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Welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman before I introduce today's guests. I'd like to point you in the direction of a documentary just released called better left unsaid produced by my friend. Dashama Le the documentary is primarily about the evolution of the far left and it features interviews with people like no, I'm Chomsky Steven Pinker Douglas Murray and myself.

Again, that's called a better left unsaid and it's worth your time.

All right. So today's guest is ala ala is a difficult person to describe as you'll see she is a blogger a sex worker and the queen of interesting Twitter poll. We talked about her upbringing as a fundamentalist Christian you talk about psychedelics meditation sex work polyamory sexual jealousy the psychology of trauma critical race Theory and identity politics. So without further Ado ala.

Ala. Thank you so much for coming on my show. Thank you for inviting me excited. I've been a fan of your blogs for probably a year-and-a-half and a fan of your.

Strange in the best wave Twitter polls for about the same time some of my listeners may also follow you in and now I'm talking about but it's not that's okay. We're we're here at the purpose of this podcast has to learn more about you and and your story and how you came to think the way you think.

And and beat up sort of difficult to Define person that you are and we have a lot of mutual interests. I think psychedelics and rationality and recently. I've seen you Tweeting often about race issues and critical race Theory and.

White Privilege Notions like this which we may get to but I want to spend the first good chunk of this basically just interviewing you about your life story. So.

Let's just go to the beginning. Where were you born and in into what kind of family were you born?.

Yeah Usher born in California and my family is very conservative might does professional Evangelical Christian and I was born around the time he was starting up his ministry for the first time so the people at state fairs and stuff and so my mom's a stay-at-home housewife because that's what women are supposed to do and my whole life beginning summary of it, yeah.

So what were you homeschooled in the Evangelical Christian cast?.

Yeah. Yeah, we I had leaped evolution is a lie and a thousand years old and it is pretty isolating. So we are also isolated strongly from the outside world media that had any sort of secular influence really condone that are like half as an example, but just general stuff like that. So what was median the fifties and sixties like I Love Lucy or is that even to Gilligan's Island telling me you're at when I grow my mom would tell me about in there to serve black and white abstractions that I wasn't interested.

So you are sort of raised in a.

Do an in a community that was trying to replicate the 50s and 60s in what the mm I guess so.

To what extent at that age? Did you have any kind of skepticism of what you have your immediate surroundings and the beliefs that were inculcated in you or were you?.

You did you just believe what you were told because this is welcomed. I think I had an unusual experience in the sense that like, my dad is extremely intellectual and he said we don't believe Christianity because it's the cultural fusion and fission you have to have sex for a long time.

So when did you feel the presence of God and how and I had started talking to his friends? He had more like certain emotional relationship with it and he has different Change setting for the love of God or something and then, you know, Jesus Christ or whatever, which is increasingly.

Yeah, I want to get there as well. I guess I think you have this blog post called the trauma narrative, which I want to talk about. Maybe after we talked about psychedelics know which will go back into your childhood and highlight some of the more negative and painful aspects of it. But I found your you're writing about psychedelics to be among the best that I've ever read on the topic and the Paradox of writing about psychedelics is that you're trying to put into words a word list experience and an experience that.

It is extremely difficult to put into words and almost asks, you not to put it into words and I'm I'm talking about LSD and shrooms specifically. Those are the two that that I've done.

But somehow you're blocked those are able to sort of point in the direction of this experience using words.

And it's a really beautiful experience to read and and I think at one point you said you did like for you did acid 40 times and 10 months or so. So take me to the beginning. How old were you the first time you dropped acid?.

It's 21 and I hadn't done another drug before cuz I've been obviously quite sheltered and I was really afraid of losing but I was at a party in a new situation with people as I very rigid. I just like you're my mind I will discover the secrets of the universe but only because I was very tightly bite of it. And so that is not much but after that trip, I realize that I done something wrong like well then I need to stop.

Trying anyway, and then the second time I did it was really credible. It was transformative rising in passing event where you finally have like a certain feeling.

And then I'm not I was like, well, I guess I'm just going to keep doing it. Right and I didn't realize until after I got here to do. You assume that this is something everyone did you know, how big is drugs like I had no at all for what was normal behavior. And so I just kind of did whatever. I feel like I sort of felt like other people do that to me.

How did you move from being a person at 16 that was still very much embedded in the repressive Evangelical non-drug doing culture 2 to being that person at 21.

I even after I lost my faith I was still a culturally embedded in a lot of.

Change it all. So I lost my faith in what section 2 structure to prove the existence of God, and then people who are doing bad things that I realize they're doing bad things and doesn't seem happy and friendly little bit more and I was like the kind of Shame and structure that a lot of people tonight when they go to public school. I mean I did in other ways, but I had left that world. So now is operating in a world where I didn't really have structure telling you what to do.

So I kind of went off the rails a little bit because I didn't understand.

At a Twitter thread recently talking about.

Start of the.

Aesthetic and and culture of public schooling from an outsider's perspective. You were home-schooled for almost your entire education, right you were in public high school.

Yeah, they previously sent me a public high school. Why do they send you the public high school really more repressive size of of your upbringing and your father, especially if you want to talk a little bit about the pain you endured as a child at at the end of your father, so that's a loaded question, but.

That's fine. Yeah, it worked through it by this point. So it doesn't show Chrysler for me as it used to my parents program called Growing Kids God's way and the basically the philosophy is that there's the natural way of child-rearing which is it like it should be good for the parents like this whole thing or parents are like trying to get their kids under control and the kids are cruel than that. This is abnormal the proper way of things that God gives structure which is that there's a strict hierarchy and everything is very strongly enforcing that hierarchy.

