1233: OnlyFans | Skeptical Sunday

1233: OnlyFans | Skeptical Sunday

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I am here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher Nicholas Pell. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. And during the week we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks. From spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers. On Sundays, though, we do Skeptical Sunday, where a rotating guest, co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic, such as fast fashion, the death industry, homeopathy, hypnosis, targeted advertising, and self-help cults.

If you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, disinformation, junk science, crime, and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of [00:01:00] everything we do here on the show.

Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. I'm sure most of you have heard of OnlyFans, the Creator platform, where you can put up videos of yourself cooking, doing fitness, or as the case happens to be most of the time, engaging in some kind of pornographic or otherwise adult activity.

I'm sure you've seen the headlines, women quits. Her job makes a hundred grand a month on OnlyFans. And while you might have opinions on the morality of that, it's hard to argue with that sheer amount of cold, hard cash. But hey, there are also guys making a killing in podcasting. Most podcasters, however, are languishing on under a hundred bucks a month in fan support.

So how similar is the CD world of OnlyFans? Are people really making money selling their nudes online? What's the profile of a creator who's crushing it and who is just out there begging for a few bucks? Maybe most importantly, are there hidden costs of selling sex online? And is this empowerment or just digital exploitation here today to help me separate the Naked truth from the dressed up hype [00:02:00] is writer and researcher Nick Pell.

So Nick, how much are you dropping every month on OnlyFans? Precisely $0. Really?

Nick Pell: Okay. Yeah. I'm gonna stick to the facts here, but people should probably know that I'm a giant stick in the mud about this kind of thing. So. Expect me to be throwing ice water on your boner, and that's gonna be a recurring theme throughout the episode.

Jordan Harbinger: That's fair enough. I try to be way less judgey about this stuff, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. But OnlyFans is really kind of weird because I look, I remember when it was first launched in 2016, I think it was. It wasn't supposed to be this self-produced porn site. Really, it was for content creators.

Most of the ones that I saw back then, I remember show fans being like, Hey, I got an OnlyFans. And it was like, for cooking, you know, like, uh, okay. And it was lifestyle or fitness stuff. It was not sex acts ranging from the mundane to the unusual. There were show fans that were like, I've got a cooking one, a fitness one.

And then I remember a guy and a gal sent me theirs and I was like, oh, whoa, okay, so you're just like [00:03:00] naked here. And he is like, yeah, that's what OnlyFans is for. And I was like, no, it's my friend's cook on here. My friend's a doctor, he isn't OnlyFans. And then this nurse who's a show fan was like, I'm paying my way through nursing school and uh, I ain't cooking.

And she showed me hers and I was like, I get it. Okay. They take all comers, no pun intended. So basically you could show people things on OnlyFans a few years ago without shielding the phone screen from your kids. So what happened?

Nick Pell: What happened as far as I can tell, is what happened to a lot of facets of American life.

COVID. Lockdowns, okay. So during the COVID lockdowns. There was a massive influx of creators possibly due to a need for money, but also maybe just a need for human connection. Is

Jordan Harbinger: that what they're selling on OnlyFans? Human connection?

Nick Pell: Well, we need to highlight right up front that OnlyFans isn't just porn.

I mean, it's certainly that, but it has elements of social media about it. You're not really signing up for just the naked pictures as such. You're signing up because you want to be able to DM your favorite E girl and have conversations with her, [00:04:00] whether they're mundane, quotidian type stuff or something.

Jordan Harbinger: Rapier. Do people really have that much direct access to the creators? I mean, I answer my email and dms, but it takes me months, and most creators don't do that. I'm certainly not charging for it. Maybe I should be.

Nick Pell: It depends on the creator. It's definitely a feature. Some of them sell. OnlyFans creators make money from subscriptions, tips, and pay-per-view.

They might have a subscription that allows you to message them. In theory. What do you mean message them? In theory, I'm extremely skeptical about how many of these women are actually fielding thousands of dms a day from thirsty dudes. Chances are a lot better that they've outsourced this to the Philippines or Indonesia or somewhere similar Uhhuh, and someone is frantically trying to coax chat GPT to give sexualized answers to a dm.

Jordan Harbinger: Are there any examples of this kind of scam happening? And I say scam because if you're not talking to the creator, but it says that you're talking to the creator and you're paying to talk to the [00:05:00] creator, that's fraudulent. But okay.

Nick Pell: Yes, there's tons

Jordan Harbinger: of this, and we're gonna get into that in detail later.

I guess I really shouldn't be surprised by any of this. This stuff all kind of goes hand in hand. I, I'm not saying that people who produce or engage in adult entertainment are scammers, but for some reason when you have the adult industry, you also have like fake dick pills and you also have, you know, just like we're gonna charge your credit card using a shady merchant that's overseas And 'cause I guess because some of it's gray area of the law and they're like, oh, you'll put up with this area that isn't accepted by everyone.

What else are you gonna sort of let us get away with? And it's not everybody and it's not every part of the industry, but I just couldn't help but notice that a lot of this stuff seems to go hand in hand. And I think a lot of it is also, they know someone's not gonna call their credit card company and be like, I was scammed.

I thought I was talking to this starlet on OnlyFans and it turns out I was talking to a computer. I want my money back. 'cause you're gonna be embarrassed.

Nick Pell: Yeah. I mean. The people in porn aren't [00:06:00] married, if you can believe that.

Jordan Harbinger: Uh, yeah, I can, based on some of the porn that I've seen. I, I mean, that my friends have told me about, you know, uh, so people who are married don't have sex like this or at all sometimes.

How, I'm gonna just leave that there. Speak for

Nick Pell: yourself.

Jordan Harbinger: How? Oh, there's nothing I can say right now to dig myself out of this hole. How prevalent is OnlyFans? How many people are using it?

Nick Pell: In August, 2024, it had 190 million active users. Which is important because if a guy signed up for OnlyFans once upon a time, that doesn't mean he is actively engaged in it.

Jordan Harbinger: I see how many women are on it. And by the way, I'm aware that women pay for OnlyFans and men appear on it. Uh, but for the sake of simplicity, we're just gonna refer to the women being on OnlyFans and the guys being the buyers. 'cause I'm gonna guess like 90 plus percent of it is that

Nick Pell: you're pretty close.

Actually, it's about 84% of the creators are women and about 79% of the customers are men. Huh. It gets pretty [00:07:00] crazy when you start running the numbers of just how many people are on OnlyFans. It's been estimated that about 2% of women between the ages of 18 and 45 are creating content on OnlyFans. Wow.

Which is a lot in a country of. 350 million plus. Yeah. I've seen claims get bandied around that 10% of all women between the ages of 18 and 24 are creating content. But that is anecdotal. It has no serious backing whatsoever. But I have seen it. Thrown out a lot. So it seemed worth addressing

Jordan Harbinger: on OnlyFans?

Or is that like some people are trying to be, influencers are in on Instagram 10% of 18 to 24? I

Nick Pell: think it's just completely made up. I couldn't find anything that said 10% of women were making content of any kind content on only, I mean I really dug for this.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So if that's made up, then people can just sort of disregard it.

