艾拉：性工作、OnlyFans、色情、陪侍、約會與人類性慾

Lex Fridman Podcast #358 – Aella: Sex Work, OnlyFans, Porn, Escorting, Dating, and Human Sexuality Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. 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 dot com. She's also a sex worker, including only fans and escorting, and is an exceptionally prolific creator of thought provoking Twitter polls. Ayla and I disagree on a bunch of things, but that just made this conversation even more interesting. I like interesting people in the full range of the meaning that the word interesting implies. I'm currently reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and 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. 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 Inside Tracker for bio monitoring. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfreeman dot com slash hiring. And now onto the full latteries. 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, and 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, 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 is rich in omega sevens. 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. This portion perfectly. It brings happiness. Get it? Maybe it'll bring you happiness, and we can just telepathically enjoy these nuts together. Go to house of macadamias dot 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 house of macadamias dot com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its AG One Drink, which is an all in one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. 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, but that's why I start the day with in terms of breaking my fast and I put in the fridge. It just is delicious. It's refreshing and it's just a great mental boost for me. They'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens dot com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I use to track biological data. It's interesting because this conversation with Ayla 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 study, sociological, for any kind of study that includes humans. And it's nice to see Ayla 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's obviously represents the future. Get special savings for limited time when you go to insidetracker dot 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 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? 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, you're uncomfortable with generalizations of that kind. Like always, is always a really bold word to use. But if it's truly novel, that means you don't really understand it's outside your distribution. So therefore, it's going to have a bunch of uncertainty. But you don't think of it as uncertainty. You think about is something new, but it actually also attracts you because there's a lot of uncertainty around it. Probably like what is this new thing? Yeah, like annihilating the mystery, like that drive. What about the danger of it? It's like part. I was just thinking of on the drive over because I was like, I'm like a little nervous about doing this podcast. And then I was like feeling into the unpleasantness of it, like the like the fear of what if something goes terribly wrong. And then I was also feeling into like how much that feels like part of why it's exciting, like if I knew that it was going to go great. I don't know. Did you actually imagine all the possible ways it can go wrong? Not like all of them, but I was like, what if I say something really dumb or like you ask me a question and I answer it in a way that makes me sound like a lot less capable than I am. I'm like really afraid of being perceived as stupid or something. I was also thinking about this on the way over like I'm kind of riskaverse in some ways like I don't driving like driving fast in cars because I was driving very carefully here because the roads are bad. Yeah. And then I'm thinking I'm very like pro risk in other ways like being really exposed to like a wide variety of people who might hate you and I think like from the outside that might look fine but I think the monkey brain is really sensitive to lots of people yelling at you. For whatever problems that you seem to have, so that's the big risk you're taking is putting yourself out there as an intellectual like through your writing and then a lot of people yelling at you. Is that is that the worst embarrassment you can? It's pretty bad. Yeah, I think I think the worst embarrassment is if I put something out there that I failed to like be properly skeptical of in myself and then people are like, oh, we caught this thing that you didn't catch. I think that's the biggest terror. Yeah, from looking at your reading and listening to your interviews, you seem to be very defensive and worried about being good scientists. Yeah, definitely. But your like methodology. Yes. And funny enough, you get attacked on that methodology. Even though you know I'm a fan of psychology, of like the academic psychology and it's it's kind of disappointing often how non rigorous their work is, how small the sample size and so on and how big and ambitious over ambitious the the proclamations about results is. Especially with the news reports on it. Now you're both the researcher, the scientist, and the reporter, right? So like that's what you have with the blog. Your sample size is often gigantic. The methodology is right there. The data is right there. You provide the data, and then you're like raw and honest with your interpretation of the data. Like there's of honesty authenticity to it. So I don't