And so they had stuff like if you have an infant's you need to teach them the car through the night to sleep through the night almost immediately and you do this by not picking them up when they cry at night because it shows them that they can't manipulate the parents to get the parents to do what they want that just shows from an Instagram the earliest age possible that you are in control of your child. And so they did stuff like started like slapping ass on the arms when we were you not able to sit up when we cried if they have the crime was defiant and stuff.

Like they had to talk to the funnel to the final is basically the amount of Freedom that you give the child.

And then if child handles those freedoms while you give him a slightly larger range to handle and if they handle that those readings well, even slightly larger range and if they don't have it while you drop down and you drop down until they're handling the freedoms well in my well, I mean obedient which could be very difficult to do cuz they asked a lot of very hard things out of kids for obedience very extremely strict and really based around I can control and breaking your well my parents.

Well, yeah, I mean, this is something that I'm more often here talked about from Seattle kids who grow up in and other nations or at it something I did. I just one just really really hears about growing up in sort of secular. America was even a.

A notch more intense than your kids who who simply get spanked, you know, occasionally by their parents or who have strict parents who is really about forgetting some of the details but.

There is really just a complete that you like not being allowed to use a computer without supervision and not being allowed to have conversations with another Christian friend without supervision that mean that it is kind of repression that is truly rare to hear about that. But like all kids you simply assumed that what you're going through is normal and you have no point of reference from which to judge your experience as abnormal so described in your earpiece the trauma narrative for different stages. And the first date is is the initial pain and then the second stage.

Has to do with some anxieties you began to suffer as a result of that pain. Can you describe some of that act in the same way that like aspects of my life right now? So it was like a normal second and then it was like the contact with the outside world that maybe start to realize that maybe something bad happens because I know what what I have gone through and contrast and so I would be coming to the house. So I would like to eventually.

Become extremely enraged lives with Siri in my body just like I couldn't had a whole breakdown Father's Day Father's day was the day that I die every year and it was really hard and I consider this to be necessary. But also it came directly from the outside world. Like the rest of the world have been basically the way that my family was I never would have felt that level of part no sink was the most interesting point to me about that blog post, which is.

There's a two-sided Point here, which is society and culture in general coaches you into feeling that an experienced a bad experience is not merely a bad experience. But in this other realm of trauma, you know, it's Badness squared.

And you know on the one hand in the short run that actually causes you to experience more pain than you had been experiencing but would you know could lead a person to say well, why are we doing this? But on the other hand we have to Define certain things as as bad in a squared as a traumatic in order to just discourage people from doing that right take to create moral taboos on behavior that is in over Lively leading to more suffering. So it's it's a kind of paradox where your coaching people into feeling more pain coaching victims with someone who is it was a victim of some pain into feeling more pain about it.

But doing it for some reason that is necessary to maintain a society that sort of.

Trying to improve itself bit by bit like two different story about your life, which is absolutely required for growth. But that is becoming aware of it is a really good for stuff and then avoiding language like should or you know, even saying that was like that you can do a lot of stuff without explicitly saying those things words,.

Yeah, dude, this is something I've noticed on the topic of racism, especially where how you frame an event can genuinely lead you to feel more or less pain about the event right like.

This is you know that the topic of microaggressions microaggressions is one that comes to mind where if someone says to me you're really articulate.

I can genuinely experience that in two totally different ways. I can hear it as a compliment.

And that's how I would naturally tend to hear. It had I not been exposed to an ideology which which serve coaches me into feeling it as as if it were a knife but if you are coach by that out ideology, you genuinely do feel it as a knife.

And then there's a further question. How should we feel it? Because that that really is the question that matters right given we know that you can coach people into feeling certain feeling almost anything as a trauma. You know, that that's the interesting thing about it is that there are some experiences that are sort of reliably traumatic almost no matter how they are framed is the experience of being beaten up although you know in certain contacts if you're an MMA fighter, it could be a pleasurable. So almost everything is malleable to some extent.

But part of what that means is that you can coach people into feeling the smallest things as if they're the largest things.

And in some sense, there's nowhere to stand from which to say something is objectively smaller objectively large.

Yeah, we still have to have this conversation about how we should feel given various lights and insults and harms. It's a very sort of confusing and rudderless space to exist. I thought your block those really evoke that well and it's something that's not often talked about because talking about it risks giving the impression that what one is saying is a wall trauma isn't real that you shouldn't validate people's traumatic experiences and so forth and that's really not the point at all. Like there's a way to kind of girl.

Are you when you work out something that happened or.

Hey Brian, she like a situation reaction on your set. But I wish we could transition to a thing where instead of reacting for you to feel like you feel bad about that. And then maybe of investigating sort of what is without attempting to maneuver or push it. Yeah, that sounds very in line with what I've learned from mindfulness meditation roaches to too, as well. Do you have you ever tried to mindfulness meditation? I'm not sure I've seen you blog about it. I think I might.

Although I think you described one of your acid trips as a forceful meditation mentally by heavy LSD use that I'm not quite sure exactly how to relate to when people say meditate Birthday meme something with you to sit down and how you would get to that place having done that much LSD and I think that's that's another question is I I've only done LSD twice and shrooms three times so I know but I have a good friend who's probably done it. You know almost as much as you have and he wonders, you know to what extent.

His mind has been shaped in the medium-term and and permanently buy it. So what have you noticed about, you know prefer for better and For Worse about how doing that much LSD over a short. Of time has shaped you I do have a memory now, I think that is maybe that's something that just happens when you age but I kind of suspect that it did actually reduce like my ability to like file through in her call stuff. But only long-term thing I did have difficulty engaging conversations for a while afterwards because my perception of time was so worked as I've stopped suffering basically and I feel infinitely more capable of handling.