But I've, I've heard that claim too, and I don't remember the exact ages, but yeah, it's like one in 10 women in their twenties is making content. And again, it's [00:08:00] something, when I Googled it, it kind of just came up on a Reddit only from other people saying they'd heard it. So that's one of those things.

I'm gonna say giant Box O salt.

Nick Pell: Everywhere I looked for that I could find said, people say this and it's not true. Okay. And I did find stuff that was about this claim, so that's why I think it's worth addressing the ages of the subscribers do skew younger in general also. It's not exclusively Gen Z, but it does cluster around Gen Z, the subscribers.

Jordan Harbinger: So it ranges from anyone can monetize content to a heavily adult oriented platform.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And I still get ads for OnlyFans on Twitter for people who do fitness programs and weird stuff. That's not people getting naked and having sex on camera. To me, it's like, it's a weird platform to choose as your platform for bodybuilding advice or whatever, but what do I know?

They're probably making money.

Jordan Harbinger: It seems pretty heavily associated in the public mind [00:09:00] with porn. And so that's what we're gonna focus on for the show. It doesn't mean that it's only porn on there. It doesn't mean that it's only straight men buying from women, but that's what we're focusing on. And I just, I wanna set that out there before we get the emails.

Like, Hey, I run a cooking show on OnlyFans. Your episode was disingenuous or something. Right? Okay. Like, we're focusing on the main part of this thing. So I, I can't really imagine trying to explain an OnlyFans credit card charge to my wife by saying, oh, is it, it's a tennis coach. Maybe I should sell a podcasting course on OnlyFans just to cover all my homeboys.

You know what I'm saying? Beyond the headlines about outrageous amounts of money, what are people actually making off OnlyFans? I, this has gotta be skewed like it is with podcasting,

Nick Pell: the top 1% is making a third of all the money. Median earnings are about $150 a month or less. OnlyFans takes a 20% cut, plus you have to pay the tax man.

So that $150 gets whittled down pretty fast. No one goes into it thinking they're gonna be the one making $150 a month. They all [00:10:00] think they're gonna be in the 1%, but that ain't how the

Jordan Harbinger: math works, man. That just sounds exactly like podcasting. It's also not free money. Which people might know intellectually, but don't think of when they sign up.

You're not just gonna post content once from your phone and watch the millions roll in. You have to be creating content regularly. You have to promote, which you can see if you haven't noticed that half of the posts on Reddit and TikTok and Instagram or whatever social media that are thirst traps, are OnlyFans funnels where you're like, oh, that's an interesting, oh, then you gotta click this, and then it takes you there.

That's all heavy duty promotion. That costs money a ton of time. You gotta engage your audience. I'd imagine all told it's probably a pretty serious investment of time and even in money to make it work, and there's no guaranteed shot, just like with any creative endeavor,

Nick Pell: right? Much like podcasting, I'd imagine marketing is a pretty huge factor.

Plus, if you're not making tons of effort all the time. You're just not gonna see any kind of consistent return. I mean, how [00:11:00] many people are gonna listen to your podcast if you release one episode a month?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Not just that, I mean, for any aspiring podcasters at home, this job keeps me pretty busy.

There's way more to making the show than just hanging out with Nick on Zoom and talking about porn, believe it or not. And it's not meant to be offensive at all, and I totally don't take it that way, but it does sting a little when people will go like, oh, what's your full-time job? When I tell them I have a podcast?

And I'm like, no, no, no. That's actually a fair assumption, right? Because most podcasters, they don't do this for a living. Or they're like, oh, so that's, do you just do that by yourself? And I'm like, no, it's a media company that has like, you know, accounting department and taxes and stuff. But no, but I don't blame people for not getting it.

It's not a real job, so I get it. Uh, but it's like, yeah, there's way more going on. And I think for anybody starting a business, they don't realize that like if you want a bakery, you don't just get debate cookies all day. You're deep in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet nonsense. I would imagine there's a lot of burnout among creators on OnlyFans, just like there is anywhere else where you're doing something for money [00:12:00] and it doesn't make any money.

Nick Pell: It's hard to quantify burnout statistics, but there's some evidence around the topic that's worth sharing. A survey of 1000 creators in the United States and the UK found that 52% of creators have experienced burnout, 37% have considered seriously quitting as a result. That seems significant, even if the numbers aren't strictly speaking scientific.

Jordan Harbinger: How does burnout at OnlyFans compare to other gig jobs like Twitch streaming or even just driving in Uber?

Nick Pell: I actually couldn't find any comparable data about gig workers. You see reports on people feeling economically insecure among Uber drivers, it's like 45% of them, and you see people at Twitch who complained about feeling like dancing monkeys, but there's no comparable study about burnout.

I don't think OnlyFans and other quasi entertainment gigs like Twitch are really comparable either to OnlyFans. I mean, virtually every society on Planet Earth in the history of forever has [00:13:00] decided that sex is not just another activity, like checking out groceries at the store or repairing used cars.

And I don't think this is some weird superstitious holdover from some alleged time of sexual repression. I think people have a very accurate sense that sex is not just some other thing. We recognize that there's some dimension of sex that requires special attention or being set apart from other aspects of our lives.

Jordan Harbinger: What about other negative effects on OnlyFans creator's lives? Do we have any information about that?

Nick Pell: 34% of OnlyFans creators reported adverse outcomes like anxiety, depression, shame, and low self-esteem. Frankly, surprised that it's not higher, but that's still significant. There's serious pressure to be cranking out new content, and I can see how that would be stressful.

This is not an economically secure way of making a living. The most troubling number that I could find was that six percents reported having little control over how their content was [00:14:00] used.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Okay. Well, I wanna jump on that, but this is interesting that you're right. There's a lot of pressure to put out new content, and I would imagine if it's you having sex with somebody, which is again, what we're focusing on for this episode, and nobody likes it, nobody buys it, that's gotta sting a little, right?

Like, if people don't like my podcast, I'm kind of like, okay, you know, it's different than other podcasts. Maybe you just wanted news, or maybe you don't think that I'm entertaining or that I'm a dumb ass and I'm, I accept that. I know that, that people think that because they write that to me very explicitly.

But like if you're just on there naked, showing off and people are like. Nah, that, that hurts man. You know, that stings, yeah. On a personal level and would definitely involve shame and low self-esteem. Like I can't even sell my boobs, uh, or my dong. Like I thought that was this thing is my whole personality.

What am I gonna do now? Uh, you mentioned that 6% reported having little control over how their content was used. I thought that was the entire premise of OnlyFans in the first place. It allowed people total control over their content.

Nick Pell: Well, you'd [00:15:00] think, but there are guys out there whose entire business model is managing in giant screaming air quotes, women who create content.

One of them really famous, and I won't say his name on this podcast 'cause it's like invoking a demon, but ah, you know what I'm talking about. And I'd imagine that in more cases than not, they're the ones that are actually in control of how the content gets used. Okay, so digital pimps. Yeah, basically over 50% felt the platform's oversight was insufficient.