it's actually really refreshing. I don't know why people criticize it. I think this is what this is what psychologists are probably terrified about being transparent and. Transparent in that way is because they'll get attacked for their methodology. So they want to cloak it in a. You know sort of layer of authority like I'm from this institution. It was peer reviewed. This kind of all these layers and I'm also not going to share the data with you and I'm also going to pretend like most psychology studies are not replicable. I'm just going to pretend there's authority to it. I think it works on a lot of people like from the outside you're like ah the scientists with the white lab coats with credentials those are the people who are like doing science and like doing science is you know you have like fancy terms that other people are don't really understand and to be fair like I I have a lot to learn I'm still like I'm self teaching I'm like learning through people learning as I go I'm definitely not super knowledgeable about this stuff. 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 like let's figure this out together but people like are think self-crippled in this because they view this as like. Religated 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, it might contribute to the controversy. Not exclusively probably, but you're just not limited by. Like part of your curiosity asking questions that seem common sense like some of the most controversial questions are like around sex. It's like everybody thinks and talks and does sex. I mean, it's it's the driver of human civilization and yet there's so little like rigorous discussion about the like the philosophical and the scientific questions around it and it's like it gets really weird. To be able to discuss them, it becomes tricky to discuss them. Yeah, super charged super because everybody has a really strong opinion like whether or not you know pornography is damaging to society or like how sex corresponds to gender or like what kind of sexuality is acceptable like do can you have sexual preferences that in them in themselves are immoral. People get very angry about it. Well, the sad part is they're not just opinionated, but most of us our relationship with sex is. I think I guess I want to say not rigorous. I think it's very difficult to be rigorous about sex. Like I, 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 how where my insecurities lie. But sex is one of those black box things. A really common thing is for people to if you have a fetish you sort of check back in your childhood to see an event that corresponds to that fetish and then you like develop a narrative like ah this event in my childhood must have caused this fetish and so I think this causes people to be biased towards like a like a concrete coherent positive 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 because we can't avoid you just want to tend towards making like coherent narratives which I think is not always the correct way to explain it. The narratives that are connected to childhood and so and so on how they originate. Yeah, you have I mean we'll talk about fetishes because you have a lot of really interesting writing on that. Just actually zooming out, I should mention you tweeted I wrote this down. You tweeted I do not understand how to have normal conversations with people in person if I'm not on drugs. So I guess let's both agree to not have a normal conversation. I guess assuming you're not on drugs now or if you are, you don't have to tell. I feel like a very small amount of fun of it, which is a nuttropic. Don't know if that counts. That 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. This is a Twitter poll. It'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 limited to a set of choices and having an existential crisis and searching for the answer. That's beautiful. That combination. This one's a big one. Like, what do you think is behind it? Do you believe that there is one primary driver? Like, do you think that it can be understood in the terms of primary drivers? Yeah, I think well, maybe it's an engineering perspective, like trying to reverse engineer the brain. I don't think we're equipped or understand enough about the mind to get there. Yeah, like what's the primary driver of a tree? Yeah, well then it gets the question of what is life? What is a living organism? Like to self replicate, probably. That's a very clean simplification, but I think life is more interesting than than just self replication. Yeah, but it sounds like you there's a curiosity in you that you're trying to like poke at, and I don't understand exactly what that curiosity is. So if I had to dedicate a thousand years to understand one of these topics, which one would be the most fruitful? I guess is the indirect thing I'm asking. No, well fun to me everything is fun, but really, yeah, I mean I'm with David Foster Wallace. The key to life is to make sure that everything is unborable or to be unborable or nothing is boring, everything is fun. Like everything, I could just literally sit. I honestly because I don't think I don't know where you got that glass, but that glass exists and I forgot it exists and it was really fun to me to know that now it's there. What felt really unpleasant things. Like if you're in like deep agony. Yeah, that's fun. Okay, that's fun because it's like I mean, yeah, heartbreak. It's like knowing that I'm capable of that. It like from. You know we're all living in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars. So when you're in that