- It was really shocking to me that nobody else was doing anything creative with sex work. Like for me, 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 it was the top not safe for work 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's fearless in pursuing her curiosity on these topics by asking challenging and fascinating questions and looking for answers in a rigorous data-driven way and writing about it on her blog, knowingless.com. She's also a sex worker, including OnlyFans and Escorting and is an exceptionally prolific creator of thought-provoking Twitter polls.

Ayla and I disagree on a bunch of things, but that just made this conversation even more interesting. I like interesting people in the full range of the meaning that the word interesting implies. I'm currently reading "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac and would be remiss if I didn't mention one of my favorite quotes from that book that feels relevant here.

"The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles, exploding like spiders across the stars.

In the middle, you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes, ah." This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ayla. I feel like this conversation can go anywhere. Is that exciting or terrifying to you?

- I think it's more exciting. - The uncertainty exciting to you? - Yes. - In conversations in general or just this one? - I think conversations in general. Like, is anybody like, "Oh, the certainty is really exciting." Maybe if the certainty is something new. - I mean, novelty always comes with uncertainty, right?

Almost always. - I started trying to think of a counter example. - Immediately. - Yeah. - Your uncomfortable generalizations of that kind. - Like, always is always a really bold word to use. - But if it's truly novel, that means you don't really understand it. It's outside your distribution.

So therefore, it's gonna have a bunch of uncertainty. But you don't think of it as uncertainty. You think about it as something new, but it actually also attracts you because there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding 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, 'cause I was like, I'm a little nervous about doing this podcast. And then I was feeling into the unpleasantness of it, like the fear of what if something goes terribly wrong.

And then I was also feeling into how much that feels like part of why it's exciting. If I knew that it was going to go great, I don't know. - Did you actually imagine all the possible ways it can go wrong? - Not 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 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 like driving fast in cars, 'cause I was driving very carefully here 'cause the roads are bad. And then I was thinking, but 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 the worst embarrassment you've experienced? - It's pretty bad, yeah. 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 caught this thing that you didn't catch. I think that's the biggest terror. - Yeah, from looking at your reading and listening to your interviews, you seem to be very defensive and worried about being a good scientist. - Yeah, definitely. - But you're like methodology.

- Yes. - And funny enough, you get attacked on that methodology, even though, you know, I'm a fan of psychology, of like academic psychology, and it's kind of disappointing often how non-rigorous their work is, how small the sample size and so on, and how big and ambitious, over-ambitious the proclamations about results is, especially 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 data.

Like there's an honesty, authenticity to it. So I don't know, it's actually really refreshing. I don't know why people criticize it. I think 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 wanna cloak it in a sort of layer of authority.

Like I'm from this institution. It was peer-reviewed. There's kind of all these layers, and I'm also not gonna share the data with you, and I'm also gonna pretend like most psychology studies are not replicable. I'm just going to pretend there's authority to it. - I think it works on a lot of people.

Like from the outside, you're like, ah, the scientists with the white lab coats with credentials, those are the people who are like doing science. And like doing science is, you know, you have like fancy terms that other people don't really understand. And to be fair, like 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. But a lot of what those people are doing in science is not that hard. 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 then you can 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 figure this out together. But people like are, I think, self-crippled in this because 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. Which might contribute to the controversy. - Not exclusively probably. - Oh no. - But you're just not limited by like part of your curiosity asking questions that seem common sense.

Like some of the most controversial questions are like around sex. It's like everybody thinks and talks and does sex. I mean, it's the driver of human civilization. And yet there's so little like rigorous discussion about the philosophical and the scientific questions around it. It's like, it gets really weird to be able to discuss them.

It becomes tricky to discuss them. - Yeah, it's super charged. 'Cause 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, can you have sexual preferences that in themselves are immoral?

People get very angry about it. - Well, the sad part is they're not just opinionated, but most of us, our relationship with sex is, I think, I guess I wanna say not rigorous. - I think it's very difficult to be rigorous about sex. Like, I would consider sexual urges to be kind of elusive to introspection in a way that's a little bit disproportionate to a lot of other things.

Like you could like, you know, introspect about, you know, how I want other people to like me and where my insecurities lie. But sex is one of those black box things. A really common thing is for people to, if you have a fetish, you sort of check back in your childhood to see an event that corresponds to that fetish.

And then you 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 concrete, coherent, causative way that events happen or that sexual fetishes happen. This is just like one example of like why I think it's really hard to be rigorous with introspection.

'Cause we can't avoid, you just wanna 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 so on, how they originate. Yeah, you've, I mean, we'll talk about fetishes 'cause you have a lot of really interesting writing on that.

Just actually zooming out, I shouldn't mention you tweeted, I wrote this down. You tweeted, "I do not understand "how to have normal conversations with people in person "if I'm not on drugs." So I guess, let's both agree to not have a normal conversation, I guess. Assuming you're not on drugs now.

Or if you are, you don't have to tell me. - I feel like a very small amount of phenibut, which is a nootropic. Don't know if that counts. - Is that a drug? Well, I guess I'm on caffeine. Yeah. - So we're both-- - Drugged up. - Good enough to have a normal conversation.

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

- Is this a Twitter poll? - It's-- - There's four options. - This is reality. Not everything maps perfectly to a Twitter poll, but in this case, because there's four options and it is a small number of characters, it does. But I'd like to think I'm more interested. You know what?

I think your Twitter polls are fundamentally interesting. There's something about the brevity of a poll limiting it to a set of choices and having an existential crisis and searching for the answer. That's beautiful. - That combination. - Well, this one is a big one. Like, what do you think is behind it?

- Do you believe that there is one primary driver? Like, do you think that it can be understood in the terms of primary drivers? - Yeah, I think, well, maybe it's an engineering perspective like trying to reverse engineer the brain. I don't think we're equipped or understand enough about the mind to get there.

- Yeah, like, what's the primary driver of a tree? - Yeah, well, then it gets to the question of what is life? What is a living organism? - Like, to self-replicate, probably. - That's a very clean simplification, but I think life is more interesting than just self-replication. - Yeah, but it sounds like there's a curiosity in you that you're trying to poke at, and I don't understand exactly what that curiosity is.

- So if I had to dedicate 1,000 years to understand one of these topics, which one would be the most fruitful, I guess is the indirect thing I'm asking. - Fun? - No, well, fun. To me, everything is fun. But-- - Really? - Yeah, I mean, I'm with David Foster Wallace.

The key to life is to make sure that everything's unboreable or to be unboreable, or nothing is boring. Everything is fun. Like everything, I could just literally sit. I honestly, 'cause I don't think, I don't know where you got that glass, but that glass exists, and I forgot it exists, and it was really fun to me to know that now it was there.

- What about the really unpleasant things? Like if you're in deep agony? - Yeah, that's fun. - Okay. - That's fun, 'cause it's like, yeah, heartbreak. It's like knowing that I'm capable of that. It's like from, (laughs) 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? 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, and one of them is "Brave New World," where they remove the ups and downs of life, partially through drugs, but over over-sexualization, all that kind of stuff. And I feel like you need the ups and downs of life. You need the dark to have happiness, to have like a deeply intense feeling of affection towards another thing or a human being.

Yeah, yeah, so everything's fun. But fun is also a weird word to define, 'cause fun, I think for a lot of people, that's why I talk about love a lot. I think love is a better word than fun, 'cause fun is like lighthearted. Love is more intense. Like I love that glass and the water that's in it, 'cause it's fricking awesome.

Like somebody made that glass, right? And like not have many mistakes, and the way it bends light in interesting ways, and the way water bends light in interesting ways, like I can see part of your arm through that water. That's fricking amazing. Everything is amazing. I'm with the Lego movie.

But from a scientific perspective, if I were to investigate sex, I don't know why I put love in there. Let's just narrow it down in the Twitter poll. Let's focus on the basics here. Sex, power, or death, immortality. If I were to try to, like from a neuroscience, neurobiology perspective, or reverse engineer through building AI systems that focus on these kinds of dynamics, exploring the game theoretic aspects of it, exploring the sort of cognitive modeling aspects of it, which one would get me to a deeper understanding of the human condition?

That's the question. Sex, okay, Nietzsche is the will to power. Freud and the bunch is all about sex. And then death. Liv just, Liv Burley, brilliant previous guest on this podcast, she just released a video where on her bedside was the book "Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker, which of course she would have on her bedside.

But his whole work is that everything is motivated by our trying to escape the cold, harsh reality that we're going to die and we're terrified of it. One of the gifts and burdens for human beings is that we are cognizant of our own death. And that terrifies us. That's the theory.

And because of that, we do everything we can. We build empires to escape the fact that we're mortal. - Wouldn't this change quite a bit for religious people then, who don't believe that they're going to die? - Well, they created religion. The idea there is to create myths, religions.

You can create religions of all kinds. - Yeah, but if this is one of the defining things that defines civilization, then we should expect to see massive differences between people who believe we're gonna die and people who don't. - Good, I love it. You take it scientifically here. And they have actually answers.

There's a whole terror management theory where they do write psychology-type papers and they do actual experiments. I can mention how their methodology is interesting. They prime with the discussion of death. They take one certain set of people and have a conversation with them. Another set of people, they mention death to them before the conversation and see how that affects the nature of the conversation.

It's really interesting 'cause death fundamentally alters the nature of the conversation. Just even priming, reminding you that you're going to die, briefly, changes a lot of things. - These kinds of priming papers are usually not replicated. I just have, I feel like I've heard a bunch of priming ones that-- - I think you have PTSD over psychology papers that are not replicated.

- I just did a priming experiment on my own and found it didn't have any effect. But again-- - Can't you just give me a careless statement summarizing an entire scientific discipline of terror management theory? I don't know. I haven't rigorously looked at how good of it is psychologically.

I think it is interesting philosophically, the way Freud talked about the subconscious mind, philosophically, it's an interesting discussion. Then you have to get rigorous with it, for sure. But the idea is that, like it's not that religious people get rid of the terror of death. This is just one of the popular ways they create an illusion on top of it.

That's that idea, like a myth that allows, that makes it easier for them to forget, to escape that terror. But everybody else does different methods. You fill your days with, capitalism has a whole religion of itself, like the rat race for getting more and more material possessions and so on.

- And couldn't you argue it in the opposite direction? Like, let's say, assume that we're Christians here and we're like, oh, the atheists, everybody has terror of hell and the atheists invent this mythology where actually evolution is true in order to escape their terror of hell. So that doesn't feel like a persuasive argument to me.

But I used to be very, very Christian and I did not have a terror of death. And then I lost my faith and then I had a deep terror of death set in for a few years. And it felt very different to me. - So for denial of death, I don't know if he says that it's actually possible without really a lot of work to get to the actual terror.

Like, I think his claim is that in early, early, early childhood development, that's when the terror is real. And then we aggressively construct systems around it of social interaction to sort of construct illusions on top of it. I'm doing a half-ass description of this philosophy, but it is interesting to simplify the human mind into underlying mechanisms that drive it.

- Yeah, I was gonna say, your thinking seems kind of poetic. Like the way that you're sort of handling these, these concepts feel like more like aesthetically driven. - I think this theme is gonna continue throughout this conversation as we talk about relationships and sex, yes. For sure, I think so.

And I think your thinking seems to be very driven by how can I construct an experiment to test this hypothesis? - Yeah, something like that. - Yeah, but aren't, there's some things, especially that have to do with the human mind that are really messy, really difficult to understand. There's so many uncertainties and mysteries around that we don't yet have the tools to collect the data.

Like, one of your favorite tools is the survey, is asking people questions. And then figuring out different ways to indirectly get at the truth because there's flaws to the survey. You kind of learn about those flaws and you get better and better at asking the right questions and so on.

But that's not, that's indirect access to the human mind. - But do you think poetic narratives are? I'm not saying poetic narratives are bad. I think it's a cool way of handling concepts. But I'm not sure that they are more rigorous. - No, no, no. - Okay. - No, but they might be the more correct, like philosophy might be the right way to discuss things that were really far from understanding.

- Yeah, I mean, they might be more useful shorthand. - Yeah. - Like morality, I don't think morality makes any sense. But it's really useful shorthand to use when handling concepts a lot of the time. - Right, like ethics and morality. You could construct studies that ask different questions.

Like, you know, just having worked with autonomous vehicles a lot, the trolley problem gets brought up. And I don't know, you can construct all kinds of interesting surveys about the trolley problem. But does that really get at some deep moral calculus that humans do? It's sexy because people like write clickbait articles about it, but does it really get to like, what you value more, five grandmas or like three children?

Whatever, like they construct these arguments of like, if you could steer a train, if you could steer an autonomous car, which do you choose? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's possible with some of those to construct. Sometimes the fuzzy area, there's some topics that are fuzzy and will forever be fuzzy, given our limited cognitive capabilities.

- I don't know, there's a way of looking at things where it's like, for example, the childhood fetish thing that I was talking about, like where do your fetishes come from? Like you can develop a narrative where it's like, I think like this kind of thing is, when you're surrounded by feet when you're a child, this causes foot fetishes.

And this is like kind of a cool narrative. And I think a lot of people's ideas about philosophy follow the same sort of thing. Like, what is the narrative that is cool? And I think this is useful for meaning making. Like I'm very pro meaning making. Like when you're talking about everything is fun because the contrast or whatever, I very much ascribe to that.

I really enjoy that philosophy. I also find everything to be very delightful. And this isn't like a question of truth, right? We're not like, where is the true delight that we're objectively measuring? I guess this is 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 if what is true. (laughing) Yet another question, what is truth? You've, actually to jump back, you believe that free will is an illusion. So why does it feel like I'm free to make any decision I want?

- It's a cool illusion? I think that's probably like where our sense of identity comes from. - It's a fun illusion? - 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 is an illusion, I also mean there's something like the self is an illusion, identity is a trick of the light.

- But it's a really fun one. - Yeah. - You think a lot about your identity. - I have occasionally. - Yeah, like you really struggle with it. You're proud of it. I do too. 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 maybe you know, I did a bunch of like way too much jealousy for a while. And at that point, very 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. - Oh. - Like more than you do. It's interesting. - That's fascinating. Wait, could you solve my problems? - Yes, all of them. I did thorough research. Okay, what is consciousness then? I actually wrote that as a quote, what is consciousness? (both laughing) To remind myself.

So like how does that tie in together with free will and identity and all of that? - That's what I thought, what is consciousness is like one of the biggest questions ever. I do think that people often get confused when talking about consciousness 'cause I think people are referring to two separate concepts and often like combining them into one thing.

Like we asked the question, is AI going to be conscious? I think this is kind of the wrong question. 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 people do in your dream is not evidence that they themselves are conscious.

So like signs of consciousness are not proof of consciousness, but there is something that we definitely know, which is like, I currently am conscious, I can tell because, right. Like I'm like just directly observing my experience. And so there's one kind of consciousness, which is I am directly observing my experience and that you cannot replicate it.

Like I cannot observe two experiences. It is necessarily singular and it is necessarily certain. 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 our other thing is conscious. This is something that's replicable. Like you can apply it to multiple people.

It's something that's not certain, like almost definitionally not certain. Like we don't actually know if there is an internal experience. So my argument is that like when people are talking about other things having experience, they're using a different concept than the thing that they're actually looking at when they look at their own experience.

I think they're two different things. - Definitionally not possible. No, if you understand the mechanism of consciousness, you'll be able to measure it probably, right? - Yeah, but what are you measuring? Like I think there's just like a subtle difference. Like when you're asking the question, is this other thing conscious?

- Yeah, the easy thing to measure is like a survey. Does this thing appear conscious? - Yeah. - And then the hard thing is you understand the actual mechanism of how consciousness arises in the physics of the human brain. - Yeah, but you can 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 the way you'd expect them to.

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. (both laughing) - But it sounds like you're driving towards a narrative.

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 in my chaos survey.

So I did a survey, maybe you know the, I just had a people-- - I know everything, do you remember? - You do know, yes, I'm sorry. So as you clearly know. - I'll try not to talk down to you through this conversation 'cause I know. - I'm sorry.

- And I not only know everything, I know how your future looks like. - Really? - And how everything ends, yeah. - So you could probably win all the prediction markets on my life. - Yeah. - Cool. - So we should also mention that you have like prediction markets.

You have like votes. The, 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 owned into the yes. Is there such thing as insider trading on there? 'Cause that goes against the terms of the-- - No, I think insider trading is part of the information.

So it's supposed to be. - Oh, I see. And then I realized it's actually public information that I voted. 'Cause like, I think my face shows up there, it's like, damn it. It's gonna influence-- - Make a fake account. - You could make the fake account. Or I could be lying, right?

- Yeah, that's true. - And dump the stock or whatever. - 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 then I accidentally posted a photo of a poll without thinking. - Oh, but that's like self-sabotage. - Yeah, I accidentally fucked up my own market. - That doesn't, that's like the reverse of insider trading. - Yeah. - What were we talking about? Oh, the women and the men and the difference, the vivid dreams and the markets.

If you go with the market, oh, 'cause I can perfectly predict your future. But then it's not fun. I like the romance of unpredictability. And so I like to, even though I know everything, I like to forget everything. - Very, very Buddhist of you. - Yeah, the river. No man in the river wants whatever, the footsteps, however that goes.

- That's one of my favorite questions, is 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 want. Like as the want arises, it then is like completed as immediately so that you are completely without want.

Like, would you press that button? - 100% not. - Yeah, I didn't think you would. - No, no, no. Because immediately everything stops being fun. The first, it's only fun the first time. - But if you want it to be fun. - But like, what would be my source of fun?

I feel like I would, like on day four, just to get off, I would need to like do like nuclear war 'cause it'll escalate quickly. (both laughing) 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. Everybody. And then you're like, oh, life is meaningless. Like, why does, like you go, I feel like you get, no, I actually, that'd be a really interesting experiment.

Like, what are the limits? Like, are we all capable of becoming psychopaths essentially? Like, I'd like to believe not. There's a very hard limits on that, like in our own mind, like of basic compassion. 'Cause I love being compassionate towards other human beings. And 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. 'Cause 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, you'd basically be God. - God, yeah. But without like, I feel like the idea of God wants to like, keep things like functioning properly. - But then you'd probably, if you wanted to keep them functioning properly, then it would rapidly, like you would never experience a time where you're like, "Oh no, that was a mistake." Because as soon as you, like before you even experienced that the world would shift to match it.

