How does a rationalist make a baby?

A member of an unusual Bay Area community decides to try to have a baby in an unusual way – by putting out a very large prize for anyone who can help her find a mate. How the internet shaped one person’s decision-thinking. Support Search Engine! https://searchengine.supercast.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

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• 0:44PJ Vogt?

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• 1:02PJ Vogt?

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• 2:29PJ Vogt?

  Can you just introduce yourself?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, hi, I'm Ayla and I'm a sex worker researcher, writer, among other things.

• 2:38PJ Vogt?

  What do you think of as your primary thing that you are, on the internet, I mean?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think it depends a lot, right? Because usually you identify as whatever is sort of most distinct about you, or like, has the greatest social impact. And that is either sex worker or writer slash researcher, depending on what circles I'm in.

• 3:01PJ Vogt?

  Ayla is one of the, there's no perfect word for this, but one of the characters of this chapter of the internet, one of its personalities. She's a writer. She writes mainly on her Substack, which is called Knowing Less. Sometimes she writes about her life as a professional sex worker. Sometimes she conducts surveys about sexuality, polling internet strangers to find out about their habits and desires. She ran one survey about people's fetishes that garnered over 700,000 responses.

• 3:31PJ Vogt?

  Sex worker who does online surveys about sex, frankly, to me, sounds like a description of a person I would ordinarily find pretty boring. People who talk a lot about sex publicly, to me, often just sound like they're strenuously working overtime to remind me that they've had it. But I deeply enjoy Ayla's writing. She provokes, but she reads to me as someone who is sincere about her beliefs, who genuinely has looked at the big questions, how to find meaning, how we're meant to live, and discovered for herself some strange and unusual answers, some of which challenge my own.

• 4:06PJ Vogt?

  But there's a specific reason I wanted to talk to her this week. She'd made a big, and to me, weird, life decision, and she'd gotten there through a process I was curious about, which had to do with her rationalist beliefs. Rationalism is an intellectual subculture, a group of people who hang out and influence each other, largely based in the Bay Area. These are people who try, through various methods, some smart, some silly, to just think more rigorously, to try to catch their own brains being biased, or stupid, or wrong.

• 4:43PJ Vogt?

  In the mainstream press, when you read about rationalists, the coverage is often pretty negative. That's partly because there are culty splinter groups of rationalists who are legitimately insane, sometimes even violent. But mainstream rationalists, to me, read as overthinking nerds, who overthink themselves to conclusions that sometimes seem very reasonable and sometimes seem a little nutty in a way that delights me. The conversation that follows, truly one of the more surprising ones I've had in a while. It's about Ayla, about rationalism, about how in a world where a lot of people have lost faith in institutions or religions, someone just figures out how to make their own life decisions, almost from scratch.

• 5:25PJ Vogt?

  What is rationalism?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on what you mean. The community is like a scene, but usually it's around some principles around, like, what does it look like to actually try and figure out what's true? Because a lot of people really want to and they sort of include it as a side effect of a lot of their thinking, but it's rare to have a very concrete, like, how do we actually think more accurate thoughts? And so it's just like various strategies and techniques to try and figure out how to do that.

• 5:50PJ Vogt?

  And so it's funny. I mean, like, if you ask most people, do you care about finding out what's true? There's not that many people who would say that they don't. But for rationalists, it's a group of people who have really decided they are going to care about this in a more deliberate, consistent way.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great way of putting it.

• 6:08PJ Vogt?

  Were you raised in a rationalist household?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  No, I was raised very religious.

• 6:13PJ Vogt?

  Which type of religious?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  I was Calvinist, evangelical, homeschooled. It was a professional evangelical family. My dad is a career Christian debater. So I learned a lot about like debate and reason, but through a very Christian lens, and it was generally quite warlike. Because realistically, Christians aren't that curious if they're wrong. The whole strategy is more how do you defend how right you are? Which I think trained a lot of sort of poor rationalist techniques into me, or rather, a lot of rationalist sins. If you will.

• 6:43PJ Vogt?

  And just, I don't want to pretend like I know this. I know that Calvinism is like a severe, in my mind, branch of Christianity, but what does it mean to be a Calvinist Christian?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it totally is associated with more severe social technology, but the five points of Calvinism are total, which is total depravity, which means that you are born sinful, like babies are inherently sinful, for example, unconditional election, which means that God picks you to be saved, not based on anything that you do or any aspect of yourself, but rather to his unknowable decisions, limited atonement, which means that Jesus died only for the elect, he did not die for the unelect, irresistible grace, which means that if God decides to save you, you cannot say no, and perseverance of the saints, which is once saved, always saved.

• 7:24PJ Vogt?

  These things have been programmed into you pretty thoroughly.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I go to the grave with those things in my brain.

• 7:31PJ Vogt?

  And so what did it look like, if you don't mind my asking, like, your dinner table in a professional Calvinist household as a kid, being somebody who's trying to figure out what's true and what's not true, and what's right and what's wrong, like, what were those conversations like?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  It was a lot of, like, training for war. I would say we would have Bible study every night when I was a child at our family dinner, where we would read the Bible, and then my dad would drill us on theological concepts, and then give us, like, a lot of examples of what, you know, enemies of the faith would say, and to the correct answer to respond to this. So there's a lot of what the arguments are and how to recite them, in a sense, and there was a lot of lip service given to, like, true doubt and figuring out what's going on. It's like, oh, we are actually interested in the truth, is what people would say, but this was not realistic.

