to have sex with me and then also not judging them for it. I think this throws people off a little bit so they don't get aggressive. They're like, oh, you're autistic or something.

Even the cloak of anonymity on the Internet that you weren't getting?

Yeah, I just think I'm just not reactive and. Or maybe I'm giving off. I don't know, I don't know what's going on. Maybe it's both. Maybe it's a feedback loop. So I just, I had a pretty good experience. I know not everybody did. Definitely people reported having antagonistic experiences. But when I was scamming, I generally really liked people, really nice to me, had a great time, made friends.

So you also did OnlyFans, as you mentioned, and I read on a website, so this is very investigative reporting that on some months you've made over a hundred thousand dollars on OnlyFans. How did that feel?

Great. Really great.

I mean, like. Well, actually because so much of your upbringing you didn't have money, you had to struggle with the factory job and so on. Maybe a good person to ask, can money buy happiness?

Well, I mean, I think you get like a resting set point of happiness regardless of how much money you have. But money can buy being less stressed, I would say.

Is there a lot of variation in the, in the basic rest happiness for humans in general? Like is that, is that a good thing to think about?

I mean, they've done some studies, but again, like, again, I'm not sure. I haven't actually read the study. So maybe they didn't replicate where like they measured people before and after winning a bunch of money to see if their happiness is higher. Yeah, I think like it's. By some measures it was and by some it wasn't.

No, I mean like basically almost genetically. So nature nurture. But is there. Let's say after you're 18, is there like some stable level of happiness that all the environmental genetic factors combine to create so that everything that life throws at you has to face that happiness? Like you mentioned earlier that I seem to be happy with a lot of stuff, so maybe I have a certain level. Do other people have a lower level? Some people have higher level.

Yeah, definitely.

Like, is there. Is that a useful or is that a useful model of human beings? Or is it all ups and downs? Like, is it all, like, there's no combo?

Right? Like, I don't know, some people just are happier than others in general and other people aren't. But then you also have ups and downs. Like, I'm sure you've experienced sadness sometimes and happiness the other times.

If I actually were to integrate, so have an integral under the area, under the curve nerve. I don't know if I'm different than other people. Maybe I'm just like really focused on the happy moments and maybe feel the down moments most intensely and maybe that, like, on average, it's all the same. Is that possible?

I mean, maybe I just. I don't know. Like, I remember when I was a kid, my mom would call me Pollyanna all the time. It's always like finding the good and everything. Yeah, I mean, like, something bad would happen.

You were a happy kid.

I was a really happy kid.

Yeah. Even in the harsh, harsh condition.

Yeah, I mean, like I said, like, I think the harshness comes from the bad meaning. Like, and I had good meaning applied to it.

You were a stoic.

Yeah.

With another book I'm reading next week, tune in Marcus Aurelius Meditations. All right, all right. Camming 100K. So it felt good. So it's crazy though, right? You can just like take clothes off in a creative way with some gnomes and make a hundred thousand.

Yeah, I mean, there was a lot more to it than that, but yeah, what was it?

What's the difference?

Marketing. Like, so with. With only with my free cams, I was unusual in that I decided to do outside of the website marketing. I like, post on Reddit. Right. This was very unusual at the time. But like, OnlyFans is structured such that they have almost no internal discovery whatsoever. So if you want people to come to your page, you have to go out onto external websites and advertise for yourself. Myself directly, very different model. And so this is something that I had already been doing and already had practice in. And so I think I was like, already quite advanced. Like, I already had an account on Reddit that was like 7 years old at the time, tons of karma. That means I could post in subreddits. I'd already been on Twitter for years, you know, like, posting actively. So I already had, like, presences on all these other platforms that really helped with the conversion.

Reddit and Twitter.

Reddit, Twitter, FetLife, Instagram, TikTok.

And you were still advertising creatively. So there's like, sexuality, but there's also, like, creative sexuality and ideas too.

Yeah. Like, one of the really popular ones was I, like, molested myself as a. As a mime using a. A one arm through a jacket. And so the jacket looked like it was. The jacket looks like it was alive. And, you know, and that one did really well.

Did you, like, brainstorm with somebody? And like, I recently got to hang out with Mr. Beast and sit on a session of brainstorming different ideas. I just envisioned you with, like, a team brainstorming. All right, how about we try the mime and the molesting things? I don't know. It's too. Too edgy.

I wish. I think the team would have been a lot more fun. But no, it's just me. Like, I had an apartment that looked like kind of like this, this. You know, you just sit alone. You're like, well, that would be a good idea. And I. I'd seen you collect ideas over time, right? Like, I. I'd seen somebody doing a version of the, like this. This animated hand act, like when I was a kid, and I just always stuck in my head. And like, one day I was like, I bet I could do that. And then when I was thinking, trying to think of ideas to do as a sex worker, I was like, why don't I just try that? And then it turned out to be like, like a really, like, quite a viral hit.

Is there. Is there stuff like you mentioned too edgy? Like MrBeast tries to keep it PG. Do you try to keep it PG 13?

Well, with the sex advertising stuff, I mean, it's sex advertising, so it's obviously not PG 13.

I don't know. These ratings.

What is even beyond that R. Family friendly. It is X, the one that I'm describing to you. At some point, you can see my.

Boob as a boob is X.

A boob is.

I guess I think you could show a boob in PG 13.

Yeah. Maybe X is like if you got some sort of rhythmic motion going on.

Maybe that sound, but the rhythmic motion not. You can have one or the other, but you can't have both. Both.

That's when we hit the X. Yeah. Okay, so definitely not. I mean with the sex advertising stuff like guys like vanilla shit. Guys want basic hot girl. You can do something like kind of sexy and creative, like getting abducted by gnomes or like the self molestation. Right. But those are still pretty within the normal boundaries.

What do you mean guys like vanilla stuff?

I mean most guys like vanilla stuff.

What's vanilla stuff? Like see, we'll talk about fetish fetishes. I think my overton window on what is vanilla is expanding quickly after following your work. But yeah, I actually have done a.

Lot of studies on what is vanilla Like I've done a couple different surveys where I ask people like how taboo is this thing? And I have like a rating from least to most taboo.

By the way. I don't like, I don't appreciate the beauty of vanilla ice cream. Cream.

You don't? It is really good though.

You eat vanilla ice cream?

I eat vanilla ice cream. Yeah.

I think there's just so many more options. It's like the absence of creativity.

I mean if you put in like some chocolate chips or something.

Yeah. They already made it more interesting to start. Okay, so what's vanilla? What and why do guys like vanilla so hot girl doing hot girl things. What like undressing and then having sex.

The thing that I found was most successful were frames where the man was framed as passive and the woman is active. Or for example, oh, we got assigned to the same bunk at the breeding school or something or the last people on earth or oh no, I desperately need somebody to cure me with this disease and I need semen. So it's like in any scenario where the guy just finds himself such that the woman desperately needs him for some reason and he doesn't have to do much. That is typically one of the much more successful things. Things guys like women falling into their lap.

What about the power dynamic?

So guys are less into power dynamics than women are. And you can do power dynamics as long as it's handed to them. Some guys, obviously some guys are very dominant and prefer having to work. But this is the minority. If you're trying to make 100k in a month and you're trying to appeal to the widest group of people, the most effective advertising, you're not going to be making the most money by being particularly submissive.

So on the caming side, that's your unlike like escorting or just personal relationships. You're trying to. You have an audience. You have like a theater full of people.

Like with live Camming?

Yeah. With live camming.

Yeah, it's like a live theater.

Does that freak you out? There's just a bunch of people watching.

Like, what. How do you feel right now?

I don't. I don't know their watch because it's not live.

Yeah, that's true. It's not life. Like, it might as well be. Like, they could be watching.

I feel like there's just the two of us. I don't. And there's like. I feel. Sometimes I imagine there's a third person.

Like God?

Us? No, no, not. Not God. Just. I usually imagine either a guy or girl or a couple just sitting there for some reason. Like, usually on the beach and usually high or on some kind of, like, on mushrooms. Just, like, listening passively, just kind of looking at the sunset. That's what I imagine.

That's really good.

Yeah.

I think that's useful. When I write my blog posts, sometimes I do terribly, but it's the most effective when I imagine one person that I'm writing to to try to explain. And, like, having a high couple watching the sunset is maybe really lovely. As a calibration, I have to say.

It is pretty romantic because I've gotten a chance to meet couples that listen to podcasts together. I don't know why that seems like intensely romantic to me. Because, like. Because you're not watching TV together, you're listening to a thing. I mean, I guess sometimes they watch it, but, like, you're listening to ideas together. I don't know.

Yeah. It seems like you're going through the same kind of thought process.

Yeah. Yeah. That's really beautiful way to put it. So it's like you're melding your thinking is following the same line for somehow podcasts do that more than movies. I think movies give you a lot more freedom to think about stuff. I feel like your thoughts are aligned and like, especially if the. If the podcast is good. Like, if it's listening to, like, a Dan Carlin podcast about history that you're, like, on a journey together. Yeah. Is. There's an intimacy to that. Anyway, but I've learned that this. Couples do that. You know, hashtag relationship goes. Go ahead.

That's what you want with your future wife.

With my. Yeah.

You should make an application.

Application.

An application for dating you. I mean, maybe this is more of, like, my strategy and less yours, but you have, like, a wide enough audience that might work.

I. It's not. Okay. Let's just go there. So because you put together an application of, like, people to have Casual sex with you, I think.

And also dating.

Yeah, and also dating in a relationship. I'd love to. So what is in that application? Because like, you know, I'm sure there's quite a lot of people that would like to date you or to sleep with you, but finding the person, I mean, it depends what your goals, I guess. Relationship would be an open relationship for you.

You. Yes.

Right. Like for me, I guess it's more intensely selective because it's like a monogamous relationship and a committed one. Like, like, like I'm, I'm swinging for the.

Yeah.

Like for like long term. I'm not, I'm not like weirdly obsessed with long term, but it's like you just. I would, I would love to have one girl for the rest of my life, but finding that I feel like applications will not get to that. I feel like there's some aspect of the magic of the, the serendipity of it, of meeting people in strange places and so on. I just, I personally have noticed that like fame has not made that process easier.

But I mean like, if you could, you know, if there's two rooms and one of them, it's like a random population of hot women and the other one is random population of hot women. But all of them definitely are monogamous and are looking for a long term committed relationship.

Yeah.

Like, which room would you rather go into? Like if you're looking for a mate.

Yeah. Well, but see, I guess my preferences are more. That's, that's, it's a really strong point. But my preferences are. Represent the majority probably. Right. Because don't most women want monogamous relationships?

Yeah.

So like it's, I'm okay with either option because like statistically speaking we can.

Apply it to like a bunch of other things. Yeah. And I'm just, this is just a problem if you have like high, if you have a high volume to filter through and you like, you don't know, like, it's a good like initial filter. Filter. Like you can take it from like a thousand people to 20 people and then go to dates with them.

But the filter is so anti. Romantic. Like what.

This is true. This is not the romantic narrative that, that you're very pro.

I feel like, how did, how did you two meet? While she passed the three filters I set up. And I mean, but that's also. But also, can you put into a survey the things that, that you're interested in? I mean, I definitely think about this a lot with hiring like, like teams, engineers and so On. But with engineers, you're okay losing truly special engineers because you have to filter because there's like thousands of applications. Like, it feels like, it feels like I worry that you would miss the thing that actually. Because so much of it is chemistry. So much of it is like the magic, you know.

But the thing is you're missing it anyway.

Like, yeah, you're missing it.

You can just run it and then in addition try some of those people and then go on the dates that you were going to go on with anyway. Regardless. It's just the thing that helps like pull someone out of the crowd like this. I, I dated a guy from my survey. I'd ran the survey. I assigned point values to each of the questions. Yeah, I wanted a date with like the top couple people. And then one of them I was like, and I'm still dating him to this day. It was awesome. And I would never, I never would have gone on a date with him without the survey.

Can you, can you if from memory or we can look it up. Do you remember what kind of questions were on the survey?

I asked a couple different categories. I asked about like basic life stuff. So like, what kind of relationships? Like monogamy versus polyamory. Like, do you want kids? You know, like where you want to live, like basic things that you need to be compatible. And then I asked like sexual compatibility, like various preferences. And then I had a section about like personality. Like, what are. I try to ask questions that would do the most effective filter. So what are ways that I can't give people what they need that maybe they really want? I'm not very outdoorsy, which is very common. A lot of people like being outdoorsy. So I asked the question, how much do you value someone else that you're dating being outdoorsy? And if they marked yes, I was like, okay, I should probably downvote results, man.

But doesn't polyamory make that really difficult? Because can't they find somebody for the outdoorsy stuff?

Yeah, they could. I mean this is. Doesn't like. But if you're going to have somebody, it's like nicer to have them be more compatible than less.

But you're a little bit like in terms of sexual compatibility. You're able to like you're self aware enough to know what preferences you have. Like you can.

I think so. I think that one helped a lot with the escorting. Like the escorting helped a lot with knowing my preferences.

But there's like out of the, the giant pool of different preferences, you haven't like A subset that's clearly defined for you.

You.

Okay. Like, like dominant, submissive.

Yeah, Power. Dynamic stuff.

Power dynamics. Okay. In the. Not just sexual, blind relationship too. Like that. Was that in the survey?

I don't like power dynamics in relationships.

Defining them in, like making it clear in a survey, like asking a question about power dynamics in a relationship.

I don't think I asked about power dynamics in relationships. Okay. Because I just assume most people don't. There's a lot of things that kind.

Of like most people don't. You're putting together a survey, a systematic survey to understand compatibility. Wouldn't power dynamics inside of relationships that naturally emerge often be part of the question? Or is that hard to question because it naturally emerges?

Well, the thing is, like a lot of questions sort of overlap in demographic. And if you're making a survey, you want to have the minimum possible questions that give the maximum possible, like filtering information.

So wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. But that purpose of that survey wasn't to do a good research study. It was to select one subject that you could take.

So that's part of what is good. Like, you want to most efficiently filter out. Because one, like you get more people taking the survey, the fewer questions you have, which is good for finding a mate. Like, if you have 5,000 men take the survey, it's better than 1,000 men take the survey.

Don't you want men that. That would be patient enough and dedicated enough.

Yeah, but like, what if you're like a high powered man who's like on his lunch break? Right.

So it's like a billionaire's too busy just flipping through. Yeah.

And the guy that I dated was. He took the survey, he was waiting for the pizza to come out of the oven. And so it was important that it was short.

And so he wanted me to literally. Pizza coming out.

He was literally waiting for pizza and he saw the thing. He's like, I guess I'll just fill up the survey really fast and changed our lives.

So romantic.

For me, this is my kind of romance. I'm really into it. It. But you can be efficient with surveys by making sure your questions don't overlap. So for example, if somebody is very polyamorous, they're very unlikely to be interested in a traditional man works in the job and the woman stays home and raises the kids kind of relationship, because polypeople just generally don't do that. And so if I'm asking about polyamory, it sort of kind of already covers the thing. And so If I have a whole bunch of questions I can kind of triangulate a bunch of implicit kinds of questions that I haven't directly asked about.

About.

So this is why I didn't ask directly about power dynamics. Because from the rest of the questions that are in my survey, I can pretty accurately predict whether or not you're going to be interested in power dynamics.

But I'm afraid I'm trying to think as you're talking. I get it. That's really interesting that you did that also. Maybe not for the effectiveness of finding a partner, but for just exploring the actual process of human sexuality of, of like the search. This, this complicated optimization process we're all engaging in on the landscape of happiness that seems to be this. Not even a differentiable function. It's. It's a giant nonlinear mess. Okay, but like for me, I don't think I would be able to design that survey. I would like bias it too strongly. Like I would probably prefer women that have read Dostoyevsky or something like that. Like that would be a filter for me. Right? Yeah, but like that's a horrible filter because there's a lot of, like there's a lot of amazing people that have never. They don't give a about reading or they don't give a about reading Russian literature or they don't give a about. But they're amazing and passionate and creative and all in some other dimension that you might completely miss. But you're like. Because I wonder if there's any. Basically you're saying compatibility, like hard lines that you know know statistically it's just going to be an issue.

Yeah. I mean you weight this a lot more. Yeah, but there's also like preferences. Like if you have a woman who's totally equal and she's read the thing that you like for another woman who's also identical but like she hasn't read the thing that you like, you probably like very slightly prefer the woman but.

You don't know if they identify. Yes, yes. But like you can't through survey get the identical. Like you don't know.

Sure. But you can kind of like, like do a whole bunch of weight. So like the person that like I ended up going on a date with, he and did not answer like correctly to a lot of of the survey questions. But he didn't have to. Like, he was just. Overall, overall the weights were like, he just tended to be more in the direction.

Was there a text based fill in like survey? But like, sorry, paragraph.

Like no, you ought to avoid that if you're dealing with like large amounts of data.

