Aella: Sex Work, OnlyFans, Porn, Escorting, Dating, and Human Sexuality | Lex Fridman Podcast #358
it was really shocking 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 I'm 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 lose the top not safe for post on Reddit I'm like well 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 knowinglust.com she's also a sex worker including only fans 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 uh 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 Matt 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 Center Light Pop and everybody goes 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 too yes in conversations in general or just this one I think conversations in general like is anybody that got a 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 counter example immediately yeah you're uncomfortable with generalizations of that kind like always is always a really bold for a tears 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 his 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 kind of 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 you can it can go wrong not like all of them but I was like what if I say something really dumb or like you ask me a question and I answer it in a way that makes me sound like a lot less capable than I am I'm like really afraid of being perceived as stupid or something I was also thinking about this on the way over like I'm kind of risk-averse in some ways like I don't driving fat like driving fast in cars because I was driving very carefully here because the roads are bad yeah and then I think I'm very like pro-risk in other ways like being really exposed to like a wide variety of people who might hate you and I think like 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 it's pretty bad yeah I think I think the worst embarrassment is if I put something out there that I failed to like be properly skeptical of in myself and then people are like oh we just 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 good scientists yeah definitely well you're like methodology yes and funny enough you get attacked on that methodology even though you know I've I'm a fan of psychology of like the academic psychology and it's 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 the proclamations about results is especially with 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 of 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 peop 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 um 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 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 are don't really understand and to be fair like I I have a lot to learn I'm still like I'm self-teaching I'm like learning through people learning as I go I'm definitely not super knowledgeable about this stuff um but a lot of what those people are doing in science is not that hard um and a lot of people like don't try to learn it because it seems so like elevated and this is one thing that really bothers me I think like everybody can do science like if you just have this aspect of curiosity and like you just really want to figure something out you can go and start you know asking people questions doing surveys like writing down the answers and the you go learn how to look at that data in a way that gives you more information about the world like it's very simple and straightforward if you just approach it humbly and earnestly and you're like please let's look let's figure this out together but people like are think self-crippled in this because uh they view this as like relegated to the domain of the experts and you know 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 we might contribute to the controversy not exclusively probably I don't know you're just not limited by like part of your curiosity is asking questions that seem common sense like what is 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 a 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 supercharged super because everybody has a really strong opinion like whether or not you know pornography is damaging to society or like how sex corresponds to gender or like what kind of sexuality is acceptable like do can you have sexual preferences that in them in themselves are immoral uh 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 a I think I guess I want to say not rigorous I think it's very difficult to be rigorous about sex like and I I would consider uh sexual urges to be kind of elusive to introspection in a way that's a little bit disproportionate to a lot of other things like you could like you know introspect about you know how I want other people to like me and um how 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 like 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 like a like a concrete coherent causative way that events happen or there's that sexual fetishes happen um this is just like one example of like why I think it's really hard to be rigorous with introspection because we can't avoid you just want to tend towards making like coherent narratives which I think is not always the correct way to explain it the narratives that are connected to Childhood and soil and so on yeah they origin is yeah you've uh 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 so let's both agree to not have a normal conversation I guess assuming you're not on drugs now or if you are Duke you don't have to talk I feel like a very small amount of fun a bit okay which is a nootropic I don't know if that counts instead of drug well I guess I'm on caffeine yeah so we're both drugged up good enough to have a normal conversation uh we don't have to what is normal anyway uh what do you think is the primary driver of human civilization is it the desire for sex love power or immortality like avoiding uh 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 it's a poor option this is reality not everything it Maps perfectly into 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 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 understanding 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 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 you 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 after to me everything is fun but I feel like yeah I mean I'm with David Foster Wallace the key to life is uh to make sure that everything is unborrowable or to be unborrowable or ever nothing is boring everything is fun every like everything I'll 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 it was really fun to me to know that now I was there but I felt like really 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 is like knowing that I'm capable of that it it like from uh 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 you know where they remove the ups and downs of life um partially through drugs but over over sexualization all that kind of stuff and I feel like you need that Contra you need the ups and downs of life uh the dark you know you need the dark to have happiness 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 in like that's why I talk about love a lot I I think I think love is a better word than fun because fun is like light-hearted love is more intense like I love that class and the water that's in it because it's freaking awesome like somebody made that glass right like they and like not have many mistakes and like there's a and the way Ben's light in interesting ways and the way water Blends light in interesting ways like I can see part of your R into that water that's freaking amazing everything is amazing I'm with the Lego movie anyway um if 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 narrowed 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 neobiology perspective or reverse engineer if they're building AI systems that focus on these kinds of Dynamics exploring the gang theoretic aspects of it uh exploring the sort of cognitive modeling aspects of it which one would get me to a deeper understanding of The Human Condition that's the question sex okay Nietzsche is the will to power uh Freud and and the bunch is all about sex and then um death uh live just uh live Burley brilliant previous guest on this podcast she just released a video where on her bedside was the book denial of death uh by owners Becker which of course you would have on her bedside but that the his whole work is that everything is motivated by our trying to escape the 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 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 like one of the defining things that Define civilization then we should expect to see like massive differences between people who believe we're going to die in people who don't good I love it you think of like a like a scientifically here but uh and they have actually answers like there's a whole Terror management Theory where they do type write psychology type papers and they do actual experiments I can mention how their methodology is interesting um they Prime with the discussion of death like they take one certain set of people and have a conversation with them another set of people they mentioned death to them before the conversation and see how that affects their uh the nature of the conversation it's really interesting because death fundamentally Alters the nature of the conversation just even priming to come like reminding you that you're going to die briefly changes changes a lot of things these kinds of priming papers usually not replicated I just have like 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 one I just did a primary experiment on my own and found it didn't have any effect but again can't you just give me okay Carol a statement summarizing an entire scientific discipline of Terror management Theory I don't know uh I think people should like I haven't rigorously looked at how good of it psychologically I think okay it is interesting philosophically the way Freud talked about the the subconscious mind philosophically it's an interesting discussion then you have to get rigorous with it for sure um 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 feel your days with like capitalism has a whole it's a whole religion of itself like the rat race for getting more and more material possessions and so on and couldn't you argue in the opposite direction like let's say assume that we're Christians here and we're like oh the atheists you know everybody has Terror of hell and the atheists invent this mythology where you know actually evolution is true in order to escape their Terror of hell so it 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 claims that in early early early childhood development that's when the terror is real and then we come aggressively construct systems around it of social interaction to to um to support to sort of construct illusions at the top of it I'm doing a half-assed description of this philosophy but there is like it isn't 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 you're 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 and you you kind of learn about those flaws and you get better and better asking the right questions and so on but that's not that's indirect access to the human mind but do you think like Poetic narratives are I'm not like saying poetic narratives are bad like I think it's like a cool way of like handling Concepts but I'm not sure that they are more rigorous no no no okay no but like 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 like I don't think morality makes any sense but it's really useful shorthand to use when handling Concepts and a lot of the time right like ethics and morality you could construct studies that ask different questions like uh you know just having worked with the autonomous vehicles a lot the uh 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 or whatever like they construct these arguments of like if you could steer a train if you could steer an autonomous car which do you choose yeah I don't know I don't know if it's possible with some of those to construct like sometimes the fuzzy area there's some topics that are fuzzing 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 like departed your footages come from like you can develop a narrative where it's like you know I think like this kind of thing is you know you're surrounded by feet when you're a child this causes foot fetishes um and this is like kind of a cool narrative uh 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 like I'm very Pro meaning making like when you're talking about everything is uh fun because you know the contrast or whatever I've very much just ascribed to that I really enjoy that that philosophy I also find everything to be very delightful uh but and this isn't like a question of truth right we're not like where is the true Delight that we're objectively measuring I guess there's a frame a poetic frame that you're using to like sort of change the way the light hits the world around you and that's super useful because it like makes you happier or something yeah but also gets to the truth or something yeah I guess what is the truth um yet another question what is truth you've uh actually to jump back you don't you believe that Free Will is an illusion um so uh why does it feel like I'm free to make any decision I want well it's a cool illusion I think it's probably like where a sense of identity oh like 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 listen illusion I also mean there's something like the selfish 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 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 you know I did a bunch of like way too much LSD for a while and at that point very no no ego and now I'm like very ego 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 could you solve my problems yes all of them I've did thorough research okay um what is consciousness then I actually wrote that as a question what is consciousness to remind myself so like uh how's that tie in together with Free Will and identity and all of that it doesn't mean what his Consciousness is like one of the biggest questions ever I think I I do think that people often get confused when talking about Consciousness because I think people are referring to two separate Concepts and often like combining them into one thing like we asked the question you know is AI going to be conscious um I think this is kind of the wrong question like uh like like 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 do 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 yeah uh and so like there's one kind of Consciousness which is I am directly observing my experience and that you cannot replicate it like there I cannot observe two experiences uh it is necessarily singular and it is necessarily certain like you can make all the arguments you want like I'm still directly observing it's not a thing that's subject to reason whereas are other things conscious this is something that's replicable like you can apply it to multiple people um it's something that's not certain uh like almost definitionally not certain like we don't actually know if there is you know an internal experience so my argument is that like when people are talking about other things having experienced 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 this is like a subtle difference like when you're asking the quest is 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 people do that in a dream presumably like if you had a very good dream or a very good simulation yeah but we could then have somebody in a simulation or a dream where they go through and they fully understand you know they do all the tests and the tests come back exactly they'd expect them to uh but from the outside we're like well this is misleading they're not actually conscious like your dream characters aren't conscious right probably I don't know are you asking are you telling I'm like appealing to an intuition but it sounds like you're driving towards a narrative I don't you you did a poll about men and women and Dreams yeah those are 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 it's like I did a survey maybe you know that I said I don't know everything you do know yes I'm sorry so as you clearly know I'll try not to talk down to this conversation because I don't know and I not only know everything I know how your future looks like really and every how everything ends yeah so you could probably win all the prediction markets on my life yeah cool so well we should also mention that you have like prediction markets uh you have like votes that you what 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 Fighters radio on there is that it goes against the terms no I think inside attorney 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 you could make the fake account or I could be lying right yeah and then dump the stuff you know I try 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 I accidentally posted a photo of a poll without thinking sabotage I yeah I accidentally yeah the fact that my own Market that doesn't that's like the reverse of Insider training yeah uh what were we talking about oh the women and the men and the difference the vivid dreams and the markets I forget what the market oh because I can I can perfectly predict your future yeah then it's not fun I like the road mass of unpredictability and so I I like to even though I know everything I like to forget everything yeah very very Buddhist of you yeah the river no no man in the river once whatever the footsteps however that's one of my uh favorite questions is like if you could press a button and then have all of your wants fulfilled anything that you want so it's like such a rapid degree that you don't really experience the one like as the wander Rises it then is like completed immediately so that you are completely without want like would you would you press that button 100 not yeah I didn't think you would no no you know because immediately everything stops being fine the first it's only fun the first time but if you want it to be fun but like what will 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 then 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 I love you everybody and then you're like oh life is meaningless like why does like you you go I feel like you get uh 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 of 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 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 yeah but without like I feel like the idea of God wants to like gonna keep things like functioning properly but then you would probably if you wanted to keep them functioning properly yeah 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 to match it oh interesting now I think I would actually I take it back I think I would regret the first time I hurt somebody see in my visualization was like a video game where everybody's like NPC