gutter, for some reason the stars look brighter, right? Like so like whenever you're going through a difficult time. Or whenever you see maybe other people being shitty to each other, it makes you like really appreciate when they're not. The contrast makes life kind of amazing. I'm reading a bunch of books. One of them is Brave New World where they remove, you know, where they remove the ups and downs of life. Partially through drugs, but over sexualization and all that kind of stuff, and I feel like you need that contrast. You need the ups and downs of life. The dark, you know, you need the dark to have happiness, have like a deeply intense feeling of affection towards another thing or a human being. Yeah, yeah, so everything's fun, but fun is also a weird word to define because fun I think for a lot of people. Like that's why I talk about love a lot. I think I think love is a better word than fun because fun is like light-hearted. Love is more intense. Like I love that glass and the water that's in it because it's freaking awesome. Like somebody made that glass, right? Like they and like not have many mistakes and like there's and the way bends light in interesting ways and the way water bends light in interesting ways like I can see part of your arm through that water. That's freaking amazing. Everything is amazing. I'm with the Lego movie anyway. If but if like from a scientific perspective, if I were to investigate sex, I don't know why I put love in there. Let's narrow down the Twitter poll. Let's focus on the basics here: sex, power, or death, immortality. If I were to try to like from a neuroscience, neurobiology perspective or reverse engineer through building AI systems that focus on these kinds of dynamics, exploring the gink theoretic aspects of it, exploring. The sort of cognitive modeling aspects of it, which one would get me to a deep understanding of the human condition? That's the question: sex. Okay, Nietzsche is the will to power. Freud and and the bunch is all about sex. And then death. Live just live burley. Brilliant previous guest on this podcast. She just released a video where on her bedside was the book Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, which of course she would have on her bedside. But that the his whole work is that. Everything is motivated by our trying to escape the the cold, harsh reality that we're going to die and we're terrified of it. One of the gifts and burdens. For human beings is that we are cognizant of our own death, and that terrifies us. That's the theory, and because of that, we do everything we can. We build, we build empires to escape the fact that we're mortal. Wouldn't this change quite a bit for religious people then who don't believe that they're going to die? Well, they created religion—the idea there to create myths, religions. You can create religions of all kinds, like. Yeah, but if this is like one of the defining things that define civilization, then we should expect to see like massive differences between people who believe we're going to die and people who don't. Good, I love it. You think it like a like a scientifically here, but and they have actually answers. Like there's a whole terror management theory where they do. Type write psychology type papers, and they do actual experiments. I can mention how their methodology is interesting. They prime with a discussion of death, like they take one certain set of people, they have a conversation with them, another set of people, they mention death to them before the conversation, see how that affects their. The nature of the conversation—it's really interesting because death fundamentally alters the nature of the conversation. Just even priming, like reminding you that you are going to die briefly, changes changes a lot of things. These kinds of priming papers usually not replicated. I just have like I feel like I've heard a bunch of priming ones that. I think you have PTSD over psychology papers is not replicated. I just did one. I just did a primary experiment on my own and found it didn't have any effect. But again, can't you just give me a careless statement summarizing an entire scientific discipline of terror management theory? I don't know. People should like I haven't rigorously looked at how good of it psychologically. I think it is interesting philosophy. The way Freud talked about the subconscious mind philosophically, it's an interesting discussion. Then you have to get rigorous with it for sure. But the idea is that like it's not that religious people get rid of the terror of death. This is just one of the popular ways they create an illusion on top of it. That's that idea like a myth that allows that makes it easier for them to forget. To escape that terror, but everybody else does different different methods like you feel your days with like capitalism has a whole is a whole religion of itself like the rat race for getting more and more material possessions and so on. I mean, couldn't you argue it in the opposite direction? Like, let's say assume that we're Christians here and we're like, ah, the atheist, you know, everybody has terror of hell, and the atheist invent this mythology where you know 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 of terror of death and then I lost my faith and then I had a deep terror of death sudden for a few years and it felt very different to me. So for denial of death, I don't know if he says that it's actually possible without really a lot of work to get to the actual terror. Like I think his claims that in early early early childhood development, that's when the terror is real. And then we aggressively construct systems around it of social interaction to to sort of construct illusions at top of it. I'm doing a half as description of this philosophy, but there is like it is interesting to simplify. The human mind into underlying mechanisms that drive it. Yeah, I was going to say your thinking seems kind of poetic, like the way that you are sort of handling these. Yeah, these concepts feel like more like aesthetically driven. I think this theme is going to continue throughout this conversation as we talk about relationships and sex. Yes, for sure. I think so, and I think your thinking. Seems to be very driven by how can I construct an experiment to test this hypothesis. