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

It was really shocking to me that nobody else was doing anything creative with sex work.

Yeah.

Like, for me it was, it was like breathing, like, you're just doing sex and you're bored and like, "What do you do?" "I don't know, let's try something funny." Like, it's just the natural progression.

Mm-hmm.

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. And, like, I didn't even try that hard.

The following is a conversation with Aella, 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. Aella and I disagree on a bunch of things, but that just made this conversation even more interesting. I like interesting people, in the full range of the meaning that the word interesting implies. I'm currently reading On The Road by Jack Kerouac, and, uh, would be remiss if I didn't mention one of my favorite quotes from that book that feels relevant here. "The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, 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. And in the middle, you see the blue centerlight pop, and everybody goes, 'Ah.'" This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Aella. I feel like this conversation can go anywhere.

Hmm.

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.

That's why I'm trying to think of a counter-example.

(laughs) Immediately.

Yeah.

You're uncomfortable with generalizations of that kind.

Like, "always" is always a really bold word to use.

But if it's truly novel, that means you don't really understand it, it's outside your distribution.

...

Mm-hmm.

So therefore it's gonna have a bunch of uncertainty. But you don't think of it as uncertainty, you think about as something new, but it actually also attracts you because there's a lot of uncertainty surround it probably. Like, "What is this new thing?"