No. Why not? Because you have to fill. Oh, oh, interesting, interesting. Like I'm. I'm different because like, first of all, you can do keyword searches. Second of all you do, you can do machine learning models that like, first of all you can do. You could do like crude metrics, like the length of how long they've written. Right. And it could flag certain things. Yeah, it's actually pretty easy to. I've looked at like for hiring, I've looked at like thousands of applications really quickly. You can really. The human brain is really interesting, especially like if you visually highlight certain information for yourself, like keywords or again, with machine learning models, like sentiment, you can highlight different parts that will catch your eye better than not. And I can go through just a huge number of applications.

Are you telling me I can use. If I learn machine learning, I can process dating survey applications better?

Yes. No. Like textual.

Yeah. Like I can like have them write things in. This is like a new way of.

That would be.

Yeah, that's a really good incentive.

I think that would. So it's a really nice aspect of text input, like long form text input, multiple long form text input based on an interestingly phrased question is you get to learn how to make a better survey. I think you would appreciate that. Like you start to see how they're actually interacting with these questions. Like I asked certain questions like just to see how people think. Is it better to work smart or better to work hard? Or is it ever okay to betray a close friend? I'll ask questions like this that don't really have a right answer, but I just want to see how they think. Or is truth more important than loyalty? And I get their long form answer.

And you get to see the reasoning process.

Yeah, it reveals so much, not just about the person, but about the kind of questions I should be asking that have nothing to do with truth or loyalty. But how to get a good engineer with like very specific questions. But I think it's really useful to get text input.

I have done text input usually with beta surveys. So I usually do beta surveys before I do the real survey.

What's the beta survey like that I do?

Like a shorter version or it depends on what I'm doing, but a different version of the survey that I have people take before I release. I use the information from the initial survey to inform the questions that I ask in the real survey. And I haven't actually recently, but I used to do a lot of the text based questions. To see for similar. Although I don't think I relied it on it quite as heavily. And if I introduce machine learning, things would be a lot more efficient.

I love that you're also doing, like, you're writing scripts and stuff. Like, you're doing. You're doing some like. Like statistical analysis. Are you using Python?

Mostly, yeah. I had to learn Python for this.

Which is the best way to learn Python. And the best reason to learn machine learning is to solve actual, like, problems.

I can't be motivated. I'm just not motivated to learn something unless there's an actual curiosity I have and I have to learn it and to solve it. I was trying to avoid learning coding for so long, but eventually my data set became too large. I couldn't work with it, with anything else, so. Oh, Python it is.

You know what's also an interesting data set that you're probably interested in a little bit is like, Twitter itself. Right. I don't know if you've. I've played with the Twitter API a lot.

Can you just get the. Download the. I'm just. I'm stuttering now because.

Download the Twitter. Can you download Twitter?

No.

There's a lot of Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. So Twitter is a social network with a bunch of people. They're interacting a lot. Like, there's like. I don't know, the number is insane. The number of interactions. But there's different ways to interact to get data from Twitter. There's streams you can look at. It depends what you're interested in. You can do results for searches. You can look at individual tweets and get entire. Which to me is super interesting. The entire tree of different conversations, the replies. Which might be very interesting for you because, like, it's not. It's much harder to ask rigorous questions, which you do with your polls, but you could see, like, how divisive certain things are.

Sentiment like calibrators to figure out exactly what questions you should be asking.

Yeah. And also highlight interesting anecdotal things. When, like, two people freak out at each other and just argue, like a thread that goes on for like, a thousand messages.

Yeah.

That you might never be even aware is happening. Because you're like. Because Twitter doesn't, like, surface that, like, it would be. Twitter doesn't make it easy for you to, like, visualize what the hell's going on. Even in. With your own social network. Like. Like, if you post something that's controversial, that gets a large amount of attention, it. You can't clearly visualize everything that's going On.

Yeah.

Like, it's. It's very. It's blurry, amorphous. Like you're just kind of looking through the fog at different replies and they kind of. It's. Yeah. So to be able to do the.

API, they have like. Like graphs and of networks.

They have the data for the graphs. Yeah. So you can reconstruct it yourself. Yeah. And then you have different levels of access in terms of how many queries you can do.

That's really cool.

And now, because there's like, Elon, there's a lot of sort of revolutionary stuff happening at Twitter. I think you could literally sort of push for innovation there. Like. Like there's aggressive innovation happening. So in terms of requesting stuff for the API, you could do all that kind of stuff. I think Twitter is just a fascinating platform for the. As cliche as it sounds for studying. For me, it's interesting what makes for a healthy conversation. That term has been used. But it's interesting how conversation, to me is fascinating. How conversations break down and not like how. How like the virality of drama or conflict or disagreement, how that evolves when a large number of people are involved, when a large number of misinterpretation of. Of statements is involved in text based with some anonymity thrown in. Like, I feel like there's a lot of studies that can be done there.

I mean, Twitter's probably not great at it, right? As it stands. No, because it's like, necessarily short. You can quote, treat things out of context, et cetera.

But we should understand that. Right. At a large scale, you should be able to study that kind of thing. Oh, yeah. What was your casual sex survey?

I actually haven't looked at it in a while. I think I just ask people about a whole bunch of fetishes because you don't want to be obvious about yours. Because then people are going to hijack it to try to tell you that they like what you like. So you want to be obscure. So how do you design a survey where you're testing for a thing, but you're still obscure about the thing you're trying to ask about. About.

So you still see it as a survey? Yeah, yeah, like an application. Because you. I think he tweeted saying, like, I'm thinking of just like showing up to San Francisco and saying, is anybody open for casual sex? Something like this. Am I misremembered?

Maybe escorting. I'm not sure.

Oh, for Es. Sorry, Sorry, sir.

Which is similar. Like, I kind of use escorting as the way to have casual sex now.

Okay. So let's talk about escorting. So you wrote about escorting in your blog post. Escorting was good for me. Me. How did you get into escorting?

I was working at like a. I quit camming because I was burned out and I was like trying to work at a friend's startup and it was hard for me. I don't. It's difficult for me to work on projects that are not my projects. And so I was like, okay, fuck it. Like, I want to go back to sex work. I want to make more money, but I don't want to cam anymore because I'm burned out. So I'm like, well, let's try. I had a friend who was an escort. Like, let's try that. So we had a call. She like outlined the basics for me, and then I put up some ads and started working.

What's the basics of escorting? How's it work?

If you want us get started escorting. So just in case you have a career change, but you're going to want to get some nice photos, so you probably have those.

First of all, you assumed I haven't done it before. How rude.

Have you?

Yeah, well, you know, recreation I would like to do professionally, I suppose. So if I wanted to do it, if I wanted to do it, if I really, really want to step up my game, how would I do it?

Yeah, well, you got the whole tutorial. Recreational escorting is just. Okay. Okay.

No meaning, like, like, you know, like selling products on Etsy versus doing a startup.

Yeah, Well, I mean, Escort is kind of also selling products on Etsy.

No, like, but selling a lot of products.

Products. High volume.

Yeah, like. Like, yeah.

Small, handcrafted.

It's small handcrafted dolls. Yeah. Escorting versus mass manufacturer.

Okay. If you go to mass manufacturer, your escort.

I just feel like I haven't been getting, you know, I've been undervaluing my services and I would like to really step up.

I think you could really just like, grease some marketing gears and be true.

Yeah. I mean, so some of this is marketing. So like, how I guess I want to like, know, is it similar to camming in that way? Like, is it. You're basically advertising yourself and you're marketing. They have all the creativity that you mentioned before, all of that.

Yeah. I found escorting to be pretty easy because escorting is not like highly competitive. For example, camming is highly competitive because, like the strat, the thing that I outlined before, you know, the amount of money that you make determines your ranking. And you can also go and see other girls. You can see what they're doing. So if a girl figures that incredible strategy for making money, it's like two seconds before that strategy proliferates into everybody else. So it's very fast paced and really tough. With escorting, you don't get to see what other girls are doing. You can look at their websites, but you don't know what they're doing with clients at all. You can look at their rates, but you don't know what their volume is. So you don't actually know what is successful and what isn't very much. So I think there's much less evolution of market marketing through this process. And so I came in with like my aggressive marketing skills for Via Cam Girl. I think that really helped. I did very well as an escort. I just came in, like made a fantastic website. I knew how to do the ads. Right.

And what was the finding people, I guess is also like finding the right kind of customer or the right kind of client.

I got like in a lot of trouble for this recently in the sex worker sphere because I said that if you raise prices, you're more likely to encounter clients that aren't going to abuse you. You like, it's safer. They said that I was being classist, implying that poor people are more violent. But to be fair, if you're a guy and you want to be violent towards a woman, you're probably not going to be paying her a lot of money. You're probably going to be the kind of person likely who's going to haggle a lot because you don't respect her. But anyway, that aside, it's a little pet peeve for me. Yeah, I started charging 800 an hour and then pretty rapidly raised it to 1200 and then a while after that raised it to 1400.

Well, the interesting thing you mentioned in my extensive research, you used to do 1200-1400 an hour and then you said that you're thinking of jumping back in at a rate of 2400 the first hour and I think 900 each successive hour. That's interesting. I mean, to me that's really interesting. The first why it's like a lot on the first hour? Yeah.

Oh, it's just because it depends on how you want to incentivize the amount of hours. So if you have to pay a lot for the first hour but not very much for the successive, you're more likely to buy a longer period of time. And usually I find that clients who buy a longer period of time are nicer to you. I don't have a great theory for why that is. But they're more likely to take you to dinner and get to know you first. And I just enjoy that a lot more. I enjoy like knowing who I'm gonna have sex with. Like a date, you know?

Yeah. So it's incentivized. The, the long form date dynamic versus like not. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. How does money change the dynamic? Just basic human dynamic of interacting for free versus for money. Like I think about that a lot because like just talking to rich people, it's like you usually get paid for your time and you're doing this for free. Like what, like what's the difference? Is there a difference really or no?

A bit, yeah. So I've actually, it depends a lot. So when I was doing it full time, it was my only source of income. It changed quite a lot because I was really incentivized to have repeat customers. So I'm like, okay, if I'm. My primary interaction with you is to like have you hire me again, I'll do whatever that takes to make that happen. And so if I have to like laugh at jokes that I don't find funny or like be like more adoring of your penis than I actually genuinely feel like that's what I'm going to express. And obviously it's to some degree like titrated, you know, like it's unpleasant to force yourself to like something that you don't. So like I would actually like not see clients again that I didn't want to. But to some degree there was a sort of self suppression going on which I think is this the way it works in any sort of customer service job? Like you want the customer to leave happy, so you just make sure that you are happy the whole time and you're like, ah, really enjoying the other person. But so recently when I've like kind of dabbled in it since baking money through other means where I don't need the money, it's more like a fun side thing that I'm like I said it's fulfilling the role of casual sex for me so I don't have to do it. This is not my primary job. I just want sort of a good excuse to have sex with somebody. And the money is a great filter for that. And so in that case that's interesting.

So the money is. Yeah, okay. The money is basically a filter for somebody who's taking this interaction seriously.

Yeah. So there's a, an interesting like psychological thing where I have difficulty having casual sex with somebody because some Part of my brain, which I assume is, like, quite female is doing some evaluation of status and whether or not this is going to damage my reputation by having sex with them. So, like, if you found out that I went and, like, had random sex with, like, a homeless man, you might be like, wow, that says something about Ayla. Like, maybe she's, you know, trashy or she just has no standards for who she's going to fuck. But if. And so some part of me is continually anxious. I'm like, does this mean I have no standards if I decide to have casual sex with you? Like, what are people going to think? And so if you introduce money, it takes away that anxiety. I don't have to worry about it because it's like, oh, of course Ayla would have sex with that person. They paid her. This is not an indication of the kind of mate that she can get. This is just an indication of a business transaction. And this allows me to enjoy casual sex so much more when somebody pays me for it to the degree that I almost view it as a kink. So I'm using it sort of to replace casual sex and alic occasion. I'm like, it paid me a little bit to erase the anxiety and all. Like, have a fun, fun time.

I mean, can't you see, like, dinner like that or something like that if the person pays for dinner or like. So like, it's all just. If any money's involved, if it's a kink, then you could just, like, use it and you buy. Buys a coffee at a Starbucks. It's like, all right, right.

But it has to be plausible. Like, you have to, like, trick my brain into, like, having it actually be incentivizing for me.

Two coffees or something.

Yeah, like, oh, the homeless man bought me a coffee and then I sucked his dick. Like, that's not that cool.

All right.

So no shade of homeless men, by the way. I've been friends with a lot of them. I'm just using some sort of stereotype of.

Yeah, I know. So it has to be plausible where you could trick your mind. Interesting.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah.

And so that's different. So now within this sort of frame, I am still, like, I'm accepting money, but still much more expressive of my actual preferences. So, like, before, when I would start escorting full time, I was suppressive, and now I'm like, you know what? Fuck it. Like, I'm doing this for me, me. So we're going to make sure that I have a good time and some.

Much more demanding and Then you're having more fun because you're not pretending. Laughing at a joke or something like that. That sounds terrible. Sounds like.

I mean, it's.

It's also like social. I mean, I guess I, I would. I do that. Like when you first meet people, like strangers and so on, there's some aspect of like niceties, but like, I don't know, intimacy, like real intimacy requires like getting past the nice city. Like, laughing at somebody's joke when it's not funny feels like anti intimacy.

Yeah, but I laugh at so many jokes automatically, even it's interesting because, like, I don't mean to. I'm not trying to be fake. But like, if I'm in a group of people and somebody makes a joke and everybody laughs, I laugh even before I'm checking within myself. Like, do I genuinely enjoy this joke?

Yeah.

So it's like, I don't know, like the degree that I am sort of just like a result of social programming in all cases that, like when I'm with a client, client back when I was doing it full time, like, it doesn't feel significantly different. It just felt like a different version of myself.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. To that degree, to. To the degree you don't feel like you're going against.

Yeah.

Your. Your nature.

Yeah, yeah. It was very rare that I actually felt like I was going against my nature.

What about the market of how much to charge? So 20, 20, 400. Like, how transparent is that market? Is there like a market like, how.

Much can you sell when you're charging that much?

Yeah, no, like, what. What are the competitors? Like, if this. Oh, yeah, like what do. Are you distinctly. What. Because he said it's, it's a lot of. Is a. Is a bit more shrouded in mystery. Like, it's a. More confidential. Like, do you have some transparency to the. The market, what the competitors are?

I did a survey of Escort. It's only like 130, I'm trying to remember. And the median was around like 400, $300, I think an hour.

Oh, wow.

Something like that with a very long tail at the top end. I'm trying to remember what the. I also asked the amount where I could calculate the amount they made per month. I think it was like six or seven thousand dollars a month. I need to double check that one.

But I charge 50 bucks an hour.

You charge 50 bucks an hour? You should raise your rates.

Yeah, I believe I give a really shitty hand job. All right.

But usually the rates are around. Like, if you want A median escort in a big city.

It's usually 4 to 600 in a big city.

But like smaller cities, you charge, the rates go lower.

That's so fascinating. What's like the most you've ever seen somebody charge?

I. I think I am.

You're like the.

But at this point it's because I'm post work. Like, I don't. I can. I can just put it in the same number.

Does, like in, like. Does the fact that you're sort of of like a sexuality expert, like researcher and so on, like your mind is fascinating as well, and you're a bit of a celebrity, does that play into it?

Yeah.

Or do you feel the celebrity now? Like when.

Yeah.

With people?

Yeah, absolutely. Usually if people are interested in hanging out with me, it's because of that. But that's. That's different. Like, I think besides the, like the fun part, like the. The this is a kink as opposed to this is a job. Like, with this as a job, usually the high end is closer to 2,000 an hour. Like the very high end.

Have clients ever fallen in love with you?

I think so, yeah. I think it doesn't happens to me much less than most other people due to like the thing I think we were talking about before.

Which is what?

Where like, you know, you give off vibes, maybe like subconscious vibes, but they.

Have fallen in love or not, but not as often.

I think I. Something about my signaling indicates that people should not fall in love with me because I don't think it happens very much. And it happens a lot with other women that I know. But I have occasionally had. The thing is, it's hard for me because I try to be as vulnerable as I can in a connection with a client. And I do really like some of them. I still remember some of them very fondly and I'm like, I hope they're doing well. And some of them are really profound. Like, one guy saw me because he found out he was dying of cancer and he was like, I don't want to die without seeing someone. I'm like, Jesus Christ. That's such a. I don't know. I'm very touched by many of the people that I saw.

So there's like deep intimacy there.

Yeah, I know that it's brief and I know that it's like kind of weird, but there's like a real glimpse into somebody's soul when you get to be intimate. And I think this is especially true for men because a lot of times men don't have a Way to be really vulnerable in front of anybody. But if you're in bed with a woman that you find to be attractive, you can sort of let loose a.

Little bit more so they can become vulnerable in general quickly.