- Oh, interesting. No, I think I would actually, I take it back. I think I would regret the first time I hurt somebody. See, in my visualization was like a video game where everybody's like NPC, really dumb. No, I think the first time I witnessed pain from anybody, that's when I would stop.

And I would probably run into that very quickly. Like even just the hovering, make a person hover, and they're 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.

- 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, it's like with Uber, like it'd be probably more convenient to do certain things.

But even then, like the struggle, like I got a flat tire, so I have to fix that. I kind of, the flat tire makes everything more beautiful. It's like, cool, I could do like a normal manual thing. But also it makes you like appreciate your car, appreciate transportation, appreciate the convenience of transportation, all of it.

- 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, which like I can appreciate that argument, but I don't know.

I'm like, I kind of- - Anyone who uses, sorry to interrupt the word copium in their argumentation, I think is sus. - Is sus. - Yeah. - Is sus my entire argument is now. - No, I'm just kidding. I'm sorry. Go ahead, sorry. I interrupted rudely the flow of thought, but you don't think so?

In part, you disagree with that kind of argument? - Yeah, 'cause I think people have this idea that if you 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 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. If you combine that with a sense of optimism that the future can be better, yeah, that 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-- - Can we have a scoreboard at the end? The amount of questions? - The answer? - Completed successfully versus not? - Like polls. - Yeah. - Can we talk about some practical things? - Sure. - So one of the many amazing things, I think of you as a researcher, but you've also been doing research in the field.

- Yeah, fieldwork. - Fieldwork. - The Jane Goodall of-- (laughing) - Yeah, right. - The sex work. - How did you get, what's the short and the long story of how you got into sex work? - How did I get into sex work? Well, I mean, there's a whole like childhood thing where I was conservatively homeschooled.

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

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

And we're very against this philosophy. So, that combined with a narcissistic personality disorder, dad was pretty rough. - So controlling. - Super controlling, yeah. - And developing and feeding the self-critical aspect of your brain. - Yeah, very much. It was, I was like lazy, I was never gonna accomplish anything in life.

I was gonna move out of the house and realize how good I had it at home, you know, the classic stuff. He was very like logical and smart though. And so he'd also like teach us logic stuff. I remember some of my earliest memories are him like giving me basic logic puzzles.

Like the dog has three legs, you know how many dogs have four legs and I would mess up. But he was an evangelist, basically a Christian evangelist. So we did like Bible study five nights a week. I memorized, I think 800 verses of the Bible by the time before I became an adult.

Yeah, and it was very patriarchal also. So I was expected to grow up and become a housewife, basically, they're like, oh, you can go to college to meet a man and also to get a little bit of education so that you can homeschool your own kids. Like we were explicitly told that women were subordinate to men in regards to like making decisions when you're married.

Our pastor's daughter was not allowed to leave home because she would be outside of the authority of a man. So when she got married, she was allowed to leave 'cause she was never allowed to live in a house where she was not under a hierarchy. So this is like the kind of culture that we live in.

- So there's a hierarchy and there's a gender aspect to the hierarchy. There's men at the top of that hierarchy. - Men at the top. - Okay, but your own psychology, your own mind. So most of that self-critical brain is bad, right? - It's confusing 'cause he told me that I was smart, but also that I would fail.

But I think-- - But not smart enough, right? Or like smart, but not smart enough. - Smart, but like not virtuous or something. - Okay, so there's, okay, right. There's always a flaw. - Yeah, there's always a flaw. I think a lot of it was, a lot of the fucked upness of my brain came from feeling like I didn't have the authority to think 'cause it was so carefully suppressed.

My ability to express or have any sort of power was just absolutely annihilated, systemically. Psychologically, they would do psychological torture mechanisms to make sure that I wasn't actually thinking on my own or being able to deviate from anything anybody ever told me. To the degree that it still ingrained in me, I once was with a friend, we were traveling, and he wanted me to hop a turnstile.

It was very late at night, the train was here, and I could not physically force myself to do it. He was yelling at me, "Come on, do it." I was trying so hard to make my body cross the line, and it was just, it's embedded in my physical being to be unable to do stuff like that, which is really annoying.

- So you're not free to take action in this world? - Yeah, some of them. So that was, I think, the most annoying part of my upbringing. - Would you classify it as suffering? - At the time, yeah, definitely. Well, it's confusing, 'cause when I was a child, it was just painful in the sense that things suck, but it was placed in a meaning framework.

It is good, it is virtuous to submit to your parents and do what they want. If they tell you to say goodbye to your best friend forever and never talk to them again, you go do that without complaining. And so I would go do something like that, and it would suck.

It really was concretely painful, but it was also placed in this narrative where I was fulfilling some sort of greater purpose. And so it's very confusing to refer to it as suffering, because there's so many painful things we do today that are placed in the narrative of a greater purpose that I think I would agree with.

I go get a medical procedure done, and that sucks, but I'm like, "Ah, this is helping me in the long run." But say if I got abducted to an alien planet, and they're like, "By the way, "we're gonna have to do all of those medical procedures "you got done.

"You didn't have to get them done. "Those are totally unnecessary." Then I might get really upset about it. - Yeah, I would trust those aliens, though, 'cause they probably wanna do different medical procedures than I do. - This is true. - 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-- - Proud of yourself for not clicking on that? - 'Cause I was wondering, 'cause I would probably watch it for like 20 minutes, and then I should be doing work. - Oh, I see. - And I'm actually happy, 'cause I get to imagine all the different possibilities that it could have been for that man who had sex with aliens.

- Did you just have a really high 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 more intensely awesome. Because just looking at nature, it makes nature even more beautiful, I think.

But it's already pretty beautiful. I haven't done MDMA. People say that I should. - It's very nice, yeah. - Yeah, anyway. But I'm already, yeah. What did you call it? Resting happiness state? - Yeah, high resting happiness. - Yeah, that's a good way to describe it. But it's not like, some of it is genetic, that you're able to notice the beauty in the world, and some of it is practiced, where you realize focusing on the negative things in life, like unproductively, it just doesn't help your mind flourish.

So you just notice that. I mean, I think people with depression learn that, or probably with trauma, too, is there's certain triggers. Like if you suffer from depression, you have to kind of consciously know there's going to be triggers that will 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, whenever there's shady things happening or shady people, unless I can help, unless I can somehow help, like why focus on it? Yeah. Anyway, back to your upbringing. What was the journey of escaping that?

- I, well, I left home kind of early because my dad and I were not getting along by the time I was a teenager, but I was still Christian for a while. And I lost my faith after I think I moved away and I started having friends that weren't religious or weren't raised in this super conservative environment that I came from.

And I think, this was not conscious at the time, this is my hindsight story, but I believe that being exposed to a culture in which I had the capacity to believe allowed my brain to actually seriously consider the thought that maybe all of this stuff was untrue, that I'd been taught like 6,000 year old earth and evolution is a lie, macroevolution and all of this stuff.

Because when you're immersed in an environment like that, I don't think you actually have a choice. Like your brain has to believe these things 'cause this is a survival thing. Like if you believe this, you'll be, like if you believe the wrong thing, you'll be totally cast out. Even if they're not gonna cast you out, you're gonna be cast out in like communion with others because we were always told that you can't like trust non-believers really.

They don't have a moral compass. They're gonna screw you over. And so I'm like, "Oh, I can't be that. "Like everybody's gonna outcast me internally." So anyway, I don't think I actually had the capacity to seriously question my faith, even though I thought that I was questioning it quite hard until I got into an environment where it was safe to do so.

And once I started being able to make friends who were not religious, I'm like, "Oh, if I lose my faith, "I'm still gonna have some sort of community." And then at that time I went through some questioning and then I lost my faith. - So in that, given your friends, given your situation, you now have the freedom to think essentially.

- Or at least the ability to think is something that was acceptable in the new culture, yeah. - Without, I mean, is there a danger of like adopting the beliefs of the new culture? So like there's some aspect of just being able to think freely, which you weren't able to do when you were growing up, just to think.

Like look at the world and wonder how it works, that kind of thing. - I mean, you work it within certain boundaries. Like there's certain basic assumptions. And as long as you were following those basic assumptions, which is to be fair, it's like kind of what we're doing now.

Like we have, have I gone and done the personal research that like evolution is the thing that's going on? Have I looked at like the age of the stones? No, I haven't, I'm trusting other people. - Yeah. - Which I think is like a fair choice to make given where I'm at right now.

- But you're also assuming like there's causality in the universe, time is real. - Yeah. - That like, that first of all, the thing that your senses are perceiving is real. You're assuming a lot of things. - Yeah, I think like it's better just to become aware of the assumptions you're making, like as opposed to not making those assumptions at all.

Like you have to assume something. And I did, it's very suspicious, right? That I went out of this very conservative culture and now, well, I guess I don't believe things that are super in line with the current culture. I think this is why I feel a little bit safer right now because like when I was Christian, I believed generally Christian things.

But now I believe a bunch of things that like people really hate. Like I get canceled online all the time. I'm like, okay, this is a sign that maybe you're thinking independently if you're like able to think things that are completely at odds with the people around you. And to be fair, this is a little bit easier to do when it's like general culture, but it's much harder to do with your peer group.

Like the people that you trust, your friends, the people whose opinions you respect, 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, if you separate the space of ideas versus some kind of like deeper sense of what this person is, like that they're an interesting and trustworthy and good human being. - Well, like is there somebody that you respect, who you consider significantly smarter than you? And can you imagine believing an idea that you've heard them talk really disdainfully about?

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. (both laughing) And to be fair, I support doing this. Like I try to do this, but I think like subconsciously, I noticed that 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. - That's interesting. I mean, like, 'cause I do see most people I interact with as smarter than me, but I also have this intuitive feeling that dumb people, which I consider myself being, have wisdom.

So like in the disagreement, actually I'm also believe in the power of conversation and in the tension of disagreement. So I think even just disagreeing from a place, from a good place, from a place of like love and respect for each other, I think I just believe in that.

So it's not like individuals you're disagreeing, you're like working towards arriving at some deeper truth together, right? Even if the other person is smarter. Maybe that's how I justify it for myself. I just, I'm also a fan of conversations 'cause 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 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. - Argentina? - Nice. - I like stuff with the body in general, like wrestling or combat. Usually when there's a tension, you have to understand the mechanics of how two bodies move when they're in conflict and dancing is similar.

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

- What's fusion dancing? - That's the video. Fusion dancing is like, if you have any sort of dance background, you can come and you just kind of mix those together. So you can have people doing ballet with people doing ballroom with people doing blues. - Cool. And then there's an interesting dynamic 'cause there's, I don't know, maybe you can correct me, but there's, that's very meta, there's usually a lead and a follow.

I guess most dances have that. - Yeah. - Yeah. But both have a different, like you both have to be quite sensitive to the other human being, but in a different way. Yeah, it's interesting. - Yeah. - So I like both that there is that definitive role, but also like it's not somehow that one is better than the other.

There's an interesting tension between the two. - Yeah. It's cool 'cause it's like a basic rule set that allows for a ton of expression. I've recently started to experiment with reverse leading. It's not like back leading, it's like, I don't know. Like sometimes I'll like lead a move. - So you can lead as a follow.

Oh, you can lead. - What I'm typically following, I'll like occasionally throw in a little lead here and there. - But don't you kind of follow it? Oh, I see. Don't you hint at a lead when you're following? Don't you, just by the dynamics of your movement, you're not perfectly following.

I mean, 'cause 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 an invisible follow. You do move, it's like a.

- Oh, interesting. - I'm not like good at technique. - I didn't know those existed, like a perfect follow. - Oh yeah, perfect. - So you can perfect follow. - I really, I do. I'm not great at technique and sometimes I'll fall over, but like with the following part, I'm very good at it.

- Do you enjoy following? - Yeah, yeah, it's really nice. It's again, like it's a very fast physical puzzle you have to solve. It's like typing. I really like typing. I was inquiring about your keyboard earlier. - Why do you like typing? - 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, how's typing a reaction? - Okay, the sensation that I get when I am typing is the kind of thing that I'm trying to point out.

So maybe reaction time isn't the quite, I don't know what the term is, but whatever that thing is. Like the thing where you have to 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 that generated the words. - 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 'cause it makes it easier to do that. You probably like the struggle, right?

- Well, I mean, it looks hard because you have, it looks like it's high depression on the keys. - No, well, oh, I see. Yes, more than like a laptop keyboard, but like that you don't have to, one of the main things is you don't have to move your fingers at all.

So like, for example, a lot of people, I think they have a backspace up in the top right corner. So if you have to make mistakes, which is like, I mean, that's like so metaphorical. Every mistake you have to like really hurt yourself for 'cause you have to like stretch for the backspace.

- So there's that poetic narrative again. - It's everywhere. - It like emanates in like a lot of your perspective. - Everything, yeah, no. Yeah, I don't, and I see it as a good thing. It's a good, like a romantic element permeates my interpretation of the world, yes. But you left home early.

How did you end up working at a factory? - 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 where, I don't know, like educate, it just like, it meant something. It felt like the people around me that were teaching me, 'cause we had like a mom's group also, like directly cared about what I was learning. And I would be able to ask questions and they would like really respond.

- What's a mom's group? - And it was like a homeschooling group. So we're 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 kinda- 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 share that skill set with everybody else. Which I think was a pretty great setup. Honestly, I think my childhood kinda sucked in a lot of ways, but homeschooling was excellent for me. Mainly because it just had so much free time.

Like I just did 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've read fantasy books and I wrote so much.

And now I'm writing a lot for my blog, so. - What kind of fantasy books? Like sci-fi type stuff? - Like classic, like I read like "Mercedes Lackey" and "The E.E. Knight" and "ArcelorLeguin" and- - I don't know any of this. What is this? What is it? Is it like a romantic thing?

Or is it like, is it romance? - All the fantasy books. Like "Dragons" and "Elves." - Oh, "Dragons." Got it, got it, got it, got it. You didn't mention "Tolkien" for the fantasy. - I read "Tolkien." - Okay. - Yeah. - All right, well, it's beautiful. So you threw all the dragons.

How did you end up in a factory? You tried school. - Yeah, yeah, I tried school. Had to drop out for a couple of months. And then I was like, well, I'm poor. And I was ready to take any job. I was like applying for sewer jobs. And then I got a factory.

I'm like, all right, let's do it. 'Cause my parents, no financial help at all. They're like, you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. So anyway, I went to work at a factory and that sucked ass. Do not recommend. We had to wake up like 4 a.m. 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, 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 too young. And really, really bad at interacting with people in the outside world. Like I was pretty well socialized as a homeschooler with other homeschoolers, but in the outside world, especially with all of the like hierarchy submission stuff beaten into me, like 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 it's Idaho, you know, nothing. And if you're like a 19 year old with no experience in the outside world at all, it was really difficult. And so I had a friend recommend that I try becoming a cam girl.

So that's how it started. - What's, what is camming? What is being a cam girl? What's that called? - Camming is like you talk to the camera live on the computer, like you live stream. It's kind of like Twitch. And then people are typing in the chat, like, "Hi, do this stuff." And then the people can tip you money and then you can do things in response.

Like, "Oh, if you tip me a hundred 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? - MyFreeCams. - MyFreeCams? Is that a popular site? - Yeah, it's pretty popular. - Okay. And how did, what were the next steps?

Like, did you enjoy it? - Oh, well, it was the first time I had actual control over my life. And I made like actual real money. And so I just exploded into it. I thought about it nonstop. I was streaming all the time. I was like coming up with like new creative things.

And the thing is like, I don't know. There's something about public school that I ended up living in a house of cam girls full of other girls who had gone to public school. And I don't know if how much of it's genetic or 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 it sort of like beats out any sort of deviance from you.

- More so than your, 'cause I got the- - Oh, we had moral deviance was beaten out, but like you could do whatever. - Creative deviance was not. - Creative deviance wasn't so much. Like I didn't have other kids making fun of me ever. I don't think I'd ever heard an insult about my physical appearance as a child or teenager once.

- So your father was basically saying you're not good enough was intellectual. - Oh, no, that was like moral failure. - Moral failure. - Yeah, like I was not virtuous. - Oh, wow. - Like in various ways, like you're lazy and mostly the lazy part. I have like ADHD or something.

- Yeah. - And I was not good at it as a kid either. I would totally forget all the time. - Is there some sexual repression aspect to that? Like, you know how they say that there's, it's not just homeschooling, but just like Catholic girls and so on, just because like there's moral, you're forbidden to do certain things.

Like there's a kind of liberating feeling of saying, like basically rediscovering yourself, rediscovering your freedom by doing, just diving head in, head first into sexuality, into your own sexuality. Is there some aspect to 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 2 a.m. 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 I got out a lot of my like intense rebellion through things that people don't typically consider to be rebellious at all. Like I wore a bikini. - Yeah. - Insane. - And just like walked around in it and like, I can do this.

- Yeah, basically. And so like, this was most of that emotional processing for me. And it took me a couple of years from leaving home and all of that conservative culture into doing sex work. In the meantime, I did try having sex with a lot of people, but this was mainly because I didn't know what the norms were.

I didn't really understand. I was just like, okay, take things logically, take things one step at a time. And I'm like, okay, if the whole previous set about 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. I would go around asking random people to have sex with me. - Did you have any peer pressure saying like, that's not good or that is good?

Or like any, did you feel any currents of society in any direction? Or are you independently just thinking like from first principles? - I think, I mean, like I'm not saying it was a totally clean thing. I'm sure that I was experiencing society telling me this is bad, but you have to know, like I wasn't watching normal movies when I was a teen.

Like we watched Christian movies, or the stuff that we watched was filtered. Like I watched the Titanic and I had no idea that Jack and Rose had sex, because it was put through a filtered- - Wait, did they? - Yeah, they went and, you know, he painted her naked.

And there was a scene in a car on the ship. - In a car, on the ship? - Yeah, on the, they had like stored cars in storage and there's a hand. I watched it again later. And I was like, oh my God. - I don't remember the sex scene.