Pain in my daily life and that's just great. I haven't I would rather have no memory of her for that. You know that you sound like I mean a very particular thing.

What do you mean there's this like that like a pushing away of pain?.

There's lots of ways that we can be aware of things that we're doing and like lots of different ways in which you can push away pain and I don't mean that like pushing my pain is inherently suffering. But I mean, it feels like there's some part of me that feels aware.

That this is what I want like with the experiences that I'm having and every given moment or exactly what I wanted.

Let me see. Ya cool. It does. I mean iframe. I mean many of the things you say are our insides that I only began to learn after having done psychedelics, but then.

Beginning to practice mindfulness meditation primarily as a way to cure panic attacks that I was having when I was 19 or 20 and one of the central insights was.

That in order to.

Just stop a panic attack. You have to paradoxically become totally okay with the fact that it's happening and stop resisting it and it it makes no sense that this is true as well with pain with with physical pain or emotional pain.

You have to the trick is to genuinely welcome to pan to fill the pan and say okay come you are welcome here. I'm not going to resist you and not merely to say those words in your head but actually translate it into some kind of cognitive action if which is totally unnatural.

But the moment you do that you find that the pain ceases to be a problem. It's not that the pain necessarily goes away all other often does.

But it ceases to seem like a problem.

And and then there's the Paradox becomes. Okay. Now I want to replicate this, you know, once you've done this once you want to replicate this every time you experience pain or anxiety.

But then that can just become another way of wanting to avoid pain and anxiety which which then doesn't work. Right so successfully stop a panic attack using this technique. I was floored and I just cuz nothing else had worked. So I so I became very interested in these kind of the insights that I think I think you it seems that you just came to buy doing LSD and by observing your mind on and off of LSD, but they are very much in line with what I've learned in a meditative context lights react very differently and I'm very fortunate in the way that my mind reacted to LSD.

But some people take LSD and then there's none of this sort of experience and I have really don't trust me. But what are there any ways to predict the kind of.

Person who will have that experience versus not I like what is it about the mentality. Is it like Netflix in some way is he was really hard to figure out and I've got a bunch of them large surveys to try and figure this out but none of the correlations I tested had any impact that's pretty in line with my observations of all my friends had a group of friends that we all did a good amount of LSD when we were like between 18 + and 21 probably.

I was also very interested in who had what kind of experiences and if there were patterns because.

I wish I was a shrooms as well. It's in this category of drugs that can really just take you two diametrically opposed places and an even ndma do people do have different experiences on it. It overwhelmingly tends to bring people into a space of love and self-acceptance send the exception seem to be exceptions that prove the rule was with LSD. I've only done it twice and I usually described those experiences as Heaven and Hell respectively. The first time was only religious language could really capture the extent to which it was Heaven and the second time.

Only religious or or medical language the language of psychosis and schizophrenia could could capture what I experienced there. And that was enough to deter me from from ever doing it again, but for that kind of thing is you don't people usually call it a bad trip.

And I've noticed that there's some people that have have only had good trips on LSD and can't imagine why or how anyone could have a bad trip and I think if you had asked me after my first trip, is it possible to have a bad experience on LSD? I would have looked at you like you were crazy. You know my with my sample size of one I would say will 100% of my LSD experiences have been amazing. I'm not sure how this drug could be horrible and it's really a really is mysterious aquino's.

There's something about how you feel going into it and how you feel around the people you're around set and setting as they say.

But.

Even knowing that the set and setting you go into this drug in matters. It doesn't really help you control where you're going to go. In fact, the very notion of control is is arguably something you just have to let go of.

Yeah, I'm not sure if there's like actually answers the question that were asking but it's like 10 benzo, which is the framework that I used to understand this and that my. But if you you're one of them to stay one of them strips and there's something in what you think is real or you know yourself or your belief system since I might like it it breaks it down and in the face of that some people lose a sense of their belief structure and then they kind of sit with it like okay.

I don't believe anything right now. That's interesting and then some people find it intolerable and that wasn't true then that means there's something else must be true.

And those people's I think get less out of LSD in general because you're distracting yourself from being in the uncertainty can't tolerate it. And he doesn't answer like why people are one of those two in the first place or even if I don't know my one horrible LSD experience deadly have to do with clinging deeply to a belief that was absurd and paranoid namely that the friend I was doing LSD with was trying to kill me. That's somehow that just a seed of that idea got into my head and blossomed into this.

Completely paranoid first-person experience where I was I was essentially the protagonist of a horror movie and my best friend was saw, you know, he was the axe murderer and another thing, you know, that's interesting about these drugs is how both the positive and negative experiences can survive you becoming so they can have that that it took me days maybe months to shake off that experience. So these are not drugs you should do lightly, you know, logically, there are people that are that have done LSD and if they could do it again should not have done it at all should just have lived a life not knowing what it's like, but it's difficult to know.

Who you are? They know what which category you are for someone who's really going to benefit from?.

Expansive mind that that you're now in happening on the drug or if you're someone who's just going to be destabilized by it and I was always I was too serious and end like you had the experience of just having friends do these drugs and seemed okay and and even seem may be more interesting as a result that I am curiosity got the best of me. Yeah. I hate ideally people should work up from a low-dose like it's something small something that's not going to affect you for three days and then try to pay attention and see if you do any sort of very mild believe I did not take a slightly higher dose and then pay attention to see if your belief constructing a little bit better strategy than I think most people employed for some reason.

I'm not sure why that isn't it should be common wisdom to start at a low dose.