• 8:19PJ Vogt?

  But at the time, for a while, it felt realistic to you.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that's part of the reason why I'm no longer Christian. Like, in it, I remember being quite young and then realizing, wait a second, there's a bunch of other religions, and they all seem very convinced about it themselves.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Uh, should I be worried? Uh, I noticed that I am in a relationship that I'm very convinced about. And so I remember like promising to myself, okay, the only way that I can make this fair and like truly believe that the other people are wrong is if I myself am open to being wrong. So I really promised that within myself and it took a very long time for me to actually figure out that I was wrong. Still, because like social incentives make it very difficult to figure out what's going on often.

• 8:57PJ Vogt?

  How old were you when you were making that promise to yourself?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Uh, like probably early teens.

• 9:06PJ Vogt?

  And so what would you like, when you say that you were being prepared for war, it's like you're being prepared for intellectual war with people who didn't believe. And the idea was that like you're being given like an operating manual. Like they'll say this, but then you'll say this. And if they say this, then you do this. It's almost like law school.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, very much. Do you know the great atheist wars of the 2010s where everybody was on forums being angry at each other about this?

• 9:29PJ Vogt?

  A bad chapter in internet, I would say.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that was very much. We were like training for the atheist wars, although I didn't really know it at the time. And like, this is my dad's profession. He would, you know, make these arguments very easily available online. You'd go to his website and you would download like, oh, if somebody says this thing, you can copy paste these argument singers to say in response.

• 9:47PJ Vogt?

  So when did you realize that you were going to go on a different path? Like, what happened to make you drop out of those?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Uh, it took sort of an embarrassingly long time. I think it was very difficult to actually think properly because I had such massive social incentive to not think properly. Like, I didn't know anybody who wasn't Christian. I was homeschooled, like I was in a bubble and everything I knew about the world was filtered through this thing. And so I would always think like, oh, I could not believe if I thought it wasn't true, but I don't think I actually had that option available to me. Like my brain just wouldn't let me consider it because the consequences would have been massive. And so it was only after I like got old enough and left home and for the first time was surrounded by a bunch of people who weren't Christian, that I think this started to give me a little bit of space in my mind to think that possibly I could disagree in some way.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Like especially seeing other people who weren't Christian and they had functioning lives. Cause we'd always been sort of told that, oh, I mean, there are good people who aren't Christian, but you know, their goodness isn't deep in some way. And they don't actually have any sort of moral guiding light. And it's going to actually be hard and you can't really trust them. And so to finally start interacting with people who seemed normal or kind or even kinder than a lot of the Christians I knew, I was like, Huh, that's not what I expected.

• 10:58PJ Vogt?

  And was this college?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went very briefly for like three months before I couldn't afford it. But it was like college and then also when I had jobs around college and the factory and stuff like that.

• 11:09PJ Vogt?

  And we, I knew that you dropped out of college. I didn't know why. It was, it was just financially, you couldn't afford to be there?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, my parents made too much money for me to qualify for any aid, but they also refused to help or co-sign any loans. So I couldn't go.

• 11:24PJ Vogt?

  Hmm.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Like my whole childhood, they made it very explicit that they would not help me financially whatsoever after I turned 18 and I was completely on my own.

• 11:31PJ Vogt?

  And so how did you support yourself?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  I worked at a factory, on a factory assembly line floor.

• 11:38PJ Vogt?

  What was the factory making?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  This was in Pullman, Schweitzer Engineering, and I made electrical relays.

• 11:45PJ Vogt?

  How is that?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  It was sucks, man. We had to wake up at like 4am and go over, you know, nine, 10 hour shifts and work weekends. It was really awful.

• 11:54PJ Vogt?

  And what would you think about when you were on the line?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  I think I tried very hard to be happy with my situation, which I kind of was because being out of my upbringing was kind of great in some ways. But I definitely was in some absolute amount of pain about it and I wanted to get out.

• 12:12PJ Vogt?

  And was the pain, like those are hard jobs.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 12:16PJ Vogt?

  And you seem like a person with an unusually active mind. Like was the pain boredom? Was the pain the hardness of the job? Like what was the pain?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was just the fact that it sucked up your whole life. It was just so many hours. I basically just lived to work and it was really sad. And I sort of had some sense that I could do something more. Like I felt very motivated. I was like a vibrant, creative person who just like really filled my life with a bunch of cool shit and I loved learning. And I kept thinking like, okay, well, if I do super, super well, maybe I can race through the ranks and like be a cool engineer or something. But I didn't know that you had to go to college to get off the factory floor. There was no way to actually become successful in that system at all. And so I felt like trapped and I didn't really know what to do about it.

• 12:59PJ Vogt?

  And so what did you do?

• 13:01Speaker 01

  I moved back down to Boise and got into sex work. I was, became a cam girl, which was great. I loved it.

• 13:09PJ Vogt?