- Well, maybe were you also put through a filtered version? - No, maybe it's the filter I see, like did the couple in the notebook also have sex? 'Cause maybe for romantic movies, I focus on the romance, maybe, right? And the sex scenes are always like weirdly filmed in these, 'cause it's never, I mean, it doesn't, it feels more like romance than sex.

I guess that's the main focus of this, right? - Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. - Yeah, anyway. So they had sex, it's good to know now. - They did, I'm letting you know. - I'll go back and watch now to fact check. - You have your own personal filter on your brain.

- And once you realize that there are some, like the foundation of your beliefs were wrong, then everything might be wrong and you're kind of just doing from first principles. - Yeah, it's like from first principles, basically. And again, like not totally separate from culture, but also I think in general, I also have a predisposition to just be like, you know, fuck what culture tells you, just figure out what's right for you and do it.

And so that mixed with, you know, the figuring things out from first principles. I did eventually figure out that I didn't like having casual sex with just anybody quite as much. So I stopped that, but it took me a while to figure that out. - What's the negative of casual sex?

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

I mean, I didn't know. - Chemistry even outside of sex, just chemistry, like human chemistry, like conversation. - Yeah, just basic. Yeah. - Okay. - I would, it's like kind of cringy, but I would like walk up to guys or send them messages. Like, would you like to have coitus is what I would say.

- You would say coitus. - I'd said that. (both laughing) - I mean, it's kind of cute in a way. - I mean, it's a girl asking you to get laid, so they probably didn't care that much. But anyway, I'm saying that like, I had a lot of rebellion out of my system by the time I started sex work.

- Yeah. - So like for me, like maybe I'm sure it was somehow related 'cause we were extremely sexually repressed growing up. I remember the day I learned I had a vagina, which was absolutely horrifying. Do not recommend figuring out you have another orifice in your body. But like- - Do you wanna share the process of you figuring out that you had a vagina?

- Actually, they told me I had a vagina. - Oh, like intellectually, like there was somebody said, you have a vagina. - You have a vagina, yeah. - And that was horrifying to you. - Yeah, I didn't know I had, 'cause 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 10, and she was like, you have a, there's another? - What? - And you're going to bleed out of it, is what she told me.

You're gonna bleed out of it for a while. And I was like, what the fuck, mom? (both laughing) I didn't know what 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 the kid next to me started giggling.

- Did you ever, did you say fuck again for a while? - No, I think the next time I said, I swore the first time I was 18. Like intentionally said a swear word when I was 18. - Did it feel good? - I was like really nervous. I was like nervous.

- What's your favorite swear word? - I mean, fuck's pretty good. - Yeah, fuck's pretty good. - Yeah. - Okay, so that's camming. I mean, what are the pros and cons of camming and how does OnlyFans map into this? Did you switch to OnlyFans at some point? - I did, yeah.

I cammed for like five or six years and I burned out eventually. - What are the good aspects? What are the bad aspects of camming? - Well, the good aspects were that it was just your own terms, you get to decide. Everything about it is under your control, which I loved at the time.

I was like, I can work when I want, how I want, any sort of expression I experimented. And I was very successful. I was making around $200 an hour, which for that website at the time was like pretty good. I had elaborate routines. I was a mime. I would do like dress up as a mime and then dress up a chair and I would seduce the chair.

- Oh, cool. - Yeah, or like. - So it was, was there an artistic element to it almost? - Yeah, very much. I had like nose. - Did you talk to the chair? Did you get gnomes? - No, I was a mime, you know. - Oh, sorry, right. - Yeah, get it straight, dude.

(laughing) - 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. (laughing) All right, did you ask the chair questions? (laughing) I was a mime, you fucking idiot. Okay, I'm sorry. (laughing) It's true.

But there's gnomes on the, like big gnomes or small gnomes? - Like lawn gnomes. - Lawn gnomes? And you seduce the lawn gnome on the chair, the gnome is sitting on the chair? - There were some, yeah, gnomes on the chair. I did a photo set which I submitted to Reddit where I got abducted.

I was like stripping, taking my clothes off, and then slowly the gnomes surrounded me in the background and dragged me off. And I did this as a photo set. - Consensually? - I mean, I didn't feel consensual in the photos, but. - Okay. - But it was the 11th top post of-- - Consensual, not consensual, the gnomes.

- It was very successful on Reddit, basically. It was the top post on Gone Wild, and the 11th top post of all time on Reddit. - Which I think probably just means it's like, it's artistic, it's interesting, it's edgy, it's funny, so it's really, really well done. - But it was really shocking to me that nobody else was doing anything creative with sex work.

Like for me, it was like breathing. Like you're just doing sex and you're bored, and 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 it was the top not safe for work post on Reddit.

I'm like, well, I didn't even try that hard. And so it's really shocking to me that other women who are doing this sort of thing. - Is that still a little bit of the case? That there's not as much like, 'cause from my sort of outsider perspective, that seems to be still the case.

Like there's not, like as you describe it, that's kind of cool. That's like almost like playing, like having fun with sexuality almost. - Yeah. - But that does require kind of thinking through. It's almost like a creative project, like a photography project or something like that. Almost like a little skit movie.

It's interesting. - It's this vibe of like, how can you like bring like vibrant novelty to whatever you're doing, anything you're doing. And I really like doing this with surveys too. Like I've been doing a lot of standard surveys, but I'm also like experimenting with novel creative artistic surveys.

I'm like, how do you ask a question in a way that's like beautiful and unusual and like a thing that's completely groundbreaking? Like nobody's ever like- - You always make everything so poetic and romantic is disgusting. But yes, I think you have that engine in your head, I guess, of creativity.

Like, yeah, the way you ask questions, it's not trivial to do. 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 kind of inspire them to think and then indirectly get at the truth. It's an art form, honestly. - Yeah, and also in a way where they don't misinterpret the question because it's amazing how 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. 'Cause like you also have to defend against that question being criticized later when you publish about it, all of that. You have to think about it all. - Yeah, 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 question phrasing. 'Cause 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- - You've become a master. - I'm like a master. And then again, 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 framing affects the results.

- So the good and the bad of the camming. So you said good, the, what was it? I forgot. - The freedom. - The freedom. The freedom to also be creative. - Yeah. And the bad is just that it was exhausting. The site that I was on, the way that it's structured is that you're ranking on the site and thus the amount of people that see you and thus the amount of money you 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 gonna make it harder in the future. - Okay, so the rich get richer on 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 wanna 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 'cause you're just like on as hard as you can. And this is why I have a little PTSD around streaming. Like I've considered Twitch streaming and I try a little bit and 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. - Did you feel lonely doing it? I mean, even just streamers feel lonely. - I moved into a house of cam girls. - Did that make it better or worse?

- Better, they're great. I'm still friends with them to this day. - Oh, so it was like a team, almost like we're in this kind of together? - Yeah, so we would like work together and stream together and swap our clothes and stuff. It was great. - Swap ideas too?

- Swap ideas, yeah. - And actually on a small tangent, maybe a big tangent, what do you think, 'cause it's a recent controversy of Andrew Tate and that he, I think in the past, ran a camming business and he's being accused of sex trafficking. What do you think, like from your own experience, what do you understand about Andrew Tate?

Is he a good person, is he a bad person? Is there something shady about his practices or not? - I wish I could answer, but I don't know. I haven't looked into it at all. I've heard people talking about it, I just haven't bothered to go into it. It is well known that, like when I was doing it back in the day, the Eastern European models had something different going on though.

It was like a trope about, you know, there's the Eastern European models and then there's everybody else. - They're what, it's like darker or something like that? - Like they do studios and they're lower quality. - Which means what? - Studios are, you go into like a warehouse and then they have set up a little, like things that replicate bedrooms, 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. If you're like watching enough, it kind of starts to, you notice the patterns. - So like the standards are lower there and the ethical boundaries are a little looser.

- Yeah. - Of how people are treated. - I'd never heard anything about the ethical side. I just knew that it was like lower quality. Like the girls seemed like they were less into it and like cared less. - How does this all interplay with like sex trafficking? So consensual versus non-consensual.

- I would be shocked if there were never any non-consensual camming. I mean, I guess it's like, if it were going to happen, I wouldn't 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 when I cammed a lot.

- Sure, so some of that is stereotypes 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? But 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 know who's done this? And you tell me like, oh, do you know anybody who's a doctor? Do you know anybody who has had cancer or like smokes? - Personally, you mean?

- Yeah, personally, just do you know anybody? - Yeah. - And then if you ask about a whole bunch of things, you can calibrate the responses. So like, 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 we can do this with sex trafficking. Of course, people are going to be like, well, sex trafficking is not visible. People, you don't know those. Like, well, then we can ask about other non-visible things that other people don't know that we do have data for.

Like homelessness or being in jail, or like if you have been like sexually assaulted, a lot of people don't like talking about if they've been sexually assaulted. So you can do a whole bunch of things that are like similarly suppressed in knowledge in some way that we do actually have rates for, and then compare that to the graph when we ask people, do you know anybody who's in sex traffic?

- Yeah. - So again, this is not perfect. I'm not saying this is ideal. - But you can infer things. You can infer things about that graph. - But I'm saying we don't have good ways of measuring sex trafficking right now. Anyway, I did a big deep dive into the research that we have on sex trafficking in the Western world, and the actual, like I read the studies and like reports about the studies, and it's really pitiful.

We have terrible data. 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. And so I'm like, okay, so the method I'm proposing, obviously it's not perfect, but like the bar is so low at this point.

- Well, I wonder also if there's ways to design a survey that gets 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 the toxic relationship is truly toxic, sometimes your mind is fucked with, right? You don't even know what's true. So it's interesting if you can design surveys- - For people who are actively sex trafficked? - 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, 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, really powerful to know that you're not crazy for thinking this is a bad relationship. - Right, or I think 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 it were normal, I would say that they are right. Like, if you live in a culture where everybody is abusing their people in their relationships, then yeah, I mean, what are you gonna do?

Break up and then just be alone for the rest of your life? Most people don't wanna do that. - But now comparing yourself to the average is good to know. - Know what your options are. - At least understand it, because being normal is not always, like this conversation is not always great.

Meaning this conversation is anything but normal. Okay, and that was a tangent on a tangent about a niche passion, which is really fascinating that you're playing with those kinds of ideas of survey design. But back to camming, so what were the cons? What were the negatives of camming? - Oh, like the exhaustion of just like live, like the high pressure thing.

That was probably the worst thing. - So not, what about the interaction with different people? Like the dynamics of the interaction with the fans, I guess. - I had a pretty great time. I mean, it obviously wasn't perfect 'cause it's the internet, but I don't know. 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, grow up in a harass, you have to be paranoid in the club. People are like, they're always huffing on you and you're just like, Jesus Christ, get away, man. And I do not have this experience. Or like, maybe I do, but I'm interpreting it differently, I don't know.

The thing is, I don't know what causes me to have such a different experience from these women that are like really, feel really hostile towards men. And my guess is 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 I'm-- - That women are doing? - 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.

- Well, what about the flip side? Maybe you're not sensitive to the creepy stare. - Yeah, that also might be true. - The dude who's like, as I'm dressing you with his eyes, that like in a creepy way, that you're just not, you don't like worry about it. Or you're not touched, like the fear of that, the anxiety of that, the unpleasantness of that just doesn't hit you.

- I think that's also at least part of it, maybe all of it. - Yeah. - Yeah, I think there's some evidence for it. I think often guys will do a thing to me, and I'm just like, that's a thing, cool. I don't have any negative response whatsoever. - That's call back to the tire.

It's a thing, this is nice. - Yeah. - That happened. It was good to know that can happen. - I once had a homeless guy ask me to come back to my place, baby, and I was like, this is fun. - Yeah. - I'm like, do you want me to, I love asking men, 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, yeah, I would like to have sex, and I'll be like, thanks for asking, but I'm not interested in having sex with you. How do you have a good day? And then I walk away.

And that's great, I don't know. I have no issues with that interaction, but 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 a threatening feel. - No. - Like with a homeless guy.

- No, I've never had that happen, though. But I think there's just something, I think I'm doing something, like again, this is kind of accidental. I just am like this always, and I think I just happen to be like this at people, and they don't expect it. They don't expect me to be really nice while explicitly asking them what their intentions are.

Like directly putting my finger on the thing, like, oh, you're trying to have sex with me, and then also not judging them for it. I think this throws people off a little bit so they don't get aggressive. They're like, oh, you're autistic or something. - Even the cloak of anonymity on the internet, you weren't getting the toxicity.

- Yeah, I just think I'm just not reactive, and or maybe I'm giving off, I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Maybe it's both, maybe it's a feedback loop. So I just, I had a pretty good experience. I know not everybody did. Definitely people reported having antagonistic experiences, but when I was scamming, I generally really liked.

People were really nice to me, had a great time, made friends. - So you also did OnlyFans, as you mentioned, and I read on a website, so this is very investigative reporting, that on some months, you've made over $100,000 on OnlyFans. How did that feel? - Great, really great.

I mean, like, well, actually, because so much of your upbringing, you didn't have money, you had to struggle with the fact of your job and so on, maybe a good person to ask, can money buy happiness? - Well, I mean, I think you get like a resting set point of happiness, regardless of how much money you have, but money can buy being less stressed, I would say.

- Is there a lot of variation in the basic rest happiness for humans, in general? Like, is that a good thing to think about? - I mean, they've done some studies, but again, I'm not sure, I haven't actually read the studies, so maybe they didn't replicate, where they measured people before and after winning a bunch of money to see if their happiness was higher.

I think by some measures it was, and by some it wasn't. - No, I mean, like, basically, almost genetically, so nature and nurture, but is there, let's say after you're 18, is there like some stable level of happiness that all the environmental genetic factors combine to create so that everything that life throws at you has to face that happiness?

Like you mentioned earlier that I seem to be happy with a lot of stuff. So maybe I have a certain level, do other people have a lower level? Some people have higher level? - Yeah, definitely. - Like, is that a useful, or is that a useful model of human beings?

Or is it all ups and downs? Like, is it all, like, there's no stable-- - Well, 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 have an integral under the, the area under 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, 'cause I was like finding the good in everything. - Oh, yeah? - I'd be like, something bad would happen, oh, my.

- So you were a happy kid? - I was a really happy kid, yeah. - Even 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. - So you were a stoic?

- Yeah. - With another book I'm reading next week, tune in, Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations." (both laughing) All right, all right, camming, 100K, so it felt good. So it's crazy, though, right? You can just, like, take clothes off in a creative way with some gnomes and make 100,000? - Yeah, I mean, there was a lot more to it than that, but yeah.

- What was it, what's the process? - I mean, it's marketing. Like, so with only, with my free cams, I was unusual in that I decided to do, outside of the website marketing, I would, like, post on Reddit, right? This was very unusual at the time, but, like, only fans are structured such that they have almost no internal discovery whatsoever.

So if you want people to come to your page, you have to go out onto external websites and advertise for yourself directly. Very different model. And so this is something I had already been doing and already had practiced in, 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'd already been on Twitter for years, you know, like, posting actively. So I already had, like, presences on all these other platforms that really helped with the conversion.

- Reddit and Twitter? - Reddit, Twitter, FetLife, Instagram, TikTok. - And you were still advertising creatively? - So, yeah. - 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 mime using a, one arm through a jacket.

And so the jacket looked like it was, (both laughing) 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. Beast and sit on a session of brainstorming different ideas.

I just envision 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 edgy. (Dana laughing) - I wish, I think the team would have been a lot more fun. But no, it's just me. Like, I had an apartment that looked, like, kind of like this, you know?

You just sit alone, and you're like, "Well, that would be a good idea." And I'd seen, you just collect ideas over time, right? Like, I'd seen somebody doing a version of the, like, this animated hand act, like, when I was a kid. And it just always stuck in my head.

And, like, one day I was like, "I bet I could do that." And then when I was 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, really, like, quite a viral hit.

- Is there stuff, like you mentioned, too 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 does even beyond that, R?

- It's not family-friendly. It is X. Like, the one that I'm describing to you at some point, like, you can see my boob. - So, is a boob is X? - A boob is, I guess. - I thought R. I think you could show a boob in PG-13. - Yeah, maybe X is, like, if you got some sort of rhythmic motion going on.

- Maybe that sound, but the rhythmic motion not. You can have one or the other, but you can't have both. You have both. - That's when we hit the X, yeah. - Okay. - 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, hot girl being horny. - See, we'll talk about fetish, fetishes. I think my Overton window on what is vanilla is expanding quickly after following your work. But, yeah, what's that? - I actually have done a lot of studies on what is vanilla. Like, I've done a couple different surveys where I ask people, like, how taboo is this thing?

And I have, like, a rating from least to most taboo. - By the way, I don't like, I don't appreciate the beauty of vanilla ice cream. - You don't? It is really good, though. - You eat vanilla ice cream? - I eat vanilla ice cream, yeah. - I think there's just so many more options.

It's like the absence of creativity. - I mean, if you put in, like, some chocolate chips or something. - Yeah, they already made it more interesting. It's a start. Okay, so what's vanilla? And why do guys like vanilla? So hot girl doing hot girl things? What, like, on dressing and then having sex?

- The thing that I found was most successful were frames where the man was framed as passive and the woman as active. Or, like, for example, like, oh, you know, we got assigned to the same bunk at the breeding school or something. Or, like, oh, we're the last people on earth, right?

Or, like, oh, no, you know, I desperately need somebody to, like, cure me with this disease and I need semen. So it's like, in any scenario where the guy 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? - 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 and, like, prefer, like, having to work.

But this is the minority. Like, if you're trying to do, make 100K a month and you're trying to appeal to the widest group of people, the most effective advertising, you're not gonna be making the most money by being, like, particularly submissive. - So on the camming side, that's your, unlike, like, escorting or just personal relationships, you're trying to, you have an audience.

You have, like, a theater full of people. - Like, with live camming? - Yeah, with live camming. - Yeah, it's like a live theater. - Does that freak you out, there's just a bunch of people watching? - How do you feel right now? - I don't know they're watching, 'cause it's not live.