What song is MDMA cuz it's something I have much more experience with and there's a kind of option line in your blog post the trauma narrative where you mention that MDMA help you cure the anxieties that resulted from your childhood pains, but with your parents, can you talk about that are mostly like touching social anxiety was a big 100. I'm actually planning on taking him tonight that again. Yeah, and then I was able to touch people while on MDMA.

A lot of things about 80% or something.

Are you have to re-up?.

Yeah. That doesn't surprise me at all. I've done MDMA maybe 10 times or so.

And I think I probably haven't waited long enough between doses to sort of full feel the full effect every time but the first time I did it I did it once and then waited maybe 2 years and ended it again.

And I had a similar experience where it at and I can't really say this about acid or shrooms of feeling medium-term changes to my personality that were large and positive like feeling waking up for three months and feeling like a more loving and relaxed version of myself.

And really testing to see whether this was Placebo in and noticing that it wasn't at the same time. There is a sort of a gravity of accrued selfhood that slowly pulls you back to.

The slightly it in my case the sort of slightly colder and more muted.

Person that I tend to be relative to to who I could be but nevertheless just.

Doing MDMA once it is something I am much more willing to recommend broadly then then doing acid or shrooms. I'm much more comfortable recommending that to someone and yes, definitely safer and especially.

Yeah safer for your mind since some way and especially for trauma. So it doesn't surprise me at all that the effects of trauma were sort of temporarily.

Afraid medium-term now if I buy this drug and that's something people are studying that they're studying that the effect on PTSD and so forth in and it seems to work at least to some extent.

So another aspect of your identity is sex work and porn and only fans and also being I would I would say Advocate or explainer of polyamory to sort of the the monogamous world. If that does that do you think that accurately.

I enjoy that. I have an explainer autobiographically. How did you begin to get into this world effort from being a a sheltered Christian girl?.

Yeah, well as a shelter Christian girl, I was expected to become a housewife maybe go to college to find a guy basically. So my future we had never been bright. My family is very poor. So I might have to work at a gas station. Like a minimum wage job and then I ended up working in a factory for a year and it was really awful. What what kind of factory was it?.

Curtis Schweitzer engineering and Manufacturing, electrical assembly relays control electrical systems. So basically these units that like would shut off or control in various ways and do a task over and over and it was awful work like 50 60 hour weeks. What am I doing with my life. I don't know if this is what I want and I will how old are you at this point? And so I decided to try and make my own business because people do that. I find it hard to overstate how disconnected from society.

I was like a lot of the things I wanted to do. I had no.

Concept of like what social norms were like is it Saint Eva is difficult to explain because loves those are just so minor that I can't even tell them to you cuz they're in the water right? Listen to Kabhi Larry and like the way people interact with each other in like what do you expect like, do you hand shakes at this or do you like call someone up at night? Like I don't know.

Anyway, so I I tried to make my own business to do photography in that went terribly because I had no idea what I was doing and it's like a living off of savings. I had from the factory and sleeping on a friend's couch and a guy that I was briefly dating help me about camming and that we should try it and I look okay, but then we broke up before we ended up giving it a shot and So eventually I was like, okay if I go on the internet and that I did and I made $60 the first night and I was like, that's the most money I've ever seen for that little work and then it became like obsessed.

I was like, okay. This is my ticket out of here. I need to work as hard as I can and 20 are you concerned about your privacy when browsing the internet? I know most of you are probably thinking why not just use incognito mode. Well incognito mode doesn't hide your activity.

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Com Coleman.

So was there a friction from the demoraes you were raised with?.

Entering the a world that your parents and whole Community would have certainly disapproved of that means being friends with people that used to be friends with I know weird. Like I probably wouldn't invite you over for holidays. And internally it was for me and like a little bit autistic and pretty compartmentalizing and so once I figured out that the world I've been raised with were not what I wanted there is no that's that's kind of wrong. I should have flipped over as I do people if that's wrong.

I don't I don't know what is wrong. Like there's no logical reason not to do it. I was very governed by the sort of like what they were logical reasons to do. So, I guess I'll do it and if I'm uncomfortable that's not a good reason for me to not do it as I was very uncomfortable for a while when I started you've also described how they making new friends.

And becoming financially independent was really valuable for you.

In this industry and.

This is obviously it's a taboo thing to do in polite Society. But as you say, I can't find any logical reason why it's it's wrong to defend that everything is consensual and I'd already disconnected the previous world. Like a lot of people don't do sex because they're afraid of it because they're afraid their Community will judge them, but I left my community behind. So there's really nothing for me to lose. Do did you not talk to your parents at this point or.

It wasn't talking to my dad still kinda don't and I wasn't talking very much. So I'm not because I was just paying attention other things.

Madison understandable easier, I noticed on Twitter sometimes that there are at least I've seen more than once you and the position of correcting misunderstandings what you just misunderstandings or missing interpretations of sex work and.

I have the impression that you defend against the.

Idea that women are necessarily exploited by participating in sex work as well as questioning the logic behind the taboos around doing sex work.

So it is it if I have that impression right? What it what do you notice?.

In in the culture or online about in terms of people's misperceptions or or false beliefs about sex work. I regularly read a lot of forms from areas. I disagree with and one of them is anti-pornography and the views are so strange. They believe that all women who engage in this in any form of sex Burkhart necessarily exploited because they don't want to be this is non-consensual in some way and is really strong discuss the people have a dissociating money in exchange for sex, which I I don't think I really resonate with or understand I would like to understand it more and was it was a question about polyamory it can be.

It was about sex works, but not very.