  How did that idea occur to you?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  I was dating a guy, I went off of Cupid and he, I guess he did some sex work and then he was like, well, I'm a cam boy. You can sort of join me. And make some money that way. You can like ride on my coattails a bit. But then I ended up breaking up with him before we tried that. And so I was sitting there, I'm like, man, well, I need money. And he told me about this camming thing, so I guess maybe I'll try that. And then I had no idea what I was doing and I logged on and I got drunk because I was scared. And then I showed my boobies and whatever. And then I made $60 my first night, which was insane money for me for that kind of work. And then I just got addicted. I was like, ah, all this vibrancy and energy, like desire to build something finally had an outlet. I was like, ah, I can channel it into this thing. I can work on it and actually like my efforts will have payout. And then I became really obsessed with it.

• 13:53PJ Vogt?

  Were you, you were doing something that was very against the like moral instruction you'd been given as a kid. Just the first time you ever like disrobe for a camera for internet strangers. Did you have fear like, did you have like, did you feel like you were overriding something? Or was it just like, I'm not going back to the factory? Like, how did it feel?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Uh, weirdly, no, I think I just sort of have a very socio-sexual disposition and.

• 14:19PJ Vogt?

  Wait, what's a socio-sexual disposition?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  It's like a type of personality metric that measures sort of how prone you are to basically casual sex. Like how easy it is for you to separate like emotion from sex, that kind of thing.

• 14:30PJ Vogt?

  I see.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  And so for me, I think that's just sort of the way that I'm wired. It's like a kind of a biological thing. And so a lot of like my training to, you know, be sexually not promiscuous was very ingrained in social. And I followed it really well, very religiously. But like, once I left my religion, I sort of had to throw everything out. I was like, okay, religion gave me a script for how to deal with like morality and family and like my personal body and my job and my life. And I know that the religion is wrong, so I have to start from scratch. I have to throw everything out, forget everything it told me. I need to figure everything out from first principles. And that involved throwing out like everything I knew about sex. Um, and so I didn't have like the secular conditioning and I threw out the religious conditioning. So from first principles, I was like, hmm, I notice I am horny. I notice I would like to have sex with someone.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  I will then go have sex with someone like that. It was just very basic and simple. And so I got pretty promiscuous pretty fast. So by the time I was camming, it wasn't that hard. Like men had seen me naked by that point. And it was definitely scary to do it publicly, but I was always very good at, uh, like taking risks and doing things, even though I was terrified.

• 15:37PJ Vogt?

  And wait, the way you're describing your interior monologue is, sounds like a person who has already become a rationalist. Like, I imagine that at that point in your life, a phrase like first principles was not in your internal monologue.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 15:53PJ Vogt?

  But you were thinking that way. Like, it was just like, that's the way your mind works, for whatever reason.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think I am well-suited towards rationalistic in this way.

• 16:02PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so you, you do this, and it's like you've been this ambitious person trying to figure out the world, struggling with the low ceiling of a factory job you don't enjoy. This blows that ceiling away, and now you're just on the internet, a place where you can try things and test them and notice what happens. And you're applying your intellectual curiosity and your curiosity about the world and your curiosity about the internet to camming. What does it look like to do that? Like, what does it look like to go in front of a camera that's attached to your computer and be naked, but to do that analytically?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Well, I was very bad at it for a long time. It turns out that applying analytics to things does not always turn out to be sexy, as many men have probably figured out. And also, like, I came from a very isolated world, where like, my parents didn't want us to watch movies that had too much romance in it, for example. So like, I didn't really see a lot of what flirting or seduction was. And so I didn't really know how that worked at all. I would get on cam, and I'd be like, "Well, I got boobs. Look at them. Please, give me money." And that didn't go super well. But so it took a lot of trial and error.

• 17:19PJ Vogt?

  Did you feel like an alien?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I think a lot of other people described me as an alien.

• 17:23PJ Vogt?

  You didn't feel like one, but people were reacting to you as if you were one?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't know that I was out of place. I knew that I had, like, come from this other world, and now I was in the outside world, because those were very separate when I was growing up. So it was very difficult for other people to understand how alien I was, even though I could feel that I was alien to them. And so that communication, like, the one-way thing was really hard for me, and people just thought I was, like, really weird for a while.

• 17:48PJ Vogt?

  But so you're both learning camming, and you're learning flirting, and you're learning, like... Secular social interactions and you're trying to do it analytically like what did your misfires look like?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  With Cami, you get money per hour, basically, or you see tips come in. And so you can sort of figure out over time, like if you engage in this kind of body language, do you get more or less money? So I did a lot of iteration and eventually I figured out that I made more money when I talked slowly and I used simpler words and I just smiled a whole lot. So like I basically had to go into sort of a gentle feminine, slow sort of persona to earn. And my big mistakes in the beginning were just being exactly the way that I was, which is like talking really fast and then talking about, you know, kind of conceptual things or something.

• 18:33PJ Vogt?

  Wait, how conceptual? What were you talking about?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  I don't know. I would talk about whatever I wanted. I mean, Cami is like, it's like Twitch streaming, just that, you know, the girl gets naked a bit. So there's a lot of time where you're just chatting at the camera.

• 18:45PJ Vogt?

  Huh.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  It's just anything, I don't know, philosophy, religion. I used to do like a religion role play because I was super good. I would just quote Bible verses of people while I'm getting naked.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  But I was also really goofy. And so I did a whole bunch of performance shows like miming or gnomes. And then this is eventually what led to the gnome photo set, which was very famous on Reddit for some period of time.

• 19:04PJ Vogt?