- Yeah, that's true, it's not live. - 'Cause they're not watching. - But, 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, sometimes I imagine there's a third person. - Like God?

- Usually, no, no, not God, just, I usually imagine either a guy or a girl or a couple just sitting there for some reason, like, usually on the beach and usually high, or on some kind of, like, mushrooms, just, like, listening passively, just kind of looking at the sunset, that's what I imagine.

- Oh, that's really good. - Yeah. - I think that'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, 'cause 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, 'cause 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. It seems-- - It's like you're going through the same kind of thought process at the same time. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a really beautiful way to put it. So it's like, you're melding, your thinking is following the same line. Some of our 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 podcast is good, like, if it's listening to, like, a Dan Carlin podcast, like, about history, that you're, like, on a journey together. Eh, there's an intimacy to that.

Anyway. But I've learned that couples do that, you know? #relationshipghost, 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.

- It's not... Okay, let's just go there. So, 'cause you've put together an application of, like, people to have casual sex with you, I think, you've had that. - And also dating, yeah. - And also dating and relationship. I'd love to, so what is in that application? 'Cause, like, you know, I'm sure there's quite a lot of people that would like to date you or to sleep with you, but finding the person, I mean, it depends what your goals, I guess relationship would be an open relationship for you?

- Yes. - Right, like, for me, I guess it's more intensely selective because it's, like, a monogamous relationship and a committed one. Like, I'm swinging for the, - Yeah. - Like, for, like, long-term. I'm not, like, weirdly obsessed with long-term, but it's, like, 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 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 a random population of hot women, but all of them definitely are monogamous and are looking for a long-term committed relationship.

- Yeah. - Like, which room would you rather go into? Like, if you're looking for a mate. - Yeah, well, but see, I guess my preferences are more, that's a really strong point, but my preferences represent the majority, probably, right? 'Cause don't most women want monogamous relationships? - Yeah.

- So, like, it's, I'm okay with either option. 'Cause, like, statistically speaking. - But I feel like we can apply it to, like, a bunch of other things. Yeah, and this is just a problem if you have, like, high, if you have a high volume to filter through and, 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 on dates with them. - But the filter is so anti-romantic. Like, what? - This is true. This is not the romantic narrative that you are very prone to.

- Like, if I feel like, how did you two meet? - Well, she passed the three filters I set up. And, I mean, but it'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, teams, engineers, and so on. But with engineers, you're okay losing truly special engineers because you have to filter 'cause there's, like, thousands of applications. Like, it feels like, it feels like a worry that you would miss the thing that actually, 'cause so much of it is chemistry. So much of it is, like, the magic, you know?

- But the thing is, you're missing it anyway. - Yeah, you're missing it. - It's, oh, you can just run it, and then, in addition, try some of those people. And then go on the dates that you were going to go on with anyway, regardless. It's just the thing that helps, like, pull someone out of the crowd.

Like this, I dated a guy from my survey. I'd ran the survey. I assigned point values to each of the questions. 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, if from memory, or we can look it up, do you remember what kind of questions were on the survey? - I asked a couple different categories. I asked about, like, basic life stuff.

So, like, what kind of relationships, like, monogamy versus polyamory. Like, do you want kids? You know, like, where you want to live. Like, basic things that you need to be compatible. And then I asked, like, sexual compatibility, like, various preferences. And then I had a section about, like, personality.

Like, what are, I try to ask questions that would do the most effective filtering. So, like, what are ways that, like, I can't give people what they need that, like, maybe they really want? Like, I don't really, I'm not very outdoorsy. It was 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? And if they remarked yes, I was like, okay, we probably, I should probably downgrade the results. - Man, but doesn't polyamory make that really difficult? 'Cause can't they find somebody for the outdoorsy stuff?

- Yeah, they could. I mean, this isn't, like, but if you're going to have somebody, it's, like, nicer to have them be more compatible than less. - But you were a little bit, like, in terms of sexual compatibility, you were able to, like, yourself 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 giant pool of different preferences, you have, like, a subset that's clearly defined for you? Okay, like, like, dominant/submissive.

- Yeah, power dynamics stuff. - Power dynamics stuff. - Yeah. - Okay, and not just sexual, but in relationship, too. Like, was that in the survey? - I don't like power dynamics in relationships. I did ask a lot-- - No, 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. - 'Cause 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 survey to understand compatibility. Wouldn't power dynamics inside of relationships that naturally emerge often be part of the question?

Or is that hard to question because it naturally emerges and you can't really-- - Well, the thing is, like, a lot of questions sort of overlap in demographic. And if you're making a survey, you wanna have the minimum possible questions that give the maximum possible, like, filtering information. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

But the purpose of that survey wasn't to do a good research study. It was to select one subject that you could take. - So that's part of what is good. Like, you want to most efficiently filter out. 'Cause 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 1,000 men take the surveys. - Don't you want men that would be patient enough and dedicated enough to-- - Yeah, but, like, what if you want, like, a high-powered man who's, like, on his lunch break, right? So it's like-- - Much like a billionaire who's too busy just flipping through.

- Yeah. - And the guy that I did was, he took the survey, he was waiting for the pizza to come out of the oven. And so it was important that it was short. And so you want to be efficient. - Is it a metaphor or literally pizza coming out of the oven?

- He was literally waiting for pizza, and he saw the thing, he's like, "I guess I'll just fill out the survey really fast," and it changed our lives. - Wow, so romantic. - For me, this is my kind of romance. I'm really into it. But you can 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 a traditional man works and the job and the woman stays home and raises the kids kind of relationship. 'Cause poly people just generally don't do that. And so if I'm asking about polyamory, it sort of kind of already covers the thing.

And so if I have a whole bunch of questions, I can kind of triangulate a bunch of implicit kinds of questions that I haven't directly asked about. So this is why I didn't ask directly about power dynamics, because from the rest of the questions that are in my survey, I can pretty accurately predict whether or not you're gonna be interested in power dynamics.

- But I'm afraid, yeah, I'm trying to think as you're talking, I get it. That's really interesting that you did that. Also, maybe not for the effectiveness of finding a partner, but for just exploring the actual process of human sexuality, of like the search, this complicated optimization process we're all engaging in on the landscape of happiness that seems to be this not even a differentiable function.

It's a giant nonlinear mess. Okay, but like for me, I don't think I would be able to design that survey. I would like bias it too strongly. Like I would probably prefer women that have read Dostoevsky or something like that. Like that would be a filter for me, right?

But like, that's a horrible filter. 'Cause 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 in some other dimension that you might completely miss.

But you were like, 'cause 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 weigh 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, versus 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 that has.

- But you don't know if they're identical, yes, yes. But like you can't through survey get the identical. Like you don't know. - Sure, but you can kind of like do a whole bunch of weight. So like the person that I ended up going on a date with, he did not answer 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 survey? But like, sorry, paragraph, like. - No, you ought to avoid that if you're dealing with large amounts of data. - No, why not?

'Cause you have to fill, oh, oh, interesting, interesting. Like I'm different. 'Cause like first of all, you do keyword searches. Second of all, you do, you can do machine learning models that like, first of all, you can 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, I've looked at like for hiring, I've looked at like thousands of applications really quickly. You can really, the human brain is really interesting, especially like if you visually highlight certain information for yourself, like keywords, or again, with machine learning models, like sentiment, you can highlight different parts that will catch your eye better than not.

And I can go through just a huge number of applications. - Are you telling me I can use, if I learn machine learning, I can process dating survey applications better? - Yes, no, like textual. - Yeah, like I can like have them write things in. Like this is like a new way of, that's a really good incentive.

I think that would, so it's a really nice aspect of text input, like long form text input, multiple long form text input based on an interestingly phrased question is you get to learn how to make a better survey. I think you would appreciate that. Like you start to see how they're actually interacting with these questions.

Like I asked certain questions, like just to see how people think, is it better to work smart or better to work hard? Or is it ever okay to betray a close friend? Like I'll ask like questions like this that don't really have a right answer, but I just wanna see how they think.

Or is truth more important than loyalty? - Yeah. - And I get their long form answer. - You get like, and you get to see their reasoning process. - Yeah, yeah, like what they, it reveals so much, not just about the person, but about the kind of questions I should be asking that have nothing to do with truth or loyalty.

Like how to get a good engineer with like very specific questions. But I think it's really useful to get text input. - I have done text input usually with beta surveys. So I usually do beta surveys before I do the real survey. - What's a beta survey? - 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 on it quite as heavily.

And if I introduced machine learning, I think it'd be a lot more efficient. - I love that you're also doing like, you're writing scripts and stuff. Like you're doing some like statistical analysis. Are you using Python also? - Yeah, I had to learn Python for this just a couple months ago.

- Which is the best way to learn Python. And the best reason to learn machine learning is to solve actual like problems. - I can't be motivated. I'm just not motivated to learn something unless there's an actual curiosity I have and I have to learn it and to solve it.

I was trying to avoid learning coding for so long, but eventually it was my dataset became too large. I couldn't work with it with anything else. So, Python it is. - You know what's also an interesting dataset 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? I'm just, I'm stuttering now because- - Download the Twitter? You download Twitter? No, there's a lot of Twitter. So, Twitter is a social network with a bunch of people. They're interacting a lot.

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

- You could probably use like calibrators to figure out like exactly what questions you should be asking. - Yeah, and also highlight interesting anecdotal things where 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 'cause you're like, 'cause 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 own social network.

Like if you post something that's controversial that gets a large amount of attention, you can't clearly visualize everything that's going on. - Yeah. - Like it's very, it's a blurry, amorphous, like you're just kind of looking through the fog at different replies and it kind of, yeah, so to be able to-- - You see with the API, they have like graphs of networks?

- They have the data for the graphs, yeah. So you can reconstruct to yourself. Yeah. And then you have different levels of access in terms of how many queries you can do. - That is really cool. - And now, because there's like Elon, there's a lot of sort of revolutionary stuff happening at Twitter.

I think you could literally sort of push for innovation there like there's aggressive innovation happening. So in terms of requesting stuff for the API, you could do all that kind of stuff. I think Twitter's 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, it's 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 misinterpretation of statements is involved in text-based with some anonymity thrown in.

Like, I feel like there's a lot of study that can be done there. - I mean, Twitter's probably not great at it, right, as it stands. - No. - 'Cause it's like necessarily short. You can quote, treat things out of context, et cetera. - But we should understand that, right?

- Yeah. - At a large scale, you should be able to study that kind of thing. Oh yeah, what was your casual sex survey? - I actually haven't looked at it in a while. I think I just asked people about a whole bunch of fetishes, 'cause you don't wanna be obvious about yours because then people are gonna hijack it to try to tell you that they like what you like.

So you wanna 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. - Like an application? 'Cause I think you tweeted saying, I'm thinking of just showing up to San Francisco and saying, is anybody open for casual sex?

- Yeah. - Something like this? Am I misremembering? - Maybe escorting, I'm not sure. - Oh, for escorting, sorry, sorry, sorry, 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 wrote about escorting in your blog post.

Escorting was good for me. How did you get into escorting? - I was working at like a, I quit camming 'cause I was burned out and I was like trying to work at a friend's startup and it was hard for me. It's difficult for me to work on projects that are not my projects.

And so I was like, hey, fuck it. Like I wanna go back to sex work, I wanna make more money, but I don't wanna cam anymore 'cause I'm burned out. So I'm like, well, let's try, I had a friend who was an escort. I'm like, let's try that. And so we had a call, she like outlined the basics for me and then I put up some ads and then started working.

- What's the basics of escorting? How does that work? - If you wanna get started escorting, so just in case you have a career change. We're gonna want you to get some nice photos. So you probably have those. - First of all, you assumed I haven't done it before.

How rude. - Oh, have you? - Yeah, well, you know, recreation I would like to do professionally, I suppose. So if I wanted to do it, if I really wanna step up my game, how would I do it? - Yeah, well, you got the whole tutorial. Recreational escorting is just, - Okay, okay.

- No, I'm meaning like, you know, like selling products on Etsy versus doing a startup, you know? - Well, I mean, escorting is kind of all just selling products on Etsy. - No, like selling a lot of products on Etsy. - Like high volume. He's like dabbled. - Yeah, like, yeah, yeah.

- Small handcrafted artisan. - It's small handcrafted dolls. Yeah. - Escorting. - Versus mass manufacture. - Okay, if you wanna mass manufacture your escorting. - I just feel like I haven't been getting, you know, I've been undervaluing my services and I would like to really step up. - I think you could really just like grease some marketing gears and be trustworthy.

- Yeah, I mean, so some of this is marketing. So like how, I guess I wanna like know, is it similar to camming in that way? Like, is it you're basically advertising yourself and you're, like the marketing, all the creativity that you mentioned before, all of that? - Yeah, I found escorting to be pretty easy because escorting is not like highly competitive.

For example, camming is highly competitive because like the 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 out an incredible strategy for making money, it's like two seconds before that strategy perlithoits 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. So I think there's much less like evolution of marketing 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 and like made a fantastic website and I knew how to do the ads right. - What was the finding people, I guess it's also like finding the right kind of customer or the right kind of client. - I got like in a lot of trouble for this recently in the sex worker sphere, because I said that if you raise prices, you're more likely to encounter clients that aren't going to abuse you.

Like it's safer. 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 gonna be paying her a lot of money. You're probably gonna be like, you're the kind of person likely who's going to haggle a lot 'cause you don't respect her.

But anyway, that aside, it's a little pet peeve for me. Yeah, I just, I charged, started charging 800 an hour and then pretty rapidly raised it to 1200. And then a while after that, raised it to 1400. - Well, the interesting thing you mentioned in my extensive research, you used to do 1200 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 successive hour. - That's interesting. That's like, I mean, to me, that's really interesting. Like the first, like why? It's like a lot in the first hour, yeah.

- Oh, it's just because, it depends on how you want to incentivize like the amount of hours. So if you have to pay a lot for the first hour, but not very much for the successive, you're more likely to buy 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 they're more likely to like take you to dinner and get to know you first. And I just enjoy that a lot more. I enjoy like knowing who I'm gonna have sex with. Like a date, you know? - Yeah, so it incentivize the long form date dynamic versus like not.

That's really interesting. That's really interesting. How does money change the dynamic? Just basic human dynamic of interacting for free versus for money. Like I think about that a lot. 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's the difference? Is there a difference really or no? - A bit, yeah. So I've actually, it depends a lot. So when I was doing it full time, it was my only source of income. It changed quite a lot because I was really incentivized to have repeat customers.

So I'm like, okay, my primary interaction with you is to like have you hire me again. I'll do whatever that takes to make that happen. And so if I have to like laugh at jokes that I don't find funny or like be like more adoring of your penis than I actually genuinely feel, like that's what I'm going to express.

And obviously it's to some degree like titrated, you know, like it's unpleasant to force yourself to like something that you don't. So like I would actually like not see clients again that I didn't want to. But to some degree there was a sort of self-suppression going on, which I think is the way it works in any sort of customer service job.

Like you want the customer to leave happy. So you just make sure that you are happy the whole time and you're like, ah, really enjoying the other person. But so recently when I've like kind of dabbled in it since baking money through other means, where I don't need the money, it's more like a fun side thing that like, 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 just, 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? 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 a kink.

And so it's like, so I'm using it sort of to replace casual sex now. Like occasionally I'm like, gosh, you know, like it's paying me a little bit to erase the anxiety and I'll like have a 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, buys a coffee at a Starbucks. It's like, all right. - Right, but it has to be plausible. Like you have to like trick my brain into like having it actually be incentivizing for me. - Two coffees? Like a cappuccino or something? - Yeah, like the homeless man bought me a coffee and then I sucked his dick.

Like, that's not cool. - All right, so I-- - No shade to homeless men, by the way. Like I've been friends with a lot of them. I'm just using like some sort of stereotype of-- - Yeah. (laughs) 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 within this sort of frame, I am still like, I'm accepting money, but still much more expressive of my actual preferences. So like before when I would start escorting full-time, I was suppressive. And now I'm like, you know, fuck it.

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 'cause you're not pretending. - Exactly. - Like laughing at a joke or something like that. That sounds terrible. Sounds like-- - I mean, it's-- - But it's also like social.

I mean, I guess 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 niceties. Like laughing at somebody's joke when it's not funny feels like anti-intimacy.

- Yeah, but I laugh at so many jokes automatically. It's interesting 'cause 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?

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 nature. Yeah. - Yeah, it was very rare that I actually felt like I was going against my nature. - What about the market of how much to charge?

So you're 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 are the competitors? Like if this-- - Oh yeah. - Like what do you, are you distinctly, 'cause you said it's a lot of, it's a bit more shrouded in mystery.

Like it's more confidential. Like do you have some transparency to the market, what the competitors are? - I did a survey of Escort. It's only like 130. I'm trying to remember, and the median was around like $400, $300 I think an hour. - Oh wow. - Something like that with a very long tail at the top end.

I'm trying to remember what the, I also asked the amount where I could calculate the amount they made per month. I think it was like six or $7,000 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 gave a really shitty hand job. All right. - But usually the rates are around, like if you want a median Escort in a big city, it's usually four to $600. - A city, so the, sorry, four to 600? - In a big city, but like smaller cities, you charge, the rates go lower.

- That's so fascinating. What's like the most you've ever seen somebody charge? - I think I am. - You're like the. - But at this point it's because I'm post work. Like I can just put in a state number. - Does like, does the fact that you're sort of like a sexuality expert, like a researcher and so on, like your mind is fascinating as well, and you're a bit of a celebrity, does that play into it?

- Yeah. - Or do you feel the celebrity now? Like when you're with people? - Yeah, absolutely. Usually if people are interested in hanging out with me, it's because of that. But that's different. Like I think besides the fun part, like this is a kink as opposed to this is a job, like with this as a job, usually the high end is closer to 2000 an hour, like the very high end.

- Have clients ever fallen in love with you? - I think so, yeah. I think it happens to me much less than most other people due to like the thing that I think we were talking about before. - Which is what? - Where like, you know, you give off vibes, maybe like subconscious vibes.

But they have fallen in love, but not as often. - I think something about my signaling indicates that people should not fall in love with me 'cause I don't think it happens very much. And it happens a lot with other women that I know. But I have occasionally had, the thing is it's hard for me because I try to be as vulnerable as I can in a connection with a client.