But what they meant by oversight isn't really said. I'm genuinely curious if this is linked to the 6% who don't think they have control over their content, but the information just isn't there. Back to burnout, 60% of creators leave in the first year. The main reasons provided for this are burnout. Low earnings, which I suspect are very closely correlated,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

Why spend your time on this platform if you're not making any money? I'd burn out putting in big [00:16:00] effort for little reward on any platform and with any kind of content, let alone something, again, is personal with as many externalities as adult content.

Nick Pell: The main takeaway, I think, is that this is not easy money by any stretch of the imagination, which is often how people think about it, especially people who are getting into it.

It's a very misleading narrative.

Jordan Harbinger: The other thing I'd imagine is a problem is women have a hard enough time if they have any kind of high profile online without creeps and weirdos bothering them. I have women show guests on the podcast, and a lot of times they'll say, do I have to do video? Okay, I gotta do my hair and makeup.

I'm like, nah, just show up, whatever, comfortable. And they're like, no, I can't do that. And I, I learned that years ago because yeah, I'll have a scientist on and they'll be like, no, I have to do hair and makeup and make sure that I look good, because otherwise, all the YouTube comments are about how crappy I look and not about the fact that I am literally an astrophysicist.

And I'm like, that's so depressing. Like, I'm searching for alien life on another planet. Okay. But like, is she hot though, bro? [00:17:00] Like, is she hot? It's so. Annoying to see that, and granted, YouTube is like scraping the bottom of the dang barrel. But look, it's gotta just be worse. If you have a career on OnlyFans where you're, it's actually your job to look hot, right?

That's the idea. Yeah. Generally, it's like you're not a scientist. Most of the time you're supposed to look hot. So now you've got stalkers and you've got all the problems that a normal woman has just existing except turned up to 11.

Nick Pell: Yeah. There's actually, there's a study on this, but it's the data. It's not a very good one.

It's this qualitative study with an N

Jordan Harbinger: of 43. For those of you among us who aren't statisticians or nerds like Nick, that means a study has 43 participants, which is tiny.

Nick Pell: Yeah, that definitely makes it not a very good study, but I do think that it's worth mentioning what we learned from those participants.

The study found frequent occurrences or fears of harassment, stalking doxing and content leakage. Harassment in this case meant privacy, invasions, persistent messaging and fear of exposure of their [00:18:00] identities. I'm not trying to downplay any of this, but getting a lot of messages from a guy who's developed a crush on you.

I'd definitely be weirded out. Doxing sucks. I've been doxed. Don't recommend it. That said, I don't think dudes being weird is really outside the purview of what you're signing up for with the caveat of there's weird and there's abuse of harassment, and also like just there's a spectrum of weird, you know?

It's like this guy messages me eight times a day. It's like, well, he is paying you three bucks a message. Yeah. You know, he's developed some weird pair of social attachment to you where he thinks you guys are gonna get married. That's stressful. That sucks. If someone's threatening you, that's criminal. If some guy's carving your name into his dick with an Exacto knife, that's definitely beyond what you signed up for.

Dang. That's outside of the spectrum of what you should expect. As weird guys on OnlyFans [00:19:00] guys getting attached to you. I mean, it's not ideal, but it's like when celebrities are like, oh, people bother me in public and yeah, I bet that sucks. You're out with your family, you're trying to enjoy dinner. You know, I used to see celebrities out all the time when I was in la.

Don't bother 'em partly 'cause I don't have anything to say to 'em. You know, you don't want to, I saw Spider-Man, Toby, whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Nick Pell: yeah. I used to see him all the time and he would just look at me like, yep, I'm Spider-Man. I'm sure it's a drag, but if you don't like it, go back Groceries at Safeway instead of starring in the Avengers Part nine.

Or posting Nudie videos on OnlyFans. Like some of this is just occupational hazard.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Sorry. You're Thor. That must be so bad. I too would hate to just be running away from throngs of women that want me and dudes who think I'm the most amazing, the treating me like a literal God for millions of dollars a year.

But yeah, the downsides are worth it. Where did the Exacto Knife thing come from? That was just such a gro, I just had a visceral reaction to that and I'm still like, we [00:20:00] know when you subconsciously protect your genitalia for no reason, I'm still doing that thing.

Nick Pell: It just came outta my twisted little mind.

Jordan Harbinger: Man, that's horrible. Just at the visual of that is just so

Nick Pell: gross too. Oh my

Jordan Harbinger: god.

Nick Pell: I don't know, Jordan, maybe you just don't love your wife as much as I do mine.

Jordan Harbinger: God, good Lord. Moving right along. What about the doxing and the leaking of images and videos? 'cause that would be kind of awful. Like I'm thinking of the show fan who was paying her way through nursing school.

It probably had not occurred to her 'cause her face was in the images, at least on the, she showed me the safe for work stuff. 'cause I didn't, I'm not a subscriber and I was like, oh, okay. She's really pretty. So I can imagine that someone can find out who she is and now she's a nurse by now. That would be kind of awful if that stuff was floating around the operating room where she now works.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Doxing sucks from firsthand experience and it's definitely not. Part of the package. This is not like, [00:21:00] oh, some guy messages me a bunch and tells me how hot I am, and it's weirding me out. That's definitely not what you're signing up for. Leaking materials, again, that sucks. That's an IP violation.

That's not a threat or harassment necessarily. It is. If they say like, I'm gonna send this to your job or your family, or something like that, like that's definitely

Jordan Harbinger: none of it's okay. But you know, like basically it's a commercial issue is what you're saying.

Nick Pell: Right? It's a commercial issue. It's one that you should, I frankly expect because this is the internet,

Jordan Harbinger: this is the media environment that we're in, right?

You make songs, people share them on Napster, you can sue all you want. You're not putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Same with porn.

Nick Pell: It becomes, I think it probably crosses over into revenge porn if there's like a spiteful, you know, oh, I sent this to your kid's teacher kind of thing. You know, you post sexual material online and anyone who can pay for it can view it like, yeah, it's a blast from the past.

But Metallica complaining about Napster.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That is a blast from the past. And I see what you're saying and I, again, I want to be clear that just because someone [00:22:00] creates adult content doesn't mean that they deserve to have their stuff leaked and that it's okay for people to harass them. I'm pretty sure that we're clear on this, but people love to listen to 10% of what we say and then write an email about it while not listening to any of our qualifications or explanations on it.

Nick Pell: I don't think shoplifting is okay, but stores price it into their business model. We know that the world is full of imperfect people if we're being, uh, generous and charitable.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Why known a writer? Yes, exactly. We know that's my dog's name.

Nick Pell: We know that on the internet, people love to commit IP violations.

We know, especially at this point, that people like to leak OnlyFans materials. You know, this, going into it, it does not make the other person's behavior okay. But like, oh, I'm so shocked that somebody pirated my movie. Is like, why? Like why does that shock you? That's just the one study. There's another one that was done by Cyber Trace and the BBC, I don't have the [00:23:00] participant size for that.

Jordan Harbinger: BBC, you mean the British Broadcasting Corporation. And again, since we're talking about porn, I feel the need to clarify that if you know, you know, but anyway, continue.

Nick Pell: I don't know. Um, but okay. The, we don't have the, the n for the other study, the other study from Cyber Trace and the British Broadcasting System, which apparently I need to clarify.