  Wait, sorry, what's the gnome photo set?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  I just, I really liked the internet. So I was a big redditor and they had a subreddit called Gone Wild where girls posted sexy photos. And I'm like, well, nobody's posting sexy naked photos that are also funny. So I did a photo set where I was like getting striptease, which was common, taking my clothes off. And then I got abducted by gnomes that slowly invaded as the photos progressed. It was like silly and dumb, but it was like the 11th top post of all time on Reddit for some time.

• 19:29PJ Vogt?

  Wow.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:31PJ Vogt?

  Was that the first time that you had viral success?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  That is, yes, that's correct.

• 19:37PJ Vogt?

  What did it feel like?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Oh, it was great. I pooped my pants the day I posted it, though.

• 19:41PJ Vogt?

  Was this related or is this a thing that happened?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  It was just, it was like a nice combination of me trying to get home and then shitting myself while my phone was blowing up as I like went viral.

• 19:52PJ Vogt?

  Wait, I don't, I don't understand the significance of you shitting yourself. You're like, was the lesson for you, like, don't pay so much attention to your phone? Or is it just another interesting thing that happened?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  No, it was just an extremely memorable day because I was like experiencing like a stressful, humiliating thing as well as like becoming famous and everybody loving the art that I had made like simultaneously.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  It was lovely.

• 20:13PJ Vogt?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  It got me like a good fan base, but it was not a very vast fan base that paid me a lot of money, unfortunately. And that was like something I had to come to terms with over time, which was very sad to me. It was like, it doesn't matter how much like effort or intelligence or creativity I put into my show, I will never ever make as much money as I do if, as if I just am like a kind of dumb, sweet woman who like masturbates well.

• 20:40PJ Vogt?

  Okay. So you've grown up with a religion that was also like here as a map for how to look at the world. That map was no good for you. You threw it out. You're camming, you're figuring it out. It was getting boring. So what do you do with that?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Well, I did a whole bunch of acid, like when I was 22 and that completely changed me. And I didn't do very well camming because I lost my motivation to cam. And then the year after that I got into rationality.

• 21:13PJ Vogt?

  After the break, what happens when a former Calvinist turned cam girl discovers an unusual new process for making decisions?

• 21:26PJ Vogt?

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• 23:28PJ Vogt?

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• 24:40PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. Okay, so you were already getting bored with camming. You're taking a lot of acid, which if you don't like your job, seems to underline for people the meaninglessness of their job. Acid gets you to rationalism?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  No, I did the acid. I lost my motivation to cam. And then I was dating a guy who read Less Wrong and then-

• 25:03PJ Vogt?

  What's Less Wrong?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Less Wrong is a website that Eliezer Yudkowsky originally wrote the sequences on, which is like a series of blog posts or sequences about like how to think more clearly. And I usually say the rationalism is like a scene of people who really like reading Less Wrong. Like right now, Less Wrong is no longer just the sequences. It's a forum. It's like pretty active and pretty good forum where people post general like research or science or rationality takes or opinions about emotions and people comment on it. And it's great.

• 25:37PJ Vogt?

  Less Wrong is set up like an old school message board. Text-heavy, dense. The premise of the website is that you can get better at thinking. You can be less wrong. If podcasts attract a certain kind of overthinker, Less Wrong is another place they might find a home. A place for overthinkers to overthink together and find new vocabularies for their overthinking. People here love a Bayesian probability. They're always updating their priors, working from first principles. Past the jargon, that just means they're doing what overthinky people usually do. Puzzling out the answers to questions about life and meaning and whether AI is going to kill us all. It's like if one of the message boards where people obsessed about bodybuilding was instead

• 26:22PJ Vogt?

  devoted to people obsessed with figuring out how to think and how to live, but without the guidance of a religion. When I read Less Wrong, the part of me that reacts to things gets very confused. Like my brain actually doesn't know whether to make jokes about all this or admire one community of people online that seems to be earnestly trying to better itself, instead of just finding new ways to become mutually insane. But when Ayla found Less Wrong, to her, it felt like a new home.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  And so I started reading that. And then I knew that there were meetups. And there was a local meetup. And so I went and I tried it and I fell in love and I kept going. And I've been going to rationalist meetups ever since.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  It feels so different from religion to me. Like, I know a lot of people describe rationality as a religion, but like, I've been part of a religion. This is nothing like it. Like personally, because religion is curiosity stopping. It's like we're giving you a set of answers and you have to like adhere to this set of beliefs, otherwise you are no longer part of a religion. And but for rationality, it was more like a process. And it's like, how do we arrive at the answers? And so you get a pretty wide variety of like disagreeing beliefs inside of people who like rationality. And people will disagree with each other about like very important things like politics or, you know, existentialism or AI or something. But the shared thing is like, how do you arrive at these beliefs in like a consistent and rigorous way?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  And the thing that really caught me for rationality, the thing that I really liked is I remember, because I had been trained in this really warlike religion thing. And I had a lot of identity wrapped up in my beliefs. Like I had identity wrapped up in my politics and I was like, okay, I believe this thing and I'm kind of cool. And if you don't, I'm going to kind of dunk on you, that sort of view.