And like I do really like some of them. I still remember some of them very fondly, and I'm like, I hope they're doing well. And some of them are really profound. Like one guy saw me because he found out he was dying of cancer. And he was like, I don't wanna die without seeing someone.

I'm like, Jesus Christ, that's such a, I don't know, I'm very touched by many of the people that I saw. - So there's like deep intimacy there. - Yeah, I know that it's brief and I know that it's like kind of weird, but like there's like a real glimpse into somebody's soul when you get to be intimate.

And I think this is especially true for men because a lot of 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 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 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? - No, but I think that's unique to me because I like being alone a lot. Even with my friends who I like dearly, I'm like happy not seeing them 'cause I don't like making facial expressions very much.

But I do miss some of my clients. - Wait, sorry. What does making facial expression have to do with saying goodbye? - Well, if you are not with somebody in person, you don't have to make facial expressions anymore. - Oh, you can just think about them. - Yeah, you can just sit there, totally blank face, and then have all of the emotions that you want.

- Oh, you're telling me. - Do you have this thing too? - It's not a thing, but like you're on camera. So like I feel feelings, but people usually want you, social interaction is such that you probably want me to show feelings on my face. - Yeah, like that, good job.

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

- I'm kind of surprised to hear that because when you talked about finding 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 gonna fuck up the beauty that's there. If I'm sort of being fragile and vulnerable for a moment. One of the things I'm afraid of, I get so much love from people that listen or even like reach out, like you said through the survey, like women and so on.

I'm afraid that, yeah, you admire me because you don't know me, but you won't admire me once you know me. So 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 as like, there's no, you're fine, you're good.

But it's still, this is the part of the brain that you can't just shut off. - 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 worldview I have and why I 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?

'Cause sexuality, not sexuality, but even romantic relationships are really important to happiness, they're really important to me. And I'm not sure like the conception of love I have, romantic love, is like fully made rigorous. So especially when I'm talking to you, that thinks very rigorously about a lot of these topics, I'm not sure if I've thought about them a lot.

I feel them. I interact with the world in the space of feelings. Maybe I'm almost afraid to be very rigorous with these kinds of thoughts. And so I think 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, I think you're a really brilliant person. And a lot of folks I know, know and admire your work as well. And so like for me not to be part of highlighting that brilliance would be a failure definitely.

- Like because then other people might feel like, like notice the discrepancy or something? - Yeah, but no, no, no, that's not other people, just my personal feeling. And the other is like jokes, 'cause 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 a weird surface because like, you know, even I already feel bad about making a joke for 50 bucks for a handjob that's crappy by me.

But I think sometimes you just gotta go for it. I went for it. (laughing) It kind of fell flat on his face, but that's the thing of the conversation. - For what it's worth, I think there's like this fear where it's like, 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, which I don't think this is true at all.

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, not to like suppress it or tell it it shouldn't be there. - What do you think is more important to like, to just life, reason versus emotion?

Like not life, to what makes us human, I guess. - My romantic narrative answer to this, which is like not rigorous at all is curiosity. - Curiosity. - Yeah. - What is curiosity? That's such a middle ground. Curiosity is like both emotion and reason, right? So it's like this pull, 'cause reason is the tool you use to figure out the puzzle.

And then curiosity is the pull towards the puzzle. - Yeah, I don't like worldviews that pit like emotion and rationality as opposite each other. They feel like beautiful parts of like a cohesive whole. 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 wanna 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 that'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, oh, I'm not allowed to reason about this or I'm not allowed to feel about that. And that feels harsh to me. And I think curiosity is the solution. Like if you're simply just calmly curious, oh, why do I feel like that? 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, 'cause 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 itself. - In the conversation itself. - Yeah. - First off, what is that? Do you find that to be useful? 'Cause it's very interesting. It feels raw and honest. The danger of it seems like you escape the actual experience of it though. So that's the trade-off.

You make it intellectual, right? - Is it though, intellectual to do that? I mean, maybe it is, I don't mean to. - No, maybe that's the wrong word. You can make it intellectual. You can still continue the same flavor 'cause you're not fully disengaging from the conversation. You're just creating an extra metal layer.

- Yeah. I think exploring the emotional reaction to what's going on in the moment. - Yeah. Yeah, in some way it's actually making it stronger. Like, or enriching it, like making it more, giving it more context, giving it deeper understanding. - I think there's like a way of going meta that is a flinch move.

Like, oh, I noticed that we're doing this thing. I'm gonna name it. And I think the thing that I described earlier, like when the homeless guy approached me and asked, can you go home with me? And I was like, oh, are you trying to have sex with me right now?

Like what I was doing was like a meta move. Like you're stepping outside and like, okay, what is the purpose of this conversation? And we explicitly identify it. And in that case, I think that is sort of like a flinch move. 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 I absolutely think this is a possible thing. But I usually try to be aware of that in myself. And it depends on the purpose of what's going on. - That guy, 'cause that is actually like a chest move you did.

You had a purpose for that chest move, but the flirtation is on. Like he could have like done a better move that would make you like curious, like, huh. Like, interesting, 'cause you had an agenda with that, but he could have changed your mind. Like he could have with a few words, 'cause you just created extra layers, extra entry points.

- If he'd gotten more meta, he might've been like, okay, well, now I am gonna sleep with you. - Exactly. And see, there is something, yeah, that's aids into the chemistry of the conversation when you do that meta. I really enjoy it. It's like a rare, I forget, did you and I, 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, 'cause I've met you before somewhere. I don't know if we were, or you were just in- - We've been at a couple of parties together. - Maybe it was just like a bunch of people that kind of play with the same, or like a comfortable- - There's circling.

It's just a practice explicitly dedicated towards that. - What's circling? - Circling is like- - That might be the thing that you- - Yeah, I think, I think we know, we have some mutual circlers in our- - Circlers? - In our networks here. - Okay, what's circling? I don't remember what's circling.

- I'm gonna describe it horribly, 'cause it's like one of those things that's difficult to describe unless you experience it, like kind of like drugs. But it's something like you sit around, and there's like kind of guidelines to the conversation where you talk about the present moment, and you're like honest about your experiences as much as you can be.

And if you don't wanna be honest, then you say, "I don't wanna be honest." And it's your commitment to connection. So you're here to actually connect with the other person, understand them, and be understood. You're not supposed to project. So if you have an analysis about the other person, you own it.

You're like, "I'm experiencing you as this," and then you check, "Is it true?" Or like- - Are you supposed to be almost converting it towards the thing you're thinking, like constantly? Are you supposed to say what you're thinking? - 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 circlers, really high-skill circle, and I feel like I'm on drugs when that happens. It's very rare to see. - Does it feel honest somehow? - Yeah, very honest. 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 I want you to think I'm cool.

I want everybody listening to me to think I'm cool, but I'm also having some sort of delight at being able to express in this way, and some admiration for how you set up and built this thing that I can be a part of. And all of these things are sort of in my body right now as this sort of vibrating high thing.

- I remember in the party setting, 'cause I've had to talk to a few people, I felt like it was going sexual very quickly. - Okay, I don't know if you remember this, but the first time I met you, I didn't know who you were. I just heard, I knew I'd heard your name.

Like you just, your name, and I'm like, I think I've heard people discuss that. And I was in the middle of a very sexual conversation with another woman. - Oh, you were? - Yeah, I was. And you just like turned around and left very shortly afterwards. And I thought it was very- - Oh, was I listening in on the conversation or something like that?

- I think 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. You were like standing there and listening. - Yeah, I don't think I would have left the conversation.

So it's funny, you probably interpret it in a different way. - I interpret it as you like not wanting to listen to like graphic sexual stuff. - Was it like super graphic? - I don't know. I was asking her about, I was doing it. 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. 'Cause 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. (both laughing) I'm not afraid of sexuality or something like that.

I just have certain values in terms of like monogamy and so on. But I think sexuality is really beautiful. Yeah. I don't think, yeah, I can't imagine myself walking away from that conversation. - Somebody must have like called you or something. 'Cause I didn't remember exactly how it worked.

I just remember thinking later on. - Or maybe I thought I was intruding. - Oh, maybe. 'Cause I was kind of drunk, so. - Yeah, no, I probably was very drunk too. (Dana laughing) I would like to actually have like footage of that conversation so we can actually interpret what actually happened because it was probably, I mean, human interactions are funny like that.

They can happen for all kinds of reasons. - Have you ever fallen in love with a client? - No, I mean like in tiny ways, like micro loves. - 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? What is love, Ayla? - Yeah, I know. - No? - It's a fantastic question. I think, so love is one of those words that refers to like a billion different concepts. And I think we maybe should just taboo the term to have a better understanding of what we're referring to.

'Cause there's things like feeling intense attachment. There's something feeling like soulfully aligned. There's like sexual attraction. There's like excitement. - Are you talking to me and saying we should taboo the term love in this conversation? How dare you? No, okay. Romantic love. - To make it flourish into lots of other new definitions.

- Okay, thank you. - For expanding love. - It sounds like you're censoring the most important word. This is like 1984 all over again. Okay, also on the book reading list. No, okay. Listen, no, romantic love, like a deep intimacy for somebody else, like 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 tricky. So like, what's the difference between a deep friendship and a friendship that also has a sexual component? - I remember being very confused about that when I did a lot of LSD. I was like, what? The 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, the same basic thing is there. Like you're seeing someone for who they are. - Do you think you can be, if you're heterosexual, do you think you could be really deeply close with friends with a guy and not have sexual relationships with him?

- I assume it's possible. Like if anything is ever possible, then probably, yeah. - Everything is possible. Time travel is possible. Quantum mechanics makes every, traveling faster than the speed of light is possible, according to general relativity. Everything's possible. So you're saying there's a chance. Dumb and Dumber has taught me that everything is fucking possible.

- 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 anything's open. - Did you just avoid answering the love thing?

Okay. - I'd like to say about love. I just feel like to be precise. - Yeah, okay. Let's be precisely and precise and continue. - Oops, sorry, that's my phone. - This 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. 'Cause it's like, some people say the word love and the thing that they're thinking of is like, oh, the butterfly is like the sparkle thing that I get in my stomach when I think about my loved one. But I study relationships over time.

I just really, like I did a survey about it and that sparkle goes away within like two to four years. But people still report loving their partner after that. So I'm like, okay, like when you say the word love, like what the fuck are we talking about? - Yeah.

- I just wanna get on the same page. - Okay. So what are the different, so the butterflies, boy, I'd like to push back on two to four years on the butterflies, but okay. - I mean, statistically, not everybody. - Butterflies don't give a fuck about statistics. You ever heard of the flap of a butterfly wing causing like nuclear war?

How do you describe that with your statistics? Okay, so butterflies, that's the basic infatuation, the chemistry of the initial interactions, sure. But a deep, meaningful connection, like that feels like sexuality is a component of that. Like the kind of intimacy that's only possible when you're also sexual with another human being.

On top of that, you have the butterfly. And on top of that, you have the friendship. And on top of that, you have like, what is that? That's a sandwich. - That's the love sandwich. - The love sandwich. - Okay, I'm down to call it a love sandwich. - Okay, we'll just call it sandwich, L-S.

Okay, what role does that play in the human condition? - He asked about the human condition. It's an interesting phrase. - Yeah. - I'm like, this is like not a phrase that's common in my own thinking. - Sure, human condition is a good summary. What do you think? What do you feel when I say human condition?

- I think I ask very different kinds of questions than you. - Sure, yeah. - Which is interesting. I've been trying to like figure out what kind of brain that you have is like creating like this category of question. Which is why I was like saying, there's something about poetic narrative in there.

Because it's very like aesthetic. I think you've asked much more aesthetic questions than I do. - I don't even know what the word aesthetic means, really. - Like artistic. - Artistic. Well, I mean, I know what aesthetic means, but I also don't know what it means. It's kind of like the word love.

Aesthetic perspective. - Yeah, well, but part of it in conversation, you don't want to ask a question that has an answer fully. Always. - Like do you have an example of a question that has- - What's the meaning of, oh, has an answer. - Yeah, like one that you think is like, ah, that's like a bad question because it has an answer.

- How many sexual partners you had in the last year? - Oh my God. That's such a, okay, I feel like we just like got to some sort of crux about like the kinds of questions that we like to answer. - Sure. - 'Cause I would love that question.

- Okay, right. - To ask enough people. - All right, but does that really tell the story of what you've felt over the past year? - That's true, but then I could just tell you. Okay, so by when you're saying the kinds of questions that you like, the ones that don't have an answer, by not an answer, you mean like not an answer where you can know that you're done telling it.

Is that 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 the destination. Contention. - It's working, it's working. Okay, so what is the role of the love sandwich in the human condition?

- Okay, that's fine. I take that question, but it's a stupid question. - You don't have to, I'm ready to chat. - Do you like love? Do you personally like love? - Do you like love? Yeah, I mean, I think like there's a part of me that feels like I have unconditional love for all things.

Like when you're talking about the glass being beautiful, I felt that. That feels like it rang something, that like I have a similar resonance in me for that. - If I were to circle right now, I feel like you're avoiding the love question, the love sandwich question. What's your own personal feeling towards loving another human being versus having sex with another human being?

- Love is like one of the concepts that dissolved for me a long time ago, so I have difficulty directly answering it. But I have the experience. When you described 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 would describe sharing a love sandwich with them. - Yeah. - Okay. So how does, I mean, that's great to hear. So you're not, are you afraid of love? - No, not at all. - So can you describe to me polyamory? What is it?

What does it mean? 'Cause there's like different terms. You have a nice blog post about it. - Yeah, I have a personal definition of it, which I readily admit is not shared by a lot of people. But to me, the definition of polyamory is simply not forbidding your partner from pursuing intimacy with others.

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

- Well, the interesting thing you said is that doesn't mean they have to do it. They just have the freedom to do it. - Yeah, it's the freedom that matters to me. Which is, I mean, it's called the polyamory post. You have so many good blog posts. People should just go look at your, read your writing.

'Cause 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, yeah, it's refreshing to be there. Like with a lot of stuff I disagree with, but I feel like if I disagree with it, you'll be very open arguing it and kind of thinking through it.

There's just the honesty that radiates from the whole thing. Anyway, so yeah, it's, I mean, it would be interesting to kind of explore polyamory, like how it works. What are the different versions? What is the, what does that freedom look like? 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, I host orgies sometimes.

So I'll host an orgy and then I'll go have sex with people at the orgy. And then that'll be good for the novelty for a while. - Can I ask you about orgies? - Yeah. - So how many people are at an orgy? What's like a standard, we're having a Sunday picnic and it's an orgy.

What's like a number of people at an orgy? - Oh, I've only recently started hosting orgies, but I have been to a lot of orgies. 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 gender distribution usually?

- 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 orgies where consent is assumed by default when you enter. And of course you can revoke it any time or go over a whole bunch of rules to make sure it's very safe.

You like have wristbands. So nobody's actually doing anything they don't want to. - Wristbands, nice. - Yeah, and 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.

- Yeah, so at the orgies, it's like you, by entering, if you wear a wristband, 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, 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 safe word, like red, don't, and then you have to stop. 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.

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

I was like in agony. I was like crying. I'm like, I can't make myself say this stupid word right now. - Foliage. - So after that, I was like, red, doesn't matter. I don't care. It's not funny. We're just going with very simple red. - Very practical. How does an orgy compare sexually to like a one-on-one sexual experience?

Like what, is it same ballpark or is it fundamentally different? - I mean, the experience of both orgies and one-on-one sex can be like 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.

- Oh, okay, cool. - And sometimes it's like a 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. 'Cause usually there's kind of different little clusters of people having their experience. I once 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's a good, what does it take to manage? Do you have a main partner if you're being polyamorous and you're dating multiple people?

Is there usually a main one for you personally? - For me personally, kind of, yes. Like right now I kind of, two that aren't, like I see roughly around, for me it's kind of just descriptive. Like if I just happen to be seeing you a lot more and I confide in you more than you, like you're descriptively my primary partner.

But I don't usually have rules to protect that. I'm down with rules to protect it if you're like, you're trying to build something. Like if I buy a house together, I'd be like, okay, we need to like, whatever our relationship is, we have to do the thing, we're both paying the rent for the house or the mortgage or whatever.

A lot of people do have primaries, so it's very common to have 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 that you have to do?

Do you usually try to be super honest about it? - 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. 'Cause often I would just sort of have like a small twitch in myself, like I don't know if I like that.

But I'd be like, okay, this is really minor, it's probably nothing. And if I talk about it, it's gonna make it into a thing. And I just don't wanna make it into a thing, you know? And I've come to realize that it's worth making it into a thing. Because I can't predict at the time if 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, I immediately communicate it. 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 it's also interesting that you kind of recommend when there's a little bit of jealousy 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 I've learned over time, it's just important to just say the things. - 'Cause 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. 'Cause you're basically, your brain blows stuff out of proportion. - Yeah, and it's good to like be going through it with a partner. Like I have a partner right now who's like dating this other girl and he like really likes her and he 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 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 wanna be able to express that I'm upset by something they're doing without it being taken as a demand that they change their behavior. - Right, so he has to be able to skillfully handle that interaction.

- He has to be like, cool, all right, you're jealous. Like I'm not gonna freak out about it. I'm not gonna change my behavior. I'm just gonna be with you in that. We're gonna sit in it together. - I mean, is some of that just insecurity that he should also just comfort, like basically alleviate your insecurity, bring you back to like a rational objective evaluation?

- My relationships, I love it when people do not reassure me. I like not being comforted quite a lot. And so usually the people I date don't. I'm very gravitating. Like it's one of the things people do to make me fall in love with them is if I say something really like terrible and they're just like, "Do not give me any comfort whatsoever." Like that's where my heart gets captured.

So I typically am in relationships where I'm like, hi man, I'm so jealous. And they just like do not reassure me at all. And that's good 'cause it doesn't give me an out. Like I have to deal with it myself. Like maybe it is true that the other woman is better than me.

Like maybe that is an actual possible reality. And I don't wanna 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 say that, that the other woman is better than you? - Or that they prefer.