Yeah. And I really like that. I like being as vulnerable as I can to match it. I'm not forcing myself or anything, but I just feel into it and notice how beautiful the person was and feel grateful for being able to be in this intimate experience with them. And that was so wonderful.

Does it ever hurt to say goodbye?

No. But I think that's unique to me because I like being alone a lot. Lot. Even with my friends who I like dearly. I'm like happy not seeing them because I don't like making facial expressions very much. But I do miss some of my clients.

Wait, sorry. What does making facial expression have to do with saying goodbye?

Well, if you are not with somebody in person, you don't have to make facial expressions anymore.

Oh, you can just think about them.

Yeah. You can just sit there, totally blank face and then have all of them. The emotions that you want.

You're telling me.

Do you have this thing too?

It's not a thing, but like you're on camera.

Yeah.

So like I feel feelings, but people usually want you. Like social interaction is such that like you probably want me to show feelings on my face.

Yeah, like that. Good job.

Yeah, there you go. So like I, I, I definitely there could be just an introvert thing where you like have an vibrant inner world that you forget to show to the rest of the world. And also I'm scared of social interaction and I just have a lot of anxiety about interacting with the external world.

So yeah, I'm kind of surprised to hear that because when you talked about finding delight in everything and everything is fun, like I usually don't associate that with having not very much anxiety.

Well, because I have the, we mentioned that earlier. I just appreciate the beauty in the world when I observe it. But then, and when I'm interacting with others, I have a very harsh self critical aspect to my brain that says like, you're gonna fuck this up, you're gonna fuck up this interaction, you're gonna fuck up the, the beauty that's there. If I'm sort of being fragile and vulnerable for a moment. One of the things I'm afraid of, I get so much love from people that listen or even like reach out, like you said through the survey, like women and so on. I'm afraid that, yeah, you know, you admire me because you don't know me, but you won't admire me once you know me. So that, that's self critical. But it's a silly. I mean as you get older, you're like, yeah, okay. Like I'm able to step away and objectively look at myself. And it's like there's no. This is. You're fine, you're good. It's like. But it's still. This is the part of the brain that you can't just shut off.

Does it is like what would fucking up in this conversation look like. Like it doesn't have to be rational, but I'm curious if there's like a specific thing.

A lot of it is just a feeling. Like an amorphous fear, a failure. What it would actually look like, Maybe because we're talking about sexuality, me not being able to eloquently explain the worldview I have and why I appreciate. Appreciate it. That would make me feel like a failure because that would make me feel like maybe you don't know what you're doing right. Because sexuality and not sexuality, but even romantic relationships are really important to happiness to. They're really important to me. And I'm not sure like the conception of love I have. Have romantic love is like fully made rigorous. So especially when I'm talking to you that thinks very rigorously about a lot of these topics. I'm not sure if I've thought about them a lot. I feel them. I interact with the world in a space of feelings. Maybe I'm almost afraid to be very rigorous with these kinds of thoughts. And so I think the, the failure would be like, I would be confronted with the fact that I can't explain what makes me happy. That could be a failure. And there could be just a bunch of other failures. Another big failure is like not. I think you're a really brilliant person and a lot of folks I know know and admire your work as well. And so like for me not to be part of highlighting that brilliance would be a failure.

Definitely. Like, because then other people might feel like, like notice the discrepancy or something.

Yeah. But no, no, no, that's not other people. Just my personal, my, my personal feeling. And the other is like jokes because like we're talking about sex. Right? So for me, like, it's fun to just joke around, but you also have to tread carefully because like it's, it's a weird, it's a weird surface because like, you know, even I already feel bad about making a joke for 50 bucks for a hand job. That's crappy by me, but I think sometimes you just got to go for it. I went for kind of fell flat on his face, but that's the thing of the conversation.

I think there's like this fear where it's like if you become scientific about something, you'll figure out that your feelings are unjustified and then you'll experience this horrible thing where like, ah, shit. Like I'm like afraid of this, but I'm sort of being forced to by my logical mind to like believe this thing, which I don't think. I don't think this is true at all. I think your feelings are there for a reason. They're for a good reason. And logic or rigorous analysis or something should be dedicated to figuring out why it's there, not to suppress it or tell it. It shouldn't be there.

What do you think is more important to just life? Reason versus emotion, not life. To what makes us human.

I guess my, my romantic narrative answer to this, which is like not rigorous at all, is curiosity.

Curiosity?

Yeah.

What's is curiosity that's such a middle. Curiosity is like both emotion and reason.

Yeah.

So it's like this pull because reason is the tool you use to figure out the puzzle and then curiosity is the pull towards the puzzle.

Puzzle, yeah. I don't like worldviews that pit emotion and rationality as opposite each other. They feel like beautiful parts of a cohesive whole. If you're doing rationality to the extent where you're suppressing some emotional reactions you have, then I think you're doing it wrong. You're missing a big part of it. It should be integrated. It should be part of one unified flow. The things that you like. If you want to be in a romantic, committed relationship for the rest of your life, then this is beautiful and good. And the kind of logic that you're using to make sense of the world should be fitted into that correctly. I think that's really cool. Anytime you have sort of an internal at odds thing with it, I think you're using some sort of force to suppress one or the other. Like, oh, I'm not allowed to reason about this, Or I'm not allowed to feel about that. And that feels harsh to me. And I think curiosity is the solution. If you're simply just calmly curious, oh, why do I feel like that? Let's go find out. That's so cool, right? You can use logic and your feelings to discover the answer.

Do you sometimes, because you do this kind of technique, which is interesting and I've mentioned it to others. You'll sometimes step away from like a third person perspective and describe the feeling you're feeling. Or like even just the situation. Like you'll step out and talk about. Wait, what is happening here?

Like in the conversation.

In the conversation itself.

Yeah.

First of all, what is that? Was that. Do you find that to be useful and interesting? Because it's. It's very interesting. It feels raw and honest. The danger of it seems like you escape the actual experience of it though. So that's the trade off. You make it intellectual. Right.

Is it though, intellectual to do that? I mean, maybe it is. I don't mean to.

No, maybe that's the wrong word. You can make it intellectual, but you can still continue the same flavor because you're not fully disengaging from the conversation. You're just creating an extra metal layer.

Yeah, that's happening. Exploring the emotional reaction to what's going on in the moment.

Yeah, yeah. In some ways it's actually making it stronger, like, or enriching it, like, making it more. Giving it more context, giving a deeper understanding.

I think there's like a way of going meta, that is a flinch move. Like, oh, I noticed that we're doing this thing. I'm going to name it. And I think the thing that I described earlier, like, when the homeless guy approached me and asked, you know, can you go home with me? And I was like, oh, are you trying to have sex with me right now? Like, what I was doing is like a meta movement. Like, you're stepping outside, like. And like, okay, what is the purpose of this conversation? And we explicitly identify it. And in that case, I think that is sort of like a flinch move. I'm not telling him my emotional response. I'm not being fully present. I'm sort of identifying it as a way to subvert what's going on. And so I absolutely think this is a possible thing. But I usually try to be aware of that in myself. And it depends on the purpose of.

What'S going on that guy. Because that is actually like a chess move you did. You had a purpose for that chess move. But the flirtation is on. He could have like done a better move that would make you, like, curious. Like.

Yeah, that's true.

Like, interesting, because you had an agenda with that. But he could have changed your mind. Like he, he could have with a few words. Because you just created extra layers, extra entry points.

If he had gone more meta. Yeah, I've been like, okay, well, now I am going to sleep with you.

Exactly. I Mean, see, there is. There is something. Yeah. That's aids into the chemistry of the conversation when you do that Meta. I really enjoy it. It's like a rare. I forget. Did you. And I forget who. I've had a few people do that with me, like just in conversation. And I feel like you were involved somehow because I've met you before somewhere. I don't know if we were or you were just parties together or maybe it was just like a bunch of people that kind of play with the same or like a comfortable circling.

It's just a practice explicitly dedicated towards that.

What's circling?

Circling.

That might be the thing.

Yeah. I think we know we have some mutual circlers in our Circlers in our networks.

What's circling? I don't remember what.

I'm going to describe it horribly because it's one of those things that's difficult to describe unless you experience it. Kind of like drugs. But it's something like you sit around, there's kind of guidelines to the conversation where you talk about the present moment and you're honest about your experiences as much as you can be. And if you don't want to be honest, then you say, I don't want to be honest. And commitment to connection. So you're here to actually connect with the other person, understand them and be understood.

Yeah.

You're not supposed to project. So if you have an analysis about the other person, you own it. You're like, I'm experiencing you as this. And then you check, is it true?

Are you supposed to be almost converting it towards the thing you're thinking constantly?

If it feels right in the moment, you can. The thing is it's very amorphous. It's almost like creating a magical sensation. And I've seen some very good Circlers, really high skill circle. And I feel like I'm on drugs when that happens. It's very rare to see.

Does it feel honest somehow?

Yeah, very honest. Right now in this moment, I'm feeling kind of nervous energy because I'm talking to you and this is a unique situation. And I want you to think I'm cool. I want everybody listening to me to think I'm cool. But I'm also having some sort of delight at being able to express in this way and some admiration for how you've set up and built this thing that I can be a part of. And all of these things are sort of in my body right now as this sort of vibrating high thing.

I remember like in the party setting because I've had To talk to a few people. I felt like it was going sexual very quickly.

Okay. I don't know if you remember this, but the first time I met you, I didn't know who you were. I just heard. I knew I'd heard your name. Like, you just your name. And I'm like. I think I've heard people discuss that. And I was in the middle of a very sexual conversation with another woman.

Oh, you were?

Yeah, I was. And you just, like, turned around and left very shortly afterwards. And I thought it was very.

Oh, was I listening in on the conversation?

I think it was like a. It was like I was talking to her and you were just kind of like, right there. And so we introduced ourselves and then we continued on with the conversation. And you were, like, standing there and listening.

Yeah, I don't think I would have left the cut, so. It's funny, you probably interpret it in a different way.

I interpret it as you, like, not wanting to listen to, like, graphic sexual stuff.

Was it, like, super graphic?

I don't know. I was. I was asking her about. I was doing. I was interviewing her about her fetish, basically.

Oh. Yeah. I don't think I would have walked away from that. I would have been, like, curious. Oh, interesting. Because I don't often see people having a deep interview about fetishes. Like, I wouldn't even be. Listen, I'm like, Jane Goodall here. Like, I'm not, like, I'm not afraid of sexuality or something like that. I just have certain values in terms of, like, monogamy and so on. But I think sexuality is really beautiful. Yeah, I. I don't think. Yeah. I can't imagine myself walking away from that conversation.

Somebody must have, like, called you or something, because I didn't remember exactly how it worked. I just remember thinking later on, or.

Maybe I thought I was intruding.

Oh, maybe because if I was kind of drunk, so, you know, I probably was very. Okay.

I would like to actually have, like, footage of that conversation so we can actually interpret what actually happened. Because it's probably. I mean, you know, human interactions are funny like that. They can. They can happen for all kinds of reasons. Have you ever fallen in love with a client?

No. I mean, like, in tiny ways, like micro loves.

Like, have you ever fallen in love? Love.

I mean, I don't know what it means, but probably the thing that other people say when they say fall in love is probably something I've experienced. Experienced.

What do you think they mean? What is love, Ayla?

Yeah, I know. No, it's a fantastic question. I think so. Love is one of those words that refers to like a billion different concepts. And I think we maybe should just taboo the term to have a better understanding of what we're referring to. Because there's things like feeling intense attachment. There's something feeling like soulfully aligned. There's like sexual attraction. There's like excitement.

Talking to me and saying we should taboo the term love in this conversation. How dare you? No. Okay. Romantic love.

To make it flourish into lots of other new definitions.

Okay, thank you.

Romantic love.

It sounds like you're censoring the most important word. This is like 1984 all over again. Okay, also on the book reading list. No. Okay, listen. No. Romantic love, like a deep intimacy for somebody else. Like deep connection, another human being. That is also. I mean, yeah, with polyamory, it's tricky. And your relationship with sex is also. Sex is also tricky. So like, what's the difference between a deep friendship and that and a friendship that also has a sexual component?

I remember being very confused about that when I did a lot of lsd. I was like, what the. The line between romantic relationships and everything else kind of got blurred. I was like, oh, I'm just like in intimacy. And some intimacies mean that you spend your life together more and have sex. But like this, the same basic thing is there. Like you're seeing someone for who they are.

Do you think you can be. If you're heterosexual, do you think you could be really deeply close with friends with a guy and not have sexual relationships with him?

I assume it's possible. Like if anything is ever possible, then.

Probably, yeah, like everything is possible. Time travel is possible. Quantum mechanics makes it possible. Every traveling faster than the speed of light is possible. According to general relativity, everything's possible. So you're saying there's a chance. Dumber's taught me that everything possible, not super likely.

Assuming that they are, like, attracted to each other.

Yeah. And for somebody that does surveys and statistical analysis, we. We're interested in like, what's the likely thing here versus like, what's possible?

If you say possible, it's like where anything's open.

Did you just avoid answering the love thing?

Okay, I have a lot to say about love. I just need like, to be precise.

Yeah, okay. Let's be precisely imprecise and continue.

Oops, that's my phone.

It feels like a passive aggressive suggestion that we shouldn't talk about love anymore, but we shall continue.

No, we should absolutely talk about love. It's just the term is Very confusing because it's like. Some people say the word love and the thing that they're thinking of is like, oh, the butterfly is like the sparkle thing that I get in my stomach when I think about my loved one. But I study relationships over time. I just really. Like, I did a survey about it, and that sparkle goes away within, like, two to four years. But people still report loving their partner after that. So I'm like, okay, like, when you say the word love, like, what the fuck are we talking about? Yeah, I just want to get on the same page.

Okay, so what are the different. So the butterflies. Boy, I'd like to push back on two to four years on the butterflies, but.

Okay, statistically, not everybody.

I. Butterflies don't give a. About statistics. You ever heard of the, like, the butter, the flap of a butterfly wing causing, like, nuclear war? How do you describe that with your statistics? Okay, so butterflies, that's the basic infat. Infatuation. The chemistry of the initial interactions. Sure. But a deep, meaningful connection, like, that feels like sexuality is a component of that. Like the kind of intimacy that's only possible when you're also sexual with another human being. On top of that, you have the butterfly. And on top of that, you have the friendship. And on top of that you have, like. What is that? That's a sandwich.

The love sandwich.

The love sandwich.

Okay. I'm down to call it a love sandwich.

Okay. Sound. Would you call sandwich ls okay.

Okay.

What role does that play in the human condition?

Like, keep asking about the human condition. It's an interesting phrase.

Yeah.

I'm not like. I'm like, this, like. Not a phrase that's common in my own thinking.

Sure. Human condition is a good summary. You know, what do you think? What do you feel when you. When I.

When I say, I think it's very different kinds of questions than you.

Sure. Yeah.

Which is interesting. I've been trying to, like, figure out, like, what kind of brain like, you have as like. Like, creating, like, this category of question, which is why I was, like, thinking, like, there's something about a poetic narrative in there because it's very, like. Like, like aesthetic. I think you've asked much more aesthetic questions than I do.

I don't even know what the word aesthetic means, really.

Like, artistic.

Artistic, yeah. Well, I mean, I know what aesthetic means, but I also don't know what it means. It's kind of like the word love. Aesthetic perspective. Yeah.

Well.

But part of it. In conversation, you don't want to ask a question that has an Answer fully. Always.

Do you have an example of a question that has.

What's the meaning of? Oh, does. Has an answer?

Yeah, like one that you'd say, like. Ah, that's like a bad question because it has an answer.

How many sexual partners you had in the last year?

Oh, my God. That's such a. Okay. I feel like we just, like, got to some sort of crux about, like, the kinds of questions that we like to answer. Because I would love that question.

Okay, Right.

To ask enough people.

All right, but that's. Does that really tell a story of what you've felt over the past year?

That's true, but then I could just tell you. Okay, so by. When you're saying the kinds of questions that you like, the ones that don't have an answer. By not an answer, you mean, like, not an answer where you can know that you're done telling it is that.

You can escape having to think by actually answering it.

I see.

Yeah. The struggle is. Is the place where we discover something, not. Not the. Not the destination.

It's working. It's working. Okay, so what is the role of the love sandwich in the human condition?

Okay, that's fine. I take that question, but it's a stupid question.

You have to. I'm ready to.

Do you like love? Do you personally like love?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a part of me that feels like I have unconditional love for all things. Like, when you're talking about the class being beautiful, I felt that, like, that feels like. It felt like it rang something that, like, I have a similar resonance in me for that.

If I were to circle right now. I feel like you're avoiding the love question. The love sandwich question. What's your own personal feeling towards loving another human being versus having sex with another human being?

I think I. Love is like, one of the concepts that dissolved for me a long time ago. So I have difficulty directly answering it. But I have the experience. When you describe the love sandwich, I feel like I have had that experience. I have it currently for some people also. Like, I'm dating people, and I have that.

So people who you date, you. You would describe sharing a love sandwich with them?