• 28:07PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  And then I remember going in and then being like kind of like subtly antagonistically trying to initiate a conversation about feminism. Because at this point, I was like an anti feminist, which I am not anymore. And then I remember asking somebody like, well, are you a feminist? And then they said, well, what do you mean by feminist? It's just such a simple thing, but they meant it earnestly. They were like, oh, I just really want to understand what you mean. And I'm not thinking about the label or the identity. I just like want to understand the concepts you're pointing to so I can like pick out the concepts that I think are sensible and the things that aren't. And there was just something in that specific interaction that for me, like suddenly I saw a different way of being. I was like, oh, my God, they're not playing a game that I suddenly now realize that I'm playing.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  And then that just completely transformed my relationship to thinking and to.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Thoughts at all, and I loved it.

• 28:59PJ Vogt?

  But so it wasn't a point they made. It was that the way that they spoke and the way that they thought, it was like literally psychedelic for you. It was mind opening and it made you realize that even though you'd stopped believing the tenets of Calvinism, the style of thinking and the style of working out ideas and the style of arguing, you had just kind of brought with you. And in the way this person asked questions, you saw a different way to think.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically. I mean, it's not even just Calvinism. It's like, a lot of people do this with politics at all, or any kind of identity.

• 29:27PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, I, it's funny, I'm not a rationalist. I read and like a lot of rationalist writers. The experience you're describing having, I've had that experience where you're talking to someone and they just start asking questions in a way where you feel like they're like, slightly like, moving some part of your brain that was on tracks somewhere else. And that it's not that you're trying to figure out what they believe, more like they have a mode of inquiry that seems more careful and you're trying to learn how to follow it.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically. It's like you like try and throw a grenade at somebody and they don't even notice that you threw a grenade. And you're like, oh, I don't have to be in a world where you are watching out for grenades.

• 30:09PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. Okay, so it's like you had this community that didn't work for you. You wandered in the world for a while. You found a process that worked for you and a community that was attached to it, of people you liked. Back then, when you're going to these meetups, like what, is it a park? Is it at somebody's house? Is it a bar?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  At the time, it was at the Seattle University. One of the attendees was a student there and like had the gate pass thing. So we just went to one of the public buildings. But eventually, we started making group houses and people started moving in together. And then the meetups turned into those houses. But it eventually ended up becoming a potluck where we'd all bring food and then have a group dinner afterwards. It was like very community vibe. And then we would read some of the sequences or adjacent blog posts. I think at one point, we read one of my blog posts even, and discuss them and, I don't know, see if we agreed or disagreed. How would we have done it better?

• 30:58PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, it sounds like the parts of college people like.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:01PJ Vogt?

  Or like Bible study, if the answers aren't already figured out in advance.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember I was walking around Berkeley like last year sometime and I really had to poop. This is a recurring problem for me.

• 31:11PJ Vogt?

  Clearly.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  The emergency pooping. But I was having one of those emergency pooping elements. And I was walking around with my friend and my friend was like, oh, well, we should stop by somewhere to poop if you need. And then he started like pointing out all the rationalist group houses that were around, like, well, down this block is this group house. And then we can go up two blocks in this group house. And like, people in these group houses, like, I don't actually know them, really. But it's a rationalist group house, which means that like, if you're part of the rationalist community, I could be like, hey, I'm a rationalist. Can I use your bathroom? And that was really cool. That actually did remind me of Christianity a bit because there's like a big communal atmosphere, like, oh, if you're part of the church, we sort of know you and trust you and we're part of the same social scene such that, yeah, there's a reputation network that lets me trust you. And that was really nice.

• 31:53PJ Vogt?

  And so it's almost like, it's weird. Like, I've been trying to understand, like, who are these people and where did they show up from? And like, I feel like, one way you could think of it is, oh, it's a new school of thought or mode of thinking. One way it gets sort of poorly caricatured is like, oh, this is like some sort of Bay Area cult. Another way to think about it is, it's a website that has a community attached to the website.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds about right.

• 32:15PJ Vogt?

  Huh.

• 32:19PJ Vogt?

  I am not a rationalist. I don't think I'll ever be one. But as you can probably tell, I am curious about what they're trying to do. They are trying to solve a problem I often find myself tripping over in my own mind. Something I notice in myself when I try to figure out what's true or how to live, is how many of my beliefs are just a product of the people I spend my time with. If what you believe is also part of your identity, a Christian, an atheist, a Democrat, a Republican, changing your mind is very expensive because on some level, you suspect you will suffer social consequences. All of us are social people, intensely so. But we also want to think of ourselves as independent thinkers,

• 33:01PJ Vogt?

  which I think means sometimes we tell ourselves that it's just a coincidence how much we happen to agree with the people we know. Or tell ourselves that we agree with them because all of us just happen to have gotten to the right answers independently.

• 33:15PJ Vogt?

  Rationalists, or the people they influence, they really seem to be trying to find a way to get to their own individual ideas for real. You don't have to have the same answers to be in their club. You just have to have the same commitment to a process. That's the theory, anyway. Although in practice, like any group, the rationalists tend to resemble each other. They usually worry a lot about AI. They tend to think hard about philanthropy. They're very into animal welfare. And there was another trait they seemed to share that, for Ailas' taste, was kind of annoying. In her opinion, rationalists throw lousy parties.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  This is my ongoing complaint with rationalists, who I love dearly. The rationalists are fucking wonderful, but they drive me up the wall sometimes with not being very bodied and then not having very good parties. So I'm like, OK, I will design a party that will maximize how weird the environment is such that they must act differently somehow. Let's see if we can shock them out of it. And so I was like, what if we did a naked party where everybody has to be naked? And maybe that will somehow break the rationalists out of whatever fucking rationalist vibe they're bringing. And so I just picked like the most insane idea I could think of, and it did not work.