Doesn't make an effort people do sex work is very lazy, which I think is a trooper dollar earned but not true in general thing is funny that people are like sex workers make too much money. This is very stupid and also sex workers are terrible and shouldn't do it. And I think those two feet into each other like the more that you shame sex workers the more money they are going to make because the stronger Market you're creating. Yeah, you're suppressing competition. So it feels like like this year's making this work really so I guess polyamory is the next topic.

What is polyamory? When did you.

Sort of discover that you are polyamorous and what are some of the misconceptions about it in a way that where everybody knows and generous and that's me. Is life in all this time. It felt like like it's really cheap thing because with my boyfriend he's like which is another aspect of society telling you to be upset by something. Like I felt like I didn't really genuine feel it. And so I was offended him later on when I figured I'd like and where you don't have to feel that way.

I was really done to it.

Stop being red.

And all the misconceptions rounded mainly a confusion of exclusivity and commitment a lot of people think that if you are not exclusive it's like so join in their mind that you try and separated families been together for 20 years, you know, you can be extremely so yeah. I know Diana Fleischman and Jeffrey Miller are our friends of mine that are also themselves polyamorous and married and and also spokespeople for it and both evolutionary psychologists as well as how the hell do you manage the jealousy?.

Another one of those things that is socially design and every single Merit if you ever tells you that you're supposed to be jealous when somebody does something with somebody else good and right and encourages and of course, you're going to feel jealous when you get everywhere abusing for me. It's something like my partner like he is dating her and she maybe she's cooler than he's going to leave her and then then that like gives me I believe that I am inadequate.

And sometimes you can actually address that you can like come to terms with being alone. And then another is just over time that your body starts to realize. There's not a threat to calm down the keep not leaving you eventually you're going to stop really being afraid about it because I clearly not true. So just talking to my friend recently.

Who just started dating someone and he.

You know, he's very similar to me in that she she tends to be pretty at least outwardly in control of his emotions. He doesn't have any burst of anger in life. He is actually I would say even more even Keel than I am and probably my most well-adjusted friend if I had to choose one that is just going to Reliable and Through the Motions always seemed correctly calibrated for the situation. It would be this guy.

And his girlfriend has this is is friends with her ex.

And he found that this absolutely drove him to a level of anger that she could not recognize himself, right? If you could feel the anger welling up and notice as it's happening. This is totally unreasonable. I'm just being I'm being crazy right now and even knowing that I'm being crazy. I cannot manage to forcibly dial down my anger right now and I empathize with this emotion deeply because it's it's one. I've also felt when it comes to sexual jealousy for instance.

And.

It occurs to me that.

This may just be a trait that varies in people.

At 8 you know, it's a trait that I wouldn't have known that I had and I am fairly sure wasn't instilled Into Me by the culture because it's actually like there's a level of jealousy that is.

Co-signed by mainstream culture and there's a level of jealousy I've experienced and and my friends has experienced where it's like you're friends with a boy and I cannot handle it right and maybe after 2 months of being together three months of being together except sides, but even that I could experience such anger such anger that I am driven to buy almost nothing in this world over you having a totally innocent friendship with a male.

And the fact that I'm in fact embarrassed to express how angry I am and I only do it in the hopes that expressing it helps me overcome it because I understand that I'm being crazy. It leads me to believe that there's just.

There's a spider in it, you know, this is probably a trait that occurs on a spectrum and if I were to guess it's probably partly heritable.

And and if that's true, it leads me to believe that.

Holly the question of polyamory and and monogamy, what do it might be.

Partly a matter of coming to realization zorbing persuaded into one of the other that is much more is it it may end up being being just closer to being gay or straight or bi and that is you just are what you are and it's not the most important thing is just to be honest with yourself about what you want and what you're capable of and to not judge other people or try to.

Push other people into one or the other and just sort of all Live and Let Live type mentality. Does that model of monogamy polyamory make sense to you or do you view it differently? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that like and it has a lot of benefits and if the cost of those benefits is high enough for you, then it makes sense to not pay that cost a lot of people like the kind of reaction that they have for whatever reason whether it be from society or from like genetics or from other issue.

You don't even have to explain it. Like it doesn't matter origin. It's just the fact is there and it might take so much effort is just not really a feasible thing to concentrate on for your life. Totally legitimate to me. Like if you decide it's not where is Community comes under attack?.

Quite a bit online or people can't raise children or they don't really love their Partners. It is very reminiscent of stuff. I heard against homosexuality like a lot of this stuff like your relationships aren't real or your relationships are flawed because you approach it in this other way or that you're definitely going to fall apart yet. I think there's way more attacks on Holly Holly Lake be viewed for distinctly to monogamy in some ways. I can respect or like to understand it but it is quite serious and there is like dedication in this is a viable option for like an actual way of life.

Yeah. I think I have to think.

A good amount of the attack comes from Envy.

By this or the some kind of I think monogamy is the default right? And so I have to assume there are there people who would want to be polyamorous?.

And maybe they even have the naturally malleable or low jealousy to make it workable.

But for whatever reason never made the effort or.

And then you know, they see people talking about how great polyamory is and seal Summers to tear it down. I mean that that would be my psychologizing of why people who are you know, totally accepting of homosexuality and bisexuality and all kinds of sexuality would nevertheless be hostile towards a community that is really infringing on them at all selection problems. I think a lot of the pushback against polyamory comes from Men Who feel sexually insecure because they're imagining a world. Where is everybody can fuck everybody than all the women will want to suck the top 10 men and all the rest of the men will be left in the dust and that's extremely frightening to them that it is one thing that I care so interesting that people actually articulate that logic, you know behind their critique of polyamory.