Jordan Harbinger: Corporation. Yeah. Yes.

Nick Pell: Thank you. 70% of participants reported bullying. Identity attacks. I don't really know what that means. And sexual harassment from followers, which again, all of this is bad, but the cyber bullying thing is like, it sucks, but everyone with a high profile internet presence has to deal with this.

It's not just only fans, creators, it's not podcasters, just people with big followings on Twitter. Yeah. I'm not saying that's okay. I'm just saying that people are aware of this. They know that this is part of being a high profile person on the internet. It's not specific to OnlyFans creators. If you go into building your profession on the internet [00:24:00] and you are not aware that that's going to be a part of your daily life, I kind of find it hard to believe that you don't know that and that you haven't priced that in.

Jordan Harbinger: OnlyFans turning lockdown, boredom into a lifetime of tax write-offs and lower back pain. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Quiltmind. If you're not on LinkedIn, you really should be, because like it or not, it's a signal of professionalism. When somebody Googles you, your LinkedIn is usually the first thing that pops up.

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Jordan Harbinger: Don't forget about our newsletter. Wee bit wiser. You love reading it. I love writing a lot of engagement from you on this newsletter 'cause you can always hit reply and reach us. It's a two minute read every Wednesday or just about.

It's very practical. You can apply something right away. The wisdom comes from our thousand plus episodes and it is a great way to engage with the show and a great companion to the show. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now back to Skeptical Sunday. I will say from my perspective, I started in 2006 and there weren't influencers or anything back then, and so I did think that the people that you experience online, I mean you're getting a cut out of regular society.

It's funny, I had a conversation with Tim Ferris about this and most people know who he is. Bestselling author, huge podcast, and I remember [00:27:00] talking with him, this is years ago, and being like, do you ever get crazy messages? It was him, me and Ramit sat. I think we were talking about our crazy messages. Tim had done sort of back of the napkin math that was like if there's one super crazy person, we didn't have chat GPT or even think to Google it back then, but he is like out of a thousand people in society, you have one like dangerously crazy person, not an unreasonable amount to think right 0.1%.

Like okay, sure. If you have 10 million followers, there's an army of dangerously crazy people that know you, follow you, consume your content, think that they know you and are maybe going to target you at some point during their delusions. And I, I even have that and people, I'm not on YouTube where I have like a wide appeal.

It's a podcast. There's people who subscribe, but I still, I can count it every September. It's funny 'cause it's fresh in my mind. Every September I get a couple of emails from different people and I don't know why September that are stressed out. This month I get my, this is my crazy month where I get the crazies.

It's always from the same [00:28:00] emails and they always say similar things. And I'm like, this person is like a hardcore, delusional, anti-government conspiracy weirdo who thinks I work for the CIA and will not listen to evidence to the contrary. And like knows a lot about my personal life. It's super fricking weird.

Nick Pell: And it's really creepy.

Jordan Harbinger: It's creepy. And so like knowing that going in now, yes, it's creepy, but I'm a dude and I'm like, okay, knock on my door and you will eat a clip full of lead if you try to do anything. But if you're a nursing student who's in the UK and you're a 22-year-old woman and the guy's like, I know you work at Kaiser Permanente, you're, you're like, that's really scary because now you're, are you waiting in the parking lot for me to get off work?

Like that's the assumption that women kind of have to make. So, anyway,

Nick Pell: and to be clear, I do completely agree that it's different for women and men regardless of whether or not they're yes. OnlyFans creators or not. And you're correct to point that out,

Jordan Harbinger: it's gonna be hard to know how you're gonna react to that until it happens.

I think that was my earlier point that I sort of lost track of. I mean, again, I knew I was gonna be getting, [00:29:00] constantly getting angry messages from people. And I love all of you, all you angry commenters out there. Even the haters and the, the, frankly, the losers. But the reality of it is very different from what people might mentally prepare for and other, some platforms have it worse.

Like my YouTuber buddies, they get it way worse. And it's because anybody can sort of access their stuff and the algorithm feeds it to people who are staring at YouTube all day. Podcasts, you kind of have to seek out, it's a different animal. OnlyFans, you're naked, there's sex involved. That's another layer of weird for people who are coming after you.

And there's also another level to this that's worth mentioning, namely, if I get an email with somebody saying, you're an enemy of the state. You're a Jew and a shill for the FBI. It's mildly disturbing, like I said before, but I've mostly forgotten about it by lunchtime until it's September again of next year.

99% of the haters and stuff that I get just disagree with me. Whereas if you are a sex worker, nude, adult creator, whatever, 99% of the haters, it's just much, much more personal and it would just feel more dangerous. I think that's my convoluted point here.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And as you know, [00:30:00] like I'm not unaware of the dangers of having an online career.

Jordan Harbinger: You spent a few, was it months dealing with an online? It was months hate mob. I mean, that's a long time to deal with like an intense level of BS like that.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And it was like threats and every everything, but this is like why I don't do editorial writing anymore. This is why do sales copywriting now?

Because I was tired of waking up to 50 emails telling me to go kill myself because I made fun of somebody's favorite band on the internet. What I didn't do is complain about it and keep doing it and it's like I made a choice. I'm not the guy who's gonna lead that life. Some people are cool with it. My tolerance for it was very low, and so I did something else.

Didn't feel like I've got chased outta my profession. I just feel like there's a guy who's cut out for that and I'm not him.

Jordan Harbinger: I think that's a fair assessment, but there have to be OnlyFans horror stories out there. Do we have any of those?

Nick Pell: We don't have a ton of examples, but I was able [00:31:00] to find three and I'm sure there's more.

This is just what I was able to find. Um, a member of our production team actually found a different article, but it was all the same stories. So I

Jordan Harbinger: actually, I spoke to someone that I know about this casually and I said, Hey, if you know anybody, 'cause he was friends with an OnlyFans creator and he had heard some stuff that was so bad.

I asked if she would talk about it for us for this piece. And she actually said it was so traumatizing and horrible, she didn't wanna ever talk about it again. And I said, can you gimme like a category? And it had to do with stalking and violence. It does get bad.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And I would estimate for the three we have, there's at least 10,000 per Oh yeah.

Probably just the scale of the problem that no one talks about. And they just go whatever. They're noteworthy because they're so extreme and two of them are like. Creepy and one of them is a nightmare.

Jordan Harbinger: So what's the difference between merely creepy and nightmarish?

Nick Pell: So [00:32:00] one guy ordered a creator champagne and then showed up at her house and was following her around after she told them to buzz off.

That's creepy. Yep. It's also criminal. Yes. And she pressed charges so good for her. One guy drove 400 miles uninvited and stalked a woman. And again, she pressed charges. This is not like Cape fear where the cops are not doing anything 'cause the criminal is so crafty that you just can't catch 'em. Like these guys are idiots and they get caught pretty quickly.

Uh, appropriate legal action gets taken, which is not to downplay it, it's just, it's not like there's people running around doing this with impunity and no one's doing anything. It's like now they got, these guys got prosecuted.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm really hoping that the nightmarish one is not

Nick Pell: going to involve a dead body.

