Lex Fridman Podcast
#358 – Aella: Sex Work, OnlyFans, Porn, Escorting, Dating, and Human Sexuality
10 Feb 2023
Aella is a sex researcher, writer, and sex worker. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - House of Macadamias: https://houseofmacadamias.com/lex and use code LEX to get 20% off your first order - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex to get 1 month of fish oil - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off EPISODE LINKS: Aella's Website: https://knowingless.com/ Aella's Twitter: https://twitter.com/aella_girl/ Aella's OnlyFans: https://onlyfans.com/aella_girl/ Askhole card game: https://askhole.io/ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:14) - Uncertainty (13:51) - Sex, power, and death (26:21) - Free will (27:46) - Consciousness (37:41) - Childhood (50:39) - Dancing (1:03:56) - Casual sex (1:06:10) - Camming (1:21:05) - OnlyFans (1:31:19) - Dating (1:47:11) - Escorting (2:05:12) - Emotion vs reason (2:13:17) - Love (2:20:50) - Polyamory (2:29:44) - Monogamy (2:36:14) - Sex fetishes (2:53:42) - Dominance and submissiveness (3:03:23) - Psychedelics (3:22:35) - Romance (3:30:05) - Body count (3:39:51) - Porn (3:43:10) - Mortality (3:45:46) - AI (3:56:26) - Rationalist discourse (4:00:18) - Meaning of life
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Ayla, a sex researcher who does some of the largest human sexuality survey studies in the world on everything from fetishes to relationships. She is fearless in pursuing her curiosity on these topics by asking challenging and fascinating questions and looking for answers in a rigorous data-driven way and writing about it on her blog, knowingless.com.
She's also a sex worker, including OnlyFans and Escorting. and is an exceptionally prolific creator of thought-provoking Twitter polls. Ayla and I disagree on a bunch of things, but that just made this conversation even more interesting. I like interesting people, in the full range of the meaning that the word interesting implies.
I'm currently reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and would be remiss if I didn't mention one of my favorite quotes from that book that feels relevant here. The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.
The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles, exploding like spiders across the stars. In the middle, you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes wild. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
We got House of Macadamias for healthy midday snacks. Why midday snacks? Snacks anytime. Athletic Greens for a delicious daily multivitamin and Insight Tracker for bio-monitoring. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team we're always hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by probably our most delicious sponsor, the sponsor that has given me a tremendous amount of happiness and joy, simple joy,
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Chapter 2: How does Aella describe her experience with sex work?
sitting alone on a couch in a podcast room, just eating macadamia snacks. They ship delicious, high quality and healthy macadamia nuts directly to your door. Anyway, this thing is delicious. It's healthy, 30% less carbs than almonds. It's the only nut of the many nuts. And I've researched this, but they've also told me that it's rich in omega-7s.
Professor Tim Noakes, who I should probably talk to at some point, sings macadamia oil praises. There's so much to say. That's awesome. The thing is, it's just delicious. It's portioned perfectly. It brings happiness. Get it. Maybe it'll bring you happiness. And we can just telepathically enjoy these nuts together.
Go to howsomeacademias.com slash Lex to get 20% off your order for every order, not just the first. Our listeners, that's you, will also get a four ounce bag of macadamias when you order three or more boxes of any macadamia product. That's howsomeacademias.com slash Lex.
This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its AG1 drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
Chapter 3: What are the pros and cons of camming and OnlyFans?
It, too, is freaking delicious. And it, too, is a source of a lot of happiness. Every day. Twice a day. In fact, I'm now religiously bringing in, on the road with me, the travel packs. because I like to bring the happiness with me. It's actually really stressful for me to travel, as it is for a lot of people. This is a recent discovery for me.
One of the things that kind of makes it a lot better, if I bring little trinkets that remind me of home, or little habits that remind me of home, or little food items and so on, and athletic greens is that. I bring Element Electrolyte and athletic greens with me on the road, and it just reminds me of home. And Athletic Greens, that's what I start the day with in terms of breaking my fast.
And I put it in the fridge. It's delicious. It's refreshing. It's just a great mental boost for me. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens.com. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. It's interesting because this conversation with Ayala is, in fact, about data. A lot of data.
