Endless Thread - Endless Thread on OnlyFans

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Journalist Leon Neyfakh — known for the podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Backfired — wanted to know more about the massively popular and sprawling online ecosystem of OnlyFans. What are its nearly 400 million users really getting from it, and what can that tell all of us about relationships forged online? To find out, he teamed up with Gracie Canaan, a stand-up comedian and OnlyFans creator. Ben and Amory sat down with them at the WBUR Festival to hear all about their new podcast for Audible, OnlyFantasy, in which they examine this bustling digital marketplace of sex and emotions, and try to understand the role it plays in the lives and relationships of the buyers and sellers. Show notes: OnlyFantasy (Audible) This conversation was produced by Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited down by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

Spotify, it's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people? Scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social? Let me introduce you to fans. And they're here with me on Spotify. Trust me, I know fans. They don't skip. They stay for hours.

They don't move on. They manifest. They're not a demographic group. They're fans. Spotify advertising. You're among fans. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. A recent episode explores the challenges and opportunities in decarbonizing one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries, ocean freight shipping. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. How are y'all doing? All right. Welcome. Welcome. Thanks for being.

here. Hey, endless threaders, that's us at WBUR's City Space a few weeks ago, getting ready to talk about OnlyFans. And if you don't know what OnlyFans is, ask your husband. Just kidding. Really, that's a joke made by one of our onstage guests, who is among the four and a half million creators on OnlyFans, each cultivating their own little online community. Or for some of them, not so little, because His OnlyFans has 400 million users.

And journalist Leon Nefok wanted to know more about this online ecosystem. You may know him as the creator and host of podcasts like Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Backfired. But for this new show, he teamed up with Gracie Canaan, a stand-up comedian and OnlyFans creator, to examine this bustling online marketplace of sex and emotions and try to understand the role it plays in the lives and relationships of the buyers and sellers. Leon and Gracie's new podcast from Audible is called Only Fantasy, and they told us all about it at the WBUR Festival. Take a listen.

So for the uninitiated, I figured Gracie, we would start with you. For people who do not know what OnlyFans is, you are a creator on OnlyFans. How would you describe it? You know, it's so funny because even after making this podcast, I feel like I still don't have a succinct log line. of what this is. It is a platform that is really like an all-in-one for digital sex workers, right? So it's something that brings, or digital creators, it doesn't even have to be sex work.

It is something that combines selling your videos with chats, with live streams. So it's really a one-stop shop for creators and subscribers to connect whatever the content is. What sorts of things are only fan subscribers paying for? For me specifically, I think, well, there are tears. So I have, you know, mass PPVs, paper views, which is like I'll send those out to everyone. And those can be, they're not, honestly, they're not very explicit. I try to make people feel connected and maybe a little bit sexual in a creative way. so it might be me like doing a little dance or me doing something like pouring water on myself

or I don't know like so there we go literally falling apart what's up guys um yeah Cassio taking your watch off that could be a thing you could be a cute thing right exactly that you got that for free yeah this is the beginning of a strip tease guys so I just want you to know and then I think mostly people do pay for a connection so if I get like an $100 tip out of nowhere, that's someone who really wants to chat to me. And then there's all, and that's the cool thing is every creator has their main source of revenue, right? So whether it's some people rely really heavily on custom videos, right, where they sell something

for $100 plus. Some people do. Or someone asks you do this for me out of video. Yeah, exactly. And then you chart, you know, that's like a bespoke piece, so to speak. And then some people are like high volume PPVs. people are alive. So I think for me, people pay really for like any kind of conversation. That's what people feel the most connected to.

The phrase that I remember clarifying a lot for me was the girlfriend experience, which was a phrase I'd heard from watching the TV show where it's about like a, like a, what's the opposite of a digital sex worker? A real, not a real sex worker. Sorry. R.R.L. Flesh and blood sex worker. Blood sex worker. Broadcast sex worker. But in the only fan, yeah, analog, thank you. But in the only fan's context, it's someone, it's almost like having a long distance relationship with someone, right?

