Thread by @antoniogm

COVID didn't kill me, so here goes my first Hereticon-themed piece for Pull Request.

One of the best talks at Hereticon was by @Aella_Girl, who described the data-centric approach to selling sex online and in person.

Our convo covered that and more...

thepullrequest.com/p/wherein-i-pa…

*I didn’t actually end up paying her for sex, though when I DM’ed her at 3AM after too much champagne, the conversation inexplicably started in that direction before course-correcting, and it was all a bit awkward.

Personally, I blame Miami.

Aella had a hard start on life, and I asked her if she feels she would have ended up elsewhere with perhaps different beginning conditions.

She felt otherwise, and in fact was glad for where her journey had taken her.

One of the counter-intuitive things Aella mentioned in her talk was that she felt prostitution was healthier than porn, both for her and everyone else.

I asked her if her professional life, such as it was, intruded into her personal life in some way.

Part of what I loved about Aella's account of her own life is how bluntly self-aware it all was, as if she'd sorted through these issues like any other puzzle that fascinated her.

Whether sex work or the OnlyFans business, Aella treated them all like a quantitative puzzle that needed solving, compiling all sorts of stats and drawing conclusions from controlled experimentation.

Many of her clients are married, and to her mind, her work actually helps save more marriages than it might destroy.

Despite getting to the top 0.01% of OnlyFans performers, netting $100k/month and beating a 50% monthly (!) churn rate, Aella ultimately ended up bored of running an optimized marketing funnel for a personal media business.

"What's the most outrageous or radical thing that you think is true that nobody else thinks is true?"

This is supposedly a question Thiel asks people, so I sprung it on Aella, and we had our first Pull Request self-censorship.

Even this cancelation cat has only so many lives.

Lastly, we talked about poop.

In an offhand comment about @sentientist's excellent Hereticon talk on eugenics, Aella mentioned she had eaten her poop as part of a DIY fecal transplant.

After collecting myself, we dug into the details....

Dropping later this week is my general take on Hereticon and conclaves of heretics more generally.

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