really dumb no I think the first time I I witnessed paying 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 gonna be probably really upset with the hovering right and so I'm gonna 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 uh 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 makes everything more beautiful was that cool I could do like a normal manual thing uh but also it makes you like appreciate your car appreciate Transportation appreciate the convenience the transportation all of it I I know some people who would like call this a bunch of copium like you're just sort of making do with what you have like we wouldn't go back to Amish times or like pre-technology because to like in order to make ourselves appreciate things more and so it seems like a hindsight reasoning uh which like I can appreciate that argument but I don't know I'm like anyone who uses sorry to interrupt the word copium in their um in their argumentation um uh I think it's sauce yeah it's that's my entire argument is now no I'm just kidding I'm sorry go ahead sorry I interrupted rudely the flow of thought uh but you you so you don't think so in part you disagree with that kind of argument um yeah because I I think people have this idea that if you uh like come to accept or like Find meaning in what you have now this is sort of at odds with trying to improve it and all right I don't find this to be the case I find like the attempt to improve it to also be part of it like I enjoy the fact that there's something like problematic going on because now I get the experience of like striving to make it go away and like that in itself is where the meaning lies it's not just that things are bad it's that there's things are bad and we're trying to stop it and also exactly there's 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 let's get like a scoreboard at the end the amount of questions the answer successfully versus not like polls yeah can we talk about some practical things sure uh so one of the many amazing things I think of you as a researcher but you've also been uh doing research in the field yeah field work good field work the Jane Goodall love yeah uh how did you get uh 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 uh do you want to actually talk about your childhood I think it's interesting because you also worked at a factory it's like your childhood is really fascinating uh and difficult uh traumatic so um 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 um 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 is 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 like baby crying was viewed as like uh you're just teaching them from an early age that they're allowed to make the parents do what the kids want yeah and they're very against this philosophy so you know that combined with a narcissistic personality disorder dad was pretty rough uh it's a 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 but I was never going to accomplish anything in life it's gonna move out of the house and realize how good I had it at home you know the classic stuff uh he was very like logical and smart though and so he'd also like teach us logic stuff I remember some of my earliest memories or him like giving me basic logic puzzles like the dog has three legs you know how many dogs the four legs and I I would mess up and uh but he was he was a evangelist basically a Christian evangelist so we like Bible study five nights a week I memorized I think 800 verses of the Bible by the time before I became an adult um yeah and it was very patriarchal also 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 like we were explicitly told that women were subordinate to men um 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 that we live so there's a hierarchy and uh the gender aspect to the hierarchy is men at the top of that hierarchy men at the top okay but you're on psychology your own mind um 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 uh but I I I'm not smart enough right or like smart but not smart enough smart but like not virtuous or something okay so okay right there's always a flaw yeah there's always a flaw I think a lot of it was a lot of the the fucked upness of my brain came from feeling like I didn't have the authority to think because it was so like carefully like suppressed like the my ability to like Express or have any sort of power was just absolutely annihilated like systemically like psychologically they would do like psychological torture mechanisms to make sure that like I wasn't actually thinking on my own or like being able to deviate from anything anybody ever told me to the degree that it's still ingrained in me like I once was a friend we were traveling and he wanted me to hop a turnstile it was like very late at night the train was here and I could not physically force myself to do it like he was like yelling me like come on do it like like no but I was trying so hard to make my body across the line and it was just it's like embedded in my physical being to like be unable to do stuff like that which is really annoying that you're not free to take action in this world yeah some so it's that that was I think the most annoying part of the my upbringing would you classify it as like suffering at the time yeah definitely well it's confusing because like when when I was a child it was it was just painful in the sense that like things suck but it was placed in a meaning framework right like 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 ever talk to them again you go do that without complaining and so like I would go do something like that and I would like it would suck it really was like concretely painful but it was also placed in this narrative where I was like fulfilling some sort of Greater purpose sure uh and so 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 like I think I would agree with like I go get a medical procedure done that sucks but I'm like ah this is helping me in the long run but like say if I got abducted to an alien planet and they're like by the way all of those medical procedures you got done like 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 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's claimed that he had sex with aliens and I was like for not clicking on that because I was wondering because because that I would probably watch it for like 20 minutes and then I should be doing work oh I see so like I and I I and I'm actually happy because I get to imagine what it all the different possibilities that could have been for that man who was like a really high like resting happiness State yes yeah it's probably like a mushroom State yeah wow do you do mushrooms I've done mushrooms before it was very awesome but 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 um people say that I I should it's very nice yeah yeah anyway um but I'm already yeah what did you call it resting happiness day yeah harvesting happening happiness yeah that's a good that's a good way to describe it but it's not like some of it's 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 uh 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 uh 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 expire like force you to spiral down and so just avoid those triggers some people have that with diet with food and so on and so I just don't like whenever there's uh shitty things happening or Shady people unless I can help on this unless I can do somehow hope like why why focus on it yeah anyway uh back to you upbringing what uh what was the Journey of escaping that um I well I left home like kind of early um because my my dad and I were not getting along by the time I was a teenager um but I still Christian for a while and I lost my faith after I think I moved it away and I started having friends that weren't religious or like weren't raised in the super conservative environment that I came from and I think uh I this was not conscious at the time this was my hindsight story but I believe that like being exposed to a culture in which I had the capacity to believe like allowed my brain to actually seriously consider the thought that maybe all of this stuff was untrue that I'd been taught like six thousand year old Earth and evolution is a lie you know macro Evolution and all of this stuff uh because like when you're when you're in immersed in an environment like that I don't think you actually have a choice like your brain has to believe these things because this is a survival thing like if you believe this you'll be com like if you believe the wrong thing you'll be totally cast out even if they're not gonna cast you out you're going to be cast out in like communion with others because we're always told that you can't like trust non-believers really they don't have a moral compass they're going to screw you over and so I'm like oh I can't beat that like everybody's gonna Outcast me internally yeah so anyway I wasn't 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 going to have some sort of community um and then at that time I went through some questioning and then I lost my faith and so in that given your friends giving you a situation you have you 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 but I mean you rip it within certain boundaries like there's certain basic assumptions and as long as you're following those basic assumptions which is to be fair it's like kind of what we're doing now like we have I 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 uh 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 I'm 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 I 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 thanks 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 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 like 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 like if you separate the space of ideas versus some kind of like deeper sense of what this person is like that that this they're an interesting and trustworthy and good human being well like do somebody that you respect to you because they're significantly smarter than you and can you imagine believing an idea that you've heard them talk really disdainfully about like how would you feel coming to me like I believe this thing that you find to be yeah I do all the time oh yeah yeah you may be braver than me and Jamaica I support doing this like I try to do this but I think like like subconsciously I noticed that I'm I don't do it as much and so I'm suspicious of myself I'm like oh I wonder if I'm hiding to myself like actual curiosity about things that might deviate from my peer group because I noticed that I'm not actually deviating with them as much as I do with the outside world yeah it's a Jimmy like because I do see most people I interact with are smarter than me but I also have this intuitive feeling that uh 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 this agreement so I think I even just disagreeing from a place from a good place from 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 uh is smarter maybe that's maybe that's how I justify 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 um 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 uh like wrestling or combat like usually when there's attention you have to understand the mechanics of how two bodies move when they're in conflict and dancing is it's 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 like you have to constantly be like figuring out like it's a rapid puzzle and that's so beautiful what's Fusion dancing that's the video that's the effusion dancing is like if you have any sort of dance background you can come and you just kind of mix those together speaking about people like 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 uh that's very meta there's usually a lead in the 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 yes so I like both that there is that definitive role but also like it's not somehow that one is better than the other there's an interesting tension between the two yeah yeah it's cool because it's like a basic rule set that allows for a ton of expression I've recently started to experience experiment with like reverse leading it's not like back leading it's like I don't know like sometimes I was like what I'm typically following I'll like occasionally throw in a little lead here and there but don't but don't you kind of always oh I see but don't you hit hint at a lead when you're following I can't don't you just by the the Dynamics of your movement you're not perfectly following I mean because there 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 follower you do a move it's like a oh interesting I'm not good at Tech I didn't know those existed like a perfect father I really I do I'm 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 yeah yeah it's really nice if it's again like it's a very fast physical puzzle you have to solve it's like typing I really like typing so I was inquiring about your keyboard earlier why are you like typing because it's like the very fast like the really rapid response what's the reaction time I like things that like 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 cause 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 maybe a 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 like 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 to generate the words yeah making your body do what your brain wants it to do but like fast and precisely well then you might not like this Kinesis keyboard because it makes the it makes it easier to do that you probably like the struggle right no you well I mean that it looks hard because you have it looks like it's high depression on the keys no it's well oh I see yes more than more than like a laptop keyboard but like that you don't have to one of the the main things is you don't have to move your fingers at all So like um so like for example a lot of people that 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 if you have to like stretch for the backspace this is like a lot of your perspectives yeah no uh yeah I don't and I see it as as a good thing it's a good like a a romantic element permeates my interpretation of the world yes but you uh 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 they 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 to mom's group and it was like a homeschooling groups there were 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're good at and they should 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 was just did like 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 so even in that constrained environment like I wrote I read fantasy books and I wrote so much and now I'm now I'm writing a lot on my blog so what kind of fantasy books like sci-fi type stuff um like classic like I read um like Mercedes Lackey and uh the ee Knight and um arsell the Gwen and I don't know any of this what is this what is it is like a romantic thing is it like is it romance it's all the fantasy books like dragons oh dragons you didn't mention Tolkien for the fantasy I read I read Tolkien okay yeah all right well it's beautiful so you you uh throw all the dragons uh how did you end up in a factory you tried school yeah yeah try school had to drop off a couple months and then I was like well I'm poor and uh I was I was trying to take any job I was like applying for sewer jobs and then I got a factory I'm like because my parents know 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 sucks ass do not recommend we had to work up wake up like 4 a.m 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 grip 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 don't have to be on your feet all the time that's that you're living a good life but 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 I was just too young the end 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 submissions stuff beaten into me like literally beaten into me it was very difficult for me to interact with other people who were like older than me or had any sort of confidence at all so they hired me to do like 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 tried 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 no it's Idaho you know nothing and if you're like a 19 year old no experience in the outside world at all it was really difficult and so I had a friend recommend that I try being humming a cam girl so that's how it started what's what what is uh what is Cami what is being a cam girl Kimmy is like you talk to the camera live on the computer like you live streams kind of like twitch and then people are typing in the chat like huh do this stuff and then the people can tip you money and then you can do things in response like oh if you took me 100 tokens you know I'll take my shirt off or something like that and like what's the what site were you using at that time my free camps my free cams is that a popular site that's pretty popular okay and how did um 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 non-stop I was streaming all the time I was like coming with like new creative things and the thing is like I don't know I there's something about public school that I I ended up living in a house with Cam Girls full of other girls who'd gone to public school and I don't know if how much of his genetic or like 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 like public school I got the impression based on them talking about it that sort of like beats out any sort of deviance from you like it more so than your because I I got the oh we had moral deviants was beaten out but like you could do whatever creative deviants crazy this 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 a teenager once so your father was basically saying you're not good enough was intellectual oh no that was like a moral failure moral failure yeah like I was not virtuous wow like in various ways like you know like you're lazy and mostly the lazy part because I have like I have like ADHD or something uh 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 uh you know how they say that there's um it'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 rediscoving yourself or discovering a Freedom by doing just uh 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 yeah 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 uh I just like walked around in it and like I can do this yeah and so like this was most of that emotional processing for me um and I took me a couple years from leaving home and all of that conservative culture into doing sex work in in the meantime I was 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 I'm like okay if the whole previous set about like 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 this part are you independently just thinking like for from first principles I think I mean like I'm not saying it was a totally a 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 we