It doesn't, but it's pretty messed up. Some dude broke into a woman's house and hid in her attic and filmed her while she was asleep. Oh my God. He was also prosecuted. Thank God. [00:33:00] Oh my gosh. So fortunately with all the examples I could find, no one was physically hurt and everyone was charged. I'm sure that it was very psychologically damaging, but nobody was hurt.

Nobody was killed. Thank God for that. There's gotta be more that we don't know about. But stalking. Actual stalking as opposed to just being a pest or a weirdo in dms. I would say that seems comparatively rare considering how many women are doing this. There's also another one that was pretty awful where a woman was doxed by other mothers in a Facebook moms group.

These are the worst.

Jordan Harbinger: This sounds awful. I can only imagine where this is going. Nobody bullies women quite like other women, like guys are violent. Don't get me wrong. That's awful. And it's terrible and it's definitely the worst thing. But somehow other women are just so crafty at at destroying each other's lives.

It's really like next level.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's awful. And that is [00:34:00] also a example of you should not have to price this in to your decision about whether or not to make adult content online. But you should be aware that it's an occupational hazard or you're just lying to yourself because it is. It's horrible that these women, any of this happen, the women, the men, it's horrible, but it's a real risk that you take.

And in her case, I think it's worth noting. Like you said, she was not doxed by an obsessed fan. She was doxed by the mean girls cabal. Though I'm sure lots of women do get doxed by weirdly obsessed fans. The world is full of shitty people. And while I'm sure that most of the guys consuming OnlyFans content are relatively normal,

Jordan Harbinger: well, it depends on what they're viewing.

I mean, I have seen the clown porn, you know, I mean, people have told me about the clown porn. Man. Normal, well-behaved people have

Nick Pell: weird tastes sometimes. They sure do. But yes, you should absolutely expect to be able to go to work and not be harassed or [00:35:00] threatened or blackmailed regardless of where you work.

You should also be aware that while most of the people viewing your content are probably within the bounds of what we, we might call normal, broadly speaking, you probably have an outsized number of freaks and weirdos relative to the general population. Sounds a little judgy, but probably accurate. Okay.

Yeah. I'm very comfortable being judgy about this.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm a little uncomfortable diving into this, but it seems like a reasonable concern. How prevalent is underage content on OnlyFans?

Nick Pell: So this is often thrown at OnlyFans as a problem with their platform, but realistically, and to be clear, anything more than zero is too much.

But we have two numbers, and they're both extremely low and reflect a fair to middling amount of due diligence on the part of OnlyFans. Okay, so in mid 2024, a child exploitation investigator flagged 26 OnlyFans accounts [00:36:00] suspected of containing child sexual abuse material. The platform removed them within a day.

These incidents were then reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. A prior Reuters investigation documented 30 child sex abuse material related complaints to law enforcement between December 9th, 2019 and June, 2024, involving over 200 explicit videos and images featuring minors.

Now again, not okay, but we're talking about 30 cases tops on a platform with 4 million creators. It's certainly terrible. I don't see any evidence that it's a systemic problem. Sure. Seems like they take this seriously, at least when they're alerted to it. That said, some of the stuff that got uncovered was like, how did this get approved by the platform?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean, look, I think if you have a [00:37:00] platform that has a ton of 18 year olds on it and you get a 17-year-old on it, that could fly under the radar, but I assume that's not what you're talking about. What specifically are you talking about?

Nick Pell: Child sex abuse material involving toddlers.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yikes. Yuck.

Nick Pell: Yeah, that's a fair reaction to that. I would say.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I

Nick Pell: can't upload a reel to Instagram from the gym with a Pantera song playing in the background without it getting flagged for an IP violation. Come on. There's no way to automatically flag this stuff. Yeah. I find it very hard to believe that that technology doesn't exist.

OnlyFans pays $14,000 a year to accompany, to keep tabs on child sex abuse material on the platform. But that's barely anything and they clearly need to be spending more.

Jordan Harbinger: I would like to move on from this topic immediately. That's super gross.

Nick Pell: Yeah. You and me both. But before we do, I want to point out that there's a whole thing where future creators will count down to their 18th birthday, which is also, you know, a [00:38:00] little creepy.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Agree. As a 45-year-old man, that's super gross. How much of a thing is that? It's

Nick Pell: prominent enough Bad baby, who you may know as the catch me outside girl from Dr. Phil.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I hate that. I know who that is. Catch me outside. How about that?

Nick Pell: Yeah, you and me both. She, uh, she kind of teased an 18th birthday OnlyFans drop that made her a million dollars in six hours.

Little Tay, who I, no idea who that is, but it's Tay, but smaller. Right. Uh, that was another one who made a million dollars in three hours and touted herself as the youngest girl on OnlyFans. Yeah. Which I,

Jordan Harbinger: I feel

Nick Pell: uncomfortable saying on your podcast.

Jordan Harbinger: Good thing you said it in an extra creepy way too. That's, that's good.

Thanks for that. So that's two examples, but honestly, I think that's enough. The takeaway here is that there's, there's nothing illegal about teasing that you're gonna be doing an explicit OnlyFans drop on your 18th birthday, but it's definitely a little troubling, and I don't think anybody wants to see [00:39:00] this becoming a trend.

Didn't they try to ban porn from the platform semi-recently? Or am I tripping? Did I hallucinate this?

Nick Pell: No, they declared in 2021 that they were gonna ban porn on the site, but there was a huge greater backlash, so they didn't, some have speculated that this was a publicity stunt, but it was likely driven by pressure from investors and payment processors.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, that makes sense. I do remember that one of the things that I hear a lot is that this is somehow empowering for the creators. But look, again, I'm not judgy. I know you're more judgy, but I'm not really seeing that empowering thing in any of the facts that you're giving me right now.

Nick Pell: I think that's a fair analysis.

I mean, even if you're in the 1% making all the money, you're basically on a treadmill. You can't ever get off. There's this woman that my wife follows on TikTok who got engaged and stopped doing OnlyFans, and her accountant was like, that was 90% of your income, so you're gonna have to dramatically change your lifestyle or start doing OnlyFans again.

And she doesn't wanna do it. But do you want to keep your [00:40:00] house? In a sense, even if you're successful, you're trapped by your own success. You're always online. You have these parasocial relationships that are necessary for you to maintain your lifestyle. You're under pressure to perform and to some extent you're under pressure to always outdo yourself.

I just don't accept that there's not an emotional price that you pay. People can try to make sex this value neutral human activity. No different than sneezing all they like. But I just think it's a fact that sex is intimate and private human activity and that exposing yourself in this way comes with some psychic and spiritual cost.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Look, I talk to sex workers here and there online 'cause I'm super curious about this whole world and I have acquaintances that are in it as a result. And one of the questions that I asked was, so do you have sex? Like that you enjoy with people that you actually like? And you'd be maybe not surprised that many of them are like.

Not with men anymore, or they're like, no. They're like, [00:41:00] no, I don't have sex anymore because I have so much at work. I never wanna do it again. And it's something I do for money. And I'm like, oh wow. You just, you have ruined that thing for yourself forever. And they're like, yeah, it's sad, but yes, that's what happened.