Why don't you like I think this is generally what motivates a lot of cysts like we have to walk him down. You know, it's like the women are going to go and get impregnated by other men really scary. I think generally are being cocked that mean I think that men get for being poly is much greater than the heat that women get for being poly. He has like four men is a threat to their masculinity because you're a woman is going off and fucking other guy like me must be such a loser.

Oh, I see my prediction is that what what feminism would say are predicted that men are praised for having multiple partners whereas women are regarded as slots.

But it seems you're saying at least with polyamory is sort of the opposite that interviewed as letting their female Partners have sex with other men and that outweighs the whatever respect they Garner for having multiple partners in people's minds when people do hate polyamory. I think a lot of it comes from the sense of this would make me more sexually insecure in this sort of system. I would not get my sexual needs met. I would not be sexually desired they be monogamy is like one of the only way is like a guarantee that they will have a meet.

And so if you take that away, it's extremely sore at night. So I want to pay bill a little bit and.

Talk about your.

I guess more recent foray into.

You're talking about the politics of race and and maybe politics in general and I guess the way I want to introduce this is that.

I think I see a definitely a strain of your thinking that.

Falls in line with the.

Rationalist community with people like slate star codex and I was on Julia Gillespie podcast recently.

And.

It's a style of thinking that is.

Very that Prides itself on being dispassionate and a political and.

It's a style thinking that I feel most comfortable in certainly and I think that's you know, it's no accident that I find your writing. So compelling.

At the same time I'm someone who is definitely gone into the world of talking about politics from a passionate perspective rather than a dispassionate detached scholarly simply curious perspective.

Even though I feel much more at home in this world of just.

That that that the style of Engagement that is more.

Commenting in the rationalist community. Do you feel a kind of tension between that do you know what I'm talkin about that there's no there's a kind of just a style of Engagement that is like a fighting mindset. Right? Like there's a thing out in the world that we have to fight for and then there's another style of Engagement that is.

Deep and dispassionate curiosity not dispassionate in the sense of of sort of not caring but in the sense that I really am so curious where the answer to this question leads that I'm going to try to leave all of my biases and preconceptions and.

Even in a moral preconceptions up at the door. There's a two different styles and I think.

Aisa can sort of see you going back before back and forth between them on Twitter and I and I do this as well. So I wonder if you noticed that tension at all I think about it because it's something I've been feeling in myself lately and haven't actually articulated. So yeah, it is sounds like you're describing like you to describe a little for listeners who don't know basically describing the pictures to Shutterfly cities of approaching the world and conflicts in conflict is conflict theory is that they believe that there are certain good guys and bad guys are Bad actors.

And the way to engage is is to sort of like if you don't do what they're going to do, you know overrun you and take over and you need to do to survive and then just a theory is sort of like.

Enterprise from people being mistaken not from being bad that if we just sort of sit around and like look at the the problem closely enough eventually we're going to figure that. There is a choice in the matter. I definitely like the mistake Siri version, but I think I operate a little bit conflict theory. I feel like mistakes. Like like offering us though. We're just trying to figure out the reality of the world feels like there's a corporation kind of way. Like if I do this and you do this, then we're both good and if I do this and you're doing conflict theory, then you might run over me and so I try to do mistakes as much as I can to Signal them that I'm willing to cooperate.

If you do this to I will do this too and I'm willing to change my mind like it's possible that you are correct and if we can I will I will come over to your team if you can be convincing enough.

So I just want to try to do but I do think that there is some sort of I do view us as at War and someday way in the sense that I think that's the woke stuff is terrifying and is going to destroy people's mental health and that makes me feel angry and Afraid and defensive and protective of people that I love spend people that they don't need. No and so I feel like I'm trying to fight the war through mistake theory in some way I are they I'm not using these terms correctly.

I don't I don't want to rely on them too heavily, but I'm trying to fight a war and in that be as charitable as I can be be like, I really think that what you're doing is terrible but like the whole time trying to be vulnerable in that what you're doing is bad. And also I'm willing to be wrong, but I don't know how to how to make those two things. Mesh. I agree with you that there is a tension and I feel pretty confused in myself about how to how to operate within both of them at the same time.

So,.

Where did you first encounter? No, woke politics is sort of how have you come to have an opinion on it and care about it throughout of the internet ether but a lot of my religious upbringing the way that these people talk.

It like that that makes me terrified. It's like you not see like I feel like I've been there done that shit. I know what that is.

It's like this this tribalism. It's this moralization of the things that were talking about. It's like attaching desert of Epic narrative to fax. Right leg is no longer about the facts. I can't discuss the fact that isolation the factor indicative of sin where God or racism or whatever and so and so we're loaded right? Like we cannot think clearly like it's a deliberate attempt to remove your ability to think clearly so that you can like actually fight this this other thing like this isn't like an ideological in tribal thing.

That's masquerading using faxes cover and it is still so clear to me. It feels like a disgusting and and I feel really upset by it. And I'd I feel so confused how they don't see that their religious. It feels great by John McWhorter and Andrew Sullivan. I think have have both written great pieces explicitly comparing intersectionality and and wokeness to religion and.

I think it's obvious to me as well. I never grew up with religion. I was always sort of atheistic by nature but also grew up in it and an atheist household.

But when I was I begin to be introduced to wokeness when I was 15 or 16 through my friends at school and through Tumblr and as well as in at a seminar that I want to but I think I talked about before on the on this podcast. I was shipped off to a seminar when I was 16 years old.

That was a meeting of maybe a thousand private school students from all across the country where we just learned the tenets of intersectionality. And you know, I I had I grew up in a very liberal town and it was a I grew up with a kind of a very diverse racially diverse town and I grew up with a default.

Progressive attitude in the in the Martin Luther King style of of of the word Progressive towards race, which is that your skin color doesn't matter racism was so obviously idiotic that it was almost not worth talking about.