are 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 uh filtered wait did they yeah they went and you know he painted her naked and yeah yeah there's a scene in a car cars and storage and these there's a hand I watched it again later and I was like I don't know what the sex scene well maybe were you also put through uh 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 and 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 you have your own effects filter on your brain and once you realize that there are some uh like the foundation of your beliefs were wrong then everything might be wrong and you're kind of just doing yeah 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 the you're at the chemistry you have with someone better then 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 quarters 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 anyway I'm saying that like I had a lot of rebellion out of my system by the time I started sex work yeah um so like for me like 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 uh do not recommend figuring out you have another orifice in your body um 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 your 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 it was like nine or ten 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 gonna bleed out of it for a while and I was like what the fuck mom I didn't know the word fuck was but I would have said that if I had known when did you first learn the word fuck 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 a kid next to me started giggling uh-huh did you ever did you say Fuck again for a while no I think the next episode I I swore the first time I was 18. like intentionally said a swear word when I was 18. did you feel good I was like really nervous I was like nervous I mean fuck's pretty good yeah it fucks pretty good yeah okay so uh so that's caming I mean what are the the pros and cons of camping and how does only fans map into this did you switch to only fans at some point I did yeah that came for like five or six years and I burned out eventually what are the good aspects what are the bad aspects of Cami 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 um I had elaborate routines I was a mime I would do like dress up as a lime and then dress up a chair and I would seduce the chair oh cool yeah or like it was almost it was was there an artistic element to it almost yeah very much no I was a mime you know oh sorry uh 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 in a very intelligent way so I appreciate that all right did you ask the chair questions I wasn't mine you fucking idiot okay I'm sorry but there's gnomes on the like big nose or small gnomes like lawn gnomes one gnomes and you seduced the lawn gnome on the chair the no missing and there were some yeah gnomes in the chair I I did a photo set which I submitted to Reddit where I got abducted I was like stripping uh 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 essentially uh I mean I mean I didn't feel consensual in the photos but okay but it was the I'm not gonna stop us the it was very successful in Reddit basically is a top person Gone Wild in 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 IG it's funny it's also really really well done but it was really shocking to be 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 I'm 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 lose the top not safe for post on Reddit I'm like well I didn't even try that it and so it's really shocking to me that other women who are doing this sort of thing is that uh still a little bit of the case that there's not as much like because I for my sort of outside of 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 is 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 is completely groundbreaking like nobody's ever like you always make everything so poetic and romantic is disgusting now uh 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 uh 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 this is very it's a 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 it all 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 like a question phrasing because I've I've I have treated so many thousands of polls and every single one I get people telling me like the way that they misinterpreted the poll so it's like it's like you've become gone through fire and then again I I'm testing the phrasings all the time like 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 the framing affects the results so the good and the bad of the caming she said good the what was it I forgot you mean the freedom the freedom to be also be to be creative yeah and that is just it was exhausting the the site that I was on the way that it structured is that you're ranking on the site and thus the amount of people that see you and that's the amount of money you are on 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 in that site yeah so it's very high pressure like 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 like on as hard as you can and this is why I have a little PTSD streaming like I've considered Twitch streaming I try a little bit and and I'm I'm like I haven't fully integrated the fact that you don't have to be like 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 foreign did you feel lonely doing it I mean even just streamers feel lonely I moved into a house with cam girls does that make it better or worse is it better 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 working together and you know stream together and swap our clothes and stuff it was great I swap ideas too swap ideas yeah and uh actually on a small tangent maybe a big tangent what do you think because it's a recent controversy of Andrew Tate and that he I think in the past ran a camping 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 I just haven't bothered to go into it it is well known that like when I was doing it back in the day that Eastern European models had something different going on though it was like a Trope about you know there's the Eastern European battles and then there's everybody else they're there what it's like darker or something like they do Studios and they're lower quality which means what the studios are you go into like a warehouse and then they have set up a little like things that replicate bedrooms yeah but they're just like stalls and then you give you rent out or you pay the studio percentage of your income and you can tell when something looks like a studio it's like a type of background yeah that if you're like watching enough it kind of starts to you notice the patterns so like the standards are lower there in the ethical boundaries are a little looser yeah I thought people are treated it's Uncle we didn't I never heard anything about the ethical site I just knew that it was like lower quality like the girls seemed like they were less into it and like Carriage less how does this all interplay with like sex trafficking so consensual versus non-consensual I would be strong ER never any non-consensual camming um I mean I guess it's like if it were going to happen to that point be surprised if it were in fact Eastern European models based on this is outdated this is I'm just thinking of my stereotypes back what I cammed a lot sure so some of that is stereotyped versus like collecting good data right yeah I haven't done data on cam girl it's hard I mean it's hard it's even hard to get that data right um yeah and 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 I mean yeah personally just do you know anybody yeah um and then if you ask about a whole bunch of things you can calibrate the responses so like that's really interesting if you're 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 traffic 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 uh 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 for things you can infer things about that graph but let's say 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 and 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 it's like there's just like vague estimations made from one guy in a basement in the 80s that's like the basis for like one big study that like a lot of people report on it was and so I'm like okay so the the method I'm proposing obviously is not perfect but like the bar is so low at this point well I wonder also if there's a ways to design a survey that gets at the um at the 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 if the toxic relationship is truly toxic sometimes your 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 actively sex drive 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 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 survey where 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 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 I think that 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 there there are people in the relationships then yeah you I 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 not comparing yourself to this to the average is good to know to know no your options are at least understand it because you know being normal is not always like this conversation is not always great um meaning this this conversation is anything but normal okay and uh 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 uh survey design uh but back to camming so um what were the cons what were the negatives of Cami oh like the exhaustion of just like live like the high pressure yeah 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 a 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 laughing on you and there's 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 uh hostile towards men and my guess is that there's some sort of like very subtle signaling that we're accidentally doing be like no fault of our own I'm not saying this is a virtue I'm saying like maybe it's just genetic or the fact that women are doing yeah that the women are doing yeah like that and it might be just something I'm completely accidentally through no intention like happening to Signal the thing that is causing men to not view me as like a desirable Target or like a Target at all what about the flip side maybe you're not sensitive to the the the creepy stare yeah that also might be true the dude who's like God like is undressing you with his eyes that like in in a creepy way that you're just not you don't like worry about it you're or you're not touch like that the fear of that the anxiety of that the the 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 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 I don't have any negative response whatsoever that's call back to the tire it's a thing this is nice that happened it was good to know that like I once had like a homeless guy like asked 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 minute they're like well uh 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 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 the homeless guy no no I've never had that happen though but I think there's something I think I'm doing something like again this is kind of accidental like I'm 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 like really nice while explicitly asking them what their intentions are like directly putting my finger on the thing that like oh you're trying to have sex with me and then also not judging them for it yeah um I think this like 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 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 skimming I generally really liked people are really nice to me had a great time made friends so you also did only fans as you mentioned and I read on a website so this is very investigative reporting that uh on some months you've made uh over a hundred thousand dollars on only fans how did that feel great really great I mean like uh well actually because so much you're upbringing you didn't have money it's a struggle with the factory job and so on um maybe a good person to ask can uh money by happiness uh 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 um 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 wasn't 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 uh has to face that happiness I think 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 I mean 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 like if I actually were to integrate so to have an integral under the area under the onto the Curve 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 really happy kid yeah even in uh in the harsh conditions 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 uh 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's a lot more to it than that but yeah what was it what's what's the difference marketing like so with with only with my free cams I was unusual and 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 only fans are structured such that uh they have almost no internal Discovery whatsoever so if you want people to come to your page you have to go out on the external websites and advertise for yourself directly very different model and so this is something that I had already been doing and already had practicing and so I think I was like already quite Advanced like I already had an account on Reddit that was like seven years old at the time tons of like Karma that means I could post in subreddits I already been on Twitter for years you know like posting actively so I I already had like presences on all these other platforms that really helped with the conversion Reddit and Twitter Reddit Twitter FetLife Instagram Tick Tock and you are still advertising creatively so like there's like sexuality but there's also like creative sexuality yeah and ideas too yeah like one of the really popular ones was I like molested myself as a as a mime using a uh a one arm through a jacket and so the jacket looked like it was uh the jacket looked 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 Beason I said uh uh 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 thing I don't know it's too too edgy I wish I think the tea would were fun but no it's just me like I had an apartment that looked like kind of like this you know you just sit alone you're like well that would be a good idea and I'd seen you should collect ideas over time right like um 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 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 um is there stuff like you mentioned to edgy like Mr Beast tries to keep it PG yeah 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 family friendly it is X like even though the one that I'm describing to you at some point like you can see my boob so there's a boom is is ex my boob is I guess it's not hard I think you can show a boom in bg30 yeah maybe X is like if you got some sort of rhythmic motion going on maybe that sound but the rhythmic was actually not you could have one or the other but you can't have both they have both that's when we hit the X so definitely not family 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 how talk about fetish fetishes I think my uh 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 miss taboo by the way I don't like I don't appreciate the beauty of vanilla ice 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 now they already made it more interesting um 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 yeah sex the thing that I found was most successful were frames where the man was framed as passive and the woman is active or like for example uh like oh you know we got assigned to the same bunk uh at the breeding school or something or like oh we're the last people on earth right or like oh no uh you know I like I desperately need somebody to like cure me with this disease and I need semen so it's like in any scenario where the guys just like finds himself such that the woman like desperately needs him for some reason and he doesn't have to do much that is like typically one of the much more successful things like guys like women falling into their lap what about the power Dynamic um so guys are less into power dynamics than women are and you can do power dynamics as long as it's like handed to them some guys obviously some guys are like very dominant like prefer like having to work but this is the minority like if you're trying to do make 100K in a month and you're trying to appeal the whitest group of people the most effective advertising you're not gonna be making the most money by being like particularly submissive so on the camping side that's your uh unlike a like uh 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 camera yeah it's like a live theater is that freak you out there's just a bunch of people watching I mean 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 live so like it might as well be like they could be watching I feel like there's just the two of us I don't know and there's like I feel sometimes I imagine there's a third person like God usually no no not not God just I usually imagine um 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 about mushrooms just like listening passively just kind of looking at the sunset that's what I imagine well that's really good yeah I think it's useful like 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 see it seems like you're going through the same kind of thought process yeah yeah that's a really beautiful way to put it so it's like you're melding your thinking is following the same life some of my 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 um like a Dan Carlin podcast about history that you're like on a journey together ah is there's an intimacy to that anyway um but I I've learned that those couples do that you know hashtag relationship goals 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 um 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 relationship I'd love to so what is in that application because like you know um I'm sure there's a 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 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 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 very unpopulation of hot women but all of them definitely are monogamous and are looking for a long-term 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 this this is 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 but I feel like 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're like you don't know like it's a good like initial 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 uh that you're very proud I feel like how did you two meet well she passed the three filters I set up and uh I mean but that's also but also can you put into a survey the things that you're interested in yeah I mean I definitely think about this a lot with hiring like like the 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 his chemistry so much of it it's like the magic you know the thing is you're missing