It, it's ruined for me. It's not something I enjoy, it's something I do for money. You know, like it's never gonna get fixed. And that, that to me is really sad. There's also the issue of the normalization of sex work. The sex work is work kind of mantra. People say, like, to say that sex work is valid. And again, you and I have differing opinions on here, but I'd like to hear what you have to say.

Nick Pell: I don't think we need to demonize OnlyFans creators or, or street prostitutes or high-end escorts. But I do think that the term sex work is fundamentally dishonest for a couple reasons. First, I think it, it conflates women making a few bucks, or even their primary income from OnlyFans with people who are actually having sex for money.

Many of whom are trafficked or otherwise coerced into the job. It's just [00:42:00] weird to me that women screwing their boyfriends on camera in the safety of their homes want some kind of like glow from this. It's very crass to me when there's this like attempt to conflate this with

Jordan Harbinger: girls, work in the blade, basically.

Is that Yes, on the streets?

Nick Pell: I find it very distasteful because I think that for most women having sex, for money, this is not some, it isn't this this cool, edgy, very 21st century thing that I do and it's just, oh, it's so fun. And that is not the reality for most of these women, and I think it's gross when there's this attempt to conflate all of this into one thing.

I do think that there's something fundamentally dangerous about normalizing this as just one valid choice among many. I think that there should be some kind of stigma against so-called sex work. I don't think that this push to insert neoliberal [00:43:00] market economics into people's romantic and sexual lives is a good thing, and I thought you were a libertarian man.

I don't think we should be prosecuting people for making OnlyFans content, but that doesn't mean that I don't think it carries a moral character. It does my reticence. To have the state intervene is not a stamp of moral approval or encouragement. Regardless of the legal issues, it seems very, very clear to me that replacing human companionship and intimacy with this cheap facsimile thereof carries with it a host of negative consequences.

Jordan Harbinger: That's an important distinction from my perspective. I think I basically agree that the government shouldn't be stopping people from doing or buying this, but I do think there's something at least sad about. Can we call it like the monetization of loneliness?

Nick Pell: There's fairly alarming statistics about how many men are virgins into their twenties and yeah.

To be clear, yes, I'm a Christian. I think sex is for married people, which I know makes me lame and old fashioned very, no, I have [00:44:00] not exactly practiced what I preach in this regard. Yeah. Look, I think that makes you even more

Jordan Harbinger: Christian somehow get those angry emails going, folks.

Nick Pell: I mean, I'm, yes. I'm not the exception of the rule here, but you know, drinking and driving is bad no matter how many times the person telling you not to drink and drive has

Jordan Harbinger: done it.

How many times have you driven drunk? That is bad.

Nick Pell: Uh, zero. My parents actually put the fear of God into me about drunk driving from like age six. My dad lost his license for DUI, which is why he quit drinking. It's kind of like one of the few things they did right? I've never driven drunk in my life. I used to feel weird if I would have, if I'd have a beer and then drive like two hours later I would be like, oh man, I'm gonna get a DUI for this.

But anyway, the problem with the delayed male virginity isn't that people aren't having promiscuous sex. The issue is this statistic seems like a fairly good proxy for how many guys have never had a girlfriend, tons of guys had, who've never had girlfriends. Isn't just sad. It's, [00:45:00] it carries socially corrosive second and third order effects that are potentially dangerous and OnlyFans and the AI girlfriends that are coming for the OnlyFans jobs, because if you don't read the news, we're almost kind of late on the OnlyFans thing because.

Everybody's got an AI girlfriend now. Cheaper, I suppose more intimate. Cheaper, but also, you know, molds to exactly the thing that you want. Right, which is, yeah, that's creepy. It absolutely is because it's not what a human being is. A human being is not a thing that you mold, that an algorithm molds to be your exact perfect, frictionless partner.

You know, this is not going to help with this problem of socially isolated adult men. To circle back to the legal issue, we need to talk about the Bob Houses.

Jordan Harbinger: I have a feeling, I'm gonna regret asking this, but what is a Bob House?

Nick Pell: It's a centralized hub for content creation. [00:46:00] OnlyFans creators might live there or even just drop into film.

There tends to be a lot of cross promotion among the creators who are living or working there.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's like a hype house for tiktoks, except it's for porn. So what's the issue with that?

Nick Pell: Well, the issue is if you're gonna start looking into OnlyFans creators from a legal perspective. There have to be some kind of actual crimes taking place in some of these Bob houses.

Oh, for sure. There's an issue in porn in general where some women in these movies, I didn't research it 'cause it wasn't the topic, but with a percentage, who knows, some of these women are trafficked or coerced and I cannot imagine that that's not true on OnlyFans as well.

Jordan Harbinger: OnlyFans, were the top 1% buy Ferraris and everyone else can almost afford extra guac.

We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Chilipad by Sleepme. recently I stayed at a nice hotel on a business trip. Not trying to flex this part of the, come on. Just trying to illustrate a point here people, and I'm laying there thinking this [00:47:00] mattress is great, but where's my Chilipad?

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All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable over at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Now for the rest of skeptical Sunday. I just read a story about this and talked to [00:51:00] somebody who knows a little bit inside of it. There used to be a website called, I think it was like Girls Do Porn or something like that, and it was pretty much exclusively trafficked women and it ended up going on the dark web for a while and the founders, I believe, tried to escape.

One of them did Escape and I think was recently ish, arrested living in Spain or something like that. After being on the FBI Most Wanted list. What he was doing was putting up ads in certain markets and saying, you know, models needed or whatever, and then the girls would show up having like no money and maybe even owing this guy money for like the flight.

He was accommodating them in his house or one of his properties. And they'd show up and he'd be like, you're doing a porn shoot? And they'd be like, no. And he's like, you owe me money. And if you wanna sleep outside in a strange and dangerous city, that's fine with me. Or you can do this thing on camera. Oh, and by the way, it's not going on the internet.

It's private. It's for something. And we tested everyone. And by the way, none of that was true. He wasn't testing or [00:52:00] doing anything, and it was all going on the internet. He sex trafficked all of these women, eventually enough of 'em went to the authorities that he is now spending a ridiculously long time in prison, thankfully.

But yeah, it's awful. And there's just kind of given the sheer probability and scale of websites like OnlyFans and that the company is hands off at the creation that's put up there, it's a near certainty that something similar is happening in many other places as well.

Nick Pell: Yeah, and there was a whole controversy again that I haven't researched the specifics of, 'cause it wasn't the topic of the episode, but there was a whole controversy, you know, how many of the women on PornHub.

Were being trafficked. They locked down their content. It's a lot stricter to get stuff on there than it used to be.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We did an episode about this with Laila Mickelwait and it turned out to be a ton of underage and trafficked people on PornHub.

Nick Pell: People can call me a bad libertarian if they want. I don't really care.

It's, I don't think there's any such thing as a good one. I'm fine with the Nordic model approach to prostitution where cops go after Johns and [00:53:00] pimps, but leave the prostitutes alone and also provide them with alternatives. 'cause like simply taking their customer base away is not, they're not gonna go, oh man, I'm broke.