You're texting with them. You're saying good morning, good night. You're sort of telling them about your day. It feels like you have a girlfriend who you have this special access to through your phone. Yeah. And I'll just add to that. Like I do a lot of what I call like connection builders. that are free. So I will do a lot of just like good morning voice memos. It's really about like taking

intimacy and scaling it to now, you know, five, six thousand people. So sending a voice memo, sending a good night memo, making someone feel special. And then in all of those free relationship builders, that get someone invested so that I can take all their money. No. So that, you know, obviously like they want to stick around and they they want to. So it's really interesting. in that way. It's interesting too that you talk about it as a connection that you're building a connection because Leon, I feel like in the podcast you talk about AOL Instant Messenger as a kind of precursor to this in a way. And your experience with someone on aim. Yeah, well, I thought of aim as a reference point after sort of initially being pretty deeply skeptical of why someone would want the thing Gracie is

describing. Like you want to pay someone. to pretend to like you through the phone? Like, it made no sense to me. Like, you want to, you're paying to sort of have these snatches of communication. You're paying to just almost have a more vivid imagination of this other person out there somewhere. And then I was like, oh, wait, I sort of did that. I didn't pay for it, but I sort of did this when I was a teenager. And I used AOL Instant Messenger, which was, for those people,

who, for those who weren't there, was like a really, I think, undersung advance in the internet where suddenly you could find out the screen name of the girl in your class or the girl you went to summer camp. College, I used it a lot in college. That's cool.

I think I used it in college, too. I think I might have moved down the G-chat by that. You're like, who's around? You're waiting for that door opening. Yeah. And so I remembered having quite intense, relationships with people I either never met or met once and never again.

And then I was like, okay, I really got a lot out of that. I could imagine someone wanting to pay for it. At the very beginning of the show, Leon, you talk about kind of how you got into making this podcast series, which might have something to do with an only fan's creator named Annie. We hear from Annie at the beginning of this series. and Annie explains this kind of key difference between what we think of as traditional pornography and specifically only fans.

Let's take a listen to that. When I first got curious about this and asked Annie about it, she offered an explanation involving a guy who once paid her $800 to make a video of herself wearing a pair of shoes that he had bought her at smushing a bunch of corn dogs with the high heels. I promise you your favorite porn star is not about to call your name and step on a corn dog. for you, so, like, yes, you can watch porn, but those porn stars that you watch will never know your name, will never speak to you. These OnlyFan girls are paid to acknowledge your existence. I had always pictured OnlyFans as a one-way street, a place to publish exclusive content

that your most motivated fans could pay to look at. End of story. Annie told me that I'd been missing the point. Most of the money people made on OnlyFans, she said, came from more than just being looked at. It came from maintaining quasi-personal relationships with subscribers over weeks or months or even longer. A lot of the people were just lonely and sad. So they really just genuinely wanted somebody to text them every day, text them good morning in the morning, good night at night, send them a couple photos.

Didn't even have to be like naked photos, just cute photos. Some were literally like me in an oversized hoodie in front of the mirror. But not all of them, Annie. showed me, I remember, I remember you showed me a couple pretty racy things you posted. Not all of them, but there were a lot of the times, I don't know if that was clear. Wanted you in a hoodie. Wanted you in a hoodie. Wanted you in a messy bun. They wanted you to not look like you, they were paying for you, basically. Well, you ruined the surprise. I was going to ask you who Annie was, but surprise. Oh, sorry. Did everyone get that? It's his little sister.