it anyway like yeah you're missing it oh you can just run it and then in addition try some of those people and then go on the dates that you're 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 the questions yeah I went on 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 a per I try to ask questions that would do the most effective filtering so like what are ways that like I can't give give people what they need that like maybe they really want like I don't really I'm not very outdoorsy and it's just very common a lot of people like being outdoorsy so I asked the question like how much do you value someone else that you're dating being outdoorsy have they marked yes I was like okay we probably I should probably download 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 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 okay like like dominant submissive yeah Power Dynamic stuff hard to announce that okay in the not just sexual blend relationship too like that was that in a survey I don't like paradigms in relationships I'm not 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 and there's a lot of things that are kind of like most people don't you're putting together a survey a systematic server to understand compatibility wouldn't power dynamics inside of relationships that naturally emerge often be part of the question or or is that is that hard to question because it naturally emerges 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's 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 surveys better than one thousand medications 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 yeah right so it's like you're just like a billionaire is too busy just flipping through yeah and the guy that I did was that he took the survey he was waiting for the piece to come to come out of the oven and so it was important that it was short are literally pizza coming he's literally waiting for pizza and he saw the things like I guess I'll just fill up the survey really fast and it changed our lives so romantic I I it's for me this is my kind of Romance I'm really into it but but you could it could be efficient with surveys by like making sure your questions don't overlap so for example if somebody's very polyamorous they're very unlikely to be interested in like a traditional like man works and like and out and the job in the woman stays home and raises the kids kind of relationship because probably people just generally don't do that and so if I'm asking about polyamory it's sort of kind of already covers the thing and so if I have a whole bunch of questions like I can kind of like triangulate a bunch of implicit kinds of questions that I haven't directly asked about so this is why I didn't ask directly about power dynamics because like from the rest of the questions that are in my survey like I can pretty accurately predict whether or not you're going to be interested in power dynamics but I'm afraid yeah like I'm trying to think as you're talking I get it it's that's really interesting that you did that also maybe not for the effectiveness of finding a partner but for just exploring the actual the process of 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 uh this um not even a differentiable function it's it's a giant non-linear 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 um I'll probably prefer women that have read Dostoevsky or something like that like there'll 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 shit about reading or they don't give a shit about reading Russian literature or they don't give a shit 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 statistically is just going to be an issue yeah I mean you wait 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 virtue is another woman who's also identical but like she hasn't read the thing that you like like you probably like very slightly prefer the one but you don't know what the identity 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 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 a survey but like uh sorry a paragraph like no you want 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 okay that's all you do you can do machine learning models that like like uh first of all you can do you could do like crude metrics like the length that's a good point of how long they've written right and it could flag certain things yeah it's actually pretty easy to like I've I've looked at like for hiring I've looked at like thousands of applications really quickly you can really the the human brain is really interesting especially um like if you visually highlight certain information for yourself like keywords or again with machine learning models like sentiment you can you can highlight different parts that will catch your eye better than not and I 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 with textual yeah like I can like have them write things in like this is like a new way of that would be yeah it'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 ask certain questions like um just to see how people think is it better to work smart or better to work hard foreign or um is it uh ever okay to betray a close friend like I'll ask like questions like this that don't really have a right answer but I just want to see how they think or is uh truth more important than loyalty yeah and and I get their long-form answer you get like and you get to see the reasoning process yeah yeah like what they it reveals so much not just about the person but about the kind of questions I want I should be asking that has nothing to do with truth or loyalty but like how to get a good engineer with like very specific questions but I think it's really useful to get text input I I have done text input usually with beta surveys so I usually do beta service before I do the real survey what's the biggest like I do like a shorter version or it depends on what I'm doing but like 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 in recently but I used to do a lot of like 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 something like uh like statistical analysis are using python also yeah I had to Learn Python for 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 to solve it I was trying to avoid learning coding for so long but eventually it was 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 the Twitter you download Twitter no there's a lot of Twitter Twitter so Twitter is a social network with a bunch of people that are interacting a lot like there's like I don't know the number's 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 uh results for searches you can look at individual tweets and get entire which to me is super interesting the entire tree of different conversations or the replies which might be very interesting for you because like it's not I it's it's much harder to ask rigorous questions which you do with your polls but you could see like how divisive certain things are yeah like calibrators to figure out like 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 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 with your social network like uh 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 a blurry amorphous like you're just kind of looking through the fog at different replies and the kind of it's uh yeah so the API they have like like graphs of networks they have the data for the graphs yeah so you can reconstruct 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 uh Elon um there's a lot of sort of revolutionary stuff happening at Twitter I think you could literally sort of push for Innovation there like there's aggressive Innovation happening so in terms of uh 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 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 this no no um 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 trait things out of context Etc but but we should understand that right at a scale at a large scale you should be able to uh study that kind of thing oh yeah what was your casual sex uh survey actually haven't looked at in a while I think I just asked people about a whole bunch of fetishes because you don't want to be obvious about yours because when 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 so you still see it as a survey yeah yeah like an application because you I think you tweet is saying like I'm thinking of just like showing up to San Francisco and saying is anybody open for casual sex stuff like this am I misremember maybe escorting I'm not sure oh for escrow sorry 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 uh wrote about escorting your blog post escorning was good for me um how did you get into escorting I was working at like a I'd 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 uh and so I was like hey 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 have a friend who's an escort I'm like let's try that and so we had a call she'd like outlined the basics for me and then I just put up some ads and started working what's the basics of us corny how's that work the base if you want to get started escorting so just yeah uh are you gonna wanted to get some nice photos so you probably won't have those first of all you you assumed I haven't done it before have you yeah well you know uh 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 I just okay okay no meaning like like you know like selling products on Etsy versus doing a startup yeah uh well I mean escort is kind of also selling products on Etsy you know like but selling a lot of products high volume yeah like like yeah small handcrafted it's a small Artisan Dolls yeah this is mass manufacturer okay on a mass manufacturer your escrow I just feel like I haven't been getting you know I've been undervaluating 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 it's just 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 um you're basically advertising yourself and you're uh like the marketing the all the creativity that you mentioned before all of that yeah I found a it's going 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 an incredible strategy for making money it's like two seconds before that strategy per little threats into everybody else so it's very fast paced and like really tough with escorting you don't get to see what other girls are doing you can look at their websites but like 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 um so I think there's much less uh like evolution of marketing through the through this process and so I came in with like my aggressive marketing skills for being a cam girl I think that really helped I did very well as an escort I just came in like made a fantastic website and 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 one of the right kind of client I got like in a lot of trouble for this recently in the sex workers sphere because I said that if you raise prices you're more likely to encounter clients that aren't going to abuse you like it's safer yeah uh they did not they said that I was being classist you know 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 a lot of money you're probably gonna be like you're the kind of person likely who's going to haggle a lot because you don't respect her yeah but anyway that aside it's a little pet peeve for me um yeah I just I charge started charging 800 an hour and then pretty rapidly raised it to 1200 and then a while after that race it to 1400. well the interesting thing you mentioned in my extensive research um you used to do 1200 to 1400 an hour and then you said that you're thinking of jumping back in at a rate of 2400 the first hour yeah and I think 900 each successful hour that's interesting that's like that's that I mean to me that's really interesting like the for like why it's like the first hour yeah oh it's just because uh it depends on how you want to incentivize like the amount of hours so if you have to pay a lot for the first star but not very much for the success if you're more likely to buy like 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 like a great theory for why that is but there's more likely like taking dinner and get to know you first and I just enjoy that a lot more I enjoy like like knowing who I'm gonna have sex with like a date you know yeah so it incentivize the the long form date Dynamic versus like uh not that's really interesting that's so 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 it's 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 uh like what's the difference is there a difference really or no 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 will do whatever that takes to make that happen and so if I have to like laugh at jokes that I find funny or like to be like more adoring of your penis than I actually genuinely feel like that's what I'm going to express yeah um and obviously it's to some degree like titrated you know like I 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 it's just 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 uh so recently when I've like kind of dabbled in it since baking money for through other means um where I don't need the money it's more like a fun side thing that like it that I'm like I said it's fulfilling the role of casual sex for me so like I don't have to do it this is not my primary job I just want sort of a good excuse to like have sex with somebody and the money is like a great filter for that and so in that case that's interesting so the money is there but yeah okay the money is basically a filter for somebody who's taking this interaction seriously yeah it also so there's 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 gonna 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 uh 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 like this is not an indication of the kind of mate that she can get this is just an indication of like a business transaction and this allows me to enjoy casual sex so much more when somebody pays me for it to the degree that like I almost view it as Kink and so it's like so I'm using it sort of to replace casual sex now like occasionally I'm like you know like pay me a little bit to erase the anxiety and I'll like have a fun fun time in case 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 you buys a coffee at a Starbucks it's like all right great but it has to be plausible like you have to like trick my brain into like having it actually be incentivizing for me like China or something yeah like the homeless man bought me a coffee and then I sucked this dick like that's not cool all right so no shade of homeless man by the way like I've been friends with a lot of them I'm just using like some sort of stereotype of yeah right now so like it has to be plausible where you could trick your mind interesting yeah I mean yeah and so that's different so now now with in this sort of frame I am still like I'm accepting money but still much more expressive of my actual preferences so like I before when I would start escorting full-time I was suppressive and now I'm like you know like I'm doing this for me so we're going to make sure that I have a good time and so I'm much more demanding and then you're having more fun because you're not pretending exactly laughing at a joke or something like that that sounds terrible sounds like I mean it's also like social I mean I guess I I would 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 cities like laughing at somebody's joke when it's not funny feels like anti-intimacy yeah how many jokes automatically if 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 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 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 against my nature um what about the market of how much to charge say 20 2400 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 you said it's uh a lot of is a is a bit more shrouded a mystery I guess a more confidential like do you have some transparency to the the market what the competitors are so a survey of escorts 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 if I'm trying to remember what the I also asked the amount that 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 um all right but usually the the rates are around like if you want a median escort in a big city it's usually four days a city so the urban sorry four four to six hundred I'm in a big city but like smaller cities you charge the rates go lower um so that's so fascinating what's like the most you've ever seen somebody charge uh um I I think I am you're like the but at this point it's because I'm post work like I can I can just put it in the same number there's like in like does the fact that you're sort of like a sexuality expert like uh researcher and so on like your mind is fascinating as well and you're a bit of a celebrity there's that play into it yeah uh do you feel the celebrity no like yeah with people yeah absolutely usually if people are interested in hanging out with me it's because of that um but that's that's different like I think besides the like the the fun part like 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 two thousand 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 we're like you know you give off five 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 it's hard for me because I try to be as vulnerable as I can in a connection with a client um I like I do really like some of them I 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 it's I know that it's brief and I know that it's like kind of weird but like there's there's like a real glimpse into somebody's Soul when you get to be intimate and I think this is especially if you're for men because a lot of time men don't have like a way to be really vulnerable in front of anybody but like 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 you being as vulnerable as I can to match it like I'm not forcing myself or anything but like I just feel into it and like notice how like beautiful the person was and like 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 uh no but I think that's as unique to me because I like being alone a lot even with my friends who are like dearly I'm like happy not seeing them uh because I don't like making facial expressions very much but I do miss some of my clients wait sorry what does make a facial expression have to do with saying goodbye well if 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 you can just sit there totally blank face and then have all of the emotions that you want are you 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 hey there you go so like I I I definitely that 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 because when you talked about like finding the light and 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 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 going to fuck up the the beauty that's there if I'm sort of being oh fragile and vulnerable for a moment one of the things I'm