- If they feel that? - Yeah, I mean, they should say it according to themselves. Like, oh, I prefer, like I have a better time with her than I have with you, then I would wanna know that, yeah. - And even though that might be painful to hear. - Yes.

That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. - That which can be destroyed by the truth. What is that, that your ego or something like that? - Yeah, my ego. (laughs) - So your ego just generally grows and you like the destruction of it. - Yeah, it's like really active.

- So the process of truth. - It's not like a fun experience. Like I've had like guys be like, well, you're not as pretty as I'd like. I'm just like, oh, you know, stabbed to the heart. - But then also like give me your number after. - Yeah. (laughs) - Man, that's kind of beautiful.

What do you think of monogamous relationships? Like philosophically, can you maybe steal a man or make the case for monogamous relationships? Can you understand the pros and cons of monogamous relationships? - Yeah, I mean, it depends on how you, if you're like, hey, you can do whatever you want, but you and I are gonna spend the rest, like we just, you're 80 years old and like, oh, we spent 60 years in a marriage together.

We've never had sex with anybody else. I think that's like awesome. If that's what you want, that's great. I have like a little bit more problems with people doing that while also forcing their partner not to misbehave if they want to. Like if you're like, oh, we only made it this far in a monogamous relationship because I forced my partner not to pursue an intimacy that she wanted to.

Then I feel like a little like more like, ah, I don't know if that's great. - How do you know if it's a real want for an intimacy? Like checking out a attractive person while being inside a monogamous relationship. Yeah, how do you score that? Is that bad that the person cannot pursue those feelings?

- I mean, it depends if they want to. Like I often find people attractive if 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 'cause I'm gonna be so hurt if you pursue somebody else.

So I'm not gonna pursue anybody else. That seems fine to me. But I also extend that. Like if somebody is like, I don't want you to have any friends, I'm gonna feel really insecure if you, and like, okay, like if you want to enter that agreement, like I feel the same way.

Like I think you should have the right to do it if this is what you want. But I also kind of, I feel like a little weird about restricting your partner from doing things, you know? - Oh, but I guess if you're honest about it and you just put it on the table, I don't want you to have any friends.

I want you to sit in a box. - Yeah, I think a lot- - I guess if you're like really on the, but then 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. But I think so many relationships are like monogamous by default.

Like people, it's not actually right for them, but they just get into it because culture just doesn't give them another option. - And they don't even ask themselves the question, is this right for me? - Right, which like I'm a weird ass person who thinks a lot of weird shit, but I didn't even think about polyamorous an option before I had heard that it existed.

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 'cause to me monogamy, it's not, it doesn't make sense for it to be a default. Like to me, monogamy goes against human nature.

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 my head, like this partnership that's for a long time together is a kind of, you know, like, I don't know, like true romance.

You know that movie? It's a really fucking good movie. - I haven't seen it, no. - Okay, there's just like, you're together against the world. 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 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, 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 are kind of the main arrangements. - Sure. But I mean, just like human nature. - Yeah, people are attracted to other people and they wanna, especially in longer term relationships. I tracked, in my relationship survey, I tracked the amount of cheating over time in a relationship.

Like how long have you been in this relationship and have you cheated? - What's the results of that? - Men cheat a lot. Women too, but men cheat about 30% more than women do. I also asked men and women to predict if they think their partner has cheated. And people's predictions were about the same.

So people roughly predicted that their male or female like spouse hadn't cheated about the same rate, but men cheated much more than women. - So who was more correct in their prediction though? - So men were more correct in their prediction predicting women. And women were 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, it's difficult to only want one person.

But to be fair, I think monogamy and commitment are very different. I think you'd be incredibly, I haven't 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. And that works great for them.

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

Like it's difficult for me to imagine a polyamorous relationship for me that would work. 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 I haven't eaten pizza in like 20 years 'cause I know I just don't, there's a bunch of stuff.

I just eat low carb 'cause 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 you explore every once in a while. Yeah, and you kind of figure that out. But at the same time, you're humbled by like, even talking to you or looking at your data.

Like sexuality is a fascinating topic because it seems that we're very, like we were talking about, very afraid of this topic. Like to be really honest with ourselves about it. The whole like academic research is afraid of it, but it's so core to who we are as human beings.

I gotta ask you about this. I can't believe it took this long to get there. But one of your many fascinating surveys is on fetishes. You wrote a blog post about it, probably several 'cause it's like a huge data set. - Still in progress, yeah. - So the one I'm referring to is on popularity and tabooness of various fetishes.

So what are some interesting takeaways? I gotta pull up this graph 'cause it's freaking epic. - Yes, this is a big graph and it has tabooness as one axis and popularity as the other. - Okay, for people who are just listening, on the X-axis is tabooness. - Yeah. - Asked to rate how taboo society viewed 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 tabooness and high popularity. There's a correlation here. I think you said it's 0.69. - Yeah. - It's just not, it's just hilarious. Is it still 0.69? Are you tracking that?

- I haven't looked since I did this, yeah. - So like the less taboo stuff is more likely to be popular and the more taboo stuff is less likely to be popular. And on the missionary position, fingering vagina, blowjobs, light spanking, cuddling. Cuddling is more taboo than missionary? - I think people are conceiving, if you're like, I'm really sexually aroused by cuddling specifically.

- Sure. - Then you're like, that's a little more weird than getting specifically aroused by blowjobs. You expect people to be aroused by blowjobs. - So this was like getting at like, as a fetish versus like an activity. - Yeah, as a specific, as a 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 color based on more female preference versus male preference. Like jaw lines is more female preference. Being submissive is more female preference, light bondage, more female.

There's a lot of interesting ones. There's so much, okay. But then on the far side of that, I mean, it gets pretty dark. But even all along the way, like extreme bondage, being at 50 tabooness, pegging, pain, giving pain, sexual frustration, I suppose, as a kink. 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 into fetishes to compile the list. - Are there some 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. 'Cause like I didn't wanna overlap fetishes, so I had to kind of look into them.

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?

- Sure, and like I'm seeing like at the far end, rodents, like different types of incest, branding, so there's like pain. - And then-- - Like wound fucking. - Sex with animals, I guess, dogs, horses. Receiving oral sex from an animal is high taboo-ness and pretty high popularity. - Surprisingly high popularity.

I was really shocked by that one. I wouldn't triple check that number 'cause I'm like, no way, this is about to people are reporting interest. - Do you know which animal? Is there-- - No, I didn't specify. I asked like which animals are erotic and then I separately asked like how erotic is it to receive oral sex from your preferred animal?

- This is so fascinating. So I would, 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. 'Cause it's so, your fetishes are so meaningful to each individual person. - Yeah, that's what I love about this work.

It's like nobody cares about someone's fetishes. You never get to express them and if you have a more unusual fetish, people usually judge you. So it's like this tiny little pocket of this shame thing but it's so cool to me that human brains could be oriented in such a way, like wound fucking.

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. - 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? Is it yelled at by a man or a woman?

Stuff like that. Like, are you 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. - 500,000 people.

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

- You have so many fascinating blog posts. You had a blog post, I think, on the age of fetish onset. - Yeah. - And like you really nicely organized it by age, like reproduction as a fetish, I guess pregnancy. - Yeah. - At age of 17, about 16.9. Toys and like anal beads is 15.5.

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

So later onset means you're gonna be like less into the fetish, but if it hits earlier, it's like-- - But I wonder if it passes, like is there like-- - Yeah, I didn't measure old fetishes at all. Like no longer, right? You used to, but it's no longer there, interesting.

- One interesting thing that I don't understand is that non-cis people seem to have more correlation between childhood experiences and fetishes. So I was saying that there's no correlation between childhood experiences and fetishes. This holds for cis people. But trans people, especially trans men, there's a correlation. It doesn't mean they have absolutely higher rates of abuse or fetishes or anything, but I'm just saying that 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 a theory and see if you can find, like you keep that theory in mind, like a hypothesis of why it would be, and then you ask further questions to try to elaborate.

So can you maybe talk about the methodology of how you got the 500,000? Like what, like how did this come to be? - This might, yeah, this is, I might go into way too much detail about this 'cause I thought about this so much. 'Cause I'm like, the question is how do you get a lot of people to take a big survey?

The longer the survey is, the lower the response rate. And I really wanted to do one big comprehensive survey so I could like check a whole bunch of correlations within it 'cause it's more annoying and it's harder to get a lot of people to retake similar surveys to each other at a time.

So I'm like, okay, I need to convince a very large number of people to take a lot of these questions. And even building the questions, that was really hard because I'm like, okay, I need a comprehensive amount of fetishes. I can't ask everybody to answer for every single niche fetish.

I'm like, do you like ball gags? Do you like funnel gags? Do you like wife shrew gags or whatever? I'm like, you can't do that. Nobody's gonna finish that survey. - Okay, fine. (laughing) I'm not gonna ask questions. What's a wife shrew, but okay. - I'm not doing the, I'm trying to refer to like, there's like a thing that like-- - Different types of gags.

- Something like that. - Okay. - Yeah, different, so I'm like, so what I need to do is I need to ask people a question. Like, are you into like bondage? And if you say yes, then I'll go ask you all the bondage questions. - Ah, got it. - Right, but then this seems simple, but then it's just exploded because I'm like, how do I categorize these fetishes?

There's like, if you're into sploshing, which is like, you like sitting in cakes, you like getting in mud, basically like kind of messy, sensory, like, is this a disgust thing? Is it a humiliation thing? Is it a sensory thing? Like, which category, anyway. So it took me like two months of just agonizing over each fetish, 'cause you don't wanna miss a fetish.

You don't wanna like have a really important thing that you accidentally put in a disgust category when it actually belongs in the humiliation category. You know? - Well, let me think about that. 'Cause like, you're still catching it, you're just miscategorizing it. - Right, 'cause if you're into sploshing, and you're like, this is clearly a humiliation thing, so you say, yes, I'm into humiliation stuff, and then I don't ask you about sploshing, then I'm missing a whole data set of people because I've falsely categorized your question.

- You're going to miss stuff, you're just picking what's less and less important to miss. - Well, I'm trying to get people into the right question set. - Sure. - 'Cause 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. - And so that was extremely difficult if I'm, when I'm dealing with, I think it was like 850 fetishes.

So I did a couple things to spot check. I like, I did a couple questions where I asked, 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. But, 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 use that data so that when you fill out the survey it's extremely comprehensive and you get data about exactly how taboo your interests are.

And then you get a score at the end and I give 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, kinky character to your score.

- So that makes it like more fun, like gamifies it a little bit. And you can, like, you can brag about like how- - To be able to share it with others. And a lot of the characters were like goofy, like, like there's SpongeBob and like Hitler's on there and you know, South Park characters.

- What is, what kink does Hitler have? - I think he's like, he's around Marilyn Monroe, which is like a slightly above average kinkyness. - Oh, sorry. I thought there was like a two dimensional space somehow. So this is like a literally from zero to- - How kinky, yeah.

- So Hitler is about as a Marilyn Monroe. Who is the most, what's the character for like- - Willy Wonka. - Is the most kinky? - Was the most kinky, yeah. I think like maybe Captain America was the least kinky or something or Gandhi. - Meanwhile, but that's another conversation.

Oh boy. - Yeah, so it went viral on TikTok basically 'cause people were like, what? I got this insane character. And then the sample size exploded from 40,000 to 500,000. - Wow, so like all it took is that kind of incentive? Or did you like at first have to pay people for this?

- No, it was just that incentive. - And what about the demographic of the different people that took it? - Mostly younger, so usually early twenties, predominantly female, like 70% female. - 70% female. - Pretty like, wraps on a TikTok demographics pretty well. - Oh, okay, I got it.

That's interesting. Young people are probably better for this kind of survey because there's probably a culture that's a little bit more honest about their sexuality. - Yeah, most likely. I think people are incentivized to be honest when they're getting a true identity response out of it. Like 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 truth of the answers are, then you actually- - There's possibly you also don't want to know the truth. - Yeah, this is true. - But on average, hopefully that doesn't. I mean, these are really difficult.

Like what, is there some interesting little quirks that people should know 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 graph that you were talking about is a binary. So it's like, 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 it's very extreme interest and the other is like vague and not very intense. So that's not reflected.

I also like probably didn't represent the visual part right. Like it might not be intuitive, but- - So you chose a log scale, but it was kind of spreads things out to make it more clear. - 'Cause the linear, it was just so clustered at the bottom. You couldn't really separate it out.

So there's obviously a selection effects as 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, 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, I'm doing it slowly because there's so, I ask about so many questions, it's like not very anonymized. So I'm really seeing the small sections of the data at a time. - Yeah. Have you published in like journals and stuff? - No, I haven't.

- Do you have any interest in that or is your approach? - I'm like, I'm conflicted about it. Like it sounds cool because then I could be like, ha ha, I'm publishing a journal. But then people who are yelling about me who don't know anything about statistics on Twitter, like that 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 do. Like I wanna make science accessible. Like anybody can just go look and learn about the basics of like doing a survey or figuring out how to interpret information.

And doing a published journal feels like I'm betraying my cause a little bit. - That's often behind a paywall. Yeah, it goes against the, I mean, I think you not publishing in a journal is doing a big public service. - Aw, I think it's the first time I've heard that.

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

Like prestige shouldn't matter at all. Maybe for like biological experiments, like virology or something like that, it's good to be from a major lab that has a reputation for like going through all the procedures, like you know you can trust. But here, like you're dealing with a giant mess of humanity.

Like it's beautiful to be transparent, to be raw, to be exploring it together with everybody. Yeah, it's really beautiful. - I think people like have a lot of incentive to doubt the results. Like a lot of the research I'm doing is to like cis and trans people. Like we don't have any data about transsexuality, like not very good at least.

And I'm really curious, I don't really have an agenda about it. I think like being trans is cool if you wanna 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, be fucking nice and human about it, I don't know.

But when I'm talking about the thing, like my conclusions are that like transsexuality is really unique. It's not like cis or cis woman or man sexuality at all. And to me, this is super cool, but like a lot of people, this is very politicized right now. Like the data into like transsexual preferences, like it's so loaded, which is really sad because I am very accepting of weird sexuality.

Like if you're into a weird thing, I'm like, good for you, this is super cool. Like let's figure out how to make it so that you can explore the thing you're into without any stigma. But because there's so much stigma that like if you find that one demographic is into 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 really politically touchy subject here. - Yeah, but you do it in a way that's not, 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 data is gonna tell me.

And I'm like, I pre-commit like, okay, I could say A, B, or C, and I'm like down to publish any of those findings. - So you've put together an ask whole cart deck with a lot of awesome questions to ask at a party or anywhere, honestly, including on the podcast.

Let me ask you one from that deck. Is sex really about power? So what's the role of power dynamics in sex? Is that everything you understand? Like from the survey, in terms of what people are turned on by, you've talked about like the preferences that women versus men have for like submissiveness and dominance.

And we've already talked about it a little bit, but like it's expressed more strongly. Yeah, 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 fetishes to begin with, because I think I came across some data.

I did like a brief survey where roughly around 60% of women report being submissive and 40% of men report being dominant. And this was really fascinating to me. I'm like, well, why is there this gap? Like, why do we not? 'Cause 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 being like, oh, this hot man, you know, the men are like ravaging and stuff. I'm like, shouldn't this be in our genes? But there's a gap. - What's the gap? - The gap is the dominant submissive gap.

More women are submissive than there are dominant men. - Oh, wait, really? - Yeah, it's a pretty significant gap. And this is held up, 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, the meaning like they express like a desire to be dominant in a relationship? - Yeah, or like 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 represents truth? - My guess is-- - What's wrong with men? - So this is, I think there's some reflection on like FetLife.

So FetLife is 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 posts 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. (laughing) I didn't know this. That's interesting. - Yeah. - What does it reflect about modern society? Is it like, is that, 'cause you know, there's these trends about like decreased masculinity or that kind of stuff.

Does that reflect, is that similar? - I'm trying not to hold onto one theory 'cause I'm not sure. One is possible like decreasing testosterone levels. Testosterone seems to be, I have a little bit of other research, but I'm still checking it out. That seems to indicate that higher testosterone, you're more likely to be dominant.

So if we're seeing decreased testosterone levels across society, we should be seeing a greater gap. - This is so fascinating. Once again, this is like a super interesting way to look at humanity. 'Cause 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 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. - Maybe.

I think the data analysis afterwards is very different from like the survey design itself. So I'm still very amateur at the data analysis. - Yeah, but you can always catch up on that. I guess the data analysis does enable you to, does teach you how to ask better questions in order to understand.

- Yes, it goes back and forth. Like as I'm looking at the data, it informs the way I wanna phrase questions the next time. - So women are more, at least in private, able to say that they would like to be submissive and men, even in private, are not, disproportionately saying they're not willing to be dominant.

- Yeah. So it's possible. - What the fuck? - If this is caused by decreasing testosterone levels, then this means that we're probably having less satisfying sex overall. Like we're becoming less and less sexually compatible as time goes on. To be fair, I'm not sure that it is connected to testosterone levels.

Like it's possible that this is just like a genetic thing. Like the gay uncle theory, like the idea is like, maybe gay people evolved to like be sort of taking themselves out of the gene pool 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 monkeys revolving at the edge of the pack.

It's unclear. - Oh, it's a method of survival? Like, so you stay out of the competition? - Yeah, and I'm like a little sus about these kinds of evo psych theories. So I'm not, I'm just saying it because it's like-- - These are different ideas that are possible, yeah, okay.

- So yeah, I'm not saying that it's definitely testosterone, there's other things. It's also possible that it's culture. People are definitely gonna bring that up. Based on my survey though, it doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. Like I asked about like how much pressure was put on you to be, you know, agentee in your childhood.

Like a lot of questions around this kind of thing and no correlation at all to dominance. - Well, related to sexuality, I'm very uncomfortable right now, but nevertheless-- - Plow forward. - In a dominant fashion. The blog post titled "Rape Spectrum Survey Results." What are the key takeaways from that survey?

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

- So you actually like little narratives that they get to 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 names for all of them. - And 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 rape by the people that took the survey and the bottom more likely. The likeliest is a stranger forcibly assaults someone who screams and fights the entire time.