So why, why did you, other than the fact that your sister, or maybe your sister was a key component of why you wanted to look into OnlyFans. But what set off you making a whole series about OnlyFans? Well, so OnlyFans took off as a platform during the pandemic when people, you know, for all the obvious reasons, people were at home, people were out of work, people were lonely. And in the five years or so since, which takes us right up to when I think we started working on this, it had exploded to the point where the numbers were just astonishing. Like, at, And I don't remember where they were exactly then, but now we're talking about more than 400 million people on there as subscribers and 4.5 million, I believe, as creators. These are just unfathomable numbers because it suggests that this is this thing that, you know, one might be tempted to think is a, you know, fringe.

activity that is like happening on the margins is in fact utterly mainstream. And I just had no idea what was going on there. As I said before, was sort of confused about like why someone would want this. And it's like, you know, I'm not trying to be polyana issue. Like I understand how people look at pornography. But this thing where you're like engaging in a fantasy relationship didn't, it didn't speak to my needs. And so I think, um, and so I think, um, I'm, I wanted to understand what was making this thing so popular. And what were people getting out of it on either side of the equation? A really surprising thing, I think, that we learn in the show or, you know,

it's just true about Only fans. You know, Leon, you were speaking to just the size of the platform, which is really incredible. But a surprising thing for podcasters, I think, is that there's no algorithm. meaning there really isn't a way for OnlyFans. It is a very modern platform, as we were talking about, but there's no way, for instance, for users to search for specific creators on the platform. Or even a specific type.

Or even a specific type. There's like no real sort of like tagging, I guess you could say. And also you don't really have a FYP. You don't really have a sort of feed that's being delivered onto you based off of your behavior, right? Yeah, which I would have expected that like any other. social media platform in the year 2026, whether it's TikTok or Instagram or Twitter, you log on and you're bombarded with recommendations.

Like maybe you'll like this person. Maybe you like this person. Like scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll until you find someone you want to pay. And instead, it's like a very web 1.0 structure where you sort of have to know that someone is on there whom you want to look at. in order to even know where to look. There's not even ask Jeeves. There's no.

You have to know their exact screen name. And I think, you know, the sort of interesting result of this, and Gracie can speak to this, is every individual creator is sort of, it's incumbent on them to promote themselves in sort of a hand-to-hand combat kind of way. So you go on, as a creator, you go on Reddit and you post in various message boards

to say who you are, what you look like, what you do, what your kind of person you are. You go on Twitter. You promote yourself in this very like kind of one person at a time kind of way. And it feels kind of like a throwback. And I don't know, we asked a lot of people like, why don't they have a more modern recommendation engine? And the only thing we really heard that felt compelling was that by doing it this way, only fans kind of farms out the promotion of the website to individual creators.

So if it's your job to make people aware that you have an account, then you're promoting only fans for free, basically. Yeah, and I'll just add to that. Only fans, at the time that we started this, we found out, and this is an exact number, quote, but OnlyFans itself, the company has like fewer than 100 employees. And that shocks a lot of people, but if you go onto the interface, you'll see, they, they, don't even have an app. So you cannot get it in the app store. It is a browser. It is completely bare bones because honestly, they don't have an incentive to optimize it. They're the most efficient

company in the world in terms of headcount to revenue. Yeah. They're already bringing in billions of dollars just with what they have. So if someone, if it's hard for users on the creator or the subscriber side, they're like, all right, figure it out. So I think that's probably why mixed with whether this is intentional or unintentional on the on the side of only fans there is something that makes it feel special by not having an FYP right you're like oh i heard my co-worker has an only fans or like i wonder if this influencer has an only fans and you actually have to go there because in my anecdotal experience um subscribers are not there to just be like i i'm going to follow someone new they usually have you know one to three creators that's that

they really like that they found through another channel, whether it's TikTok or Instagram or Reddit or whatever. And they, that's really what they're there for. This is funny to me because I had this realization when Amory and I were listening to the show and we were texting each other about it. I immediately texted Amory only fans as like podcasts for porn. Yep. Which is to say that both of these forms are also separately podcasts for porn as well. That's right. We interviewed a guy. Sorry to interrupt you, but I can't let an opportunity go by without mentioning this.