afraid of that gets so much love from 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 I was like there's no this is you're fine you're good like but it's still there 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 of failure what it would actually look like maybe because we're talking about sexuality me not being able to eloquently explain the world view 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 sex sexuality and not sexuality which is 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 romantic love is like fully um 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 this base 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 uh not I think you're a really brilliant person um 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 no no no that's not other people just my personal life my personal feeling and like 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 um but I think I think sometimes you just gotta go for it I went for it it kind of flat fell flat on his face but uh um that's that's the thing with the conversation I think there's like the sphere it's like uh if you become like 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 uh which I don't think I don't think this is true at all like I think like your feelings are there for a reason like they're for a good reason and like logic or like rigorous analysis or something should be dedicated to figuring out why it's there yeah not that not by not to like suppress it or tell it it shouldn't be there you know what do you think is more important to like to just life to reason versus emotion like 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 was is curiosity that's such a middle curiosity is like both emotion and reason yeah right 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 yeah I I don't like the World Series that pit like emotion and rationality is opposite each other they feel like beautiful parts of like a cohesive whole yeah like if you're doing rationality to the extent where you're like suppressing some emotional reactions you have then I think you're doing it wrong you're like missing a big part of it like it should be like integrated it should be like part of like one unified flow like the things that you like if you want to be in a romantic committed relationship for the rest of your life then this is like beautiful and good and the kind of like logic that you're using to make sense of the world should be fitted into that correctly I think it's really cool like anytime you have sort of like an internal at odds thing with it I think you're like using some sort of force to suppress one or the other like I'm not allowed to reason about this or I'm not allowed to feel about that and it feels harsh to me and I think curiosity is the solution like if you if you're simply just calmly curious oh why do I feel like that let's let's go find out that's so cool right like you can use logic and your feelings to like 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 uh first off 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 though intellectual to do that I mean maybe it is I don't mean to no maybe this wrong word you can make it intellectual yeah but you can still continue the same flavor because you're not fully disengaging from the conversation you're doing 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 way it's actually making a stronger like or enriching it like making it more uh yeah giving him more context giving a deeper understanding I think there's like a way of going meta that is 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 are you trying to have sex with me right now like what I was doing is like a meta like you're stepping outside like and like okay what is the purpose of this conversation we explicitly identify it and in that case I think that is sort of like a Flinch move like I'm not telling him my emotional response I'm not like being fully present I'm like sort of identifying it as a way to subvert what's going on and so I absolutely think this is a possible thing uh but I usually try to be aware of that myself 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 with that chest move but the flirtation is on like he could have like uh 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 gotten more meta yeah it might have been like okay well no I'm gonna exactly I mean see there is there is something uh yeah that's AIDS into the chemistry of the conversation when you do that matter I really enjoy it it's like a rare I forget did you not 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 uh somewhere I don't know if we were or you were just doing parties together or maybe it was just like a bunch of people that kind of play with the same or like this circling it's just a practice explicitly dedicated towards that what circling circling that might be the thing yeah I think I think so we know we have some mutual circulars in our circles and our networks here what's uh what's circling I don't remember what I'm gonna describe it horribly because it's like one of those things that's difficult to describe unless you experience it like kind of like drugs yeah but it's something like you sit around there's like kind of guidelines to the conversation where you talk about the present moment yeah you're like 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 um and your like commitment to connection so like you're here to actually connect with the other person understand them and be understood yeah um you're not supposed to like project so if you're like have an analysis about the other person you own it you're like I'm experiencing you as this you know and then you check is it true um or like are you are you supposed to be almost like converting it towards the thing you're thinking like constantly um if it feels right in the moment you can the thing is it's very amorphous right it's like almost like creating a magical sensation and I've been with some I've seen some very good circulars 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 like like right now in this moment I'm feeling like kind of like nervous energy because I'm talking to you and this is a unique situation and like I want you to think I'm cool yeah I want everybody listed me to think I'm cool but I'm also having some sort of delight at being able to express in this way and like some admiration for how you like 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 is this sort of vibrating High thing I remember like in the party setting because I've got 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 here's your name and like I think I've heard people discuss that sure 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 right oh was I listening in on the conversation or something it was like 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 and then I don't think I would have left the cut so it's funny you probably interpret it in a different way 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 okay sexuality is really beautiful yeah I I don't think yeah I can't imagine myself walking away from that conversation he was 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 the human interactions are are funny like that they could they can help for all kinds of reasons um 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 what do you think they mean um what is love I love 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 tether the term to have a better understanding what we're referring to because there's things like I feel like intense attachment there's something feeling like like soulfully aligned there's like sexual attraction there's like are you excitement talking to me and saying we should taboo the term love maybe in this conversation how dare you no uh okay romantic love okay to make it flourish into lots of other new definitions okay thank you very much it sounds like you're censoring the most important word this is like 1984 all over again okay but also on the book a reading list oh okay listen uh no romantic love like a deep intimacy for somebody else like it like a deep connection with a 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 uh 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 and the the same basic thing is there like you're seeing someone for like who they are do you think you can be if you're heterosexual do you think it 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 every traveling faster than the speed of light is possible according general relativity everything's possible so you're saying there's a chance sometimes taught me that everything it's probably impossible not super likely assuming that they are like attracted to each other yeah and for somebody that has surveys and statistical analysis 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 feel like to be precise yeah okay let's be uh precisely and precise and continue I'm sorry that's my phone uh 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 butterflies 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 look what the fuck are we talking about yeah it's gonna get on the same page okay so what are the different so the butterflies boy I'd like to push back down two to four years on the butterflies but okay I mean statistically not everybody I butterflies don't give a fuck 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 uh okay so butterflies that's the basic confession infatuation in 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 Sam would you call a sandwich l l us okay what role does that play in The Human Condition like you've asked 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 on what do you think what do you feel when you when I when I say it's very different kinds of questions in you sure yeah which is interesting I've been trying to like figure out like what kind of brain like you have is like creating like this category of question which is why I was like saying like there's something about a poetic narrative in there yeah 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 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 me 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 like one that you was like oh that's like a bad question because it has an answer how many sexual partners you've had in the last year oh my God 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 sure because I would love that question okay right to ask enough people all right but that's does that really tell the story okay of of what you've felt over the past year that's that's true but then I could just tell you okay so by by when you're saying the kinds of questions that you like the ones that don't have an answer but not an answer you mean like not an answer where you can know that you're done telling it that you can escape having to think by actually answering it I see yeah the struggle is the place where we discover something not not the uh not the destination yeah okay 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 I take that question but it's a stupid question you don't have to it's I'm ready to do you like do you like love do you personally look like love yeah I mean I I think like there's a part of me that feels like I have unconditional love for all things like what you're talking about the class being beautiful I felt that it's like that feels like it felt like it rang something that like I have a a similar resonance in me for that if I were to Circle right now I I feel like you're avoiding the love question uh-huh the love sandwich question what's your own personal feeling towards loving another human being versus having sex with another human being I 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 sure but I have the experience where you just 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 does uh uh 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 yeah 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 uh uh I mean it's called the the polyamory post you have so many good blog posts people people should just go look at your uh your read your writing because it's it's really really strong and often backed by data but also just a deeply honest look at yourself and your understanding of the world 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 to arguing and and kind of thinking through it just there's just the honesty that really is from the whole thing anyway so uh yes I mean it would be interesting to kind of explore what polyamory like how it works what are the different versions what is the what does that freedom look like what is it what does that freedom feel like to be able to go see other people depends on you like 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 like one or a few people and then occasionally I like some novelty so usually I'll go like like I host orgy sometimes so a whole Synology and then I'll go have sex with people with the orgy and then that'll be good for the novelty for a while ask about orgies yeah so how many people are in orgy what's like a standard we're having a Sunday picnic it's an orgy what's like a number of people at an orgy 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 dish what's the gender distribution usually uh usually about even it's like ideal if you can get more women than men in most of them I've recently been hosting free use orgies or or juice where a consent is assumed by default when you enter and of course you can revoke it anytime or go over a whole bunch of rules to make sure it's very safe 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 like consensual like at any time but it's at any time within the constraints of this building or something like that you yeah so at the orgies it's like you buy entering if you wear a wristband uh then you are like by default opting into consent so people don't have to like do a thing where they negotiate with you and like to be like is this okay it's just the default is like you just go for it and if they want you to stop they say the safer like red don't and then you have to stop um and we do like exercise in the beginning of people saying red to make sure that everybody knows exactly what the rules are what's your favorite safe word red right when I first started doing like weird kinky shit I was like oh let's make a safe word and we pick the word foliage I was like that's goofy right and then but then it eventually came a time where I did actually in fact want to say the safe word 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 it's like red doesn't matter I don't care it's not funny we're just going with very simple very practical how does an orgy compare sexually uh to like one-on-one sexual experience um like what is the same ballpark or is it fundamentally different I mean the experience of all both orgies and one-on-one sex could make really high variety there's a high variety but 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 there's like three sums also like maybe there's another person involved but it's hard to like have a whole bunch of people on one in one cluster because usually there's kind of different little clusters of people having their experience sure I was part of a 10 woman orgy it was a total lesbian thing and that felt like a writhing cluster it was very nice but typically you kind of separate out with like very small PODS of people doing stuff okay so back to polyamory so what uh what's a good uh What what does it take to manage do you have a main partner if you're being polyamorous and you have you're dating multiple people is there usually a main one for you personally uh 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've been confiding 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 I would buy a house together I'd be like okay we need to like whatever our relationship is we have to do the thing we're both paying the rent for the house or the mortgage or whatever uh a lot of people do have primaries so it's very common to have like X like prescriptive like I'm gonna get married to you and you're not allowed to like have anal sex with anybody else that sort of thing what about like the transparency and the communication they have to do yeah you usually try to be super honest extremely yeah I mean I've learned over time that like 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 think okay this is really minor um it's probably nothing and I don't if I talk about 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 would I've come to realize that it's worth making it into a thing because I can't predict at the 10 time with like the small feeling I have is going to grow and then when I grow it now it's like 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 jealousy oh yeah definitely and like it 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 a partner like I have partner right now who's like dating this other girl and he like really likes her and you 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 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 I mean he has to be able to skillfully handle the interaction yes cool all right you're jealous like I'm not gonna freak out about I'm not gonna change my behavior I'm just gonna 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 it back to like a rational objective evaluation right my relationships I love it when people did 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 but like that's where my heart gets captured so I typically am in relationships where I'm like I mean 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 right like that the other woman is better than me like maybe that is an actual possible reality which 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 uh say that that the other woman is better than you yeah or that they if they if they feel 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 than I would want to know that yeah and even though 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 ship what is that that your ego or something like that my ego so your ego just generally grows and you like the destruction of it yeah it's like really access to the truth it's not it's like a fun experience like I've guys be like well you're not as pretty as I'd like I'm just like oh you know so stabbed to the heart and but then also they give me your number after yeah foreign what do you think of monogamous relationships like philosophically can you maybe steal man or make the case for monogamous relationships um can you understand the pros and cons of a monogamous relationships yeah I mean depends on how you defend if you're like hey uh 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 um 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 I we only made it this far in our relationship because I forced my partner not to pursue an intimacy that she wanted to then I feel like a little like more like 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 score that that's that bad that the person cannot pursue