• 34:24PJ Vogt?

  So it's like, you were like, these people live completely in their minds. I'm going to try to create a party structure where they cannot help but be interesting in a non-in-their-minds way. And they were like, yes, your thinking for why this party should exist or why we should attend it is sound. And yet, they attend the party and they still just do the same thing that they would always do, but just naked.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was so funny. I couldn't believe it. I was just so like, damn it, foiled again.

• 34:52PJ Vogt?

  And what was like the, like, for me, every time I was throwing a party, the first fifth is kind of like difficult because I'm worried that people are not going to show up or if they show up, they're not going to have fun or everyone's kind of in their corners or they're like clustered around me. Like, what did conversation look like at the naked party?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  People felt awkward, just stilted. And then I was trying to make jokes and then at some point it just became like a long debate about global politics. That's mostly all I remember.

• 35:21PJ Vogt?

  OK.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  I think I tried to put on music and make them dance, but it didn't work.

• 35:25PJ Vogt?

  OK, so I think I'm seeing it. It sounds like you're a person where... You were enjoying the Bay Area's many countercultures. Rationalists were a part of that. Their sort of brainy insistence on living in their own minds was sometimes annoying. It sounds like part of your role in that community is to like, push them towards like, fun, embodiment, things like that?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was like the local sex weirdo.

• 35:53PJ Vogt?

  Right, in the Bay Area rationalist community, which is like a very funny local sex weirdo to be.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, very much.

• 36:02PJ Vogt?

  Ayla said that at her naked rationalist party, the attendees wore masks. The idea being that the anonymity might make people more comfortable, or the party more interesting. And so, some night in the Bay, there were nude philosophy fans, wearing animal masks, paper bags, paper mache, discussing trade policy, while their host looked on in real disappointment that things had not turned out differently.

• 36:30PJ Vogt?

  I spend a lot of time wondering what the world would have been like without social media, what we'd believe, who we'd follow. These days, I mostly notice what we've lost instead of what we've gained. But I wonder also about Ayla in the social media-less world. Is she still stuck at the factory making electrical relays? Is she still an uncomfortable Calvinist? Does she even know that somewhere out there, there's actually a tribe for her? A tribe too scattered and weird to find each other without a disruptive new communications technology? That'll also bring us rising authoritarianism and very convenient e-commerce? Probably not.

• 37:09PJ Vogt?

  After a short break, the local sex weirdo in the Bay Area rationalist community decides to do the most normal thing in the world: find someone to have kids with.

• 37:21PJ Vogt?

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• 38:03PJ Vogt?

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• 38:45PJ Vogt?

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• 39:19PJ Vogt?

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• 40:04PJ Vogt?

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• 40:30PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. So the specific reason I wanted to talk to Ayla this week of all weeks was because I'd seen her posting about what I thought was, even by her standards, a very unusual project. Is project even the right word? She'd been trying to find a partner to have a kid with. But Ayla had been pursuing that goal with the same home-brewed deductive logic that she routinely pursued life's questions with. So I'm curious about the current mission that you are on. How do you, as a rationalist, apply the principles of rationalism to your goal, which is that you want to have a kid and you want to find a partner who you can have a kid with?

• 41:10Speaker 01

  I mean, rational is about winning, is the common phrase. So-

• 41:14PJ Vogt?

  What does that mean, rationalism is about winning?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  I think it's like, a lot of people have debates over what kind of beliefs are true, but generally the correct beliefs are winning. And I don't mean like fighting other people. I mean, like if you build a car, does it run? You know, have you won at your goal of like trying to build the car? It's like demonstrable change in the world.

• 41:34PJ Vogt?

  Got it. Okay. Like sometimes how I think about it is it's people who are trying to figure out how to behave correctly without religion, but it sounds like a more accurate way to view it would be people who are trying to optimize.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  How do you achieve your goals?

• 41:47PJ Vogt?

  And so how do you apply that mode of thinking to this goal of like procreation?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  I mean, there's lots of things like I've made prediction markets about dating to see what the market thinks about my love life.

• 42:00PJ Vogt?

  A prediction market is a place where strangers can bet on the outcomes of anything. You have opened up markets into what is going to happen to your love life?

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Yes, like I broke up with my partner a while back and then I'm like, well, I get back together seriously with my partner and then people get to bet on that because often when you're inside of a thing, it's like hard to see straight.

• 42:17PJ Vogt?

  Well, what did you learn by doing it?

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Well, I think the market was higher than I thought it was. I was like, I am never gonna find anyone. I'm not gonna get back together with him. And the market was like 60% like, yes, you are. And I'm not back with him seriously, but I'm back to him casually. It seemed like a good chance that might become serious. So maybe the markets were wiser than me.

• 42:38PJ Vogt?

  I've had that experience. There was somebody I had like broken up with. I was like, I'll never talk to them again. And a friend of mine was just like, I'll bet you 40 bucks. And then immediately I was like, oh, I'm lying to myself.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's something about having money on the line that just really causes your brain to cut through the bullshit.