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, but aren't there some things especially that have to do with the human mind? That are really messy, really difficult to understand. There is 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 is flaws to the survey. You kind of learn about those flaws and you get better and better asking the right questions and so on. But that's not that's indirect access to the human mind. But do you think like poetic narratives are? I'm not like saying poetic narratives are bad. Like I think it's like a cool way of like handling concepts, but I'm not sure that they are more rigorous. No, no, no, okay, no, but like they might be the more correct. Like philosophy might be the right way to discuss things that were really far from understanding. Yeah, I mean they might be more useful shorthand. Yeah, like morality, like I don't think morality makes any sense, but it's really useful shorthand to use when handling concepts in a lot of the time. Right, like ethics and morality, you could construct studies to ask different questions. Like you know, just having worked with autonomous vehicles a lot, the the trolley problem gets brought up. And I don't know, you can construct all kinds of interesting surveys about the trolley problem. But does that really get at some deep? Moral calculus that humans do. It's sexy because people like write clickbait articles about it, but does it really get to like what you value more? Five grandmas or like three children, whatever. Like they construct these arguments of like if you could steer a train, if you could steer an autonomous car, which do you choose? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's possible with some of those to construct. Like sometimes the fuzzy area, there's some topics that are fuzzy 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 for it's like you know I think like this kind of thing is you know you're surrounded by feet when you're a child this causes foot fetishes. And this is like kind of a cool narrative. And I think a lot of people's ideas about philosophy fall 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 you know the contrast or whatever. I very much just ascribe to that. I really enjoy that that philosophy. I also find everything to be very delightful. But and this isn't like a question of truth, right? We're not like where is the true delight that we're objectively measuring. Like 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 what is truth. You had another question. What is truth? You've actually to jump back. You don't 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 it's probably like where a sense of identity comes from. Oh, like when 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 something in me has exerted agency over having this thought or not having this thought. Like the sense of self really comes down to choice, and so when I say that like free will is an illusion, I also mean there's something like the self is an illusion, identity is a trick of the light. But it's a really fun one. Yeah, you think a lot about your identity. I have occasionally. Yeah, like you really struggle with it. You're proud of it. I do too. It's not we have different journeys, but so I really take a lot of delight in it. I used to be very into like deconstructing it. Like you, maybe you know I did a bunch of like way too much jealousy for a while, and at that point very no no ego, and now I'm like very ego. I really enjoy having a lot of ego. I actually happen to know like everything about you. Really, yeah, like more than you do. It's interesting. That's fascinating. Wait, could you can you solve my problems? Yes, all of them. I've did thorough research. Okay, what is consciousness then? I actually wrote that as a quote. What is consciousness? To remind myself, so like how does that tie in together with free will and identity and all of that. That's me. What is consciousness? Is like one of the biggest questions ever. I think I do think that people often get confused when talking about consciousness because I think people are referring to two separate concepts and often like combining them into one thing. Like we asked the question, you know, is AI going to be conscious? I think this is kind of the wrong question. Like, ah, 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 like I'm like just directly observing my experience. Yeah, and so like 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 you know 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 this is 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, you do that in a dream, presumably. Like if you had a very good dream or very good simulation. Yeah, but we could then have somebody in a simulation or a dream where they go through and they fully understand. You know they do all the tests and the