those feelings uh 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 the bodies put it on the table 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 and 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 the people sure it's not actually right for them but they just get in here 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 my polymers 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 as is 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 uh I don't know like True Romance you know that movie it's a really fucking good movie okay this is just like um 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 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 or the kind of the main sure Arrangements but I think it's just like human nature like yeah people are attracted to other people and they want to yeah especially in longer term relationships I I tracked and my relationship survey I track 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 what's the results of that men cheat a lot a lot uh women too but mentioned 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 they're male or female like spouse uh hadn't she about the same rate but mentioned much more than women so who uh who was more correct in their prediction though uh so men were more correct in their prediction predicting women and women were that moon or more off women thought men cheated much less than they actually did and but both of them were off but like the male Gap was significantly more so yeah I mean you're right when you say monogamy is not default like I think you're like really getting at something like human beings are just especially in long-term relationships difficult to only want one person but to be fair I think manami and commitment are very different I think you'd be incredibly I've known so many very long-term super committed poly couples that live lives that look very similar to the very romantic monogamous couples like children houses like 20 years yeah 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 conversation 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 like what for myself like 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 a like I have very little but like at this point it's like um I haven't eaten Pizza in like 20 years because I know I just don't I disappointing stuff I just eat low carb because it makes me feel good but there's so many foods I haven't explored it's just like well I know what I love so it was like you probably 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 or looking at your data like with sexuality is it is a is a fascinating topic because it seems that we're very like we were talking about very afraid of this topic I like to be really honest with ourselves about it the the whole like uh academic research is afraid of it but it's so core to who we are as human beings I got to ask you about this I can't believe it took this long to get there but one one of your many fascinating um surveys is on fetishes you wrote a blog post about it uh probably several because it's like a huge difference still in progress yeah so uh the one I'm referring to is on popularity and tabooness of various fetishes so what are some interesting takeaways I got to pull up this graph because it's freaking epic yes this is a big graph and it has taboo-ness as one axis and um popularity as the other okay for people just listening on the x-axis is to taboo-ness yeah asked to rate how taboo Society viewed the sexual interest and on the y-axis is percent of people reporting interest log scale oh boy all right so just some examples on the low taboo-ness 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 that was the motion since I did this yeah uh so like the last type of stuff is more likely to be popular and the more taboo stuff is less likely to be 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 arrested by blowjobs you expect people to be aroused by blow jobs so this was like getting at like as a fetish versus like an activity yes as specific as like a concrete sexual interest like I am specifically interested in this thing yeah and so those are thighs and lips different body parts jaw lines and then some of it is colored based on more female preference versus uh male preference like Jaw lines is more uh female preference being submissive is more a 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 tabunus pegging pain giving pain sexual frustration I suppose right as a kink uh yeah and there's so many interesting ones like to me like just that I haven't even like considered yeah I had to do so much research in the fetishes to to compile the list okay sounds surprising like options to you that you're like oh okay this is like a fetish yeah well more confusing was like what the fetishes are about because like I didn't want to overlap fetish it so I had to kind of look into them yeah and I'm like there's like such interesting manifestations of core drives like if you're really aroused by disgust like 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 you know yeah and like I'm seeing like a at the far end uh rodents um like different types of incest branding so there's like pain and then spoon fucking sex with animals I guess dogs horses receiving oral sex from an animal is high tabunas and pretty high popularity surprisingly High popularity I was really shocked by that one I wouldn't triple check that number because I'm like no way the this amount of people are reporting interest do you know which animal is there no I didn't specify I asked like which animals are robotic and then I separately asked like how erotic is it to receive oral sex from your preferred animal this is so fascinating so I I would uh 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 it's like nobody cares about your 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 could 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 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 uh 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 that I think like we have common theories about like oh are you abused it is you yelled it by a man or a woman um stuff like that like are you was really sexually repressive you know is it gender roles where you've expected to conform a whole bunch of stuff and then I asked you know obviously about like a massive amount of fetishes and my sample size right now is 500 000 people 500 yeah it's massive and I have stated for all of it and the result looks like that'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 like change like the age at which it triggers they have so me fascinating blog post he had a blog post I think on the age of fetish onset yeah and uh like you uh you really nicely organized it by age like reproduction as a fetish I guess pregnancy yeah as at age of 17 about 16.9 uh toys and like anal beads is 15.5 yeah one of the interesting things I found I mean this data set's 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 um if you are if a fetish occurs for you earlier like even much earlier onset you're more likely to report being extremely interested into it so later onset means you're going to be like less into the fetish but if it hits earlier but I wonder if it passes like it's really yeah I didn't measure old fetishes at all like no longer right you used to but it is no longer there interesting one interesting thing that I don't understand is that um that uh non-cis people seem to have more correlation between childhood experiences and fetishes so I was saying that there's no correlation between childhood experience divisions this holds for CIS people so trans people specially 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 like for them there does actually seem to be some sort of connection between childhood experiences and sexuality later in 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 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 uh like how did this come to be yeah this is I might go into way too much detail about this because I thought about this so much yeah 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 um and I really wanted to do one big comprehensive survey so I could like check a whole bunch of correlations with it within it uh because it's you know 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 shrew gags or whatever I'm like you can't do that nobody's gonna do this okay I'm not good I'm not gonna ask questions what's the wife true 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 okay um yeah different so I'm like so what I need to do is I didn't ask people a question like are you in like bondage and if you say yes then then I'll go ask you all the bondage questions ah got it right but then this seems simple but then it just exploded because I'm like how do I categorize these fetishes there's like if you're into sploshing uh which is what's that like uh you like sitting in cakes you like getting in mud but basically like kind of messy sensory like is this a disgusting 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 a discuss 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 miscategory categorizing it right because if you're into splashing and you're like this is clearly humiliation sick so you say yes I'm into humiliation stuff and then I don't ask you about splashing then I'm missing a whole data set of people because of falsely categorized your questions you're going to miss stuff you're just picking what to what's less and less important to miss well I'm trying to get people into the right questions set sure because like 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 I have to those overarching questions have to be really really well calibrated so that I can accurately feed you into the right sub part of the survey awesome so that was extremely difficult if I'm when I'm dealing with I think it was like 850 fetishes um so I did a couple things to spot check I like I did a couple questions where I asked um like in the detailed in the survey but like also the beginning of the survey just to see like what percentage people I was capturing um but and then 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 um it's extremely comprehensive and you get data about exactly how taboo your interests are and 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 like how kinky they were so then I matched the historic character Kiki character to your score so that makes it like more fun like gamifies it a little bit and you could well you can brag about 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 uh what king does Hitler have I think he's like he's around Marilyn Monroe which is like a 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 there's a bottom who's uh the most what's the character from Willy Wonka here okay I think like maybe Captain America was the least kinky or something or Gandhi meanwhile but that's another conversation boy uh yeah so even viral and Tick Tock basically because people were like what I got this insane character and then Mr the sample size exploded from 4 40 000 to 500 000. wow so like all it took is that kind of incentive what did you like uh at first have to pay people for the server foreign people that took it I'm mostly younger so usually early 20s um predominantly female like 70 female pretty like wraps out on Tick Tock demographics pretty well yeah oh okay I got it but 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 uh 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 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 that yeah this is true but on average hopefully that doesn't I mean there's these are really difficult like what what is this some interesting little quirks that um 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 of you said is the categorization to make it more efficient is there some for the analysis part yeah so the the graph that you're talking about it's um it's a binary so it's like if you and 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 like some fetishes have exactly the same amount of people like are at least a little bit into them but one of them is very extreme interest and the other is like fake and not very intense so that's not reflected I also like probably didn't represent the visual part right like might not be intuitive but he chose a log scale but it was kind of spreads things out to makes it more and more clear because the linear it was just so clustered at the bottom you couldn't really separate it out so there's obviously a selection effects it's possible that like the identity results at the end impacted people's results a little bit but the thing 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 um but it's like at least it's something like 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 yeah I'm doing it slowly because uh it they're so I ask about so many questions it's like not very anonymized so I'm really seeing small sections of the data at a time yeah have you uh have you published in like journals and stuff no I haven't you have any any interest in that or is your your approach I'm like I'm conflicted about it like it sounds cool because then I could really call her and publish on the 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 silly criticism like I don't like I want I feel so passionate about extra science like science that you can just 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 um and doing a published Journal feels like I'm I'm betraying my cause a little bit that's often behind the paywall yeah it's uh it goes against the I mean I think you not publishing a journal is doing a big public service 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 um 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 uh Prestige shouldn't matter at all um maybe maybe for like like biological experiments like fireology 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 it's beautiful to be transparent to be raw to be exploring it together with everybody else it's really beautiful I have people like have a lot of incentive to doubt the results like a lot of the research I'm doing is to like assists and trans people like like we don't have any data about transsexuality like not very good at least um 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 uh transsexuality is really unique um it's not like like sister or CIS woman or man sexuality at all and 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 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 isn't 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 this it's not feel like it has an agenda right you're just exploring yeah I feel pretty open to what I'm gonna find like I often have no idea what the date 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 uh so you've put together an Ask whole cart deck yeah 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 and then 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 uh we've already talked about it a little bit but like it's expressed more strongly see 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 fetches to begin with because I think I came across some data I did like a brief survey where about roughly around 60 of women report being submissive and 40 of men report being dominant and this is 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 and you know like women would be like us hot hot man you know the men are like ravaging and stuff I'm like shouldn't this be a in our jeans but but there's a gap what's the Gap the Gap is the dominant submissive Gap more women are submissive and there are dominant men oh yeah really yeah it's a pretty significant Gap and this is held up like 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 against again on like what kind of dominance you're measuring but overall it's a roughly 40 to 60 So when you say there's not many dominant men then the the meaning like they express like a desire to be dominant in the relationship yeah or like in sexually sexually sexually in bed so like if I ask questions like how much do you like being dominant in bed like men are less likely to answer strong yes to that question but if I ask are you likely to be submissive like women are very much yes really and that's expressive like that's that that that represents truth um my guess what's wrong with men so this is I think there's some reflection in like fet life so felt like this website where people like sign up and connect based on their fetishes and this is like you can kind of see it picked up in the Forum post about like how like dominant men are you know are getting laid so much and you know submissives are always looking for a dominant like there's 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 uh is that because you know there's these Trends about like decreased masculinity or that yeah so is that reflect is that that's so much similar I'm trying not to hold on to one Theory because I'm not sure one is possible like decreasing testosterone levels um testosterone seems to be I have a little bit of other research but I'm still checking it out that seems to indicate that uh higher testosterone you're more likely to be dominant so if we're seeing decreased testosterone levels across Society where it should be seeing a greater uh Gap um 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 like how many people are doing large-scale research like this I feel like you're like 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 you 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 date 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 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 uh 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 and 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 like it's possible that this is just like a genetic thing like me the gay Uncle Theory like the idea is like maybe gay people evolve to like be sort of taking themselves out of the gene pool to be but to be assistants and like it's possible that like there's certain percentage of men sort of like quote unquote evolved to be submissive to take themselves out of sexual competition and to instead be like the the monkeys revolving at the edge of the pack oh it's a method of survival like so you stay out of the competition yeah and I'm like a little obsessed about these kinds of Evo psych theories so I'm not I'm just saying it because it's like different ideas that are possible yeah okay so yeah I'm not saying it's definitely testosterone there's other things it's also possible that it's culture people are definitely gonna bring that up based on my survey though it doesn't seem to be any evidence of that like I asked about uh like how much pressure was put on you to be you know agenty in your childhood like a lot of questions around this kind of thing and no correlation at all to dominance well related to sexuality I'm very uncomfortable right now but nevertheless the plow forward in a dominant fashion uh uh 