There's a guy who became famous as like a YouTube streamer. His name's Adam 22. I don't know if anyone, if that rings a bell for anyone, but he has a podcast with his wife. And it's a podcast freely available. You can listen to it anywhere. He and his wife interview a different only fans creator on the podcast every week. They do like a Mark Marin style inside the actor's studio style. interview with her where they talk for an hour, an hour, 20 minutes. And then the conversation

ends, and they all have sex together. And that part is available as a video for pay, for money on only fans. On only fans. It's an amazing, I mean, it's an amazing idea for a podcast. Great crossover. But both of these forms of media, I think, kind of struggle with discovery, people, you know, finding what they're looking for. Being a podcaster is, is like maybe in some ways being an OnlyFans creator and that you don't just need to make the content. You really have to market it. You got to sell it. That's what we're talking about. Does any of that ring true for you all as podcasters who made a podcast about OnlyFans? Yeah. I mean, I think I realized pretty early on that a lot of the work that an OnlyFans creator does is marketing, you know, self-promotion, kind of like all the

same things you do if you're a journalist on Substack. It's like, I think. Collabs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You're, trying to link, you know, it's, it's, it's, I think it replicates the same, uh, mechanism for growing ones audience that you see in any other realm. Uh, I think it's just like the structure of this, of the social web, which is that as people become divorced from institutions and become their own personal brands, you are, uh, if you want to make more money today than you did yesterday, you have to keep selling yourself. And, uh, one of our early, like, I don't know, thoughts of what our angle might be here is like, oh, maybe we're all just only fans creators now. Some of us sell blog post on substack and others sell racy photos, you know.

Corn dog squishing videos. Yeah. Yeah, we're all only fans creators and we're all horrors. And if anyone, as someone who gets called a horror online all the time, like we are, you are selling your mind and body every day to make money. So I just want you guys to know everyone in here, unless you're, you know, living off your parents' money, which is a different kind of war. No. But I want to say, as far as the marketing, you know, that's something I was, this is my first podcast project, which I got incredibly lucky about all of my other podcast friends hated me. But I'm a stand-of comedian, and so I am, for better, worse, very used to that relentless marketing grind.

But a lot of creators we talk to kind of look back on their earlier days and realize, oh, my God, so much of this is marketing. It's more than creating the actual content and chatting to people. It's going viral. It's like trying to go viral on Instagram on TikTok. It's posting, you know, I spoke with an agency and they were like, if you're already posting, like come back and talk to us when you're posting five times a day on TikTok, just on TikTok. So I know. And I mean, they're little things. They're not, these are not, you know, it's just like.

I'm doing a dance or like cinnamon challenge or whatever. But so that is when, and this is something we can get into later, but that is really a huge incentive of why creators work with agencies. It's not that they can't, you know, it's not so much the chatting or the creation. It's the constant marketing push across all social media platforms. We're going to talk more about agencies because this is an important part of the business. But I want to hear from another clip from the podcast because this also speaks to the marketing aspect. This is a creator named Bell Grace that you talk to. And to your point,

Leon, she, Bell Grace blows up accidentally during the pandemic through the act of marketing herself. She's posting videos on TikTok to try to get people to her only fans page. And in December of 2020, one of those TikTok videos goes viral. The timing is great because she's just quit her day job because she's starting to make more money on OnlyFans. And let's listen to a bit of what happens when the video goes viral. I was just like, oh my God, this is absolutely life-changing. It couldn't have happened at a better time of me, like, leaving work and then going viral. It just, like, kind of, like, topped it all off.

I always believe that things are just meant to be, and I just think that was just meant to be. According to Bell, the video got 58 million views, which translated into a massive jump in profit on Onlyfans. Yeah, so I can actually pull up my stats, just give me a second. So September, I did $3,200. In October, $4,900. In November, I did $8,200. In December, I did $14,300. And then are you ready for this one?

This was my biggest jump. In January, 2012, I did $38,945. That's Leon at the end, I think. I had to hear that just for Leon's gasped. Yes, it stopped me in my tracks, too, hearing that number. I think it captures what a lot of us were hearing. And we have a picture of the earnings statement, I believe, that we can show here just to prove these numbers climbing up and up and up.

This is monthly income from OnlyFans for Bell Grace. So Gracie, how unusual is this? And what can you say about, I don't know how many subscribers you have currently. Do your earning statements look like this? Yeah, way more. Double. Actually, it drinks on me after this. Well, one of the things that we learned, which makes sense is, again, I can't even remember the exact statistics anymore.