I guess I'll go, you know, go. Now I'm gonna go to trade school. This is possibly the most shocking thing I'll ever say on the show. But I really think that radical feminists are onto, by which I mean like in the academic sense, like Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon,

Jordan Harbinger: I know MacKinnon. Yeah. She's from my law school. So Catharine MacKinnon, she's like an icon in the space.

And I was walking in the hall and I saw her and you know, she's very approachable and nice, but she's also like a world-renowned feminist icon. And one of my property teachers was like, oh, hey Kitty, how are you? And I looked at the other students in the hall and we were all like, ah. No way. He just called Catharine MacKinnon Kitty.

Oh my, no chance. And she was like, oh, hey. And we're like, oh, okay. So that's your nickname. Uh, we were, we were speechless. 'cause we were like, oh, you're fired now. Like, that's how this works. Right? Like, you're, you're going to jail for using that [00:54:00] nickname with this very serious. And she was, she's just actually like a shockingly reasonable person in many ways.

I guess we were not expecting that. Right. We were kind of a little bit afraid of her. 'cause she's serious. Like she's brilliant.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So I've, I'm using radical feminist in the academic sense of a school of feminism. Not a, you know, feminists that I blow

Jordan Harbinger: things up.

Nick Pell: Right. And also like, this is a term they would, I believe self apply and I absolutely love Andrea Kin and have kind of like a, a weird, um, fixation on her as a, just an interesting person and a brilliant writer, but.

Yeah, I think that they're correct about quite a bit their analysis about why prostitution and pornography are like inherently problematic. I accept that to basically be

Jordan Harbinger: true. But aren't these men and women mostly engaged in just consensual commerce? That's the crux of the issue. Are they? Okay. You're talking about street prostitution, not OnlyFans though, right?

Nick Pell: Well, we have some data that some of the women on OnlyFans might be coerced.

Jordan Harbinger: I didn't realize we had data on that. I was all speculating [00:55:00] before.

Nick Pell: No, we have data on this. So there's a 2024 Reuters investigation that found a woman who had been held captive by her boyfriend and forced to make OnlyFans content for two years.

Oh my

Jordan Harbinger: God. Yeah. Two years is a porn sex slave. That's horrific. Jesus.

Nick Pell: Another study found a trafficker was making a million dollars from OnlyFans. And let me tell you, uh, friends, he was probably not making it off. One woman.

Jordan Harbinger: No.

Nick Pell: The Avery Center's 2021 research found that 6% of creators acknowledged that traffickers had helped create and market their content.

30% reported being approached by suspected traffickers offering. Account management in exchange for subscription revenue.

Jordan Harbinger: I know that trafficking is a big part of the porn industry, the mainstream porn industry, and we just kind of touched on that, so it doesn't really surprise me all that much as tragic and disgusting as it is.

Are there any key differences between trafficking in traditional forms of porn and trafficking and [00:56:00] OnlyFans? Is there anything notable there?

Nick Pell: The big one that needs mentioning is that the trafficking involved in traditional porn in some sense, is happening with more participants. I'm not sure that, you know, everyone involved in shooting a scene with a trafficked woman knows that she's being trafficked and exploited, but I am reasonably certain that some of them know, on the other hand, when it's just one guy, one woman in a webcam, there are far fewer people involved, and so it can happen a lot more quietly, which in a sense makes it more dangerous.

It's easier to get away with because you don't have as many willing participants. Who are okay with what you're doing.

Jordan Harbinger: There's not a sound guy and a lighting guy and a catering who are like, why is she scared and crying when the camera stops and like says she can't leave? And like, this is not cool. I'm outta here and I'm calling the cops.

Yeah. If you're just, like you said that one woman was held captive by her boyfriend for two years and forced to create content, that's, I can't even imagine how horrible that is. [00:57:00] And, and I, I can imagine that this also makes it a lot more difficult to prosecute too. Just putting my lawyer hat on. I mean, there's fewer participants, fewer people to talk to the cops in the event of a bust.

There's fewer people for the cops to lean on to get more information. There's fewer clues, right? Because if it's just a bunch of user generated content, how are you gonna know that anything's wrong in the first place? It's probably also harder in general because of the distance covered and the opacity of the platform in general.

You just, you don't have any idea who's behind the account. Most of the time. You kind of know what they look like if they're showing their face or whatever, but other than that, they could be anyone. And I'm guessing that getting info out of OnlyFans. You need a subpoena, right? You can't just be like, Hey, who's the person in this video ca?

Like they're gonna say, gimme a, show me a court order. I'm not just gonna dox a bunch of our users for you,

Nick Pell: and they may not even give it to you. Then, who knows? Yeah. There's a coalition led by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation that documented patterns consistent with e pimping and online sexual exploitation.

And I suspect that all of [00:58:00] this just kind of scratches the surface of the dark underbelly of OnlyFans. We talked about the child sex abuse material and like that's way harder to conceal than trafficking or coercing or exploiting a woman who is of legal age. The thing is, sexual crimes of this nature are generally hard to investigate and prosecute.

A lot of times the victims don't want to communicate. Sometimes the victims don't even know that they're victims or they don't think of themselves that way. There's a difficult, complicated, and uncomfortable gray area of consent when it comes to Ladies of the Digital Night,

Jordan Harbinger: Uhhuh

Nick Pell: and their managers.

Jordan Harbinger: So-called managers. Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Pell: So you know, for the record, I rank pimps somewhere below Fent dealers, which is to say slightly below Pon Scum. I don't want people to think that I'm making excuses or alibis for them here. I'm just trying to explain the reality of the situation. It sucks. It's hard to hear or talk about, [00:59:00] but the reality is what it is, and that's why I think the best approach is the Nordic model.

They've just decided in Nordic model countries that the dubious consent of the women involved is irrelevant, and what the men are doing is illegal and whether they're buying it or selling it.

Jordan Harbinger: So while there's some clear differences between OnlyFans and more traditional forms of sex work, I think that one thing they share in common is that it could be very hard to walk away.

That might be because they're being coerced in some way, but it, it might also just be because they don't have a lot of other options, man. I know a couple of single moms that you know, got pregnant in their teens and twenties and they're good looking and they're like, so I'm looking for a new job. And so far I found stripper girl who works at a really dodgy club where I'm pretty sure you're not only just walking around in lingerie for this amount of money.

I found other random sex work stuff on camera and there's a cafe that's gonna pay me 10% of what all of those other jobs are gonna do. And I can't afford to take [01:00:00] that because I have a kid. And yeah, they don't really have other options. And so her decision is she is gonna be really poor 'cause she doesn't wanna get sexually assaulted all the time.

It's just gonna be harder to get a job in normy land. Like, it'd be almost like be like going to prison in a way. Like what do you do? What do you say?

Nick Pell: Yeah. Can you explain this gap on your resume? I think very few employers are gonna be stoked to hear the answer. I was a full-time only Vans creator.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

I wanna say you and I are a little bit different in this. I don't think it would bother me personally, but I'm probably the exception to the rule here and sadly I'm not hiring right now other than of course for naked landscaper who dresses like a clown in lingerie. Speaking of trafficking, you really do have to find somebody who's kind of like, I don't care.