A lot of data from, I think she has over 500,000 people that took a very extensive survey on their sexual preferences and all that kind of stuff. So basically... self-report information about your own understanding of your mind and body and so on. I mean, that's so powerful. That's so, so, so powerful.
Data in general is really powerful for any kind of study, for medical studies, for psychological studies, sociological, for any kind of study that includes humans. It's nice to see Ayala do this gigantic data set. But to figure out what you need for your body, for your life, for your diet, that should not be based, no matter how big the data set is, that should not be based on population data.
Or it should only be in part based on population data. It should be hopefully in large part based on the data that comes from your own body. And that's what... Inside Tracker is one of the great folks that are taking a step forward in this thing that obviously represents the future. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's A-Long. 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?
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Chapter 4: How do emotions and happiness fluctuate in our lives?
So maybe I have a certain level, do other people have a lower level, some people have higher level? Is that a useful model of human beings? Or is it all ups and downs?
There's no stable. 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. I'm sure you've experienced sadness sometimes and happiness the other times.
If I actually were to integrate, so have an integral under the curve, 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?
Yeah.
I just, I don't know. Like I remember when I was a kid, my mom would call me Pollyanna all the time. So I was like finding the good in everything.
Yeah. I'd be like something bad would happen. So you were a happy kid.
I was a really happy kid.
Yeah. Even in the harsh conditions.
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Chapter 5: What is the role of marketing in camming and escorting?
I'd already been on Twitter for years, posting actively. So I already had 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? Yeah. So there's sexuality, but there's also creative sexuality and ideas too.
Yeah. One of the really popular ones was I molested myself as a mime using one arm through a jacket. And so the jacket looked like it was alive and that one did really well.
Did you brainstorm with somebody? I recently got to hang out with Mr. Beast and sit on a session of brainstorming different ideas. I just envision you with a team brainstorming. All right, how about we try the mime and the molesting thing? I don't know, it's too edgy.
I wish. I think the two would have been a lot more fun. But no, it's just me. I had an apartment that looked kind of like this. You just sit alone. You're like, well, that would be a good idea. And you just collect ideas over time, right? I'd seen somebody doing a version of this animated hand act when I was a kid. And it just always stuck in my head.
And 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 quite a viral hit.
Is there stuff like you mentioned too edgy? Like Mr. Beast tries to keep it PG.
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Chapter 6: How do power dynamics affect relationships and casual encounters?
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've personally 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, that's, it's a really strong point, but my preferences are 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.
We can apply it to like a bunch of other things. Yeah. And I'm just, this is just a problem. If you have like high, if you have a high volume to filter through and you like, you don't know, like it's a good, like initial filter. 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.
This is true. This is not the romantic narrative that you are very prone to.
If I feel like, how did you two meet? Well, she passed the three filters I set up. And I mean, but that's also, but also can you put into a survey the things that you're interested in? 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 because there's like thousands of applications. Like it feels like. It feels like I worry that you would miss the thing that actually... Because so much of it is chemistry. So much of it is the magic.
But the thing is, you're missing it anyway.
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Chapter 7: What insights does Aella share about childhood experiences and fetishes?
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 going to be like less into the fetish, but if it hits earlier, it's- But I wonder if it passes, like, is there like faces?
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 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 and not the other. I don't have a good theory for that.
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Chapter 8: How does Aella's research methodology contribute to understanding sexual preferences?
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?
I might go into way too much detail about this because I thought about this so much. Because 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 check a whole bunch of correlations within it.
Because it's more annoying and it's harder to get a lot of people to retake similar surveys to each other at a time. So I'm like, okay, I need to convince a very large number of people to take a lot of these questions. And even building the questions, that was really hard because I'm like, okay, I need a comprehensive amount of fetishes.
I can't ask everybody to answer for every single niche fetish. I'm like, do you like ball gags? Do you like funnel gags? Do you like wife shrew gags or whatever? I'm like, you can't do that.
Nobody's going to finish that survey.
Okay, fine.
I'm not going to ask questions. What's a wave 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. Okay.
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