But I think I know what you're going to say. Yeah, I got you. 95% of creator. 75% of creators. Yeah, thank you. 75% of creators make $300 a month or less. Yeah. So this is definitely an exception.

Also relatable to podcasts where it's like one. The top 25% of podcasts make money. The rest do not. Yeah. You know, and we remind her that we hear the success stories and not the other ones, which we did look for, but believe it or not,

we did not find a lot of guests willing to talk about how little money they make on OnlyFans. You know, Bell, I think with her, and she has said this, it was a perfect storm. She worked, I mean, she also worked very hard. She worked consistently. She enjoys the work. but having that happen in COVID was just, you know,

and then she kept at it. She kept the momentum. So I've definitely seen spikes. I think I'm currently, I have two pages. I think I'm between like four and two percent. So that is. What is that four? I mean four and two percent?

Oh, sorry, top like four and two percent. So someone like Bell is probably like under one percent. She's probably like the top six percent or something. Zero point six or zero point? Yeah. Yeah, 0.6. Like, 0.1 is Sophie Rain, you know, who makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year. We all know who that is, right?

Yeah. She is, she will make, I think that her top subscriber has paid her a total of $7.4 million. And most of it is for phone calls. One subscriber has paid her $7.4 million. So it's like, and she will say this. It's like a lot of it is luck. A lot of it is, you know, hard work mixed with luck. But yeah, I think that is a very rare thing.

And that is kind of people see those numbers. And they're like, I'm going to get on OnlyFans. And it's like, all right, go, you know, it's not going to be $34,000 right off of that. Yeah. So the vast majority of creators are making $300 or less. The top, you know, 1%, less than 1% are making millions and millions. OnlyFans is valued at $3.15 billion today. Can you break down a little bit for us how the company makes money?

And also like how do you see that, Gracie? Like how does that work? How do you make money? How do I make? I don't. I'm a stand-up comedian. No. They take 20% of all earnings, which some people complain about, but for the most part,

I'm like, if I didn't have only fans, this would be, it would be four different platforms that I would have to manage. I don't think I would make as much money. So for me, 20% seems like a low lift. And Apple takes 30% if you make an app. It's pretty normal. So like 20% is actually pretty normal. Yeah.

Yeah. So I don't have a problem with that. And they're actually quite like when you check your weekly, monthly statements, it actually just shows your net automatically. So they're not kind of dangling that. They're like, yeah, here's what you have. So yeah, that's how they make their money. That's it.

They just take hours. We have more of our conversation with Leon Nafak. and Gracie Canaan on their new podcast about only fans in a minute. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. Ships move the vast majority of the world's goods, and it's cheaper and safer compared to trucks or planes. So the shipping was there, centuries, and it will remain there in the future.

So how does an industry this essential think about sustainability? Follow, is business broken, wherever you get your podcasts, and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode about what it will take for ocean freight shipping to reach net zero emissions. I'm Dean Russell, co-creator of WBUR's new family-friendly podcast, The Midnight Rebellion. This story transports you to a future shaped by climate change. The water is high, seaweed is everywhere, and the city is ruled by salty robots. The good news, you choose.

what happens. The decisions you make can turn the tide. All episodes are out now. This summer, find your next great adventure at WBUR.org slash midnight or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to jump ahead a little bit because time is just flying by as we knew it would happen. And I want to talk, you mentioned agencies. So, you know, the top really successful creators can be represented by agencies. And Gracie, you talked about how you're offering the girlfriend experience. You're waking up in the morning and messaging your subscribers as if it's like, good morning, hon, whatever. And a way to make...

Was that good? Do I have a future? I hear I can make a lot of money. Yeah, let's talk after. You got a future. So one way to make a lot more money is to have people do that talk for you. Yeah. In a way, this was kind of the most, to me, intriguing part of this whole world is that people

like Gracie who have... How many subscribers did you say you have? I have like a little over 6,000 right now. Okay, 6,000 is a lot. And beginning when Gracie and I first met, I think you had like 80, right? And so you were talking to everyone yourself. Wow. When you get to thousands, suddenly you can't really keep up.