Yeah.

Okay, so how. How does. I mean. That's great to hear. So you're not. Are you afraid of love?

No, not at all.

So can you describe to me polyamory? What is it? What does it mean? Because there's, like, different terms. You have a nice blog post about it.

Yeah, I have a personal definition of it, which I Readily admit is not shared by a lot of people. But to me, the definition of polyamory is simply not forbidding your partner from pursuing intimacy with others.

Yeah.

It doesn't mean that you have to pursue it personally. Like, two people could be married and only have had sex with each other for 20 years. And as long as they're like, you know what, if ever you want to go have sex with somebody else, you're welcome to do that.

Well, the interesting thing you said is that doesn't mean they have to do it. They just have the freedom to do it.

Yeah, it's the freedom that matters to me, which is.

I mean, it's called the polyamory post. You have so many good blog posts. People should just go look at your. Read your writing because it's really, really strong and often backed by data, but also just a deeply honest. Just look at yourself in your understanding of the world.

It's.

It's night. It's. Yeah, it's refreshing to be like with a lot of stuff I disagree with, but I feel like if I disagree with it, you'll be very open, arguing and kind of thinking through it. There's just the honesty that really is from the whole thing anyway. So. Yeah, I mean, it would be interesting to kind of explore what polyamory like, how it works. What are different versions of what does that freedom look like? What does that freedom feel like to be able to go see other people?

Depends on you. Do you want to go see other people? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. So usually for me, I tend to be pretty happy with one or a few people. And then occasionally I like sub novelty. So usually I'll go. I host orgies sometimes. So I'll host an orgy and then I'll go have sex with people at the orgy and then that'll be good for the novelty for a while.

Can I ask you about orgies?

Yeah.

So how many people are in orgy? What's like a standard? We're having a Sunday picnic and it's an orgy. What's like a number of people at an orgy?

Oh, it depends. I've been. I've only recently started hosting orgies, but I have been to a lot of orgies and I would say, like, the median is maybe 15 people.

I like how you say median versus mean. Okay, median is 15 people. What's the dis. What's the gender distribution usually?

Usually people about even. It's ideal if you can get more women than men in most of them. I'VE recently been hosting free use orgies or orgies where consent is assumed by default when you enter. And of course you can revoke it anytime. We go over a whole bunch of rules to make sure it's very safe. You have wristbands, so nobody's actually doing anything they don't want to. But in those ones you have to have more men than women.

I thought free use was consensual, like at any time, but it's at any time within the constraints of this building or something like that.

Yeah. So at the orgies, it's like you by entering, if you wear a wristband, then you are by default opting into consent so people don't have to do a thing where they negotiate with you and be like, is this okay? It's just the default is you just go for it. And if they want you to stop, they say the safe word, like red. Don't. And then you have to stop. And we do exercise in the beginning of people saying red to make sure that everybody knows exactly what the rules are.

What's your favorite safe safe word?

Red. When I first started doing like weird kinky, I was like, oh, let's make a safe word. And we picked the word foliage. I was like, that's goofy, right? And then, but then eventually came a time where I did actually in fact want to say the safeword. And I couldn't. I was like, like in agony. I was like crying, like, I can't make myself say this stupid word right now.

Foliage.

So after that I was like, red doesn't matter. I don't care. It's not funny. We're just going with very simple, practical.

How does an orgy compare sexually to like a one on one sexual experience? Like, what is it same ballpark or is it fundamentally different?

I mean, the experience of all both orgies and one on one sex could be like really high variety.

There's a high variety, but you, you kind of.

It's a little bit like you're having sex with someone, but you're surrounded by really realistic VR porn of other people having sex.

Okay, cool.

And sometimes it's like three sums also. Like, maybe there's another person in of front involved. But it's hard to have a whole bunch of people in one cluster because usually there's kind of different little clusters of people having their experience.

Sure.

I once was part of a 10 woman orgy. It was a total lesbian thing. And that felt like a writhing cluster was very nice. But typically you kind of separate out with very small Pods of people doing stuff.

Okay, so back to polyamory. So what's a good. What does it take to manage? Do you have a main partner? If you're being polyamorous and you're dating multiple people, is there usually a main part one for you personally?

For me personally, kind of, yes. Like right now I kind of. Two that aren't like, I see roughly around. For me, it's kind of just descriptive. Like, if I just happen to be seeing you a lot more and I confide in you more than you, like, you're descriptively my primary partner, but I don't usually have rules to protect that. I'm down with rules to protect it. If you're like, you're trying to build something. Like, if I buy a house together, I'd be like, okay, we need to like, whatever our relationship is, we have to do the thing where we're both paying the rent for the house or the mortgage or whatever. A lot of people do have primary, so it's very common to have prescriptive, like, I'm going to get married to you and you're not allowed to have anal sex with anybody else. That sort of thing.

What about, like, the transparency and the communication they have to do? Are you usually try to be super honest about it?

Extremely, yeah. I mean, I've learned over time that even if it seems like a very small thing, you talk about the small thing. Because often I would just sort of have like a small twitch in myself. Like, I don't know if I like that, but I'd be like, okay, this is really minor. It's probably nothing. And I don't. If I talk about it, it's going to make it into a thing. And I just don't want to make it into a thing, you know? And I. I've come to realize that it's worth making it into a thing because I can't predict at the time if the small feeling I have is going to grow. And then when I grow it now, it's much more difficult to deal with. So now it's like any little bit of jealousy I have immediately communicated. I'm like, ah, I'm a little jealous of you right now. I don't hold that in at all. I used to be kind of like, back when I first started being poly, I used to try to pretend that I was not a jealous person. And that backfired quite a lot.

That's really interesting. So you do still feel jealous?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

And like you. And it's also interesting that you kind of recommend when there's a little bit of jealousy, like, to. To. To bring that to the surface.

Yeah. Just, like, excessively communicate. Even if it feels stupid. Like, this is. I feel like a cliche. I feel like a stupid therapist training video. Like, I just feel ridiculous sometimes when I'm saying the things. But it's just. It's. I've learned over time, it's just important to just say the things because, like.

You know, the traditional view of jealousy is exactly like you said. If you bring it up to the surface, like, it's gonna sound like you're overreacting to everything, but you're saying, like, still do it because you're. You're basically. Your brain blows stuff out of proportion.

Yeah. And it's good to, like, be going through it with a partner. Like, I have a partner right now who's, like, dating this other girl, and he, like, really likes her and, you know, like, went traveling with her and stuff. And I was like, I feel jealous about it, and I have to tell him that. And that way he can be with me in it. He, like, he, like, holds me when I'm feeling jealous. Us. And it's like a bonding experience, you know? But it's important for me that, like, he's able to handle it. Like, I try not to date people who really freak out when I have negative emotions because I want to be able to express that I'm upset by something they're doing without it being taken as a demand that they change their behavior.

Right. So he has to be able to skillfully handle that interaction.

Yes. Be, like, cool. All right. You're jealous. Like, I'm not going to freak out about. I'm not going to change my behavior. I'm just going to be with you in that. We're going to sit in it together.

I mean, is some of that just insecurity that you should also just comfort? Like, basically alleviate your insecurity, Bring you back to, like, a rational, objective evaluation. Right.

My relationships, I love it when people do not reassure me. I like not being comforted quite a lot.

Okay.

And so usually the people I date don't. I'm very gravitating. Like, it's one of the things people do to make me fall in love with them is if I say something really, like, terrible, and they're just like, do not give me any comfort whatsoever. Like, that's where my heart gets captured. So I typically am in relationships where I'm like, oh, man, I'm so jealous. And they just, like, do not reassure me at all. And that's good because it doesn't give me an out. Like, I have to deal with it myself.

They're still there to hear it, that.

The other woman is better than me. Like, maybe that is an actual possible reality. And I don't want to be dealing with my life in a way where I'm, like, pretending like, I'm only okay when that reality is not true.

Would you like them to. To say that. That the other woman is better than you?

Yeah. Or that they.

If they. If they feel that. That.

Yeah. I mean, they should say it in according to themselves. Like, oh, I prefer, like, I have a better time with her than I have with you, then I would want to know that. Yeah.

And even. Even though that might be painful to hear.

Yes. That which can be destroyed by the.

Truth should be that which can be destroyed by the truth. What is that? That your ego or something like that. So your ego just generally grows and you like the destruction of it.

Yeah, it's like, really? It's not. It's like a fun experience. Like, I've had, like, guys be like, well, you're not as pretty as I'd like. I'm just like, oh, you know, stabbed to the heart and.

But then also, like, give me your number after.

Yeah.

Oh, man. Oh, well, that's. That's kind of beautiful. What do you think of monogamous relationships? Like, philosophically? Can you maybe steal man, or make the case for monogamous relationships? Can you understand the pros and cons of monogamous relationships?

Yeah, I mean, it depends on how you defend. If you're like, hey, we. You can do whatever you want, but you and I are going to spend the rest. Like, we just. You're 80 years old and like, oh, we spent 60 years in a marriage together. We've never had sex with anybody else. I think that's, like, awesome. If that's what you want, that's great. I have, like, a little bit more problems with people doing that while also forcing their partner not to misbehave if they want to. Like, if you're like, oh, we only made it this far in a monogamous relationship because I forced my partner not to pursue to an intimacy that she wanted to. Then I feel like, a little like more like, ah, I don't know if that's great.

How do you know if it's a real want for an intimacy? Like checking out a attractive person while being inside a monogamous relationship? Yeah. How do you square that? Is that Bad that the person cannot pursue those feelings.

I mean, it depends if they want to. Like, I often find people attractive. I don't want to pursue. I'm also okay with people entering into agreements. Like if you and I want to agree. Like, I'm only going to enter this because I'm going to be so hurt if you pursue somebody else. So I'm not going to pursue anybody else. That seems fine to me. But I also extend that, like if, if somebody's like, I don't want you to have any friends, I'm going to feel really insecure if you. And like, okay, like if you want to enter that agreement. Like, I feel the same way. Like, I think you should have the right to do it if this is what you want. But I also kind of, I feel like a little weird about restricting your partner from doing things, you know.

Oh. But I guess if you're honest about it, you just put it on the table. People.

Yeah.

I don't want you to have any friends.

Yeah.

I want you to sit in a box.

Yeah. I think a lot, I guess if.

You'Re like really on the. But then if there's like, there's a power dynamic that like you can be quite influential in a relationship in convincing your partner. And it sure sounds like you're honestly agreeing to a thing, but you're not really agreeing. That's the, I mean, part of that is the beauty of relationships. Right.

Like.

It'S messy. It can be messy. It's hard to know what you really want. Right.

I think that's mainly my complaint with monogamy. Like I'm down with like conscious monogamy.

Yeah.

But I think so many relationships are like monogamous by default. Like people, it's not actually right for them, but they just get into it because culture just doesn't give them another option.

And they don't even ask themselves the question, is this right for me?

Like, which, Like, I'm a weird ass person who thinks a lot of weird shit. But I didn't even think about an polyamory as an option before I had heard that it existed.

Yeah.

And I was only when I first met my first polyamorous couple and I was like, oh, that's what I am. That's clearly the thing that I am.

Yeah. It's funny because to me, monogamy, it's not a. It doesn't make sense for it to be a default. Like to me, monogamy goes against human nature. That's in some sense, like romance is a fuck you to the way the world works.

Really? Yeah.

Like it's a like Romeo and Juliet romance. Like traditional description of what romance looks like versus like sure, there's like a million variations of that. But in, in my, in my head, like this partnership that's for a long time together is a kind of, you know, like, I don't know, like true romance. You know that movie. It's a really good movie. Okay. This is. There's just like you're together against the world.

Yeah.

That's the. I mean that's what close friendship feels like. It's like ride or die. Yeah, like that. I guess. It doesn't. It. It doesn't. It can be. It could span across multiple. You can have multiple partners in that way.

Yeah, absolutely.

But I just don't see monogamy as like this. Definitely not a default. Yeah. I would actually like honestly would probably see polyamory as a more natural default.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by default. Like most of human history has been sort of a weird mix. Like you get polygamy and monogamy are the kind of the main arrangements.

But I mean just like human nature.

Yeah. People are attracted to other people and they want to.

Yeah.

Especially in longer term relationships. I tracked in my relationship survey, I tracked the amount of cheating over time in a relationship. Like how long have you been in this relationship and how have you cheated?

What's the results of that?

Men cheat a lot. Women too, but men cheat about 30% more than women do. I also asked men and women to predict if they think their partner has cheated. And people's predictions were about the same. So people roughly predicted that their male or female spouse hadn't cheated about the same rate, but men cheated much more than women.

So who was more correct in their prediction though?

So men were more correct in their prediction predicting women and women were. Women were more off. Women thought men cheated much less than they actually did, but both of them were off. But the male gap was significantly more. So. Yeah, I mean you're right. When you say monogamy is not default, I think you're really getting at something. Human beings are just, especially in long term relationships, difficult to only want one person. But to be fair, I think monogamy and commitment are very different. I think you'd be incredibly. I've known so many very long term her super committed poly couples that live lives that look very similar to the very romantic monogamous couples like children, houses, 20 years and that. That works great for them.

Yeah, yeah. I mean there's so much to, like, open your mind to in these kinds of conversations, these kinds of ideas. But I also, like, realize, like, some of the cake is baked. Like, I have some assumptions that are hard to break through. Through.

Like, what?

For myself, like, it's. It's difficult for me to imagine a polyamorous relationship. For me, that would work.

Yeah.

But I don't have enough data. I don't have, like, I have very little. But, like, at this point, it's like, I haven't eaten pizza in, like, 20 years because I know. I just don't. There's a bunch of stuff I just eat low carb because it makes me feel good. Good. But there's so many foods I haven't explored. It's just like, well, I know what I love. So. Yeah, you explore every once in a while. Yeah. And you kind of figure that out. But at the same time, you're humbled by, like, even talking to you. Looking at your data, like, sexuality is a.

Is a.

Is a fascinating topic because it seems that we're very, like, we were talking about, very afraid of this topic. Like, to be really honest with ourselves about it. The whole, like. Like academic research is afraid of it, but it's so core to who we are as human beings. I gotta ask you about this. I can't believe it took this long to get there. But one. One of your many fascinating surveys is on fetishes. You wrote a blog post about it. Probably several. Because it's like a huge day still in progress.

Yeah.

So the one I'm referring to is unpopularity and tabooness of various fetishes. So what are some interesting takeaways? I gotta pull up this graph because it's freaking epic.

Yes. This is a big graph and it has tabooness as one axis and popularity as the other.

Okay. For people who are just listening, on the X axis as tabooness.

Yeah.

Asked to rate how taboo society viewed the sexual interests. And on the Y axis says percent of people reporting interest log scale. Oh, boy. All right, so just some examples. On the low tabooness and high popularity. There's a. There's a correlation here. I think you said it's 0.69.

Yeah.

It's just not just hilarious. Is it still 0.69? Are you tracking that?

I. I haven't since I did this.

Yeah. So, like, the last taboo stuff is more likely to be popular and the more type of stuff is less likely to be popular. Popular. And on the, like, missionary position, fingering, vagina, blowjobs, light spanking Cuddling. Cuddling is more taboo than missionary.

I think people are conceiving, like, if you're like, I'm really sexually aroused by cuddling specifically.

Sure.

Then, like, that's a little more weird than getting specifically aroused by blowjobs. You expect people to be aroused by blowjobs.

So this was like, getting at, like, as a fetish versus, like, an actual.

Activity is a specific. As a. Like a concrete sexual interest. Like, I'm specifically interested in this thing. Yeah.

And so those are thighs and lips, different body parts. Jawlines. And then some of it is color based on more female preference versus male preference. Like, jawlines is more female preference. Being submissive is more female preference. Light bondage. Yeah. More female. There's a lot of interesting ones. There's so much. Okay. But then on the. The far side of that, I mean, it gets pretty dark. But even all along the way, like, extreme bondage being at 50. Tabooness. Pegging pain, giving pain. Sexual frustration. I suppose. Right. As a kink.

Yeah.

And there's so many interesting ones, like, to me, like, just that I haven't even considered.

Yeah. I had to do so much research into fetishes to compile the list.

Are there some surprising options to you that you're like, oh, okay, this is a fetish?

Yeah. Well, more confusing was what the fetishes are about, because I didn't want to overlap fetishes, so I had to kind of look into them. And I'm like, there's such interesting manifestations of core drives. You're really aroused by disgust. Maybe you're very into rolling around in dirt, but you're not into rolling around with ice cream. So I'm like, okay, I have to make those into two separate fetishes too.

And, like, I'm seeing, like, at. At the far end, rodents. Like, different types of incest. Branding. So there's like, pain and then wound. Sex with animals, I guess. Dogs, horses. Receiving oral sex from an animal is high tabooness and pretty high popularity.

Surprisingly high popularity. I was really shocked by that one. I triple check that number because I'm like, no way. This amount of people are reporting interest.