And I had an instinct to never segregate based on race. And I I remember when I was 10 years old some kid had the idea to play a soccer game of the black kid versus the white kids and the type of kid. I was at the time me and this other other black girl. We just walked away and we were like, we're not participating in this because this is just like something inherently wrong about this. That was the kind of sort of default moral intuition I had.

And then I went to this seminar where I was taught the terms white privilege and internalized oppression and.

I was always the skeptic by Nature so I had questions but the environment was so repressive that I couldn't ask those questions and always repressive is also deeply spiritual and there were kids there that were coming out of the closet for the first time that were from places where it ends, you know balling in tears over being in a place where they finally felt accepted in their sexuality and it was incredibly warm and spiritual environment where you also we're not allowed to ask any questions and I thought you knew years later.

I thought this this must be what many people feel like growing up in church that there's clearly something beautiful and deep about it, but it relies on repression of thought in order to maintain itself.

And in this excerpt is one of the tenants of rationality is like that which can be killed by the church should be by there such as yourself open and let yourself be destroyed by something that might not knew, you know an idea that has persisted for so long and I think this is why I am so well if he has a lot of mechanisms to keep the outside of it at some level it's not an accident that most people throughout most of.

History have been religious and I have believed things that are patently and provably absurd.

And have punished anyone who defense like that's that's not that's not a bug that's a feature. But we also have the future and then the capability of reason and rationality and in various places and berries times that has one out and then that is definitely definitely view myself and the other work in the writing I do as you know in the tradition of reasons criticism of religion or symmetries to notice between say like white privilege and original sin, I think yeah, you know, it is original sin something you grew up believing.

Yeah, you know, I only know what I know about it from from reading about it, but the Symmetry seem seem right there to be noticed like the the notion that.

You are born guilty of something, right? This is what Robin diangelo says, it's your white you are born a racist. It's actually not your fault in a deep sense, right? You are literally this inevitably to be born white in America is to imbibe racism. There's no agency about it whatsoever and you can never get rid of it actually, but even though you can't get rid of it, you have to constantly do the work right you have to constantly take my program until the end of time knowing that you'll never get rid of it.

But you still do have to take this particular healing program that I have critical race theory in this case I M A. I know the parallel you got people killed big shame guilt or whatever and don't have a clear path for how to make that go away on its own.

Aren't you are not to attempt to prove yourself wholly, you can like find live with yourself. If you are a place where you are, no longer a person feels like an actual concrete structure for the nebula deep down. I think that's right a joke or heat. She just references the forever empty that people feel inside right? And I think the whole crowd last knowingly write.

It's just that you know this sense of of not enough Miss inside.

And any thought system that can come in with a package that says that acknowledges that you feel alienated right as opposed to most of the society which is marketing which is just you know, pleasure based and this is what you need La pobla. There's these thoughts systems that so hard on his face when they say wait a minute breathe something feels wrong, right? You don't feel totally at home in the world you sort of hate yourself or you feel vaguely guilty. Let me explain all of that.

I know why and then they give you a program to help in and that's enormously attractive that that's the genius of the doctrine of original sin.

And it's also the genius of of the doctrine of white privilege, and I totally see the appeal of it.

The problem is it requires you to adopt all of these beliefs about what your skin color?.

How your skin color makes you different from others how it prevents you from knowing certain things or helps, you know certain things do in D'Angelo's case.

Allegedly, I as a black person like if we're talking about the subject of race, you have to default to my opinion. I just epistemologically I have something over you which is that I know things in a way that you can't possibly which is quite the claim to make philosophically.

My skin color just helps me it gives me another way of knowing in a deeper way of knowing things such that.

You can't challenge my beliefs right there. There's nothing you can really say on the topic of race that is valuable at all. And I remember I was talking to a white friend of mine recently.

And he's he's a smart guy and not woke at all sort of vaguely economically last on on politics.

And he said well, I just feel like as a white guy.

Like I just really have nothing of value to add to the conversation on race and I thought that was the Crux of of what I disagree with because I know this person.

To be too smart to have nothing to say right like I know she knew she might correct me on something and this is a topic. I I pay a lot of attention to but from the mix of his mind and life experience. I know that if he has nothing of value to say on the topic of race, then a lot of people have nothing of value to say on the topic of race, including a lot of black people. I just cuz of that kind of mind I know him to have and the notion that he would feel that because of his skin color.

He has nothing to add that's really at the core of what I'm trying to criticize when I criticize woke epistemology in any event.

It's good to see that you're sort of speaking out about these things and I wonder to what degree.

Also your your background having grown up or is it part of this there is this I think.

It's not explicit part of locust but a kind of implicit sense that.

Yes, there are poor white people. But fundamentally the conversation can't be about class rather than race has to be about race. So I noticed that and what are your thoughts about that the power structures like do you like who you can give authority to and obviously it's not advantageous for them to give power to poor people because a lot of white people are poor decisions like a redrawing of boundaries like gerrymandering but the concepts and it's really pouring like I had to work in a factory for a year and I didn't go to college and so is it feels so strange to me?

It's like.

Play Bat doesn't do anything. I know that they have responses that you know, they have well-structured immune responses to being like well that I mean you would have been worse if you were black right like if you were poor but you would also been blocked and it would have been even harder for you may be true. But it's this is just the way that they're placing emphasis on the importance is not Nuance whatsoever is very binary. I grew up with wealth and it was obvious from the time.

I was born that I was going to go to college.

And I grew up around a lot of other black people in precisely the same or very similar scenario, you know, my town was a wealthy.