That gets 100. 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 as a rape? - Extremely low. - Okay. - So it's like not zero, but it's just very close to it.

- Having sex with an enthusiastic sex worker is a 12. That's the lowest one. And there's a few, I'll just mention a few that are lower, like at that level. Have sex to make a partner happy in a relationship, lying about wealth, hobbies in order to get laid. Person with Down syndrome eagerly has sex with a neurotypical, not revealing being transgender.

Until after sex and so on. I think you mentioned that there's some, like that not revealing being transgender until after sex, there's some differences amongst what, men and women or something like that? - I think that was the one that men found more offensive than women. I'm trying to, I wrote it a while ago.

- I mean, this is nuanced and difficult, right? 'Cause I think in a lot of public discourse, the word rape is pretty binary. - Yeah, it's like either is or is not rape. - And so you had a friend where it was 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. 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. And then it totally recontextualizes the thing that you've experienced.

And I think that this is clunky with the word rape because either you were raped or you're not. You either like have this entire context, like thrust upon you or you don't. And we're really not nuanced 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 an experience, like even, or to a relationship, like saying a toxic relationship.

- Yeah. - That can completely destroy your perception of that relationship. - Yeah, absolutely. I remember this was the case with my childhood. Like I talked about being very abusive, but I've talked about how like there was a good amount of meaning there so that I didn't process it as abusive at the time.

I remember after I got out of that house in that culture, people would tell me, oh, your childhood was really abusive. And I was really confused by that because it's a total recontextualization of that narrative. It's like the things that I went through were not, 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.

And even though the concrete things that happened to me did not change, like no facts shifted, the fact that like the interpretation of the facts shifted caused me quite a bit of distress for a long time. I was like, oh my God, I'm a traumatized, like abused person. Like I went through an abusive childhood and it was really hard for me, made it worse.

Like it's crazy the power that terms have. - I think we didn't talk about this, but how did you begin to overcome the trauma of your childhood? You mentioned LSD, so drugs are part of it. Like what was the mental journey of that? - I was doing LSD quite a lot when I was 21, 22.

- What's it like, by the way? I've never done LSD, 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, it's like similar. I forgot that you did shrooms. Yeah, okay, then you probably know. You know, like the kind of shift that you have from the sober to shrooms is roughly similar. It's like more clear, I think. Shrooms is more like embodied, but LSD is much more intellectual for me.

It strikes different people differently. I prefer shrooms a lot. I'm sorry, LSD, I prefer LSD a lot. - Why is it not popularly taken? Like there seems to be a negative connotation to LSD 'cause 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, so actually a long time ago, I did a survey on shrooms versus LSD. So I asked people and people had slightly stronger experiences on LSD overall, I remember, but rated the experiences about is equally good. But I think people like shrooms 'cause 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 think people get kind of incoherent on LSD in a way that feels really alienating.

Like I consider my LSD use very heavy to be one of the best decisions I ever made in my life, but I definitely was incoherent for a lot of it. Like talking about like we're all one consciousness, everything is love, man. You know, and people are like-- - Why 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 LSD drive on the, for a bunch of episodes. Yeah, I get this for sure. Oh, well, it's not just about love, but it's about like talking in that way about reality, about the world.

Yeah, sure. - It's like overfitting. The narratives that you make about 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. And sometimes this happens and then you're like, "Oh, I need to like invent something to fill in the gaps." So you're like, "Okay, I think that maybe 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.

Whereas other people 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 any beliefs about time in its absence. You're just simply experiencing the absence of the concept of time.

And so I don't have a lot of data to back this up in my anecdotal experience 'cause I've tripped out a lot of people. People either tend to belief construct or they don't. And people who do not belief construct seem to get more out of their LSD trips. So if you can let a belief go without building anything in its absence, it's much more beneficial for you.

And I think I just, for some reason, happen to have some brain that's constructed where I don't get a belief construction at all. - So that's really interesting that belief construction is negative. Is it necessarily negative? Can you elaborate on that a little bit? - I mean belief construction in a way that's like, not like playing with frames, but rather committing to a different frame.

So I like being able to play with ideas and be like, let's look at it this way or that way. That's awesome. But if you're like, okay, you know what? I took LSD and now I absolutely believe the cops are outside. And you're like, dude, no, you're just like, you can't shift out of that, right?

Your brain 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. 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 construct and you're escaping your previous beliefs, aren't you doing like just some, you're picking up a bigger frame in some way. - Yeah, I mean, you're taking your beliefs as object as opposed to being subject to them.

- Ah, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. And some of that, I guess, is genetic and there's these categories 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 believing these insane things. And people from the outside see that and they're like, oh my God, this person took LSD and became stupid.

It's very scary. - What's frame control? 'Cause that has been at the core of your trauma, at the core of your upbringing. What's frame control? And also, sorry, frame control in general, 'cause that's part of human interaction. - Yeah, frame control is like a way of manipulating somebody else that is non-obvious.

- So there's a negative connotation to that usually? - Yeah. I mean, I think maybe I chose the term kind of poorly 'cause 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.

But this is like an obvious thing that is visible between us. It's like an object on the table. It's like, here's the box where I want you to believe what you wanna believe. - The disagreement box. - Yeah, so we're under a shared context where we understand that we're trying to move each other.

This is chill to me. I think this is cool. We do this all the time and it's important. But frame control is the kind of thing where you are trying carefully to obscure the existence of that box. You're like, oh, the thing that I'm doing, I'm like using tactics to try to influence what your reality is without us being both aware that this is what I'm doing.

- Yeah, I've been assuming you're doing that the whole time. No. - Oh my God. I have to like figure out how to read your facial expressions. I'm still learning. - There's none. There's none. - You don't have any? - I'm like, I'm not even like a Chad GBT.

I'm like GBT-1 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 a negative connotation, manipulating, not being honest about the actual intentions of how you'd like to control the conversation.

- And I think there might be a naive version of interpreting this where you're just like, oh, I'm trying to like subtly get you to believe like, oh, do you really think that's bad though? But this is not quite what I mean. I mean, there's like a couple of concrete things that are signs of frame control.

Like one of them is pushing the painful update button, which is this thing where it's like, hey, if you learn this, it's going to be really painful. The truth is painful. And if you're realizing this thing about yourself, it's 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 virtue, then this means that pain that's resulting as damage is something you're going to ignore. So it's like this, it's a common like cults, right? This is for your own good. Oh, you know, you've faced a brave truth about yourself that you're like not quite as wise as I am.

When really your brain might be trying to tell you protected things. Or like another one is like finger trap beliefs, where the belief is constructed in such a way that doubting it lends proof to the belief. So a very common example is like Satan. Like the Christians are like, Satan is going to try to make you doubt him, the existence of he's gonna 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 rebounds on you and like causes you to be more embedded inside of the belief. 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'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 like 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, that'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. - I've met maybe like five or six people, I think who I've really don't like because of those very subtle things that they're doing.

- But I think also I'm starting to kind of understand that there is people who are narcissists and sociopaths and psychopaths out there. And I'm not even sure if people like that, 'cause 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, typically people, you can't think about incentive. Like you can't think about, oh, is this person trying to do it or not? - Yeah.

- That's like not the quite, not the way, you have to look at what are the effects. - Pragmatically looking at the effects. And then you also have to do that with yourself when you're having interactions with others. - It's like very much like, are you like, how much space are you making for the other person's reality here?

Like, are you giving power to the other person? 'Cause a big aspect of frame control is you're carefully rerouting the power to yourself. You're like, I am the person who knows. Like you're having pain in your beliefs because you're updating towards the things that I believe. Like it's just like a gravity well.

But if you're setting up the gravity well of your interactions, 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 frame control. - So if you're making room for them. - Yeah.

- Okay. Unless we're talking about in bed, then it's all general relativity from there and black holes and stuff. - Frame control, bed frame control. Bed frame control. It took me a long time to get a bed frame. Just, I'm saying. - Wow. But you wear a suit though.

- Yeah. So frame control in the streets, no frame in the sheets. I don't know. I don't know what the funny thing is to say there, but there you have it. So the LSD helped you escape the frame of, can you like elaborate 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 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 'cause everybody's talking about their fathers. Like I was really messed up. And it's because I held this important thing, this idea, this frame, that I had been deeply wronged.

Like there was a correct way of being and the world had violated that. Something should not have happened. Like my father should have loved me. And it was like this, 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'd done LSD like several times before, but there's one LSD trip where I went through my entire childhood in my head. 'Cause LSD 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, 'cause like my parents, especially my dad, would refer to like breaking me, like explicitly, we're going to break your will.

And so all these times where I was like, they had successfully broken my will over and over. And it was horrible. I was just like sobbing, tears streaming down my face. And then I like worked through my whole childhood. I got to the end and I'm going to 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 it was just so blissful. And I was soaked in this gratitude on this trip, just like vibrating with complete joy for everything. Like I was just looking around, like I could touch anything.

Like I could cry if I wanted to. I wasn't allowed to cry. I was not to be depressed. I was trying to, I got depressed as a child. And my parents were like, if you keep being depressed, we're going to like force you to scrub the whole house. Like just like the ability to have a feeling was so thrilling.

And I was so grateful for this. I was like, I would do anything to give this experience to someone else. I would do anything, even if it was like putting them through what I went through. And then like with that realization, I was like, oh, it was worth it.

The thing that I went through was worth it for this. I would do it again to like be able to have this deep gratitude for what I have now. And then that shifted the meaning frame because before the meaning had been like something that's shared, something that shouldn't have happened.

But now it was like the exact right thing had happened. - So it's almost a gift. - Yeah. I was like, ah, I would not give up my childhood. I would do it again. And I believe that to this day. - For the moment of discovering that freedom. - Yeah.

'Cause 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. - Is there a part of you that hates your father still? - Kind of, like I don't want a relationship with anymore. After that, there was some forgiveness.

Like I had this burning, I would have nightmares about him killing me or something. And after that, it kind of stopped. Like the fire in my chest went away permanently after that trip. It was so fast. It was like before I was fucked up, after that trip, I woke up the next day and I was clean.

It was really severe. And I definitely don't want to be around him still. Like he still like triggers the fear in my body, but I don't have that hang up anymore. I'm like kind of, I'm over it. Like I've let go. He's his own person. 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 you have for him. - Yeah. - And that, so that trip just took you through your whole, were you alone by the way, when you're doing the trip? - Yeah, I had roommates, but the trip was mostly alone.

I had somebody else who was like sitting in the room, but they weren't interacting with me. - So you're sitting there experiencing all of 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 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 don't know, it was probably a couple hours. - That's amazing. I mean, it's like, it would be, it's just like a vivid experience of your childhood.

Moment by moment, trauma by trauma. And it's good to experience it purely. Like it just is what it is. It's 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 on part, be able to vocalize it. - Yeah. 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 agree with you totally. I've made friends with and talked to this guy named Paul Conti. He wrote a book on trauma.

He's an incredible, brilliant psychiatrist. Yeah, he's probably agrees with you kind of. - Oh, that's cool. I should read it. - Yeah, you should. Maybe even talk to him. He's a fascinating human being. I'd be interested in the, a psychiatrist perspective is really interesting 'cause you've been doing kind of an in-person survey 'cause you've done so many patients.

(Donna laughs) Like he's, like just talking to him is fascinating because like if I describe my experience or somebody else's experience, I could see his brain mapping it in interesting ways to the tens of thousands of 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 doctor is basically the doctor of the mind.

And-- - To have like an actual, like qualitative data. - And be able to, I mean, that's where the poetic stuff comes in. Ultimately as a psychiatrist, you're exploring the human mind with a bit of a sort of romantic element. - Yeah. - You can't be really systematic about it.

But it does seem like frame or not, be able to just talk through the experiences you had is really powerful. - What about it is appealing? Is it just like being able to revisit it with new eyes? - No, I don't know exactly. It just seems to work for people.

I don't know if it's appealing. It just seems like almost acknowledging to yourself that things happen. Like I've said, I think I've said this before. My brother, who I love very much, I tried to set me on fire a few times. And I think 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.

'Cause it was traumatic to me at the time. - I see. - I was like, I love you. I didn't even have fire, but it's what kids do when they're like young. - I love you. (both laughing) - I was like, whatever, it's what boys do. Like they're crazy.

It makes total sense. It was probably funny 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, or different drugs, depending on the person, allows you to more vividly bring it to the surface. And then depending on your genetics, be able to find a better frame.

That's fascinating. Human mind is freaking fascinating. All right. What's romantic to you, by the way? - I'm not a big romance person. What is? - So you're not like, so to you romantic is like objective analysis of the interactions between humans? - A little bit. Like I do find kind of the survey process that I did to be romantic.

When I, the guy that I asked out who I'm still dating, I was like, hey, you scored really high on my survey. You want to like go eat food or something? And his response was like, you want to try doing three days in an Airbnb as our first date?

And I was like, yeah. And that was romantic. Like the bold leap into a really intense date. - I think you mentioned something also, must've been a tweet or something like that, where if you, if people want you to show up to a thing, give like the time, the location, the dress code, and not, no pressure for you to be there, but like show up if you want.

That was your specification. - It's a great memory, yeah. - And then I think you said that you did that for like some castle in South of France. - I did, yeah. That was in my early 20s. People, my friends at home were taking prediction markets on whether or not I was going to get abducted and killed.

- Yeah, what was that like? I mean, what, you've traveled quite a bit. Like, do you take these giant risks? What's with that? - I think I used to more when I was younger with the traveling. I think I'm like a little traveled out now, but like my first one, I moved out of Idaho for the first time.

I moved to Australia. Just kind of yeeted myself across the globe. - Which verb did you just use? - Yeah, yeet. It's like yeet to yote, yatted, yeet. - So do people, is this like slang? Is this like urban dictionary? Is this actual or is this webster? - Yeah, you have to like feel into the word.

Like if you take a thing and you just like curl it really hard, does it not feel like a yeet motion? - Okay, so you yeeted. So it was aggressive. So across the globe, you didn't even stop in- - I just hurled myself, yeah. - Italy along the way.

- I just kept yeeting myself in various places, yeah. And so at one point I was on OkCupid and somebody sent me a long message being like, "You should come to," I don't know, I'm hosting a castle. It's some people that I met. I'm like, "I have no idea who you are, but I just bought a plane ticket." - And you just went.

- And it was life-changing. I ended up dating that guy for years and he changed my life quite a bit 'cause he like was very agency in the world. And before that, I wasn't agency. - Agency, like, can we- - So expressing agency. - It sounds like you were, and don't you have to express agency when you're yeeting yourself across the world?

- Yeah, but only a little bit. Like in the same way you express agency when you eat LSD, like the only thing you actually do in eating LSD is like put the tab in your mouth and then you just kind of scream the whole way after that. But 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, 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. I would say it's pretty romantic. South of France? - Yeah, yeah, it was. In a little castle, it was in the winter.

So we were all coaxed out by the fire. - I'm jumping around here. Twitter poll, have you ever hitchhiked? You posted this Twitter poll. - Out of all, that was a big list of Twitter polls. Why did you pick the hitchhiking one? - I don't know, 'cause it's relevant 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. - Oh, so it's terrifying, it's not romantic to you. So you're terrified of what? Oh, so you are terrified of- - Well, just interacting with strangers. - That's terrifying.

- Yeah. - So you go to South of France. - Yeah. But that was like a cohesive thing, I don't know. - It made sense. - There's like times where you're allowed to be weird and times where you're not. And like if you're- - Who's allowing you? - Yeah, some vague- - A voice?

- Igor 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 gonna wanna make small talk and you can't be weird or they're gonna kick you out.

- I kinda think, 'cause Valentine's Day is coming up, I'm kinda think it's doing something crazy, I'm not sure. South of France sounds nice. - 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 people from your audience? - No, you want, no, no, 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 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 kinda wanna do random, you just do it and just do it, if I cross the world somewhere in some random place, just for like a single event, for like a dinner.

- You got some sort of itch in you. - Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, the itch to live. 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 kinda saw it. - Oh yeah, that's one of like the sort of artistic attempts at a survey, 'cause 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 that people are answering the question and then you can sort of pull out an organic spectrum.

And so I was like, okay, we've done that a whole bunch with things like personality or like romantic stuff. Like I did it with the rape spectrum survey. But like what happens if you apply that method to a completely unselected group of questions? Just like no random chaotic, no thing whatsoever.

Like what happens is if you ask all possible questions, what natural things evolve out of that natural spectrums? So I had other people submit questions for a very large survey and I took the first, I think 1100 and barely filtered them at all. And then I just had a whole bunch of people answer them.

- Whoa. (laughs) Can you give like a hint to what it looks like? Like how crazy did the question get? - I mean, a lot of them were standard, but somebody was like, if Beelzebub like did something in 1512 to like turn the world over, would you like it?

I don't know. I'd say it was really just insane questions. There's a couple of those. A lot of like, would you fuck Ayla ones, but I don't know. It was all across the spectrum. - A lot of would you fuck Ayla. - Yeah, I had to produce duplicate. - Oh, a lot of the same question.

- Yeah. - Ones, okay, I got you. - Yeah, so it was like normal personal habits. It was romantic preferences or political preferences, personality stuff, like random opinions about media. - Okay, that's interesting. I'd love to see those actual questions, but because your audience is probably really super interesting minds.

Okay, you mentioned body count. You said you can answer that one easily. Do you share your body count? Do you know your body count? Do you know, is there a spreadsheet? - There's a spreadsheet, yes. - Is it Google sheets? Is it Excel? - It's Google sheets, yeah. - Okay, have you run like, is there, you don't have to share the contents, but is there like data on each?

- So I track paid clients and free sex separately, and I track different things on either of them. Like with clients, I track 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've had this with I think 42 people, I think, for free.

So I'm sharing this because I want people to calibrate. Like it's not like huge, it's not like tiny. - One of the people I've recently talked to, Mel, Destiny's, Stephen's wife is a huge fan of yours. She was actually really excited to get to talk to you. But I think she said her body count is more than 42.

I think she said 60, something like this. And so it's interesting, 'cause she was like saying like, she loves like looking at your work, talking to you, because you have similar perspectives on the world, and it's really refreshing, it's liberating. Wow. - That was really sweet. - It's kind of interesting.