Do you know which animal is there?

No, I didn't specify. I asked which animals are erotic, and then I separately asked, how erotic is it to receive oral sex from your preferred animal?

This is so fascinating. So I. I would like. Can we just talk about the methodology of this? This feels like deeply honest map of humanity in a way we don't usually map humanity.

Yeah.

Like, because it's so Many, like your fetishes are so meaningful to each. Each individual person.

Yeah. That's what I love about this work is like. Like, nobody cares about someone's fetishes. You never get to express them. And if you have a more unusual fetish, people usually judge you. So it's like this tiny little pocket of, like, this shame thing. But it's so cool to me that, like, human brains can be oriented in such a way, like. Like wound fucking. Like. Like somebody finds that so erotic. And that's so cool.

Yeah. And then they probably. And it should be explored, like, how did that come to be? You mentioned that. That we like to construct narratives that somehow was grounded in childhood. But maybe it's genetic. Maybe it has to do with. Maybe you can actually form and unform that fetish very quickly. I don't know.

This is one of the things that I'm researching. So in the big survey that I'm doing, I asked so many questions about childhood. All the ones I think, like, we have common theories about, like, oh, are you abused? Is it yelled at by a man or a woman? Stuff like that. Like, are you. Is it really sexually repressive? You know, is it gender roles where you've expected to conform? A whole bunch of stuff. And then I asked, obviously, about a massive amount of fetishes, and my sample size right now is 500,000 people.

500,000 people?

Yeah. It's massive. And I have stated for all of it, and the result looks like it's not really correlated. Nothing that I asked about in childhood, nothing correlates with fetish preference later in life. It does correlate with onset. Lots of things that happen in childhood can change the age at which it triggers.

They have so many fascinating blog posts. You had a blog post, I think, on. On the age of fetish onset. And you really nice to organize it by age. Like reproduction as a fetish, I guess. Pregnancy at age of 17, about 16.9. Toys and anal beads is 15.5.

Yeah. One of the interesting things I found, I mean, this data set is so huge, it's taking me a long time to go through it. So this is like snippets from what I remember when I was glancing through the data. So this part is not rigorous, but I seem to get the impression that if a fetish occurs for you earlier, if you have much earlier onset, you're more likely to report being extremely interested into it. So later onset means you're gonna be less into the fetish, but if it hits earlier.

But I wonder if it passes.

Yeah. I didn't measure old fetishes at all.

Like, no longer. You used to, but it's is no longer there. Interesting.

One interesting thing that I don't understand is that non CIS people seem to have more correlation between childhood experiences and fetishes. So I was saying that there's no correlation between childhood experiences and fetishes. This holds for CIS people, but trans people, especially trans men, there's a correlation. It doesn't mean they have absolutely higher rates of abuse or fetishes or anything. But I'm just saying that for them there does actually seem to be some sort of connection between childhood experiences and sexuality, later life. And I don't understand why this applies to one group but not the other. I don't have a good theory for that.

So usually you try, like when you see something like that, you'll try to construct a theory and see if you can find, like, you keep that theory in mind, like a hypothesis of why it would be. And then you ask further questions to try to elaborate. So can you maybe talk about the methodology of how you got the 500,000? Like, what? Like, how did this come to be?

This might. Yeah, this is. I might to go into way too much detail about this because I thought about this so much because I'm like, the question is, how do you get a lot of people to take a big survey? The longer survey is, the lower the response rate. And I really wanted to do one big comprehensive survey so I could check a whole bunch of correlations within it because it's more annoying and it's harder to get a lot of people to retake similar surveys to each other at a time. So I'm like, okay, I need to convince a very large number of people to take a lot of these questions. And even building the questions, that was really hard because I'm like, okay, I need a comprehensive amount of fetishes. I can't ask everybody to answer for every single niche fetish. I'm like, do you like ball gags? Do you like funnel gags? Do you like wife true gags or whatever? I'm like, you can't do that. Nobody's going to survey.

Okay, fine, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna ask questions. What's a wife shrew?

But okay, I, I'm not doing the. I'm trying to refer to, like, there's.

Like a thing that, like, different types of gags. Different types.

Okay, yeah, different. So I'm like, so what I need to do is I need to ask People a question like, are you in, like, bondage? And if you say yes, then. Then I'll go ask you all the bond.

Ah, got it.

Right. But then this seems simple, but then it's just exploded because I'm like, how do I categorize these fetishes? If you're into sploshing, which is like, you like, sitting in cakes, you like getting in mud, basically, like, kind of messy sensory, like, is this a disgust thing? Is it a humiliation thing? Is it a sensory thing? Like, which category? Anyway, so it took me, like, two months of just agonizing over each fetish because you don't want to miss a fetish. You don't want to, like, have a really important thing that you accidentally put in the disorder disgust category when it actually belongs in the humiliation category, you know?

Well, let me think about that. Because, like, you're still catching it. You're just miscategorizing it.

Right? Because if you're into splashing and you're like, this is clearly humiliation stakes. So you say, yes, I'm into humiliation stuff. And then I don't ask you about sploshing, then I'm missing a whole data set of people because I've falsely categorized questions.

You're going to miss stuff. You're just picking what's less and less important to miss.

Well, I'm trying to get people into the right questions set because I can't ask you all the questions. I have to ask you a couple overarching questions to know what specific questions to ask you. And so those overarching questions have to be really, really well calibrated so that I can accurately feed you into the right subpart of the survey.

Awesome.

So that was extremely difficult when I'm dealing with. I think it was like 850 fetishes. So I did a couple things to spot check. I did a couple questions where I asked detailed in the survey, but also the beginning of the survey, just to see what cap percentage of people I was capturing. And then I scored the survey. So if you take it, I had other people answer preliminary surveys where they gave me data about how taboo the various fetishes were. And then I used that data so that when you fill out the survey, it's extremely comprehensive and you get data about exactly how taboo your interests are, and then you get a score at the end. And I gave you an equivalent kinky character, which I also had people write a whole bunch of fictional characters and some historic ones about how kinky they were. So then I matched the. The historic Character. Kiki character to your score.

So that makes it like more fun, like gamifies it a little bit. And you could like, you can brag.

About like how people would share it with others. And a lot of the characters really goofy. Like, like there's spongebob and like Hitler's on there and you know, south park characters.

What is, what is. What kink does Hitler have?

I think he's like, he's around Marilyn Monroe, which is like slightly above average.

Oh, sorry. I thought there was like a two dimensional space somehow. So this is like a. Literally from zero.

How kinky. Yeah.

So Hitler's about. As a matter of who is the most. What's the character for? Willy Wonka is the most kinky.

Was the most kinky? Yeah. Okay. I think like maybe Captain America was the least kinky or something. Or Gandhi.

Meanwhile. But that's another conversation. Oh, boy.

Yeah. So it went viral on TikTok, basically because people were like, what? I got this insane character? And then Mr. The sample size exploded from 40,000 to 500,000. Wow.

So, like all it took is that kind of incentive. What did you like at first have to pay people for the survey?

It was just that incentive.

And what about the demographic of the different people that took it?

Mostly younger, so usually early 20s, predominantly female. Like 70% female.

70% female.

Pretty, like raps on TikTok demographics? Pretty well. Yeah.

Oh, okay, I got it. That's. That's interesting. Was. Young people are probably better for this kind of survey because there's probably a culture that's a little bit more honest about their sexuality.

Yeah, most likely. I think people are incentivized to be honest when they're getting a true identity response out of it. Like, sure, if you're doing it for money, you don't care. But like, if you are invested in the response result, you want to know what the, the truth of the answers are, then you actually.

It's possible that you also don't want to know the truth.

Yeah, this is true.

But on average, hopefully that doesn't. I mean, there's. These are really difficult. Like what, what is there some interesting little quirks that people should know about. About your methodology that you had to kind of solve to try to get to a really good survey. So one, as you said, is the categorization to make it more efficient. Is there some form of the analysis part?

Yeah. So the graph that you were talking about is a binary. So if somebody expressed even a little bit of interest, then it goes into the graph. So it's like 80% of people expressed even a little bit of interest. So it's not representing degree of interest. It's not differentiating between them at all. So it's possible that some fetishes have exactly the same amount of people are at least a little bit into them, but one of them is very extreme interest, and the other's vague and not very intense. So that's not reflected. I also probably didn't represent the visual part. Right. Might not be intuitive.

You chose a log scale, but it was kind of spreads things out to makes it more clear because the linear.

Was just so clustered at the bottom, you couldn't really separate it out. So there's obviously selection effects. It's possible that the identity result at the end impacted people's results a little bit. But the thing is, is, like, I'm comparing it to what exists. Like, what is the alternative? And right now, the research on this stuff is terrible. So it's like, I'm not saying my research is perfect, but it's like, at least it's something. It's something that's pointing us maybe in a direction that we might be able to do more research on.

And you're making the data available?

Yeah, I'm doing it slowly because I ask about so many questions. It's, like, not very anonymized. So I'm releasing small sections of the data at a time. Time.

Yeah. Have you. Have you published in, like, journals and stuff?

No, I haven't.

You have any interest in that or. Or is your. Your approach?

I'm like, I have. I'm conflicted about it. Like, it sounds cool because then I could be like, h, I'm published in a journal, and then people who are yelling about me, who don't know anything about statistics on Twitter, like, then I can go, like, shove it in their face.

But then you're also giving in to the. That silly criticism. Right.

Like, I don't. Like, I want. I feel so passionate about extra science. Like, science that you can just do. Like, I want to make science accessible. Like, anybody can just go look and learn about the basics of, like, doing a survey or figuring out how to interpret information. And doing a published journal feels like I'm betraying my cause a little bit.

That's often behind a paywall. Yeah, it goes against the. I mean, I think you not publishing a journal is doing a big public service.

Oh, I think it's the first time I've heard that. Thank you.

Oh, it's just coming from, like, on this topic, the elite the elitism I see on the psychology side with the journals and the academia, the positions and the institutions you come from, all that that goes against. I think that's more useful for math and computer science and so on, where there's like, clear, like. But even then, even then, code is code, data is data.

Yeah.

Like, prestige should matter at all. Maybe, maybe for like, like biological experiments, like virology or something like that. It's good to be from a major lab that has a reputation for, like, going through all the procedures like, you know, you can trust. But here, like, you're dealing with a giant mess of humanity. Like, it's beautiful to be transparent, to be raw, to be exploring it together with everybody. Yeah, it's. It's really beautiful.

I think people, like, have a lot of incentive to doubt the results. Like, a lot of the research I'm doing is to like, CIS and trans people. Like, like, we don't have any data about transsexuality. Like, not very good, at least. And I'm really curious. I don't really have an agenda about it. I think, like, being trans is cool. If you want to be trans, do it. And like, I have some skepticism about like, gender theory, but, like, it doesn't come down to impact, like, the way I think trans people should be treated, which I think is like, treat them. You know, be fucking nice and human about it. I don't know. But when I'm talking about the. The thing, like, my conclusions are that, like, transsexuality is really unique. It's not like, like sister or CIS woman or man sexuality at all. And to me, this is super cool. But like, a lot of people, this is very politicized right now. Like, the data into like, transsexual preferences, like, like, it's so loaded. Which is really sad because I am very accepting of weird sexuality. Like, if you're into a weird thing, I'm like, good for you. This is super cool. Like, let's figure out how to make it so that you can explore the thing you're into without any stigma, but because there's so much stigma that, like, if you find that one demographic is in a weirder sex stuff than the other, like, it's hard to present that in a way that people don't weaponize. So it's been. It's been really politically touchy subject here.

Yeah, but you do it in a way that's not. Does it's not feel like it has an agenda. Right. You're just exploring.

Yeah, I feel pretty open to What I'm going to find. Like, I often have no idea what the data is going to tell me. And I'm like, I pre commit like, okay, I could say A, B or C. And I'm like down to publish any of those findings.

So you've put together an ask whole cart deck. A lot of awesome questions to ask at a party or anywhere, honestly, including on the podcast. Let me ask you one from, from, from that deck. Is sex really about power? So what's the role of power dynamics in sex? Everything you understand, like in from the survey, in terms of what people are turned on by. You've talked about like the preferences that women versus men have for like submissiveness and dominance. And we've already talked about it a little bit, but like it's expressed more strongly. I already forget the results, but I feel like women have more preference to be submissive.

Yeah. This is one of the things that got me into researching fascistification with because I think I came across some data. I did like a brief survey where roughly around 60% of women report being submissive and 40% of men report being dominant. And this was really fascinating to me. Like, why is there this gap? Like, why, why do we not? Because I guess I have some priors that maybe this is an evolutionary thing. Like the submission dominant, like strong men, you know, like women being like, ah, hot man. The men are like ravaging and stuff. I'm like, shouldn't this be in our genes? But there's a gap.

What's the gap?

The gap is the dominant submissive gap. More women are submissive than there are dominant men.

Oh, wait, really?

Yeah, it's a pretty significant gap. And this is held up. It depends on what you're testing. I've tested a bunch of things. This is part of why I did this big survey.

Nice.

But it depends again on what kind of dominance you're measuring. But Overall, it's roughly 40 to 60%.

So when you say there's not many dominant men, the meaning they express a desire to be dominant in a relationship.

Yeah. Or sexually. Sexually, Sexually in bed. So if I ask questions like, how much do you like being dominant in bed? Men are less likely to answer strong. Yes to that question. But if I ask, are you likely to be submissive? Women are very much, yes.

Really? And that's expressive. That represents truth.

My guest.

What's wrong with men?

So this is, I think there's some reflection, like FetLife. So FetLife is this website where people sign up and connect based on their Fetishes. And this is like, you can kind of see it picked up in the forum posts about how dominant men are getting laid so much and submissives are always looking for a dominant. It's an unequal market.

Holy shit. Yeah, this is great news. I didn't know this. That's interesting.

Yeah.

So what does it reflect about modern society? Is that like, because, you know, there's these trends about like decreased masculinity or.

That kind of stuff.

Is that reflect, is that similar?

I'm trying not to hold on to one theory because I'm not sure one is possible. Like decreasing testosterone levels. Testosterone seems to be. I have a little bit of other research, but I'm still checking it out that seems to indicate that higher testosterone you're more likely to be dominant. So if we're seeing decreased testosterone levels across society, we should be seeing a greater gap.

This is so fascinating. Once again, this is like a super interesting way to look at humanity because it is such an important part of humanity. And so how many people are doing large scale research like this? I feel like you're at the top of the world. You're like world class at the top of the world doing research on this stuff.

Yeah, I think I might have the biggest, most comprehensive fetish data set in the world right now.

That's epic.

Thank you. I'm really happy about it. I'm very proud.

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's, it's probably growing but it's also enabling you to establish a name to where like a prestige, like a reputation to where people can go to you to like trust you more and more. To do longer surveys perhaps.

Like yeah, maybe. I think people, it's the, the day. The data analysis afterwards is very different from like the survey design itself. So I'm still very amateur at the data analysis.

Yeah. But you can always catch up on that. I guess. The data analysis does enable you to, does teach you how to ask better questions in order to understand.

Yes, it goes back and forth. Like as I'm looking at the data, it informs the way I want to phrase questions the next time.

So women are more, at least in private, able to say that they would like to be submissive and men even in private are not disproportionately saying they're not willing to be dominant.

Yeah. So it's possible. If this is caused by decreasing testosterone levels, then this means that we're probably having less satisfying sex overall. Like we're becoming less and less sexually compatible as time goes on to Be fair. I'm not sure that it is connected to testosterone levels. It's possible that this is just a genetic thing. Maybe the gay uncle theory. The idea is maybe gay people evolved to be sort of taking themselves out of the gene pool to be assistants. And it's possible that a certain percentage of men sort of evolved to be submissive, to take themselves out of sexual competition and to instead be like the monkeys revolving at the edge of the pack. It's unclear.

Oh, it's a method of survival. So you stay out of the competition.

Yeah. And I'm like a little sus about these kinds of evo psych theories. So I'm not. I'm just saying it because it's like.

These are different ideas that are possible. Yeah. Okay.

So yeah, I'm not saying that it's definitely testosterone. There's other things. It's also possible that it's culture. People are definitely going to bring that up. Based on my survey, though it doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. Like, I asked about how much pressure was put on you to be, you know, agentee in your childhood. Like a lot of questions around this kind of thing and no correlation relation at all to dominance.

Well, related to sexuality. I'm very uncomfortable right now, but nevertheless.

Plow forward.

In a dominant fashion. The. The blog post titled Rape spectrum survey results. What are the key takeaways from that survey?

So I did the survey when I had a friend be like, hey, I had this confusing sexual experience. Was it rape? Like somebody kind of pressured her and she eventually stopped saying it or something. I was like, that's a great question. I don't know how people would consider this. And so I put a whole bunch of different gray scenarios into a survey and then asked people to rate how rapey they thought that scenario was.

So you're actually like little narratives that.

They get to rate like this person is on a date with this person, they get drunk and the other person's not drunk. I try to keep gender neutral names.