And you haven't made this jump and you've thought about it. People can hire a company essentially. There's a lot of these companies that are sometimes called agencies, sometimes called management companies. Some people call them e-pimps for obvious reasons. And what they do is they take over your account. You set up like a Dropbox or whatever where you submit your content, someone else posted for you.

And crucially, they hire what are called chatters, who will then chat for you with your subscribers. So you can have 100 conversations going at once because it's 100 different people, some of them whom are men in the Philippines or in India or in, you know, other parts of the world who are being paid like $2 an hour to have these romantic, sexual, sometimes just normal conversations with people who think they're talking to their crush. And so we interviewed a couple of these people who have this job. It's a really weird job, as you can imagine.

And, you know, I think there's a, the difficult thing here is like the user in many cases, doesn't obviously realize that they're talking to some random person. Right. And they're quite disappointed when they realize it. Yeah. And this is so complicated because, as you said, OnlyFans really, it's been around since 2016, but it really blows up during the pandemic.

When everyone is at home, everyone is lonely. You know, we start hearing about the loneliness epidemic. And so you have potentially very lonely people who, yes, they are paying to talk to someone like you, Gracie, or someone like Bell Grace or whomever. And it's really easy to forget that you're paying for that relationship and to feel like it's authentic. And you also talk to someone who works at an agency in the podcast.

And when you know, when you ask him about, does he feel conflicted about, you know, these customers feeling taken advantage of feeling like their emotions are being manipulated, He just says, well, yeah, but I mean, they had to have known this was never a real relationship. But how do you think about that, Gracie, as a creator? Because these are very lonely people who you're talking to every day. And you have to balance their real feelings with also, this is how you might pay rent. Yeah.

Well, first of all, I want to say I am a huge advocate for subscribers. I like, I love my boys. Like truly I, and I will say, yes, there is a stigma. And yes, it's correct that a lot of them are lonely, don't have social skills, there definitely are those people. But a lot of my subscribers, they're like pretty happily married or just like on it to support me or on it for fun or whatever. So, but I will say, you know, the agency, the manager of the agency we spoke to,

he works at a boutique agency. He has, you know, all American really turned. chatters. And I didn't judge him for doing that. Oh, I did. I know. I know. It was weird. Because I was like, because he said, you know, this is a business. We do have to pay ourselves. We have to pay the creators. But can we do that while making these people still feel cared for? He goes, I have a lot of people working for me who chat, who care about the subscriber that they are assigned to. And so I'm like,

it's weird because you are still getting that care. which is, it's so weird for me to say as someone who really likes my subscribers. But then there's the other side of that, which is, you know, we talk to this basically Cam Girl Farm Kingpin in Romania. And he's just like, I don't care. I pay my chatters $2. Take these guys for all their worth. Like, you, by any means necessary.

And I think I have like huge, we, but all that had huge moral problems with that. And I didn't see a big difference between that guy who was like unapologetic about his, you know, the fact that he was taking advantage of specifically American men. He had this whole riff about how American men are specially, especially easy to manipulate because we have soft hearts. They have not seen war. Yeah. You could be called worse things than having a soft heart. Yeah. And then this other guy who is this like Los Angeles, you know, agent basically,

was kind of explained to us like, the way I sleep at night is I think to myself, these men are paying for someone to pay attention to them. And guess what? Someone is. It may not be the person that, whose name is on the account, but like someone's doing that,

and that's what they're paying for. Still a connection. Yeah. But I feel like I have some subscribers where if I had a friend chat for me, because apparently I can't, is I think I have subscribers who would rather,

talk to someone, then not talk to me at all because I can't get to them. So it's, I don't know, it's confusing. It's a gray area for me. But yeah. We have some audience questions. Obviously, everyone wants in on this conversation and we're running out of time and it's so frustrating. By the way, you must listen to the podcast. The first three episodes right now are out. There are six parts. She mentioned that head of a management company in Romania. There are so many great amazing characters. Voices that they heard from in this podcast series. So please, please listen to it.