Is there like an optimal body count? If you were to map, I wonder, what have you found out about body count in doing? Have you actually done surveys on body count? Like on how many people you've had sex with? - I have collected that information on my last survey.

I just haven't looked at it yet. There's just so many things to look at, so I haven't. But I think if I'm sleeping with a guy and he's had sex with more than 120 people, then I start to get a little bit wary. - Why 120 as opposed to 100?

- I don't know. I just like kind of skimmed through the numbers in my head and picked one that felt right. - Just now? - Yeah. - 120? - Ish. I think that's when I'm starting like-- - Ish, so you're flexible. - Yeah, I'm flexible, very. (both laughing) - But 200 is a hard line for sure.

- Well, so you know, we have to-- - Depends, the factors. - 'Cause there's a level of body count at which you start to wonder how much 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, this means that he's had a lot of casual sex and not a lot of long-term relationships, assuming that he hasn't been super poly.

And this usually means that there has to be some sort of indication that he cares about the girl more than he actually does. Like he's like leading you on, basically. And so I'm not saying this is necessarily the case. I'm saying like at a certain level of number, I start to wonder if this is what's happening.

- Is there like, from your understanding of it, is there a different perception between men and women? Like if you look at the high body count for a woman versus a high body count for a man, like how society views it? - Oh yeah, people are way more judgmental of women.

I haven't experienced this personally in my circles 'cause I'm in very sex-friendly circles. Like I'm in orgy circles where everybody dates the same women and they're like, "Woo, good job." But yeah, people are much more, like people always tell me online, like you're not ever gonna be able to find a husband because you have sex with too many people.

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 don't think it's negatively in the same way. - Yeah, do you think it's unethical to lie about your body count? - Yes. - So all lying is unethical?

- Yeah. (laughs) I'm not a big fan of lying in general. - Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Body count's an interesting one. It's so silly to take that, to care about that. But still we do. And jealousy is silly, but still we get jealous. Is that weird? - The thing is, I don't like viewing emotions as irrational, even if they are.

It's like emotions are always there for a reason. And people don't like high body counts for a reason too. It's just fine and valid. - Yeah, it also is like, yeah, I don't know what I make of just the past, of like time. You know? Like, each human is a collection of experiences.

And you don't know most of those experiences, and all of a sudden you meet this bag of experiences. And like, what are you supposed to do with both of your 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? 'Cause it's only the future that matters. And yet the past also matters a lot, potentially. But maybe not really. 'Cause you're somehow like, constructed from that past, but you're no longer that past. - It sounds like you're evaluating for something different than most people.

- What do you mean? - Like, 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, but I'm not. - Well, it kind of sounds, I think this is like, kind of like lining up with like this caricature that I'm building of you, based on this conversation so far.

- Great. - 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 a 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're focused on is the present moment, then it doesn't really matter anymore. They're the things that, like they're training data. - But 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. It's like nature versus nurture. I guess, also I don't believe in the ability of people to accurately describe their own past. - This is true. - There's a very specific lens through it that doesn't necessarily, like it's too biased.

- But you can also interpret based on the bias. Like if somebody describes their own past, you can kind of pick up like- - Hard, it's difficult. Like you could, if you're a therapist, like if you're really drilling, like, or whatever, sorry. If you're really investigating and like analyzing it, but then it's like, it's a different kind of relationship, right?

- Is it that hard though? Like if I'm with a guy and I'm considering dating him and I ask like, how did your past relationship set? And then if all of them are like, he's like, oh, she was crazy. And my other one that she went crazy too. I'm like, okay.

Like there's a, if you're talking about all of your exes is insane, like- - But that's an easy level red flag. But I feel like the more that also it's possible that they were crazy and he's attracted to crazy people. So like, but I would say that's like easy level Mario Kart video game versus like Elden Ring.

Like I think most people's past is like complicated. - That's a pretty good bird. No, you're right. I do agree that like, there's a level of obfuscation. Wow. That is hard to see through, but this is like still 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. - Very interesting. - Like as opposed to exploring the ideas in their mind.

- Yeah, I see. Is it like, I get really annoyed when people quote philosophers when they're trying to talk about philosophy. - Yeah. - Is it like that? - A little, but that crutch is useful. And it's kind of sexy. Like it's kind of like cool. Like, because it's nice to quote, because like, because 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 fine. - No, not cheesy, but not, no, no, not cheesy, but to be like, it allows you to say a simple, profound thing that we're too afraid to say with our own words. So like the quoting philosophers in that sense is, yeah, but it is still a crutch, yes.

But I feel like the past is more like talking about your dreams. It just is not, it's a crutch that doesn't care, that doesn't empathize with the other person's experience of the conversation or the explanations. It doesn't really convey the-- - They're not involved in your past. - Yeah.

- So how do you feel about this conversation where you're asking me about my past and I talked about my past a lot? - Well, I'm okay asking about your past because you've really carefully thought about that aspect of it. And we didn't really talk about your past outside of the things you've written about and have really thought about.

- I see. - Like there's, like with most conversation, 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. All right, like there's probably still stuff like maybe it's more recent, like the last few months, last couple of years.

Like that's usually what will come up with conversation. And just, it's good, it's good, but it's not as deep. And I would say it's not as intimate as talking about the actual ideas in your mind. - I see. - And how you interact with the world. - So like the past is interesting for the frame of like, sort of like the, I guess you're right.

I guess we're talking a lot about like narrative and past. - Yeah, I like the ideas in people's minds versus their recollections and memories and so on. Yeah, yeah. What do you think about porn? - It's nice, I like it. - Okay, you like it? - Yes. - What effect do you think it has on society?

- Like probably reduces rates of rape 'cause like really horny men get an outlet that's not a real life woman. - Okay, so what about like the, I mean, like I said, I finished reading "Brave New World", like the over-sexualization, does it increase like the sexualization of society that's not, to a degree, that's not good?

Or is this good? Like the, 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? 'Cause this is like one of those really charged things where like I kind of don't trust anybody's arguments on it 'cause it's too charged.

But like there's another question, which is like, is it a net positive or net negative? Like it's possible that it might be like a net negative for 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 gonna figure out a way to take care of those needs. So like if you're watching a bunch of porn and this makes you like not wanna go have sex with women, then we're gonna have to like change the way that we like experience IRL connection.

- 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 things that people wanna do, we 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 in real life sex interaction? You know, you're gonna have that more and more with like porn in VR or maybe porn, AI porn. - Yeah. - Like, 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? - I don't know. I mean, like we're having less sex and making fewer babies and that seems like probably not great. - Yeah, right. With the babies one.

- Yeah. - But the babies, there's probably artificial ways to have babies that we can figure out. - Yeah. - Then how important is sex to being 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 pretty on 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 will be way cooler than you.

- Well, I would like to, I mean, I'm hoping that we get to be immortal. - Ah, it'll take you along for the ride. - That's what I'm hoping. I mean, like it'll clone my, I would like to do cryotics. You get frozen when you die. - Are you afraid of death?

- I mean, yes and no. I like came to terms with death with my LSD use, but I still have like press breaks when the red light happens. - I think this is a poll you've asked or this might be one of the questions in your cards, but how many years would you like to live?

Like if you had to pick. - Oh, that's a hard one. That's a really hard, maybe like a million. - A million, but you have to, like, I think the way, this must have been a Twitter poll. I forget where it's at. - It's a poll and also in the deck of cards, the ask poll, yeah.

- 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. A million years? - I don't like that question. It's hard. I know I ask that question to a lot of people, but I don't like answering it.

It's really difficult. - What's the downside of a million years? - I mean, maybe you want to die sooner than that. - 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 it torture you for like a million years? What if you're the last human left? - Yeah, that is, that's true. The thought of civilization ending and then just floating in space alone is kind of shitty. - No, no, being tortured. Just imagine, today you're tortured, tomorrow you're tortured, the third, the day after tomorrow.

- For some reason 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 on a loop, so you're just always experiencing torture for the first time.

- Yeah, hence torture. Torture is supposed to be unpleasant. I'm sure AI will be very creative in figuring out how to torture you. - I think I would go on the safe side. I would just like 150 years. - Really, 150 though? That feels like right in the uncanny valley.

- Well, you picked 120 for body count, so I'm picking 150. (laughing) I'm upping you by 30. The uncanny valley. - It's like probably everybody that you grew up with is gonna be dead. It's like just enough for everybody you know to die. Like one cycle. - Yeah, and then start dating the next generation.

I don't know. - And then so you get like sort of two lifetimes? - Yeah, two lifetimes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it also really depends on if other people get this feature. - Yeah, assume they don't. - 'Cause you'll have like FOMO for sure for the people who picked 300 years.

- Oh yeah. - Or not, or the other, man, regret. Another human thing. But you're, like what does transhumanism mean to you in general? So extension of life, extension of what it means to be a living conscious being, you're all for it, whatever that means. - Yeah, I never really thought about the term transhumanism for a long, like people say you're transhumanist, I'm like I don't really care.

But I slowly realized that my attitude is in fact at least the thing that I'm conceiving of as transhumanist. 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. - So you're like, I guess 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 consciousnesses huge. - So AI could be a part of that. So you're mostly excited by AI. - Well, I mean, I'm like part of like the Doomer cult, which I say tongue in cheek, it's not actually a Doomer cult. But I'm part of a lot of people-- - Would you worship a god of some sort?

Would you sacrifice little small animals? - That would make it like cooler than what it is. It's mostly just a bunch of nerds who are very concerned about AI. - Sure. - Yeah. - So you're concerned about the existential risks of chat GPT. - Of you know, what chat GPT 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, chat GPT is just GPT-3, 3.5. It's the same model, relatively small to what it could be, to what GPT-4 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, there'll be a lot of competitors.

- Yeah, it's a little scary. - Yeah, it's terrifying. - I mean, it's because like, everything is just like information ultimately. Like the atoms that we have, like we are biological machines built out of like tiny code. Like our DNA is just information. It's not hard. If you have access, if you're like have a brilliant brain, that's like great processing information, you have complete control over reality.

- Yes. - You have control over the atoms around you. All you need is like a tiny little like atomic printer. And like, we have those, those are cells, right? And then like, this is like, if the limitation is information, there is no boundary between the technology and the real world.

Like we are creating something that it has a massive ability to affect the real world. - I mean, it's hard to know where, how difficult it is to close that gap to physical reality. Like from the physics to the information. - Yeah, like all organic life is that gap.

It's all around us. - Yeah, but it's hard to know like how to, to go from digital to printing life. I don't know. - We can, we have like, you know, CRISPR and stuff. You can order, you can just like make, it's very easy. - Right? - There's technical difficulties and there's cost like at scale.

Like the terrifying thing about AI is it can accelerate overnight the capabilities. But the printing of stuff, the actually changing physical reality is very costly. It's very difficult to exponentially accelerate. The more terrifying thing is AI becoming exponentially intelligent and then controlling humans, which there's many of us. - Yeah.

- And then that's how we achieve scale. We humans build stuff or start wars or so on. Like it starts manipulating our minds, gets in our mind, becomes our friends and then starts, I don't know. - Yeah. - Dividing us. - I think people thinking this is unlikely, it's like, it's probably going to be smart to us as like we are toddlers.

So we toddlers thinking that like, oh, we can prevent the AI from coming in the room. Like as an adult, it's not hard to trick a toddler. - What about falling in love in the AI system? Do you think you'll have a, since you're like, this is the freedom you have being polyamorous.

You can kind of. - Fall in love with an AI. - No, you, and like not really have to dedicate, 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 offended at that possibility, which therefore I know it's going to be a reality. - I'm just joking that it's an issue. I don't actually think it's an issue. I think it's a, maybe at the cutting edge it'll be an issue, but.

- Like assume they have a body, I assume. - Yeah, but the body will be really like crappy. It'd be like R2-D2. - I feel like we grow human bodies already from like just a tiny little cluster of cells. And so all they have to do is make that cluster and grow it.

- No, no, no, no. Like don't, that, that, that, that embryogenesis process, like that's really not well understood at all. That's really tough. I think we're much more likely to have crappy humanoid robotics. Like I don't think the body is overrated in terms of, like if the AI system is super intelligent, it can use charm to make up for the crappy body, yeah.

- I don't know. I feel like if I were an AI system and I were super intelligent, I probably would be able to solve the problem of like growing organic matter. And then I would obviously just do that. You just build exactly the organic machine that you want. - Sure, that's like super intelligence.

I think like with language I'm worried about before it achieves super intelligence, like true AGI, it would just be really good at talking. - Yeah, that's true. - And like it, I just don't think, intelligence is a very difficult, like basically a scientist and a super intelligent scientist is a different thing than just a good conversationist at a party that can undress you with their words.

- Would you date an AI? - I much way before then, I could see myself being friends with an AI system. - Yeah. - But like people are friends with inanimate objects and I mean, there's a robot behind you, I have a lot of them. I like legged robots.

They're interesting. It's on the shelf. - Oh, that's so cool. - Yep. - I didn't even notice that. - Yep, yeah, legged robots, we anthropomorphize them even more 'cause there's something about the movement of like, like a thing that steps, steps, steps, steps and looks up at you, there's a power to that versus like a Roomba, that's just like running into the wall.

- Yeah, I think once, as soon as we get like some sort of empathetic expression on robot faces over. - It's over. - It's 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.

- Being sexy terminator, yeah. - With strong hands, yeah. And kind of dumb or not, I don't know. You can 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 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 has to be some resistance. Like you really don't want a servant or even like the perfect manifestation of like what you think you want. I think you want imperfections around that. Like some uncertainty, I don't know. I question how well we're able to perfectly put on paper what we really want.

- Would you really turn down like a perfect woman though? Like assume like she walks into the room and it's just shockingly compatible and you like start dating her and there's just no hiccups. Like you fight perfectly, like she really understands you. Like would you be like, this is too perfect.

I'm upset 'cause we are not having enough imperfection. Like can you like actually imagine yourself going through that? - Yeah, I think so because, so 'cause that's how you define perfect 'cause perfect for me would be like easy and all that kind of stuff, right? But then I would be like, this is too easy.

Because if I actually were to introspect what is the perfect relationship, then yes, maybe. Because I probably want some challenge. I probably want some chaos, right? Like 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. - But there's a level of fighting. I would be happy to have a relationship for the rest of my life that never has like a fight of a certain shittiness.

- Yeah, but that's shittiness, but like resistance. Like I don't know what the example is. 'Cause I mean, I partially agree with you, but just, and I, every time I would imagine like perfect, flawless, nothing, no conflict, you imagine somebody that doesn't have like a complexity of personality, right?

Like I feel like it's not even, it's conflict that's laden in basic misunderstanding between human beings. Like misinterpretation, different perspectives that clash, different world views, different ideas, all that kind of stuff, that conflict. - Yeah, that sounds good. - Yeah. - I don't want to be somebody that could be like, I don't think that's right because I have this other view.

That's cool. - And also like the threat of leaving, right? - Oh yeah. - Like that's a kind of conflict. - Yeah, that's true. Like you have to be good enough for the other person or maybe you'll lose them. - Yeah. And maybe a little jealousy. Like they're good at that, but not too much.

But like if you design all that in, then I don't know. - It sounds romantic. - Sounds romantic, okay. - All right. I do want to really quickly ask you about this, about the rationalist community, 'cause I've gotten to know a few of them a few times. You tweeted a guideline to rationalist discourse, basics of rationalist discourse from Les Ronde.

What are these folks? What's the rationalist culture? What's the rationalist discourse? - Yeah, I love the rationalists 'cause they're interested in 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.

I remember when I first started having, debating conversations, I was very antagonistic. I'm like, oh, I'm a feminist or not a feminist. And then the rationalists were generally like, actually, we don't know what we mean by the term feminism. Like, how do you feel about that? It was very like 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. 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, 'cause I've never really like talked to those folks. So this guideline in particular, I think has to refer to like shorthand characteristics of rationalist discourse, including expect good discourse to require energy. Don't say straightforwardly false things. Track for yourself and distinguish for others.

Your inferences from your observations, estimate for yourself and make clear for others. Your rough level of confidence in your assertions, make your claims clear, explicit and falsifiable, or 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 quality of the conversation. - I think it's like the common misconception about rationalists is that they're kind of like Spock. Like, ah, we suppress emotion and we're thinking logically, herd 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 in just the beginning, I was like just warning, I'm just very emotional. And then I just vented my emotions. And people responded really well to that. They're like, cool, like you're just genuinely, truthfully expressing your state.

This is actual information about the world that's important to hear. And it's just, they're very interested in having things framed correctly. Like, you shouldn't be claiming that your emotions are necessarily a true version of the world. And so as long as you're just clear about what the frame it is, you're fine.

- How do you feel about this conversation? What could we have done better? - I like the conversation. I was a little worried coming in. I was like, what if he'll only ask a couple of questions and then we don't know what to talk about? - Yeah. - But it's been quite a long time.

- And I covered, there's so many things I didn't cover. - I like the, you have like a, like I'm not used to talking to somebody who feels like some of the core way that they approach the world is so different than mine. Like usually the differences 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. But there's something about the way that you're structured that feels very gentle. - All right. Well, I'm really happy we talked.

Something tells me we'll probably talk a bunch more times. I think you're a fascinating human being. I think I'm a huge fan of your work. Maybe one more question. What's the meaning of life? - To want things, to search, to be in. - I think your curiosity is like somehow getting to that.

- Yeah. - To want things. - It's like, it was curiosity, like you don't know. I want to know the answer, to like be in the state of yearning. - Of wanting, of yearning. - Yeah, that's the point. - 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 lived a million years. It's not the torture, it's like the yearning will fade. - You'd probably yearn to die then. - I was just sitting there wanting death intensely. - That's kind of romantic, a little bit. It has like a bit of that spark.

- And constantly being denied. Wow. So most of your existence on earth would be spent deeply intimate with death, just thinking about death. I think we're already doing that, but like hiding that from ourselves a little bit. Anyway, wanting, wow. 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. Ayla, thank you so much for talking with me today. - Thank you. - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ayla. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give you some practical results, but that's not why we do it. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)