You're chopping vegetables, but it's, that's gonna be way less appealing than what you were making working at some club.

Nick Pell: I could see how you could transition to like social media management or something that doesn't even pay very

Jordan Harbinger: well. So that's the chopping vegetables of the digital world really.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it very much is.

The [01:01:00] main pivots that you're going to have are gonna be like reality television I guess, but that river seems to flow in the other direction. There's established reality television stars who start making OnlyFans content, whether it's adult or just a more personal look at their lives. But other than that, how many porn stars have crossed over into mainstream media?

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, I remember Traci Lord specifically because it was like, oh, it's a big deal. She used to be in porn, and now she actually does stuff that's not porn. And if I try to think of somebody besides her in my entire lifetime that's made that transition, that's pretty much it.

Nick Pell: Jenna Jamison.

Jordan Harbinger: I haven't thought of her in 20 years.

Like Yeah. Household name for all the wrong reasons. I mean, I, I'm not like, yeah, I really loved her in Game of Thrones or whatever. Like, no. Was

Nick Pell: she in Game of

Jordan Harbinger: Thrones? No, she wasn't. Of course not. Yeah, it's hard.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And like, you know, Traci Lords, like, she did direct to video PM entertainment movies, which I loved.

'cause I have Bad Taste Skin Max kind of [01:02:00] Sunday night. No, she's like a, she's, she does like Renegade Cop movies, which I really like. I love Direct Action. That sounds like a porn by the way. Direct action from the eighties and nineties where like, you know, they're a cop who doesn't play by

Jordan Harbinger: play by the rules.

Yeah.

Nick Pell: The, he's a cop who plays by his own set of rules, like I'll, I mean that shit up. And Traci Lord did a couple of those for PM Entertainment, which is like, you know, the Criterion collection of Renegade Cop movies. And yeah, they're what's called like Born to Kill or something, so it's like that type of, she made a couple of those kinds of movies, which I loved.

But yeah, I have bad taste, which is better than having No Taste. John Waters movie. She did. Like, is any of this stuff mainstream media?

Jordan Harbinger: I don't even know who these people are. Yeah, but that's probably a me problem.

Nick Pell: Yeah, there's a stigma around adult content. Doesn't matter how much you wish. It wasn't true.

It is. So there's a lot to walk back from if you decide this is gonna be your path and it just doesn't work out, you know what you could do? There's probably a [01:03:00] burgeoning little cottage industry of like. I used to pretend to enjoy sex on camera, and now I pretend to believe in Jesus. There's probably some kind of industry like that, like X porn person, motivational speaker Bs, but like there's no pivot from this.

There's no realistic pivot from this.

Jordan Harbinger: It seems like OnlyFans is just one part of a bigger story to gify everything, including your sexual and romantic life.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I mean, that's kind of my basic assessment of it, is what I find so personally objectionable about it. I don't think the cure to loneliness is men buying attention online.

I don't think it's anybody's cure to loneliness

Jordan Harbinger: attention that probably isn't even coming from the person they think it's coming from.

Nick Pell: Right. I'm very curious about what percentage of the messages are actually coming from the creators, and there's no data on this because how would Of course, how would there be?

But what we do know is that chat trolleys in general are transitioning from human beings to ai. So why would only fans be any different? A [01:04:00] lot of the companies I work for, they use support hired from the Philippines. So why would OnlyFans be any different?

Jordan Harbinger: There has to be some kind of information on this.

OnlyFans isn't gonna even necessarily know or tell us, but there's gotta be data on messaging in general. Yeah.

Nick Pell: Messaging is about 70% of all the revenue generated by the platform. Wow. So again, it's not the pictures. They're selling human contact and interaction. It's a lot sadder, in my opinion, than porn addiction in that respect.

Beyond that, there are platforms specifically used for OnlyFans or similar platforms. They're called Flirt Flow and Chat persona. Presumably these would not exist if people were not using them. We also know of a class action lawsuit against OnlyFans based directly around buyers feeling like they got burned by the platform because they found out they weren't really chatting directly with the creators.

Reuters reported on creators using chatbots and ai though must be said [01:05:00] that OnlyFans terms of service directly prohibits the use of ai.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, I was curious about that.

Nick Pell: Yeah. There was an investigation in Wired about how precisely the shill chatters manage clients for the creators. So no statistics, but there's pretty conclusive anecdotal and circumstantial data that this is happening, which has another dimension to the, it's kind of sad that men are paying for digital companionship angle.

Because they're not even getting what they think they're paying for. They're talking to a chat bot or some outsourced support team and it's like, yeah, no kidding. They're going to AI girlfriends now.

Jordan Harbinger: I was just gonna say the same thing. It's like you might as well knowingly go to an AI girlfriend because you're paying 10 times, a hundred times as much to use OnlyFans to talk to AI anyway.

So like just to have a veneer that someone lies to you and says it's them, you're paying a huge markup. So I think you're onto something with that. I don't have the same as if people couldn't guess moral stance against OnlyFans and adult content creation that you do. But I do think [01:06:00] anytime someone is paying for human contact that they're lacking somewhere else, that is not a sustainable solution to the problem that they have.

And there's a serious disconnect between creators, preconceptions about OnlyFans versus the reality. There might be money in OnlyFans. It's neither quick nor easy. It comes with a lot of personal risk that the platform doesn't have to take on despite taking 20% off the top of each creator. And so look OnlyFans.

It might get pitched as a dream job where you lounge around while collecting mountains of cash, but it really, it's just hustle culture in a thong. Thanks Nick Pell for giving us a full frontal on the facts on OnlyFans. Thanks everyone for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday Advertisers deals, discounts, ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show, it's created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and [01:07:00] opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer.

Also, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it is fact-check, so consult a professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. When disaster strikes, it's not your go-bag or survival stash that saves you, it's your neighbors. Amanda Ripley joins me to reveal why most people freeze instead of panic and how our biggest threat in a crisis isn't chaos.

It's denial.

JHS Trailer: Disasters happen quite frequently and they've gotten more frequent, and weather and geological disasters specifically have increased about 400% over the past 50 years. But we'd actually gotten much better at surviving them over the same time period. So the number of deaths [01:08:00] has dropped by about two thirds.

In 1990, the National Hurricane Center could predict the path of a hurricane only about 24 hours in advance. That's all you had to get outta the way, which really isn't enough just based on the way people make decisions about evacuation. And also based on the design of dense urban places. So now the National Hurricane Center can predict the path for hurricane with pretty good accuracy 72 hours beforehand, which is actually a pretty big difference when it comes to getting out of harm's way.

So this is a recurring nightmare for many millions of people at this point, evacuating, worrying. Recovering, rebuilding all of this, and it's actually a massive tax on our economy. So the bottom line is, if you haven't personally experienced a disaster yet, you probably will, unfortunately. But the upside is that the number of deaths has dropped.

Humans tend to become polite and courteous and cooperative, [01:09:00] almost to a fault in most disasters, including strangers. Actually, your best ally are the people around you.

Jordan Harbinger: This episode might just change the way you think about prepping and who you should be getting to know before the next emergency. Check out episode 1106 with Amanda Ripley.