But I do feel like we should ask, I hate asking AI questions, but we have to talk about AI. Because when we talk about chatters and we talk about the future of this, you also talk to someone who has made an AI creator on OnlyFans. So do you personally worry as a creator,

Gracie, about AI swooping into the OnlyFans marketplace? And Leon, based on the people that you talk to, is that a direction that you think the sex industry might go in. It's even more, it's like a step further than the person in the Philippines in a way. I personally don't worry about it for me. I think that the people who are gravitating towards AI creators

are also the people that are gravitating towards creators that are completely run by agencies. So I don't view it as a threat to myself at all. I just think it's more a continuation of this weird dystopian. world, especially when you look at these AI creators on Instagram and you have real human men being like, you are so gorgeous. Then it's just like, whoa, where are people's minds? So I think it's more just disturbing, as we all know, than a threat.

I think that people will, maybe this is optimistic, but I don't think there is a replacement for human connection. I think the chatters are not long for this world because I think, you know, And then chatters. Correct. Yeah, I think an AI will not make those weird grammatical choices that tip me off to the fact that I was talking to someone in a foreign country. We talked to a few men who were like,

I would rather be duped by an AI than realize that I've been spilling my guts to some random guy who I, you know, who actually heard what I was saying, you know, like I think people, and we've seen this, like, people like talking to their chatbots. A lot of people do it. Right, Gracie? Yep. So I just think the chatting function I would expect will be taken over by AI. How do you feel about the morals of all of this

and like sort of on balance only fans good, only fans bad, somewhere in the middle, just a continuation. How did you come away from this project feeling? about it as a platform. Is it doing more harm than good, too, speaking to the loneliness piece of it? I honestly came out of this platform

or out of this project more confused and less opinionated than I did when I went into it, I feel like. I mean, it is. It's a continuation of sex work. It's, you know, everyone has had the same problems with, whether it's only fans or, you know, old school Victorian.

era prostitution. It's always been like, this is something shameful. This is something, why are you engaging in this as a consumer when you could be doing something in real life? So for me, it's like, it's like the one ring. It's like all how you use it. Actually, wait, that's a terrible analogy because that couldn't be used for good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Leander, do you haven't, yeah, go for it. Good or bad. I, you know, I've seldom like made a show where I knew at the end who like the heroes and who the villains were. Um, But I think what I came to appreciate more having done the reporting for this show is that there are a lot of people out there who just don't have much of a social life. Like they don't know anyone.

Like they don't know. They don't have, they don't go out. They don't have romance. They don't have flirtation. They don't have crushes. And I think the question we were grappling with is like, does having an outlet for those people reduce the chances that they'll go out and seek that stuff in real life?

But at the same time, like, we also talk to plenty of men who genuinely got some fulfillment out of these relationships. And so it's hard to be mad at that. Only Fantasy is the podcast. Leon Naefaq, Gracie Canaan, give it up for them. Thank you. And so much for being here. And to these guys as well.

Yeah. Thanks, everyone. That was our conversation with Leon Nafak and Gracie Canaan at WBURC-SPASAS as part of the WBUR Festival. It was produced and co-hosted by me, Amory Siebertson, and Ben Brock Johnson, and edited down just for you by producer Grace Tatter with mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vicus. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. See you then. Support for this podcast.

comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast about the Morotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken, wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Valerie Thomas, Professor of Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech, on whether the ocean freight shipping industry can reach net zero emissions by 2050. It's technically feasible. That's a very simple question. Will we get there? Will it all be deployed? We're going to see. I just want to add. in there that, yeah, we've talked a lot about the difficulties for shipping in getting to net zero. This is not the only thing that's going to be going on. Aviation is seeking to do the same thing, maybe even faster, and the other uses of petroleum are all transitioning. You may think,

and in some ways that makes the problem even bigger, there are other ways that it makes it easier. Some of the fuels that are used for shipping are very similar to those used. for aviation. So as infrastructure gets built out, shipping can benefit. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken, wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more about the Morotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at iBMS.bU.bU.edu.