tests come back exactly they would 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. But it sounds like you're driving towards a narrative. I don't you did a poll about men and women in dreams. Yeah, there was some kind of difference. I couldn't tell what the difference was except that more men than women. Quite a lot more women dream vividly than men. Oh, which I actually found my chaos survey. So I did a survey. Maybe you know that I had people everything you do know yes I'm sorry. So as you clearly know, I'll try not to talk down to this conversation because I'm sorry. And I not only know everything, I know how your future looks like. Really, and every how everything ends. Yeah, so you could probably win all the prediction markets on my life. Yeah, cool. So we should also mention that you have like prediction markets. You have like votes that you what what's the site called again? Manifold manifold, and one of them was will I be on the Lex Friedman podcast? Yeah, and I voted. I invested everything I own into the yes. Is there such thing as insider trading on there? That goes against the terms of the. No, I think insider trading is part of the information. So it's supposed to be. And then I realized it's actually public information that I voted because like I think my face shows up there's like damn it. It's going to influence you could make the fake account or I could be lying right. Yeah, I could be and then dump the stock whatever you know I try to manipulate somebody made a market like is Aila going to post a poll spelled P O L E on her Twitter like a photo and I was like I'm going to manipulate this market so I like fuck 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. I forget what the market. Oh, because I can 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 Buddhist of you. Yeah, the river no no man in the river wants whatever the footsteps. However, 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 immediately so that you are completely without want. Like would you would you press that button one hundred percent not? Yeah, I didn't think you would. No, no, no, because immediately everything stops being fun. The first it's only fun the first time. But if you want it to be fun. But like what would be my source of fun? I feel like I would like on day four just to get off. I would need to like do like nuclear war. Because it'll escalate quickly. I feel like if everything is possible, I assume you mean like something that like is not just normal human things. Yeah, magical world. Magical world and you start escalating really quickly. Like I wonder, I'll probably do like I want everybody to just fly into the air and hover in the air. That'd be everybody, and then you're like, "Oh, life is meaningless. Like why does like you? I feel like you get. " No, actually, that would be a really interesting experiment. Like, what are the limits? Like, are we all capable of becoming psychopaths? Essentially, like I like to believe not there's a very hard limits on that. Like in our own mind, like a basic compassion because I love being compassionate towards other human beings. It's one of the things I think about. If you give me power, like a lot of power, like absolute power. I think that's the power you mentioned is the scariest kind of power because it's like it's not even power in this normal world. It's like magical power where you lose. It's a dream world power where you like video game power. You don't even think of it as reality. You could just mess with the world. I feel like that's terrifying. Yeah, you basically be god. God, yeah, but without like. I feel like the idea of God wants like kind of keep things like functioning properly. And then you would probably would if you wanted to keep them functioning properly, then it would. Rapidly, like you would never experience a time where you're like, oh no, that was a mistake, because as soon you like before you even experience that the world would shift to to match it. Oh interesting. No, I think I would actually I take you back. I think I would regret the first time I hurt somebody. See in my visualization was like a video game where everybody's like NPC really dumb. No, I think the first time I I witnessed pain from anybody that's when I would stop and I would probably run into that very quickly. Like even just the hovering make a person hover and they're going to be probably really upset with the hovering right and so I'm going to be like no don't do that anymore. And then I'll probably go to honestly I'll just return back to my normal life. Yeah, that's that's kind of what I feel like like if I had the power to do anything, I think I would probably want to have a life very similar to where I am now. Yeah, yeah, I mean there's it's like with Uber like it would be probably more convenient to do certain things, but even then, like the struggle like I got a flat tire so I have to fix that. I kind of the flat tire makes makes everything more beautiful. Was that cool? I could do like a normal manual thing, 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 this seems like a hindsight reasoning, which like I can appreciate that argument, but I don't know. I'm like anyone who uses sorry to interrupt the word copium in their 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 floor thought. But you you so you don't think so in part you disagree with that kind of argument. Yeah, because I 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 feeds into this productive effort of making things better. And 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