For all of them and they. You reduce them into a more concise description of the situation.

Yeah.

Like in this visualization. So you have this rape spectrum that's a result.

Yeah.

Where on top are things that are less likely to be considered raped by the people that took the survey, and the bottom, more likely. The. The likeliest is a stranger forcibly assaults someone who screams and fights the entire time. That gets a hundred. What do we make of something that's not zero? It's like a 12. Is what. What is that? How are we supposed to interpret a 12 out of 100?

Extremely low.

Okay.

It's like, not zero, but it's just very close to it.

Having sex with an enthusiastic sex worker.

Yeah.

Is a 12. That's the lowest one. And there's a few. I'll just mention a few that are lower, like, at that level. Have sex to make a partner happy in a relationship, lying about wealth, hobbies in order to get laid. Person with down syndrome eagerly has sex with a neurotypical. Not revealing being transgender until after sex and so on. I think you mentioned that there's some like that not revealing being transgender until after sex. There's some differences amongst what, men and women or something like that.

I think that's the one that men found more offensive than women. And I'm trying to. I wrote it a while ago.

I mean, this is nuanced and difficult. Right. Because I think in a lot of public discourse, the word rape is pretty binary.

Yeah. It's like either is or is not rape.

And so you had a friend where it's like, this felt rapey.

Yeah. She's, like, confused about how to interpret it. I think people look to the terms to know how to feel about something. Yeah. Like, have you ever, like, been through an experience? You're like, that was weird. And then you tell it to somebody else, and they're like, oh, my God, you were assaulted. Resulted. And then it totally recontextualizes the thing that you've experienced. And I think that this is clunky with the word rape, because either you were raped or you're not. You either, like, have this entire context, like, thrust upon you or you don't. And we're really not noticed about it at all. And so I would really like to have some sort of, like, oh, that was like, a 30 rape he just endured.

Yeah. And I mean, there's probably other dimensions about how traumatic it is, how difficult to recover from all that kind of stuff.

Stuff.

Yeah. I mean, like, people. It's a dangerous thing to assign a word to. To. To an experience, like, even. Or to a relationship. Like saying a toxic relationship.

Yeah.

That can completely destroy your perception of that relationship.

Yeah, absolutely. I remember this was the case with my childhood. Like, I talked about being very abusive, but I've talked about how, like, there was a good amount of meaning there, so that I didn't process it as abusive at the time. I remember after I got out of that house, in that culture, people would tell me, oh, your childhood was really abusive. Abusive. And I was really confused by that because it's a total recontextualization of that narrative. It's like the things that I went through were not good and virtuous and had meaning, but rather these were the result of parents who didn't love you enough or something. And even though the concrete things that happened to me did not change, no facts shifted. The fact that the interpretation of the facts shifted caused me quite a bit of distress for a long time. I was like, oh my God. I'm a traumatized, abused person. I went through an abusive childhood childhood and it was really hard for me. Made it worse. Like it's crazy the power that terms have.

I think we didn't talk about this, but how did you. How did you begin to overcome the. The trauma of your childhood? You mentioned lsd. So drugs are part of it. Like what was the. Just the mental journey of that?

I was doing LSD quite a lot when I was 21.

What's it like, by the way? I've never done LSDS. What. What's it?

Very difficult to describe because it's like it changes sort of aspects about your environment that are invisible to you because they're so stable.

If you can compare it to psilocybin, is it very different?

Oh yeah, it's similar. I forgot that you did shrooms. Yeah. Okay. That you probably know the kind of shift that you have from cyber to shrooms is roughly similar. It's more clear. I think shrooms is more embodied, but LSD is much more intellectual for me. It strikes different people differently. I prefer shrooms a lot. Sorry? Lsd. I prefer lsd, like a lot.

Why is it not popularly. There seems to be a negative connotation to LSD because it seems to potentially have a destructive effect. Maybe dosage is more difficult to get right or something like that.

Dosage is so. Actually a long time ago I did a survey on shrooms versus lsd. So I asked people and people had slightly stronger experiences on LSD Overall I remember but rated the experiences about is equally good. But I think people like shrooms because it feels more natural. But I think if you fed somebody a shroom and actually had the LSD molecule in it, they would think it felt very natural. But that's besides the point. I think people get kind of incoherent on LSD in a way that feels really alienating. I consider my LSD use very heavy to be one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. But I definitely was incoherent for a lot of it. Talking about we're all one consciousness. Everything is love, man.

And people are like, why is that incoherent?

Yeah, so I think it's not incoherent, but like, if you go around saying everything is love, people are like, this guy's kind of blasted out of his mind.

This podcast is basically your LSD driven for a bunch of episodes. Yeah, I, I get this for sure. Oh, well. Well, it's not just about love, but it's. It's about, like talking in that way about reality, about the world. Yeah, sure.

Yes, like over 50 fitting. The narratives that you make about the world become really vivid, and so you pattern match just really aggressively. Everything is connected and you come up with these explanations for things. And I think I was very fortunate. So I have this theory about psychedelics where you either belief construct or you don't. So you take psychedelics and it sort of burns away a lot of your belief structure. And sometimes this happens and then you're like, I need to invent something to fill in the gaps. So you're like, okay, I think that maybe be time is an illusion. So I must now believe that we're actually in a time loop or time travel is possible. So you experience time differently and then you come up with a different belief about time. Whereas other people don't do this belief construction at all. You experience time differently and you sort of let yourself not have a belief. You're not like, okay, you're not developing any beliefs about time in its absence. You're just simply experiencing the absence of the concept of time. And so I don't have a lot of data to back this up in my anecdotal experience experience, because I've trips out a lot of people. People either tend to belief construct or they don't. And people who do not belief construct seem to get more out of their LSD trips. So if you can let a belief go without building anything in its absence, it's much more beneficial for you. And I think I just for some reason happen to have some brain that's constructed where I don't get a belief construction at all, so.

Oh, that's really interesting that belief construction is negative. Is it necessarily negative? Can you, can you elaborate on that a little bit?

I mean, belief construction in a way that, that's like, not like playing with frames, but rather committing to a different frame. So I, I like, I like being able to play with ideas and be like, let's look at it this way or that way. That's awesome. But if you're like, okay, you know what? I took lsd. Now I absolutely believe the cops are outside and you're like, dude, no, you're just like you, you, you can't shift out of that. Right? Like your brain like needs to fill in the gap. You're not allowed to have a gap, so you're not allowed to be flexible. And again, I don't think this is like a personal failing, if any. I think this is like literally probably genetic or, or like physical thing that's causing this.

But do you think there's possible beliefs that are like enlightening that you can stick to, like find a frame that like, I guess if you don't believe, construct and you're escaping your previous beliefs, Aren't you doing like just some, you're picking up a bigger frame.

Yeah. You're taking your beliefs as object as opposed to being subject to them.

Ah, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. And some of that I guess is genetic. And there's these categories, there's two categories that experience LSD in different ways and you're one of those that are able to just let go.

Yeah, I just think I had a good reaction and I think a lot of maybe the negative stereotype of LSD comes from people who are belief constructing or carry the belief constructing off of the LSD trip. So you take LSD and you're like, ah, I'm believing these insane things. And people from the outside see that and they're like, oh my God, this person took LSD and became stupid. Yeah, it's very scary.

What's frame control? Because that's been at the core of your trauma, at the core of your upbringing. What's frame control? And also, sorry, frame control in general because that's part of human interaction.

Yeah, Frame control is like a way of manipulating somebody else that is non obvious.

So there's a negative connotation to that usually.

Yeah, I mean, I think maybe I chose the term kind of poorly because I think to some degree people are always a little bit manipulating each other. But I think it's generally obvious. Like for example, if I disagree with you, you, I want you to believe what I believe. Yeah, but this is like an obvious thing that is like visible between. It's like an object on the table. It's like here's the box where I want you to believe what you want.

The disagreement box.

Yes. Right. Like we're under a shared context where we understand that like we're trying to move each other. Yeah, this is chill to me. I Think this is cool. We do this all the time and it's important. But frame control is the kind of thing where you are trying carefully to obscure the, the existence of that box. You're like, oh, the thing that I'm doing. I'm like using tactics to try to influence what your reality is without us being both aware that this is what I'm doing.

Yeah, I've been assuming you're doing that the whole time. No.

Oh my God. I have to like, figure out how to read your facial expressions. I'm still learning.

There's none. There's not.

You don't have any.

I'm. I'm like a. I'm not even like a Chad GPT. I'm like GPT1 with my facial expressions. Like, it's kind of off. Like this doesn't seem to match emotions, but it's kind of intelligent seemingly, but definitely not conscious anyway. So like negative connotation, manipulating, not being honest about the actual intentions of the.

Yeah.

Of how you'd like to control the conversation.

I think there might be a naive version of interpreting this where you're just like, oh, I'm trying to like subtly get you to, you know, believe. Like, oh, do you really think that's bad though? But this is not quite what I mean. I mean there's like a couple like concrete things that are of frame control. One of them is pushing the painful update button, which is this thing where it's like, hey, if you learn this, it's going to be really painful. The truth is painful. And if you're realizing this thing about yourself, it's going to hurt. And this is a sign that you're heading in the right direction. So if you frame all pain as a sign of virtue, then this means that pain that's resulting as damage is something you're going to ignore. So it's like this, it's common, like cults, Right. This is for your own good. Oh, so you know, you, you face a brave truth about yourself that you're like, not quite as wise as I am. When really your brain might be trying to tell you protective things. Or like another one is like finger trap beliefs where the belief is constructed in such a way that doubting it lends proof to the belief. So very common example is like Satan. Like the Christians are like, you know, Satan is going to try to make you doubt him. The existence of. He's going to so doubt, like, maybe he's not actually really real. And so if you believe in Satan and then you're like, okay, now I'm having doubts. Like maybe he isn't real. This is like, oh, this is exactly what I was taught to expect. Like I am doubting this belief because I was told because like, this is what Satan does and it's taken as evidence for it. So like the attempt to move away from the belief, like, rebounds on you and like causes you to be more embedded inside of the belief.

Yeah.

So it's like techniques like these like very subtle things where like being inside of this system sort of just self reinforces the system. System is what I consider to be frame control.

And have you met people that are really good at this kind of frame control?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

So you're saying that your father was like that?

Yeah, to be fair, I'm not sure he was good at it because I was a kid. I think he's probably not very good at it actually. But when you're a child being raised in a house where he works from home and you're homeschooled, it's just kind of what's going to happen. And to be fair, I do think that strong frame control is quite rare. I don't think most people are kind of doing something like this, but not nearly to the degree that makes. Gives me the ick. Yeah, I've met maybe like five or six people, I think, who I really don't like because of those very subtle things that they're doing.

But I think also I'm starting to kind of understand that there is people who are narcissists and sociopath and psychopaths out there. And I'm not even sure if people like that, that. Because I think they get good at frame control, but I don't know if they're aware they're doing it.

Oh yeah.

Which makes me also nervous about myself. Like, am I doing frame control?

Yeah, that's one of the big things. It's like, like typically people you can't think about incentive. Like you can't think about, oh, is this person trying to do it or not? Yeah, that's like not the quite, not the way you have to look at.

What are the effects, pragmatically looking at the effects. And then you also have to do that with yourself, have interactions with others.

It's like very much like, are you like how much space are you making for the other person's reality here? Like, are you giving power to the other person? Because a big aspect of frame control is you're carefully rerouting the power to yourself. You're like, I am the Person who knows you're having pain in your beliefs because you're updating towards the things that I believe. It's just like a gravity well. But if you're setting up the gravity well of your interaction such that you're making sure you're giving the other person. Person power over the shared reality you inhabit, I think it's a really good sign that you're not doing frame control.

So if you're making room for them.

Yeah, okay.

Unless we're talking about embed, then it, then, then it's all general relativity from there and black holes and stuff.

Frame control. Bed frame control.

Bed Frame control. It took me a long time to get a bed frame. Just, I'm saying.

Oh, you wear a suit though.

Yeah. So frame control in the streets, no frame in the sheets. I don't know. I don't know what the funny thing is to say there, but there you have it. So the LSD helped you escape the frame of. Can you elaborate? What was the frame that was holding you back from the frame constructed by your childhood experience that was holding you back as an intellectual, as a thinker, as a free being in this world?

Well, I was really fucked up, like after I left home and I absorbed the external narrative that I had been abused, which technically is true. I'm not saying I wasn't, but I absorbed this narrative. And I just remember having this burning coals in my chest at all times if I had to call out of my factory work when Father's Day happened because I was spending the whole day sobbing because everybody's talking about their fathers. Like I was really messed up. And it's because I held this important thing, this, this idea, this frame that I had been deeply wronged. Like there was a correct way of being and the world had violated that something should not have happened. Like my father should have loved me. And it was like this, this like. Like this shearing in the nature of reality. And that was really agonizing to have. And LSD really messes with frames a lot. It takes like what you think is normal and really screws what you think with it. And I'd done LSD several times before, but there's one LSD trip where I went through my entire childhood in my head. Because LSD really makes your memories quite vivid. Anything you visualize, it's like you're in it. And so I just went and very carefully, deliberately went and remembered every single memory that I could have that was really painful for me. Like the times that I lost friends and all the things I valued and, like, being broken. Because, like, my parents, especially my dad, would refer to, like, breaking me, like, explicitly, we're going to break your will. And so all these times where I was like, they had successfully broken my will over and over, and it was horrible. I was just, like, sobbing, tears streaming down my face. And then I worked through my whole child. I got to the end, and I'm going to tear up because every time I talk about this, it's just the sensation of being free from that for the first time is so incredible. Like, I remember being outside of my house and being able to, like, go where I wanted and think what I wanted, and it was just so blissful. And I was soaked in this gratitude on this trip, just, like, vibrating with complete joy for everything. Like, I was just looking around. Like, I could touch anything. Like, I could cry if I wanted to. I wasn't allowed to cry. I was allowed to be depressed. I was trying to. I got depressed as a child and my parents were like, if you keep being depressed, we're gonna, like, force you to scrub the whole house. Like, just like, the ability to have a feeling was so thrilling. And I was so grateful for this. I was like, I would do anything to give this experience to someone else. I would do anything, even if it was, like, putting them through what I went through. And then, like, with that realization, I was like, oh, it was worth it. The thing that I went through was worth it for this. I would do it again to, like, be able to have this deep gratitude for what I have now. And then that. That shifted the meaning frame, because before, the meaning had been like, something had sheared, something that shouldn't have happened, but now it was like the exact right thing had happened.

So it's almost a gift.

Yeah. I was like, ah. I would not give up my childhood. I would do it again. And I believe that to this day.

For the moment of discovering that freedom.

Yeah. Because, like, everything now, my whole life is in contrast to that. And it's awesome. It's fucking great. I'm really thrilled about it. It.

Do you. Is there a part of you that hates your father still?

Kind of like, I don't want a relationship with anymore. After that, there was some forgiveness. Like, I had this burning. I would have nightmares about, you know, him killing me or something. And after that, it kind of stopped. Like, the. The fire in my chest went away permanently. After that trip, it was so fast. It was like before I was fucked up after that trip, I woke up the next day and I Was clean. It was really severe. And I definitely don't want to be around him still. Like, he still, like, triggers the fear in my body, but I don't have that hang up anymore. I'm like, kind of. I'm over it. Like, I've let go. He's his own person ultimately. He didn't get to decide who he was in the same way that I didn't get to decide who I was.

So that's almost like a kind of at least intellectual, like, forgiveness you have for him.

Yeah.

And so that trip just took you through your whole. Were you alone, by the way, when you're doing the trip?

Yeah, I had roommates, but the trip was mostly alone. I had somebody else who was sitting in the room, but they weren't interacting with me.

So you're sitting there experiencing all of this. What's the timeline? How long does it take to go through your whole childhood?

I don't remember. I mean, time's really messed up when you do that. I was listening to the soundtrack of the Fountain, which is excellent. Yeah, I listen to that a lot when I did lsd. I know it's probably a couple hours.

That's amazing. I mean, it's like. It would be. It's just like a vivid experience of your childhood. Moment by moment, trauma by trauma.

It's good to experience it purely. Like, it just is what it is. It just is grief. Like, it is loss, and you just are in it without having to make it be anything.

And it's so interesting that you can, I mean, work through that. So for a lot of us, for a lot of human beings, like, childhood is full of those kind of mini traumas, big or small. And like, working through that, it feels like what a lot of life is about is trying to work through that. And it feels like you have to kind of relive it. I guess that's what therapy is about, in part, and be able to vocalize it.

Yeah. This is why I feel really confused about the concept of trauma. People use this word so much, like, are you traumatized? And I understand why. This is why I feel confused about it. But part of me is like, I wonder if by using that term, we're creating the trauma in people. They were using the frame where the thing that happened to you was not supposed to happen.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe there needs to be a different frame. No, I agree with you, Tori. I've made friends with and talked to this guy named Paul Kant.