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 her or something I was like that's a great question like I don't know how people would consider this and so I put a whole bunch of different gray uh scenarios uh into a survey and then asked people to rate how rapey they thought that scenario was she actually like little and like little narratives yeah they get a rate like you know 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 uh 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 um 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 that's 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 it 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 within your typical not revealing being transgender until after sex and so on I think you mentioned that there's some like either that not revealing being transgender until after sex there's some differences amongst what men and women or something like that I think that men found more offensive than women I'm trying to I wrote a little while ago I mean uh this is nuanced and difficult right is because uh I think in a lot of public discourse the word rape is pretty binary yeah it's like either one is or is not rape and so you had a friend whereas 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 yeah 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 noticed about it at all and so I would really like to have some sort of like oh that was like a 30 rape you just endured yeah and I mean there's probably other dimensions about how traumatic it is how difficult it is to recover from all that kind of stuff yeah I mean like people it's a dangerous thing to assign a word 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's 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 child was really abusive and I was really confused by that because it's a total re-contextualization of that narrative it's like the things that I went through were not you know good and virtuous and had meaning but rather those were like the result of you know parents who didn't like love you enough or something uh and it even though the the concrete things that happened to me did not change like no facts shifted the fact that like the the interpretation of the fact shifted caused me quite a bit of distress for a long time I was like oh my God I'm you know I'm a traumatized like abused person like I went through an abusive childhood and it was really hard for me it 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 uh 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 LCD quite a lot when I was 21. what's it like by the way I've never done lsues what's it very difficult to describe because it's like like it changes sort of aspects about your environment that are invisible to you because they're so stable is it like if you can compare it to like psilocybin is it very different oh yeah uh it's like similar I forgot that you did shrooms yeah okay that you probably know you know like the kind of shift that you have from cyber dish rooms is roughly similar it's like more clear I think shrooms is more like embodied but it LSD is much more intellectual for me it strikes different people differently I prefer shrooms a lot I'm sorry LSD real estate a lot why is it not popularly take like there seems to be a negative connotation to LSD because like it seems to potentially have like a destructive effect like maybe dosage is more difficult to get right or something like that does this exactly a long time ago I did a survey on streams versus LSD so I asked people and people had slightly stronger experiences on LCD overall I remember but rated the experience is about is equally good um but I think people like streams because it feels more natural quote-unquote but I think if you like fed somebody a shroom and like actually had the LSD molecule in it they would have a they would think it felt very natural but that's besides the point I I like I think people get kind of incoherent on LSD in a way that feels really alienating like I consider LCD my LCD 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 like talking about like we're all one Consciousness everything is love man you know and people are like is that incoherent 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 lsdriver for a bunch of episodes yeah I get this for sure oh well well it's not just about love but it's uh it's about like talking in that way about reality about the world yeah sure it's like overfitting there's the narratives that you make out the world become really Vivid and so you pattern match just really aggressively like everything is connected and you come up with these explanations for things and I think I was very fortunate so I like this theory about psychedelics where you either like belief construct or you don't so you take psychedelics and it sort of like Burns away a lot of your belief structure um and sometimes you this happens and then you're like I need to like invent something to fill in the gaps so you're like okay I I think that maybe uh time is an illusion so I must now believe that like we're actually in a Time Loop or like time travel is possible so you experience time differently and then you come up with a different belief about time uh whereas other people uh don't do this belief construction at all like you experience time differently and you sort of let yourself not have a belief you're not like okay and you're not developing anybody's about time in its absence you're just simply experiencing the absence of the concept of time right uh and so I I don't have a lot of data to back this up in my my anecdotal experience because I've trips at a lot of people people either tend to believe construct or they don't and people who do not believe 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 I believe construction is negative what is it necessarily negative can you elaborate a little bit I mean belief Construction in a way that's like uh uh not like playing with frames but rather committing to a different frame so I sure 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 LLC and now I absolutely believe the cops are outside and you're like dude no you're just like 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 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 constructing you're escaping your previous beliefs aren't you doing like just some you're picking up a bigger frame yeah in some way you're taking your beliefs as object as opposed to being subject to them ah got it got it got it got it and some of that I guess is genetic and there's these categories of people there's two categories that experience LSD in different ways yeah 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 leaving these insane things and people from the outside see that and they're like oh my God this person took outstand became stupid yeah it's very scary um 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 no sorry frame control in general because that's part of human interaction uh yeah Fame control is like a way of manipulating somebody else that is non-uh obvious so there's a negative competition to that usually uh 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 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 the disagreement box yes like 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 yeah we just all the time and it's important but frame control is the kind of thing where you are trying carefully to obscure the existence of that box yeah you're like oh um 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 none you don't have any I'm like uh I'm not even like a Chad gbt I'm like gbt one 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 uh negative connotation manipulating right not being honest about the actual intentions of the uh yeah of how you'd like to to control the conversation I think there like 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 it's like a couple of concrete things that are signs of frame control um like one of them is pushing the painful update button um which is this thing where it's like uh Hey if you uh learn this it's going to be really painful the truth is painful and if you're realizing this thing about yourself it's gonna hurt and this is a sign that you're heading in the right direction so if you frame all pain as a sign of of virtue then this means that pain that's resulting as as damage is something you're going to ignore so it's like this it's a common like Cults right this is for your own good oh uh you know you've faced the brave truth about yourself that you're like not quite as wise as I am um when really your brain might be trying to tell you protective things or like another one is like finger trap beliefs um where you the belief is constructed in such a way that doubting it lends proof to the belief it's a very common example is like Satan like the Christians are like uh 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 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 re 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 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 like you 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 right 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 uh it's just kind of what's going to happen and to be fair I do think that like 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 uh 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 I think also I'm starting to kind of understand that there is people who are narcissists and sociopaths and Psychopaths out there and um I'm not even sure if people like 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 it's like not the quite not the way you have to look at what are the effects programmatically looking at the effects and then you also have to do that with yourself it's like very much like are you like how much space are you making for the other person's reality here like sure are you are you giving power to the other person because a big aspect of frame controls you're carefully rerouting the power to yourself you're like I am the person who knows I'm like you're having pain in your beliefs because you're updating towards the things that I believe like it's it's just like a gravity well but if you're if you're setting up the gravity well of your interaction such that you're making sure you're giving the other person power over the shared reality you inhabit I think it's a really good sign that you're not doing problem 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 um it took me a long time to get a bed frame just I'm saying I know but you wear a suit though uh yeah uh so frame control on the streets no frame in the sheets I don't know I don't know what the funny thing is to say though but there you have it um so the LSD helped you escape the the frame of uh can you like elaborate what what was the frame that was holding you back from like 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 it absorbed the external narrative that I had been abused which technically is true I'm not saying I wasn't but like I absorbed this narrative and I just remember having like this burning coals in my chest at all times like 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 was 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 left me and it was like this this like like the 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 with it and I didn't LLC like several times before but there's one LSD trip where I remember I went through my entire childhood in my head because LC like really makes your memories quite Vivid like 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 gonna break your will as all these times where I was like they had successfully broken I will over and over and it was horrible I was just like sobbing tears streaming down my face and then I like worked through my whole child I got to the end and I'm gonna tear up because every time I talk about this it's just like the sensation of like 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 uh it was just 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 thought I'd 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 uh was so thrilling and I was so grateful for this I was like I would do anything to give this experience to someone else or 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 shifted the meaning frame because before the meeting had been like something had sheared something that shouldn't have happened but now it's 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 do you is there 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 wow it was really severe uh and I definitely don't want to be around him still like he still like triggers the fear in my body yeah 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 like 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 yeah for him yeah and that so that that trip just took you through your whole year Alone by the way when you're doing the trip uh yeah I had roommates but the trip was mostly alone I had somebody else was like sitting in the room but they weren't interacting with me so you're sitting there experiencing all this what's the timeline like how long does it take to go through your whole childhood I don't remember I mean time's really messed up when you when you do that I was listening to the soundtrack of the fountain which is excellent yeah I listened 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 all it's just like a vivid experience of your childhood yeah 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 I this is why I feel really confused about the concept of trauma like people use this word so much like are you traumatized and I understand why like 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 I agree with you thought I just I've I've made friends with and talked to this guy named uh Paul Conte he wrote a book on on trauma he's an incredible brilliant psychiatrist yeah he's probably agrees with your kind of oh that's cool I should read it yeah you should um maybe even talk he's a fascinating human being I'd be um interested in the um a psychiatrist's perspective is really interesting because it's a you did 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 it 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 as the doctors basically the doctor of the mind and um 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 it can't be really systematic about it but I 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 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 um like I've said uh I think I've said this before my brother who I love very much I 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 starting to have fire but it's what kids do when they're like yeah I was like I was whatever fights this is what boys do like it's they're they're crazy uh it makes total sense it's probably funny and from his perspective but yeah I wonder I want to bring that to the surface of that that helps and maybe LSD allows you to uh 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 uh so you're not like so to you romantic is 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 uh when I the guy that I asked out who I'm still dating I was like hey you squirted like 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 I was like yeah and that was romantic like the Bold leap into oh leap into a really intense date I think you mentioned it I think you mentioned something also um must have been a tweet or something like that where if you um 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 it 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 um 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 one I moved out of Idaho for the first time I moved to Australia I just kind of yielded myself across the globe which verb did you just use yeah eat it's like to yote yachted eat so people do people is this like slang is this like Urban Dictionary or is this actual or yeah you have to like feel another word like if you take a thing and you just like curl it really hard ah does it not feel like I eat motion okay so you eat it so a great this was aggressive so across the globe with you didn't even stop in I just hurled myself yeah absolutely along the way I 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 I don't know I'm hosting a castle it's some people I thought I met 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 agentee agent T like uh and can we expressing agent it sounds like you were and don't you have to express agency when you're eating yourself across the world you have a little bit like in the same way you express agency when you eat LSD like the only thing you actually do anything else is like put the tab into your mouth and then you just kind of Scream the whole way after that yeah but I I there are 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 uh 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 gonna 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 yeah that's pretty bold as I would say it's pretty romantic south of France yeah yeah it was in a little castle is in the winter so we were all closed up by the fire um 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 posts why did you pick the hitchhiking one I don't know because it's relevant to it oh actually to traveling 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 our magic too I'm terrified of what oh so you you are interacting with strangers that's terrifying yeah you still 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 in times where you're not and like if you're like he had some fake before 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 to 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 just do it and just do it like across the world somewhere in some random place just for like a single event for like a dinner uh you got some sort of itch in you but yeah I mean yeah the the itch to live it's like like sometimes it's nice to drop a little like chaos into a thing right what's your chaos survey by the way like you mentioned that earlier I kind of saw it I don't know yeah that's one of like the sort of artistic attempts at a survey because you know like 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 you know where they ask a whole bunch of questions and then they run calculations on the data to like sort of group it by organic clusters so like with the big five it's like 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 uh 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 filter them at all and then I just had a whole bunch of people answer them well uh can you give like a hint to what it looks like like what like how crazy the question get I mean a lot of them are standard but somebody was like if there's above like did something in 1512 to like turn the world over would you would you like it I don't know it's like it was really just insane questions there's a couple of those a lot of like would you fuck Ayla once but yeah once okay I got you 