• 42:56PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. Okay. So one thing you're doing is you're inviting other people to make bets on what's going to happen with you as a way to better understand yourself, what you're doing, what you're looking for, et cetera. What else?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  I met my current partner through a survey or well, I originally met him at that naked party, but like I didn't talk to him. I didn't know who he was. And so I actually met up with him because I made a survey to date me where I had people fill out a form about a bunch of stuff that was important to me. And then I scored them secretly on the backend and then I contacted the highest scores.

• 43:28PJ Vogt?

  I saw you post this, like you made a post that was just like. If you're interested in dating me, answer these questions. But I didn't read the survey. What type of questions were on the survey?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, the survey is split into three sections. One is like basic demographics, like are you the right age range in the same location in the world? Are you poly? Do you want kids? And then another section is like sexual compatibility. And then the third section is like personality values kind of stuff. And so I sort of weighted those three equally. And then inside of those, I had a whole bunch of questions that I thought were important and a lot of decoy questions. And then I spit out a score at the end.

• 44:06PJ Vogt?

  And it found you a person you like. So presumably in this case, your method was winning.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was like I ended up talking to him like briefly at a party to the circle. And I knew about his existence, but I never like seriously considered him. I was just like, I was just a random dude. I don't particularly feel attracted to him. We don't have chemistry or whatever. But then he scored so high on the survey. I was like, well, I guess I have to give him another shot. And so our first date was three days in an Airbnb and then it worked out.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  I think a lot of the world sort of shies away from optimizing things that are supposed to be magical. Like, oh, you're supposed to have this almost like mystical quality when you meet your boyfriend and then fall for him. And it's like, not about anything really specific or cold, hard traits about him. There's just something about him. And sort of rationalists don't really ascribe to the mythology kind of thing. They're like, no, you can optimize anything. Is there just a better way? Just look for love. And often this runs up against people's sense of romanticism. But like a traditionally rationalist approach to this sort of thing is to sort of disregard their romanticism in favor of like actually succeeding.

• 45:10PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so Ayla has been using open to all surveys to select people to date. She's been inviting internet strangers to bet on her future romantic choices, partly as a way to just test whether she could be kidding herself. But the really unusual choice she'd made is that she put up a cash prize to anyone who could help her in her quest, a large cash prize. A decision unusual enough that it had made me want to talk to her in the first place to understand what kind of thinking had led to that decision, which I had never heard of anyone making before. So can you tell me about this post that you wrote?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm looking for something like a husband and offering a bounty, 100K if anybody remembers, someone that I ended up marrying. And I am looking for someone who wants kids and is poly and yeah, I don't know, this is sort of the thing.

• 45:58PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, this is the thing. This is the thing. And the thing you're describing, you're describing it like in a very like, well, obviously way or something or like, but it's an interesting and unusual thing that you've chosen to do, in my opinion.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess so. Everything's kind of weird and unusual when I do it the first time or have the first thought. But then after a while, it feels like a normal thing and I forget what it's like to find it weird.

• 46:22PJ Vogt?

  So what, where were you? I assume you were somewhere where you had to poop, but like, where were you when you were like, oh, I should put a bounty on this? Like, what was going on?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Well, what happened is I signed up for like a matchmaking thing.

• 46:33PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  And they had a system where if you, if they match you, you pay them $100,000. And I was like, that, it means sure, like if I, if they fail, whatever. And if they succeed, I've made a husband and then I will have in hindsight that it's worth it. Then after a while, I was like, dude, why am I just paying them 100K? If I'm actually like willing to part with 100K for a husband, should I not crowd source this? Should I not let anybody have this option? So I posted it publicly.

• 47:00PJ Vogt?

  I read it and was like, 100K, do I know anybody? Like it definitely worked on my brain.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  That's the goal.

• 47:07PJ Vogt?

  And how did you decide on 100,000? It's a lot of money.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  I mean, that's what the original matchmaker people were asking for. And this feels like high enough to be incentivizing, like pretty meaningfully incentivizing, especially since social circles are sort of stratified. Like, I'm sort of interested in somebody who's roughly equivalent to me in maybe visibility or money or something, which means that like you're selecting for slightly higher income, higher wealth people.

• 47:31PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  And those people tend to know each other and then those people are incentivized by lower amounts of money. So you really have to like raise the total money to like catch their attention.

• 47:39PJ Vogt?

  And then there was, if I remember, there was an additional part about pregnancy.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  If you get me impregnated. Yeah. So it would like someone to pay me $10 million to have and raise their child as a single mother, which I mean, seems kind of unlikely, but you know, why not? You should always like say the trades you're willing to make just in case. Then if you hook me up with this person, then I'll pay you 300K.

• 48:01PJ Vogt?

  And is this something like in my imagination, I'm like, okay, that seems like an advertisement for Elon Musk. Are there other people who are like, yes, I want to pay someone to raise my kid, but I don't want to meet or interact with my kid? Or are you just like, maybe that person exists and if so, this money will summon them? Like, how did you decide this?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Um, well, I had kind of slightly offhandedly tweeted a while ago that like, if you pay me $10 million, raise your baby lol. And then somebody messaged me about it and then we were in somewhat serious talks about it for a while. And it ended up not working out, but like I went through the whole process of like talking to lawyers and.