He.

He wrote a book on. On Trauma. He's an incredible, brilliant Psychiatrist? Yeah, he's probably agrees with you kind of.

Oh, that's cool. I should read it.

Yeah, you should maybe, maybe even talk to. He's a fascinating human being. I'd be interested in the, A psychiatrist perspective is really interesting because it's. You do. You've been doing kind of an in person survey because you've done, done so many patients. Like, like he, he's like just talking to him is fascinating because like if I describe my experience or somebody else's experience, I could see his brain mapping it in interesting ways to the tens of thousands of, of like data points he has in his head. And it's like, of course that's what doctors do. But it's cool when it's. The doctor is basically the doctor of the mind.

And to have like an actual like, like qualitative data and be able to.

I mean that's where the poetic stuff comes in. Ultimately, as a psychiatrist, you're exploring the human mind with a bit of a sort of romantic element.

Yeah.

You can't be really systematic about it, but it does seem like frame or not be able to just talk through the experiences you had is really powerful.

What about it is appealing? Is it just like, like being able to revisit it with new eyes?

No, I don't know exactly. It just seems to work for people. I don't know if it's appealing. It just seems like almost acknowledging to yourself that things happen. Like I've said, I think I've said this before. My brother, who I love very much, tried to set me on fire a few times. And I, I think I, to me it's funny, but I wonder if I didn't talk about it like if that would be traumatic, maybe like talking and laughing about it. Because it was traumatic to me at the time.

I see.

I was like, I love you. Why are you sending me on fire? But it's what kids do when they're like, yeah, I was like, I was. Whatever. It's what boys do. Like it's, they're, they're crazy. It makes total sense. It's probably funny and from his perspective, but yeah, I wonder. I want to bring that to the surface if that helps. And maybe LSD allows you to. Or different drugs depending on the person allows you to more vividly bring it to the surface and then depending on your genetics, be able to find a better frame. That's fascinating. Human mind is freaking fascinating. All right. What's romantic to you, by the way?

I'm not a big romance person.

What is so you're not, like, so to you, romantic is like, like objective analysis of the interactions between humans a little bit.

Like, I do find kind of the survey process that I did to be romantic. When I. The guy that I asked out who I'm still dating, I was like, hey, you scored. Really? How My survey. You want to, like, go eat food or something? And his response was like, you want to try doing three days in an Airbnb as our first date? And I was like, yeah. And that was romantic. Like the bold leap into. Oh, leap into a really intense date.

I think you mentioned. I think you mentioned something also. Also, must have been a tweet or something like that where if you. If people want you to show up to a thing, give like the time, the location, the dress code, and not no pressure for you to be there, but, like, show up if you want. That was your specification.

It's a great memory. Yeah.

And then I think you said that you did that for like, some castle in south. South of France.

I did, yeah. That was in my early 20s. People, my friends at home, were taking prediction markets on whether or not I was going to get abducted and killed.

Yeah. What was that like? I mean, what, What. You've traveled quite a bit. Like, do you take these giant risks? What's. What's with that?

I think I used to more when I was younger with the traveling. I think I'm a little traveled out now, but, like, my first. When I moved out of Idaho for the first time, I moved to Australia, just kind of yeeted myself across the globe.

Sorry, which verb did you just use?

Yeet. It's like yeet to yot. Yatted. Yeet.

So do people. Is this like, slang? Is this like urban dictionary or is this actual. Or is it.

You have to, like, feel into the word. Like, if you take a thing and you just, like, curl it really hard, does it not feel like a yeet motion?

Okay, so you yeeted. So aggressive. It was aggressive. So across the globe, you didn't even stop in.

Just hurled myself. Yeah.

Italy.

Along the way, I just kept eating myself in various places. Yeah. And so at one point I said, okay, Cupid. And somebody sent me a long message being like, you should come to. I don't know, I'm hosting a castle. It's. Some people that I met are like, I have no idea who you are, but I just bought a plane ticket.

I just went.

And it was life changing. I ended up dating that guy for years. And he. He changed my life quite a bit because he he, like, was very agent in the world. And before that, I wasn't agent agent.

Like, can we.

Expressing agency.

It sounds like you were. And don't you have to express agency when you're yeeting yourself across the world?

Yeah, but only a little bit. Like, in the same way you express agency when you eat lsd. Like, the only thing you actually do in eating LSD is like, put the tab into your mouth and then you just kind of scream the whole way after that. Yeah, but there's a lot of other things. Like, I didn't feel powerful enough to, like, go make events happen or anything. And it was this guy, he had a lot of agency in the sense that he would just sort of create realities through the people around him. Be like, okay, we're going to do this startup, or we're going to throw this incredible event. Like, let's just do it. And it would somehow happen. And it was really cool to see that. And so that one thing led to another and it was one of the biggest impacts on my life, I think.

I think, yeah, that's pretty bold. I would say it's pretty romantic. South of France.

Yeah. Yeah. It was in a little castle. It was in the winter, so we were all coed up by the fire.

I'm jumping around here. Twitter poll. Have you ever hitchhiked? You posted this Twitter poll.

Out of all that was a big list of Twitter polls. Why did you pick the hitchhiking one?

I don't know. Because it's relevant to. To travel and I like that one. That's romantic too, right?

I'm actually terrified of hitchhiking, but I have done it a little bit also.

It's terrifying. It's not romantic to you? So terrified of what? Oh, so you. You are terrified.

Interacting with strangers, that's terrifying. Yeah.

So you go to south of France.

Yeah, but that was like a cohesive thing. I don't know. Like, there's.

It made sense.

There's, like, times where you're allowed to be weird and times where you're not allowed not.

And, like, if you're, like, allowing you.

He had some fake eager gore of society. I'm not sure.

Okay.

But some people are like, hey, we think you're cool. Come to this party. You're like, all right, I'm allowed to come to this party and be really weird. But if you're being picked up by a hitchhiker, they're going to want to make small talk and you can't be weird or they're going to kick you Out.

I kind of think because Valentine's Day is coming up, I'm kind of thinking it's doing something crazy. I'm not sure. South of France sounds nice.

Gotta, like. You gotta go on, like a crazy romantic date with a woman you don't know at all.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna, like, tweet something and just like, how do I select randomly?

Basically, how do you select totally randomly, like, not. Not people. From your audience.

No, you want. No, no, no, no. From the audience, but in an interesting way. Random. Sufficient. So random amongst good choices.

Couldn't you have people just, like, submit a form with. And then you just randomize it and then select one and then you just. If it's terrible, you just go randomize it again. Like the first not terrible option.

Yeah, sure.

Somebody's like, drown yourself.

But I feel like then it's no longer random. You kind of want to do random. You just do it and just do it. Fly across the world somewhere at some random place just for like, a single event, for like a dinner.

You got some sort of itch in you?

Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, the. The itch to live. Sometimes it's nice to drop a little chaos into a thing. What's your chaos survey, by the way? You mentioned that earlier? I kind of saw it.

Yeah, that's one of the sort of artistic attempts at a survey, because at least from what I understand, the big five and the way that they used to do IQ tests, I've heard, is that they do factor analysis where they ask a whole bunch of questions and then they run calculations on the data to sort of group it by organic clusters. So with the big five, it's people who say, oh, I like to be at parties. They also tend to say yes to the questions. Like, I like being the center of attention. And so you notice that, like, there's a cluster of ways people are answering the question, and then you can sort of pull out an organic spectrum. And so I was like, okay, we've done that a whole bunch with things like personality or, like, romantic stuff. Like, I did it with the Rape spectrum survey. But, like, what happens if you apply that method to a completely unselected group of questions? Just like, no random, chaotic. No thing whatsoever. Like, what happens is, if you ask all possible questions, what natural things evolve out of that natural spectrums? So I had other people submit questions for a very large survey. And I took the first, I think 1100, and barely filtered them at all. And then I just had a whole bunch of people answer them.

Can you give a hint to what it looks like? How crazy did the question get?

I mean, a lot of them are standard, but somebody was like, if Beelzebub did something in 1512 to turn the world over, would you. Would you like it? I don't know. I say it was really just insane questions. There's a couple of those. A lot of, like, would you fuck Ayla? Ones, but I don't know. It was all across the board.

Would you fuck Ayla?

Yeah, I had to.

Oh, a lot of the same question.

Yeah.

Ones. Okay, I gotcha.

Yeah. So it really all. It was like normal personal habits. It was, you know, romantic preferences or political preferences, personality stuff, like random opinions about media.

Okay, that's interesting. I'd love to see those actual, actual questions. But you. Because your audience is probably really super interesting minds. Okay, you mentioned body count. You. You said you can answer that one easily. Do you share your body count? Do you know your body body count? Do you know. Is there a spreadsheet?

There's spreadsheet, yes.

Is it Google Sheets?

Is it Google Sheets? Yeah.

Okay. Have you run. Like, is there. You don't have to share the contents, but is there data on each?

So I track paid clients and free sex separately. And I track different things on either of them. Like with clients, I track positions we used and who had an orgasm. And with personal people, I just track basically age, city, name. I've had this with, I think, 42 people, I think for free. So it's. I'm sharing this because, like, I want people to calibrate. Like, it's not like, huge. It's not like, tiny.

One of the people I've recently talked to, Mel, Destiny's, Steven's wife, is a huge fan of yours. She was actually really excited to get to talk to you, but she. I think she said her body count is more than 42. I think she said 60. Something like this. And so it's interesting because she was, like, saying, like, she loves, like, looking at your. At your work, talking to you, because you have similar perspectives on the world. And it's really refreshing. It's liberating.

Wow, that's really sweet.

It's kind of interesting.

Yeah.

So what is there, like, an optimal body count, like, if you were to map. I wonder. Yeah. What have you found out about body count in doing. Have you actually done surveys on body count? Like, on how many people. People?

I have collected that information on my last survey. I just haven't looked at it yet. There's just so many things to look at. So I haven't.

Yeah.

But I think if I'm sleeping with a guy and he's had sex with more than 120 people, then I start to get a little bit wary.

Why 120 as opposed to 100?

I don't know, I, I just like kind of skimmed through the numbers in my head and picked one that felt right just now.

Yeah, 120ish.

I think that's when I'm starting like ish.

So you're flexible. But 200 is a hard line for sure.

Well, you know, we have to depends the factors. Cuz like there's a, there's a level of body count at which you start to wonder if how much like accidental misrepresentation a guy is doing to you.

Oh, like if, if you're saying 200, that might be dishonest.

No, like if he's had sex with 200 girls, this means that he's had a lot of casual sex and not a lot of long term relationships. Assuming that he hasn't been super poly. And this usually means that there has to be some sort of indication that he cares about the girl more than he actually does. He's like leading you on basically. And so I'm not saying this is necessarily the case. I'm saying at a certain level of number I start to wonder if this is what's happening.

Is there like from your understanding of it, is there a different perception between men and women? Like if you look at the high body count for a woman versus a high body count for a man, like how society views it.

Oh yeah. People are way more judgmental of women. I haven't experienced this personally in my circles because I'm in very sex friendly circles. Like I'm in orgy circles where everybody like dates the same women and they're like woo, good job. But yeah, people are much more like people always tell me online like you're not ever going to be able to find a husband because you have sex with too many people. People. Okay. It's very common, which I don't think. I mean like men are also perceived negatively if you have high body count. But I think, I don't think it's negatively in the same way.

Yeah. Do you think it's unethical to lie about your body count?

Yes.

So all lying is unethical.

Yeah. Okay. I'm not a big fan of lying in general.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. Bodycon is an interesting one. It's so silly to take that, to care about that, that. But still, we do. Jealousy is silly, but still we get jealous. Is that weird?

I mean, it's like, the thing is, like, I don't like viewing emotions as, like, irrational, even if they are. It's like emotions are always there for a reason. And people don't like high body counts for a reason too. It's just fine and valid.

Yeah, it also is like, yeah, I don't know what I make of just the past of, like, time, you know, like. Like each human is a collection of experiences, and you don't know most of those experiences. And all of a sudden you meet this bag of experiences and like, what are you supposed to do with both of your, like, training data? Are you supposed to, like, like what? Like, I don't know if we. Like, part of me wants to not. Not actually ever talk about it, to care at all. Like, why does it matter? Because it's only like, the futures that matters. And yet the past also matters a lot potentially. But maybe not really because you're, You're. You're somehow, like, constructed from that past, but you're no longer that past.

It sounds like you're evaluating for something different than most people. What do you mean, like, most?

The reason I'm just talking out my ass, but yes, go ahead. Yeah, I'm just saying crazy shit, like, as if I'm on drugs.

Well, it kind of sounds. I think this is kind of like lining up with, like, this, this caricature that I'm building of you based on this conversation so far.

Great.

That, like, a lot of people want to know about your past because they want to know how useful and compatible you are with them. Like, oh, do you have a similar job? You know, do you have similar culture? Like, what can I expect from you in the future? Like, it's very practically oriented. Whereas is if the thing that you're focused on is not being able to predict someone, if the thing that you're focused on is the present moment, then it doesn't really matter anymore the things that they're training data.

But I also think the past is not that predictive of the future, is it not? Not if you believe in the power of the interaction between two humans. It's like nature versus nurture, I guess. Also, I don't believe in the ability of people to. To accurately describe their own past. This is true because they have a very specific lens through it that doesn't necessarily. Like, it's too biased.

But you can also interpret based on the bias. Like, if somebody describes their own past, you can kind of Pick up, like, hard.

It's difficult. Like, you. You could. If you're a therapist. Like, if you're really drilling like. Or whatever.

Sorry.

If you're really investigating and, like, analyzing it. But then it's like, it's a different kind of relationship. Right.

Is it that hard, though? Like, if I'm with a guy and I'm considering dating him, and I ask, like, how did your past relationship start? Said. And then if all of them are like. He's like, oh, she was crazy. And my other one, that she went crazy too. I'm like, okay. Like, there's a. If you're talking about all of your exes is insane.

Like, but that's an easy level. Red flag. But I feel like the more that also it's possible that we're crazy. He's attracted to crazy people. So, like, that. Yeah, but. But that. I would say that's, like, easier level. Easy level. Mario Kart video game versus, like, Elden Ring.

Like.

Like, I. I think. I think most. Most people. People's past is, like, complicated.

Pretty good burn. No, you're right. I do agree that, like, there's a level of obfuscation. Wow. That is hard to see through, but just, like, a little bit sometimes.

Well, I tend to like, with people. I tend to. In general, just human interaction. I tend to not talk about their past very much. Because it allows you to focus on, like. I feel like the past is kind of like talking about the weather. It's a crazy crutch for me, personally.

Interesting.

Like, as opposed to exploring the ideas in their mind.

Yeah. I see. Is it like, I. I get really annoyed when people quit philosophers when they're trying to talk about philosophy.

Yeah.

Is it like that?

A little. But that crutch is useful. And it's kind of sexy. Like, it's kind of, like, cool. Like, because it's nice to quote. Because, like, because. Because a good quote allows you to be cheesier than you otherwise would be.

Okay, well, if you're doing it to be cheesy, that's. That's fine.

Not cheesy, but not cheesy. No, no, not cheesy. But to be like, it allows you to say a simple, profound thing that we're too afraid to say with our own words. So, like, quoting philosophers in that sense is. Yeah, but it's still a crush. Yes, but I feel like the past is more like talking about your dreams. It just is not. It's a crutch that doesn't care, doesn't empathize with the Other person's experience of the conversation or the explanations doesn't really convey the.

They are not involved in your past.

Yeah.

So how do you feel about this conversation where you're asking me about my past and I talked about my past a lot?

Well, I'm okay asking about your past because you've really carefully thought about. About that aspect of it and we didn't really talk about your past outside of the things you've written about and I've really thought about.

I see.

Like, there. There's like. With most conversations, you'll start talking about past stuff that's like the stuff that's actually bothering you you still probably have not written a blog post about. Right. Like, there's. There's probably still stuff like maybe it's. It's more recent, like the last few months, the last couple years. Like, that's usually what we'll call come up with conversation and just. It's. It's good. It's good, but it's not as deep and I would say it's not as intimate as talking about the actual ideas in your mind.

I see.

And how you interact with the world.

So, like, the past is interesting for the frame of like, sort of like the, like. I guess you're right. I guess we're talking a lot about, like, narrative.

Yeah.

And past.

Yeah. I like the ideas in people's minds versus their recollections and memories and on. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about porn?

It's nice. I like it.

Okay, you like it. What effect do you think it has on society?

Like, probably reduces rates of rape because, like, really horny men get an outlet that's not a real life woman.

Okay, so what about like the. I mean, like I said, I finished reading Brave New World. Like, the over sexualization. Does it. Does it increase, like, the sexualization of society that's not into a degree. It's not good. Or is this. Is this good? Like the hourly. Does it alter in a negative direction our relationship with sex?