New York suburb that was like a third black. So if under the woke worldview just putting myself next to you. I would Trump you in every respect except for you being a woman your class would actually do nothing for you in terms of your Social Status relative to me. You couldn't really invoke your quote-unquote white poverty as a sort of platform to stand on to make your opinions matter. You could do it with being a woman that would give you some kind of standing but it flattens the whole Contour of privilege and lock an opportunity which are all real Concepts and just Narrows and down to one one aspect or two aspects of race and gender.

Why is it actually a the conversation about privilege is like a 12000 dimensional conversation having to do with yes race and gender but also.

Geography family genetics individual genetics as its height and facial Symmetry and beauty and you know a personality traits where you're born when you're born those are just the most obvious ones but you know in a million other ways this conversation is so multi-dimensional you have the only things that are recognized our group characteristics, right? It's not about a lion Coleman. It's about white woman and black man and I was really surprised to find it every single other sex workers we talk.

Play for fun. And then it was great and I did it or it's like I needed to get back at my boyfriend or need to know the real to me that like I was the only white person who is belief advantage and then it started White.

That is the conversation to have not say that is nothing but it is so interesting that like nobody says single word about the drive to get in a car how I was different from everybody else brought to my skin color to the way they were thinking about that.

I think there's a lot of people that would be much more warm to the idea of white privilege it if it were treated as simply one amongst many equally compelling an interesting varieties of privilege in this world that carve out the social World in and all sorts of ways, right like but it's really an obsessive Focus. It's an obsessive Focus that's presented as if it's just totally reasonable and it would be reasonable if it were in the context of an actual discussion about privilege and opportunity in general as a manifest in a friend.

I was talking to referencing earlier. He had the kind of upbringing class wise and family structure wise. That is The Stereotype of a black people right to contribute even only from his lived experience.

About you know what it's like to grow up with a struggling single mother it in his case because he's white that suggested me something wrong with just our connecting lived experience, which is a real and important thing and our desires to to make sense and improve the world right in a place like this is what we were talking about earlier. Like I went through, it was really awful and my perspectives on that is so different from a lot of money by creating a woman raising a look at the thing or that like the kind of marriage used to make sense of the thing can't be like incredibly different from what they are.

I always bring up on the topic of lived experience is the the Twins and pools of Thomas Sowell and James Baldwin who I think we're probably the greatest black conservative and liberal writers of the 20th century and on the topic of race. If you express skepticism of woke anti-racism what I've often guide Enterprise, what year your black and you grew up privileged that you didn't grow up in the hood. You didn't grow up in a place where it would make sense to fear the cops. And that's true.

And that's a way of sort of dismissing my ideas or it were explaining my ideas to someone that thinks the experience of being black should and negatively lead you to the worldview of tanahashi Coates and Abram candy until 4th.

And this is one of those armchair philosophy ideas that is sounds good to people on paper and it if so to make some some sense until you actually look at the world or is it just easily debunk of all, right. So so well in Baldwin or the sort of example, I always have in my swing was like they both grew up in Harlem like 5 years apart and soul. In fact with less privileged than Baldwin and it was in a homeless shelter for 4 A. And yet he became the conservative and Baldwin became the the liberal and the deeper point is that they just so you know, they grew up in the same place being black in the same time and came to completely different conclusions.

Intellectually about the the topic of racial inequality in this source is a racial inequality and the best way to approach them policy wise and so forth.

And then if you look at the wider context of famous black conservatives to the extent that one really becomes famous you someone like Glenn Lowery's from the southside of Chicago as is Shelby Steele Walter Williams who who recently passed away was from the projects in Philadelphia and all of these people had the sorts of backgrounds that allegedly are supposed to lead you to to sound like Hebron candy on these issues and and yet they didn't.

So there's really no.

Empirical backing to this notion that lived experience.

That leaves you it is the sort of inevitable cause of what beliefs in The Logical cause of book beliefs. And in fact every time I've seen polling from Pew and NPR, I think as well which finds at at least among black Americans the more educated you are the more likely you are to say that racism is a huge problem that's affected your life. That's an interesting result. I don't know exactly there's a few different ways that result could be interpreted but it certainly is it's not obvious that being more economically privileged end should lead you to have more wealth police, right?

If anything it seems like the model should be the more poverty and and hardship you experience as a black person the more you should be likely to absorb woke anti-racism, which is an ideology of the downtrodden and oppressed, right?.

Frustrating because I was like, that's a good argument and then my mind went totally just like Express that argument to them then maybe they would update their perspective and then I was like at all and then I just have a little bit of sadness. Yeah. Well if it works with some obviously but yeah, I mean the truth is so much of this is mediated by social approval and not wanting to lose friends and certainly, you know, that there's a little bit of an illusion I think of an efficacy on the part of people making arguments because you don't really see the thousands of people listening to this podcast episode silently quietly changing their minds in the privacy of their own home and not posting about it what you see as a public person on Twitter is is what people are willing to put out publicly.

Never say we helped build up in the background on an adventure. And for whatever reason you happen to be the kind of person that found that they could leave their Community right leave everyone that they knew right? Some people dispositionally can't do that until make compromises on their beliefs and then that last exactly the same with with wokeness. Yeah, that's trapped in their belief. All right. Well, that's the end of my questions for you now, I would love to have you back at some point in the future, but this was an excellent conversation one of my favorites.

And before I let you go, can you point people to wherever you want them to find your work or your Twitter handle and so forth? Yeah. Thank you very much. This is really nice. Very good at articulating positions, which is nice. Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Don't take it the wrong way of knowing less.com at know knowing less and then I'm on Twitter it a little girl a e l l a underscore girl, and I mean Google will do the rest really awesome. Thank you.

Thank you.