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 actually actual questions but because your audience is probably really a super interesting Minds okay uh you mentioned body comp you said you can answer that one easily uh do you share your body count do you know your body count do you know is there a spreadsheet there's a spreadsheet yes there's a Google Sheets is it Excel sheets yeah okay have you run like uh is there you don't have to share the the the contents but is there like data on each so I track uh paid clients and free sex separately and I attract different things on either like with clients I track like positions we used and who had an orgasm and with personal people I just track basically like age City you know name and I I I've had this 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 uh Mel Destiny's Stephen's uh wife is a huge fan of yours uh she was actually really excited to get to uh 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 oh it's really sweet it's kind of interesting yeah so what is there like an optimal body comp 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 have selected 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 well 120 is opposed to 100 I don't know I just like kind of skimmed through the numbers in my head and picked one that felt right just know yeah 120 ish I think that's why I'm starting like uh so you're flexible yeah first um but 200 is a hard line for sure well it's you know we have to it depends the factors because 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 you're saying 200 that might be dishonest no like if he's had sex with 200 girls uh this means that he's had a lot of casual sex um and not a lot of like long-term relationships assuming that he's you know hasn't been super poly yeah and this usually means that there has to be some sort of um like indication that he cares about the girl more than he actually does like he oh because he's like leading you on basically um and so I'm not saying this is necessarily the case I'm saying like at a certain level of number I start to become 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 uh 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 uh but yeah you people are much more like people always tell me online like you're not we're going to be able to find a husband because you have sex with too many 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 in your body count yes so all lying is unethical yeah I'm not a big fan of lying in general yeah yeah it's interesting bodycon's an interesting one it's so silly to take that to care about that but still we do yeah jealousy is silly but still we get jealous is that weird I 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 they're 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 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 actually ever talk about it to care at all like why does it matter because only like the future is 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 like you're evaluating for something different than those 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 like kind of sound I think this is like kind of like lining up with like this this caricature that I'm building of you based on this conversation so far great but uh 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 like if the thing that you're focused on is not like being able to predict someone like if the thing that you focus on is the present moment then it doesn't really matter anymore they're they're the things that like their training data but I also I also think that 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 second nature versus nurture I guess also I don't believe in the in the if in the ability of people 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 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 would 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 isn't that hard though like if I'm with the guide I'm considering dating him and I asked like how did your past relationships end and then if all of them were 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 yeah I feel like the more that also these possible they were crazy he's attracted to crazy people so like that yeah but but that I would say that's like easier love easy level Mario Kart video game versus like Elder ring like like I think most most people's past is like complicated he's a pretty good bird no you're right I do agree that like there's a level of obscued obfuscation wow that um is hard to see through but this looks 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 is a 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 quote philosophers and 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 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 it allows you to say a simple profound thing that we're too afraid to say with our own words so like the quoting philosophers in that sense to see yeah but it's still a crutch yes but I feel like the past is more like talking about your dreams it just it's not it's a crutch that doesn't care it doesn't empathize with the other person's experience of the conversation or the explanations doesn't really convey the uh they are not involved in your past yeah so how do you feel about this conversation or 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 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 last couple years like that's usually what we'll 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 them 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 in past yeah I like the ideas in people's minds versus their Recollections and memories and so on yeah yeah uh what do you think about porn it's nice I like it okay you like it yes uh what effect do you think it has on society uh 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 um I mean like I said I finished reading Brave New World like the over sexualization does it does it increase like the sexualization society that's not into a degree it's not good or is this is this good like the are really 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 um but like there's another question which is like is it a net positive or net negative yeah like it's possible that it might be like a net negative four specifically our relationship to sex but like a net positive overall in general I'm not sure but the thing 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 you like not want to go have sex with women then we're gonna have to like change the way that we like experience IRL connection um to compete with porn yeah which seems like a natural evolution of like the civilizational cycle like I'm pro-natural Evolution and like instead of trying to stop at things that people wanted to actually figure out how to integrate that and like 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 and 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'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 yeah I mean like we're having less sex than making fewer babies and that seems like probably not great uh yeah right with the babies one yeah but the babies there's probably artificial ways to have babies that we can figure out yeah but then how important it sex to be human I guess sex with other humans like we're gonna 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 pr the transhumanist side of things I'm like happy to stop being human so you're okay if like the centuries the last time will be something like these biological bags of meat that we are let's become something new and cooler even though that thing would 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 I was like a little clone my I'm I would like to do cryonics you get Frozen when you die are you afraid of death I mean yes and no I like came to terms with death would do all of my LSD use but I still have like press breaks when the red light happens I think this is a this is a poll you've asked or this might be one of the questions in your cards but uh how many years would you like to live like if you had to pick oh that's awesome 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 Paul and also in the deck of cards the asshole yeah uh yeah like you have to pick that number of years and you have to live that many years and you can't live anymore yeah you can't die sooner I guess yeah a million years I don't like that question so I know I asked that question 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 yeah like you know I guess I would rather wait to see if AI kills us all in the next 10 years and if it doesn't then I'd like to maybe make it a million years yeah but can't torture you for like a million years what if you're the last human left yeah that is i that's true the thought of like civilization ending and then just flooding his face alone is kind of shitty no no being tortured just imagine today you're torture tomorrow you're tortured the third The Day After Tomorrow sometimes it's not that scary I don't know torture for a million years yeah I just assume you'd get used to it but like maybe if they reset your memory so it was not a loop so you're always experiencing torture for the first time yeah hence torture torch 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 was just like like 150 years but really 150 though that feels like right in like The Uncanny Valley well you picked 120 for body count so I'm picking 150. of The Uncanny Valley it's like probably everybody that you grew up with is going to be dead it's like just enough for like everybody you know to die like one cycle yeah and then start dating the Next Generation no I don't know and then so you get like sort of two lifetimes yeah yeah I mean it also really depends on if other people get this feature yeah I 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 the of life extension of what it means to be and 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 transference I'm like I don't really care but I slowly realized that my attitude is in fact at least the thing that I am conceiving of as trans-humanist like I'm very happy to do artificial wounds and you know upload our brains to the great Collective and whatever I don't have the thing that I'm like oh what about like the true organic humanness that makes us who we are like whatever that soul of humanity I have no attachment to it at all which I think is what I'm thinking of as transhumanist I'm like so you're like I I guess the the window of what you consider to be beautiful about life is not limited to this particular definition yeah let's explode like let's make our Consciousness is huge so AI could be a part of that wait so you're mostly excited by AI well I mean I'm like part of like the Doomer cult uh I wish I say tongue-in-cheek it's not actually a doom or cult but I'm part of uh do you worship a god of some sort would you sacrifice little small animals that would make it look 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 chat GPT of you know what chat gbt will eventually evolve into being yeah 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 Chad GPT is just gpd3 3.5 it's the same same model relatively small to what it could be uh to what gpt4 will be in 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'll there'll be a lot of competitors yeah it's a little scary yeah it's terrifying I mean because like like the everything is just like information ultimately like the items that we have like weird biological machines built out of the 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 atom's ready all you need is like a tiny little like Atomic printer uh and like we have those those are cells right and and I'm 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 hard to know where if how difficult is to close that Gap to physical reality like from the physics to the the information you have 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 look you know crisper and stuff you can order you can just like make sure you see uh 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 they actually changing physical reality is very costly it's very difficult to exponentially accelerate the more terrifying things AI becoming exponentially intelligent and then controlling humans which there's many of us yeah and then that's how we achieve skin we humans build stuff or start wars or or so on like it starts manipulating our minds gets in our mind becomes our friends and then starts uh I don't know yeah thinking this is unlikely it's like it's probably going to be as smart to us as like we are to toddlers so we 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 about falling in love in the AI system do you think you'll have a sincere like this is the freedom you have being polyamorous you can kind of can fall in with an AI no you and like it 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 boyfriend is an AI it's an issue right why would it be an issue all right now you're already getting uh offended at that possibility which they're therefore I know it's going to be a reality no I'm just joking there's an issue I don't actually think it's an issue I think it's uh maybe at The Cutting Edge will be an issue but like assume they have a body I assume yeah I think yeah but the body will be really like crappy it'd be like R2D2 I like I feel like we grow human bodies already from like just a tiny little cluster of cells especially and so all they have to do is make that cluster and grow it no no no no like don't that that that the embryogenesis process like that's really not well understood at all that's really tough I think more much more likely to have crappy humanoid robotics like I don't think the body is overrated in terms of like if if the AI system is super intelligent it can uh 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 I think like with language I'm worried about before it that she's super intelligence like true AGI it'll just be really good at 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 uh inanimate objects and I have there's a robot behind you a lot of them there's I like Lego robots they're interesting it's on the Shelf oh it was so cool cool yep I don't even notice that yep yeah Lego robots are they they we anthropomorphize them even more because there's something about the movement of like uh some like a thing that steps up steps and looks up at you that there's a power to that versus like a Roomba that's just like running into the walls yeah I think once as soon as we get like some sort of empathetic expression on robot face it's over so we're gonna be like oh 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 as a dominator yeah with strong hands yeah and and kind of dumb uh or not I don't know that you can customize customize it'd be interesting to do a survey like how they would customize it oh yeah like 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 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 you be like this is too perfect I'm upset because we're not having enough imperfection like you like actually imagine yourself 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'll be like this is too easy because if I if I actually were to introspect what is the perfect relationship then yes maybe because I probably want some challenge 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 um 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 con it's conflict that's Laden in misunder basic misunderstanding between human beings like misinterpretation different perspectives that Clash different worlds views different ideas all that kind of stuff that conflict yeah that sounds good yeah I like having somebody like 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 all 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 they're good at that but not too much like but like if I if you design all that in then I don't know it sounds romantic it sounds romantic okay all right I I do want to really uh quickly ask you about this about the the rationalist community because I've gotten to know a few of them a few times he tweeted a guideline to rationalize discourse basics of rationalist discourse from less wrong what are these folks What's the rationalist culture what's the rationalize this course uh yeah I love their astronauts because they're interested like how do you have conversations more effectively if you're trying to figure out what's actually true and which sounds kind of obvious but in practice it's not usually um I remember when I first started having you know debating conversations I was very antagonist I'm like oh I'm you know 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 let's like how do you feel about that it was it was very like uh kind and compassionate like even if somebody says something that sounds insane you're like okay well we're going to respect your reasoning and like even if we disagree let's actually figure out why you think the way that you think um 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 like talked to those folks so this guideline particular I think has to refers to like shorthand characteristics of rationalist discourse um 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 explicitly acknowledge that you aren't doing so or can't 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 who's here to destroy the the the the quality of the conversation I think it's like a common misconception about rationalists is that they're kind of like Spock like ah we used to press emotion we're thinking logically hurt eater but I found this to be really not the case like I remember there's a less strong thread where I was like really emotional and I commented and at the beginning I was like just warning I'm just very emotional and then I just vented my emotions and people respond really well to that they're like cool like you're just like genuinely truthfully expressing your state this is actual information about the world it 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 and I was like what if he'll only asked a couple questions and then we don't know what to talk about yeah but it's been in quite a long time and I 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 uh maybe one more question what's the meaning of life to want things to to search to be in well I think your curiosity is like somehow getting to that yeah to one thing 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 yeah I wonder 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 live just a million years it's not the torture it's like the yearning will fade you're probably yearned to die then I was just sitting there wanting death intensely that's kind of romantic a little bit it has like a 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 I think we're already doing that but if I 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 is 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 might give you some practical results but that's not why we do it thank you for listening and hope to see you next time