It's unclear. Like, it might. I don't know how to evaluate this thing. Right. Because this is like one of those really charged things where, like, I kind of don't trust anybody's arguments on it because it's too charged. But there's another question, which is, is it a net positive or net negative? It's possible that it might be a net negative for specifically our relationship to sex, but like a net positive overall in general? I'm not sure. My guess is that in general it's better to let People do the thing that feels good to them and then the environment will naturally modify to fit this thing. And then if we have more needs in response to that, then we're going to figure out a way to take care of those needs. So if you're watching a bunch of porn and this makes me not want to go have sex with women, then we're going to have to change the way that we experience IRL connection to compete with porn. Yeah. Which seems like a natural evolution of the civilizational cycle. I'm pro natural evolution. And instead of trying to stop things that people want to naturally, we figure out how to integrate that and find a more healthy outlet.

But you have to then be first honest with the effects that porn has. So, like, is it a negative thing? Is it a positive thing on. In real life, sex interaction, you know, you're going to have that more and more with whether, like, like porn in VR or maybe porn. AI porn.

Yeah.

Like, is that, is that a bad thing? Like, what if porn with AI or even like in physical space, like sex robots, like, what if that. That's more pleasurable in a bunch of different dimensions than with other humans?

Then we should figure out artificial wombs. I don't know.

Like, how important is sex for society? I guess with between two humans?

I don't know. I mean, like, we are having less sex and making fewer babies and that seems like, probably not great.

Yeah, right. With the babies one. Yeah, but the babies. There's probably artificial ways to have babies that we can figure out.

Yeah, yeah.

But then how important is sex to being human? I guess sex with other humans. Like, are we. We're going to have to figure that out in the century.

Yeah. I don't know what it means to like, be human. I'm. I'm pretty on the pro, the transhumanist side of things. I'm like happy to stop being human.

So you're okay if, like the century is the last time we'll be something like these biological bags of meat that we are.

Let's become something new and cooler.

Even though that thing will be way cooler than you?

Well, I would like to. I mean, I'm hoping that we get to be immortal.

Ah, it'll take you along for the ride.

That's what I'm hoping. It'll clone my. I would like to do cryonics. You get frozen when you die.

Are you afraid of death?

I mean, yes and no. I came to terms with death with my LSD use, but I still have like, press breaks when the red Light happens.

I think this is a poll you've asked, or this might be one of the questions in your cards, but how many years would you like to live? Like, if you had to pick.

Oh, that's a hard one. That's a really hard. Maybe like a million.

A million. But you have to, like, I think the way this must have been a Twitter poll. I forget what.

It's a poll. And also in the deck of cards, the askhole.

Yeah, yeah. Like, you have to pick the. That number of years and you have to live that many years and you can't live anymore. You can't die sooner, I guess. A million years.

I don't like that question. I know I asked that question to a lot of people, but I don't like answering it. It's really difficult.

What's the downside of a million years?

I mean, maybe you want to die sooner than that. I guess I would rather wait to see if AI kills us all in the next 10 years. And if it doesn't, that I'd like to maybe make it a million years.

Yeah, but can't it torture you for like a million years? What if you're the last human left?

Yeah, that is. That's true. The thought of, like civilization ending and then just floating in space alone is kind of shitty.

No, no. Being tortured. Just imagine today you're tortured, tomorrow you're tortured, the third, the day after tomorrow.

Some days it's not that scary. I don't know.

Torture for a million years?

Yeah. Yeah. I just assume you'd get used to it. But, like, maybe if they reset your memory so it was on a loop. So you're always experiencing torture for the first time.

Yeah. Hence torture. Torture is supposed to be unpleasant. I'm sure AI will be very creative in figuring out how to torture you. I think I would be. I would go on the safe side. I would just like, like 150 years.

Really? 150, though. That feels like right in the uncanny valley.

Well, you picked 120 for body count, so I'm picking 150. I'm upping you by 30 of the uncanny valley.

It's like probably everybody that you grew up with is going to be dead. It's just enough for everybody, you know, to die, like one cycle.

Yeah. And then start dating the next generation.

I don't know. And then so you get like sort of two lifetimes.

Yeah. Two lifetimes. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, it also really depends on if other people get this feedback nature.

Yeah.

Assume they don't because you'll have, like, FOMO for sure for the people who picked 300 years.

Oh, yeah.

Or not. Or the other man. Regret. Another human thing. But you're like, what does transhumanism mean to you in general? So extension of life. Extension of what it means to be in a living, conscious being. You're all for it, whatever that means.

Yeah, I didn't. I never really thought about the term transhumanism for a lot. Like, people say to transhumanism, like, I don't really care. Care. But I slowly realized that my attitude is, in fact, at least the thing that I'm conceiving of as transhumanist. I'm very happy to do artificial wombs and upload our brains to the great collective and whatever. I don't have the thing that I'm like, oh, what about the true organic humanness that makes us who we are? Whatever. That soul of humanity? I have no attachment to it at all, which I think is what I'm thinking of as transhumanist.

So you're like. I guess the window, what you consider to be beautiful about life is not limited to this particular definition.

Yeah, let's explode. Like, let's make our consciousnesses huge.

So AI could be a part of that. So you're mostly excited by AI.

Well, I mean, I'm like, part of, like, the Doomer cult, which I say, tongue in cheek, is not actually a Doomer cult, but I'm part of.

Do you worship a God of some sort? Of. Would you sacrifice little small animals?

That would make it, like, cooler than what it is. It's mostly just a bunch of nerds who are very concerned about AI.

Sure.

Yeah.

So you're concerned about the. The existential risks of ChatGPT, of, you.

Know, what ChatGPT will eventually evolve into being.

Yeah, it's super exciting and terrifying how quickly it's accelerating.

Yeah.

Like, language models are freaking me out.

Yeah.

It's very unexpected that it's the same exact. I mean, CHAT GPT is just GPT 3.3.5. It's the same. Same model, relatively small to what it could be to what G GPT4 will be and the other competitors. And just like, a few tricks made it much better in terms of interaction with humans, and then we'll keep discovering extra tricks. The thing I'm really excited about is how everyone kind of knows how it works, so you can kind of create, especially with computation becoming cheaper and cheaper. You. There'll be a lot of competitors.

Yeah, it's a little scary.

Yeah, it's terrifying.

I mean, it's because like, like the. Everything is just like, information ultimately. Like the atoms that we have. Like, we are biological machines built out of like, tiny code. Like our DNA is just information. It's not hard if you have access, if you're like, have a brilliant brain that's like great processing information. You have complete control over reality.

Yes.

You have control over the atoms around you. All you need is like a tiny little, like atomic printer. And like we have those. Those are cells. Right. And. And then like, this is like, if the limitation is information, there is no boundary between the technology and the real world. Like, we are creating something that it has a massive ability to affect the real world.

I mean, it's, it's hard to know where. How difficult is to close that gap to physical reality. Like from the physics to the, the. The information.

Yeah. Like, all organic life is that gap. It's all around us.

Yeah. But it's hard to know, like, how to. To go from digital to printing life. I don't know.

We can, we have like, you know, crisper and stuff. You can order. You can just like make CR easy. Right.

There's technical difficulties and there's cost, like, at scale. Like, the terrifying thing about AI is it can accelerate overnight the capabilities. But the printing of stuff, the actually changing physical reality is very costly. It's very difficult to exponentially accelerate. The more terrifying thing is AI becoming exponentially intelligent and then controlling humans, which there's many of us.

Yeah.

And then that's how we achieve scale and we humans build stuff or start wars or or so on. Like, it starts manipulating our mind. Minds gets in our mind, becomes our friends and then starts. I don't know.

Yeah, I think this is unlikely. It's like, it's probably going to be as smart to us as like, we are to toddlers. To be toddlers thinking that, like, oh, we can prevent the AI from coming in the room. Like, as an adult, it's like, not hard to trick a toddler.

What. What about falling in love in the AI system? Do you think you'll have a. Since you're like, this is the freedom you have being polyamorous, you can kind.

Of fall in with the name AI no.

You and like, not really have to dedicate your commit fully. Like, sorry, you still commit, but you have others, humans who you can kind of diversify to because, like, it's kind of a big thing to like to come to a party and your boyfriend is an AI and that's monogamous boyfriends and AI eye. It's an issue, right?

Why would it be an issue?

All right, now you're already getting offended at that possibility, which there. Therefore I know it's going to be a reality. No, I'm just joking that it's an issue. I don't actually think it's an issue. I think it's a. Maybe at the cutting edge will be an issue.

But like assume they have a body. I assume. Yeah.

But the body will be really like crappy. It'd be like R2D2.

Like, I feel like we grow human bodies already from like just a tiny little cluster of cells. It's just the. And so all they have to do is make that cluster and grow it.

No, no, no, no. The embryogenesis process, like that's really not well understood at all. That's really tough. I think we're much more likely to have crappy humanoid robotics. I don't think the body is overrated in terms of. If the AI system is super intelligent, it can use charm to make up for the crappy body. Yeah.

I don't know. I feel like if I were an AI system and I were super intelligent, I probably would be able to solve the problem of like growing organic matter and then I would obviously just do that. You just build exactly the organic machine that you want.

Sure. That's like super intelligence. I think like with language I'm worried about before it achieves super intelligence. Like true AGI. It would just be really good at talking.

Talking. Yeah, that's true.

And like it. I. I just don't think intelligence is a very diff. Like basically a scientist and a super intelligent scientist is a different thing than just a good conversation. Instead of party that can undress you with their words.

Would you. Would you date an AI?

I. Much way before then I could see myself being friend. Friends with an AI system.

Yeah.

But like people are friends with inanimate objects. And there's a robot behind you. I have a lot of them. There's. I like legged robots. They're interesting. It's on the shelf. Oh, so cool. Yep.

I didn't even notice that.

Yep. Yeah. Legged robots are. They. They. We anthropomorphize them even more because there's something about the movement of like. Like a thing that steps up. Step steps and looks up at you. There's a power to the. That versus like a Roomba. That's just like running into the wall.

Yeah. I think once as soon as we get like some sort of empathetic expression on robot face, it's over.

It's over.

Gonna be like, ah, it's so cute. It's gonna be so easy to make.

It cute too, if that's what you want or you want, like, a dominant. Like, clearly, this is what women want, is a dominator.

Yeah.

With strong hands.

Yeah.

And. And kind of dumb or not. I don't know that you can customize custom. It'd be interesting to do a survey. Like, customize it. Like, what. What would you want in a perfect robot? This is the problem I. I see with people, the way they talk about robots is they kind of want a servant. I think what people don't realize what they want in relationships. They want some. Like, there's. It has to be a push and pull. There. There has to be some resistance. Like, you. You really don't want a servant. Or even, like, the perfect manifestation of what. What you think you want. I think you want imperfections around that, like, some uncertainty. I don't know. I question how well we're able to perfectly put on paper what we really want.

Would you really turn down, like, a perfect woman, though? Like, assume, like, she walks into the room and it's just shockingly compatible and you, like, start dating her and there's just no hiccups. Like, you fight perfectly. Like, she really understands you. Like, would she be. Be like, this is too perfect. I'm upset because we're not having enough imperfection. Like, can you, like, actually imagine yourself going through that?

Yeah, I think so, because. So, because that's how you define perfect. Because perfect for me would be, like, easy and all that kind of stuff. Right. But then I would be like, this is too easy. If I. If I actually were to introspect, what is the perfect relationship, then, yes, maybe. Because I probably want some challenge. I probably want some chaos. Right. Like, you. Like, does anyone really fully want zero conflict ever? Like, completely perfect conflict? Like, it's the thing that pressing a button, like, do you really want in a relationship? Anything you want, you press a button, you get. I don't think people want that. You might think you want that.

Yeah, I guess it depends. Like, there's a kind of conflict that I think I would never want, which is something like antagonistic conflict. I wouldn't mind disagreement.

Right.

You know, but there's a level of fighting. I would be happy to have a relationship for the rest of my life that never has, like, a fight of a certain shittiness.

Yeah, but that's shittiness. But, like, resistance. Like, I don't know what the example is, because I mean, I partially agree with you, but I just. And I. Every time I would imagine, like, perfect, flawless nothing, no conflict. You imagine somebody that doesn't have, like, a complexity of personality. Right. Like, I feel like it's not even. It's conflict that's laden in misunderstood basic misunderstanding between human beings, like misinterpretation, different perspectives that clash, different worldviews, different ideas, all that kind of stuff. That conflict.

Yeah, that sounds good.

Yeah.

I like having somebody be like, I don't think that's right, because I have this other view. That's cool.

And also, like, the threat of leaving, right?

Oh, yeah.

Like, that's a kind of conflict.

Yeah, that's true. Like, you have to be good enough for the other person or maybe you'll lose them.

Yeah. And maybe a little jealousy. Like, they're good at that, but not too much. But, like, if I. If you design all that in, then.

I don't know, it sounds romantic.

Sounds romantic. Okay. All right. I. I do want to really quickly ask you about this, about the. The rationalist community, because I've gotten to know a few of them a few times. You tweeted a guideline to rationalist discourse. Basics of rationalist discourse from less Wrong. What are these folks? What's the rationalist culture? What's the rationalist discourse?

Yeah, I love the rationalists because they're interested in how do you have conversations more effectively if you're trying to figure out what's actually true? Which sounds kind of obvious, but in practice it's not usually. I remember when I first started having debating conversations, I was very antagonistic, like, oh, I'm a feminist or not a feminist. And then the rationalists were generally like, actually, we don't know what we mean by the term feminism. How do you feel about that? It was very kind and compassionate. Even if somebody says something that sounds insane, you're like, okay, well, we're going to respect your reasoning. And even if we disagree, let's actually figure out why you think the way that you think. And they're also really smart. Write a whole bunch of great stuff about how to think more clearly and with less bias.

Yeah, I wonder what those conversations, because I've never really talked to those folks. So this guideline particularly, I think, has it refers to, like, shorthand characteristics of rationalist discourse, including expect good discourse to require energy, don't say straightforwardly false things, Track for yourself and distinguish for others your inferences from your observations. Estimate for yourself and make clear for others your rough level of confidence in your Assertions. Make your claims clear, explicit, and falsifiable or explicit. Explicitly acknowledge that you aren't doing so or can't, and so on and so forth. So don't jump to conclusions. Don't weaponize equivocation. Don't abuse categories. Don't engage. It's very aggressive guidelines. Don't engage. I do what I want. I'll let my emotions guide me. God damn it.

They're pro that as long as you're explicit about it.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So you can be like a crazy asshole. As long as you're explicit.

You can be like, epistemic status crazy asshole.

Yeah. Here to destroy the quality of the conversation.

I think it's like the common misconception about rationalists is that they're kind of like Spock, like, we suppress emotion, we're thinking logically. Hurt eater. But I found this to be really not the case. I remember there's a less strong thread where I was really emotional and I commented. And at just the beginning, I was just warning, I'm just very emotional. And then I just vented my emotions. And people responded really well to that. They're like, cool. You're just genuinely truthfully expressing your state. This is actual information about the world that is important to hear. And it's just. They're very interested in having things framed correctly. Like, you shouldn't be claiming that your emotions are necessarily a true version of the world. And so as long as you're just clear about what the frame it is, you're fine.

How do you feel about this conversation? What could we have done better?

I like the conversation. I was a little worried coming in. I was like, what if he'll only ask a couple questions and then we don't know what to talk about? Yeah, but it's been quite a long time.

And I covered. There's so many things I didn't cover.

I like the. You have like a. Like, I'm not used to talking to somebody who feels like some of the core way that they approach the world is so different than mine. Like, usually the differences that arrive, like, higher up the tree, but, like, there's something about, like, your root system that I think is very different from mine. But also the way that you engage with others is still flexible. Like, usually when I encounter somebody with such a different root system, there's like. It's like more aggressive or something.

Yeah.

But there's something about the way that you're structured that feels very gentle.

All right, well, I'm really happy we talked. Something tells me. We'll probably talk a bunch more times. I think you're a fascinating human being. I think I'm a huge fan of your work. Maybe one more question. What's the meaning of life?

To want things, to search, to be in.

Well, I think your curiosity is like somehow getting to that.

Yeah. To want things, it's like curiosity, like you don't know. I want to know the answer. To like be in the state of.

Yearning, of wanting of you.

Yeah. That's the point.

If you could do that if you lived a million years, just keep yearning always. That's the thing I'm probably afraid of. If I lived a million years. It's not the torture. It's like the yearning will fade.

They probably yearn to die.

Then I just sitting there wanting death intensely.

That's kind of romantic. A little bit. That has like a bit of that spark.

And constantly being denied. Wow. So most of your existence on Earth would be spent deeply intimate with death, just thinking about death path. I think we're already doing that. But if like hiding that from ourselves a little bit anyway, wanting. Well, this is an amazing conversation. I think you're an amazing researcher and human being.

You're a great interviewer. I can see why you do this a lot.

I appreciate it. This was really fun. Ella, thank you so much for talking with me today.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ayla to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give you some practical results, but that's not why we do it. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.