• 48:34PJ Vogt?

  You were talking to lawyers, like to, to draw up what this would look like as a formal.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, how would this work legally? How would child custody work? Like, how would it work with the fertility clinic? And stuff like that.

• 48:45PJ Vogt?

  I think what I so appreciate about this stranger plan is like, I mean, a lot of things, like it's, it's,

• 48:54PJ Vogt?

  you're making an unusual choice in a very deliberate way, but also it's like the thing you want, which is like, find a mate and have a kid is so conventional, but you want it on your very specific terms and your very specific way. It's a combination of a very old idea and a lot of new ideas.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm a, I'm a super weird person, um, which I know that everybody sort of thinks that they're weird, but I suspect that I maybe actually weird, even adjusted for that bias. And I've been having like problems finding people that I'm attracted to in general. So I think it takes like, if, if I'm that unusual, then I probably cannot go about mate finding in the usual way.

• 49:34PJ Vogt?

  And how's it gone so far?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Uh, not great.

• 49:37PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've looked at the submissions to the forum and nobody sort of has jumped out. Like, there's been a couple of direct recommendations that caught my interest, but none of them have quite worked out yet.

• 49:49PJ Vogt?

  And do you? It's weird, I can kind of make the argument that, I don't know, it's such a normal thing to be at the part of your life where you're like, like, monogamous, polyamorous, whatever, where you're like, I am trying to find like, my person, whatever that means, even if you're person's persons. And like, I feel like a lot of people struggle with this at some point. And like, the thing I'll typically say to people, which is, because it's true, like, not as a lie, as I'll be like, you know, most people find somebody, you kind of only have to find one person who really suits you. But in the meantime, it's really, the uncertainty is really hard. Like, is your brain struggling with the uncertainty the way everybody else's does?

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes I'm sad. I'm like, oh, man, I think there's like a reasonable chance that I might live my life without ever finding a guy that I want to have kids with. And that's like, pretty narratively sad. I'm like, oh, does this mean I'm a failure in some way?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  But, I mean, I think I'm like fundamentally okay.

• 50:44PJ Vogt?

  These questions Ayla's wrestling with are core human ones. Who should I partner with? And how? Should I procreate? And if so, the conventional way or one of the myriad new ones? Time and time again, in the past few years, I've met people with some new to me, or weird to me, answers to those questions. And then, they've talked about how they got to those answers, or I've seen their lives up close. And almost always, the unconventional paths to family have seemed just as workable as the conventional ones. Which is really a way of saying that partnership is hard. Families are hard. And we're only here once. So we study our friends' choices, and then we guess. We guess about who to be with, whether or not to have a kid,

• 51:28PJ Vogt?

  and if so, how, and if so, when, and if so, how many. We guess, and we hope we're right. What makes Ayla different, to me, is not her answers, it's her process, and how public it is. To write in public that you are looking for a mate is to invite comments about why you will never find one. To say you think you've found an unconventional answer to the question of family is to invite people to tell you why you're dangerously wrong. But it's also a kind of gift. You're sharing data. You're letting other people try to learn from your experiment.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  And I'm just, I really have a lot of value in trying new things. Like even if it fails, now you have the value of like, understanding what it was like to do it. And I think a lot of people will avoid trying the new thing because they're like, oh, we're just going to have a downside or if it's going to fail. I'm like, yeah, but you don't know that. And how much money would you pay to know that?

• 52:17PJ Vogt?

  I think a lot of people don't like being wrong. And I think a lot of people don't like being seen to be wrong. I think some people would rather not be embarrassed than find out what is true or what they really believe. I think that's like a really, really normal thing.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Everybody knowing you're wrong sucks.

• 52:33PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. But it doesn't seem to especially, either it doesn't bother you or you choose not to let it bother you.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  No, it definitely bothers me. I, I like, often my brain will like refuse to let me think clearly because I'm sort of subconsciously avoiding the fear of social penalties. And sometimes I notice it and sometimes I don't. I think a lot of the rational community tries in theory to make it such that we reward people who admit being wrong to like, sort of help our primate brains be less afraid. Like if somebody's like, changes their mind, we're sort of like, yes, good job. Fantastic admitting you're wrong. This is a virtue.

• 53:09PJ Vogt?

  Okay, well, we're doing our part by airing this interview.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I appreciate it.

• 53:13PJ Vogt?

  Have you figured out, like, if a search engine listener recommends somebody, is there some kind of like revenue sharing deal that the show would participate in?

• 53:22Speaker 01

  I mean, I could probably work something out.

• 53:23PJ Vogt?

  Okay. I mean, we're still trying to find a business model for podcasts.

• 53:31PJ Vogt?

  This is wonderful. I am so happy to get to talk to you. Enjoy the rest of your day.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Okay, you too. Bye bye.

• 53:37PJ Vogt?

  Bye.

• 53:44PJ Vogt?

  If you or someone you know think you might be a good match for Ayla, you can find her post about all this on her Substack, which is called Knowing Less.

• 54:33PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinnamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was fact-checked by Claire Hyman. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support from Emily Multer. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Shuff. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. If you'd like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus audio, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show.

• 55:16PJ Vogt?

  You can sign up there or directly in Apple Podcasts. Follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. And thank you for listening. We'll see you in a couple weeks.