The Blindboy Podcast - Saint Barts Tarmac

Episode Date: April 23, 2019

A chat with Conner Habib. Conner is a porn performer, occultist and academic. He hosts the against everyone with Conner Habib podcast. We speak about, sex workers rights, porn and the occult. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yart, hello and welcome to the Blind Buy podcast. This is, it's episode 81 I believe. This podcast is actually, it's pre-recorded because you're going to be listening to this on a Wednesday morning. I hope you're having a lovely Wednesday morning. I'm in Spain. I am in Spain for a week specifically to write in a very aggressive fashion. I have a deadline coming up. Look, the second book of short stories is going to be coming out. And I have a deadline of the 31st of May. And I just want to get this fucking book out.

I'm writing some stories that I'm incredibly happy with. I'm loving the way it's going. Writing some stories that I'm incredibly happy with. I'm loving the way it's going. So I'm in Spain for a full week. To go to cafes and write like a mad bastard. And I want to come back with about 20,000 words. Which is very achievable.

If my head is in the right place. And I'm focused. And have no other distractions. I will come back with 20 000 words so um that's why this is a pre-recorded podcast um it's going to be a live podcast i'm interviewing an incredibly interesting chap called connor habib and Connor is Connor's from Los Angeles he's just moved to Dublin I've heard I'd heard of Connor before through I'm a fan of a guy called John Ranson John Ranson's a journalist and podcast maker and all of this and John Ranson has done two or three pieces on the porn industry and Connor's name popped up once or twice because John Ransom was using him as a consultant, I think. So Conor Habib is a male porn performer.

He's also an academic. He's an occultist. He's an incredibly interesting character and when I saw that he'd moved to Dublin I was just like I gotta get this fucker on I gotta get him on uh so he came to Vicar Street and did a live podcast with me about two months ago and we had amazing crack it was unreal fun we immediately just clicked an incredibly interesting person well able to talk uh well able to go off on a tangent and i listened back to this live podcast that i'm going to show you and i was laughing a lot through it it's loads of crack and loads of

fun and we speak about some quite important things that aren't really spoken about that much in the wider narrative of Irish media such as sex work, attitudes towards sex. You don't really see large mainstream conversations about this happening so it was a pleasure to have Conor come on and speak about that. So I'm not going to do an ocarina pause this week I just want to let you go straight into the live podcast so before i get into the live podcast as you know this podcast is supported by ye and the listener if you want to be a patron of this podcast if you want to give me the equivalent of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month you can patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast

okay you can also like and subscribe to the podcast on fucking spotify or itunes or whatever connor is also a podcast host he does a smashing podcast podcast called against everyone with connor habib and connor also has a patreon page that i would urge you to if you like this interview and you like what conor's doing consider becoming a patreon because he's just after moving to ireland and this is his full-time gig his full-time gig is going to be podcasting and if you're a journalist and you're liking what conor is saying give him a shout have him on to write an article or to speak to him. A very interesting character that now happens to be living in Dublin.

So his Patreon is patreon.com forward slash Conor Habib. He spells his name C-O-N-N-E-R and Habib is H-A-B-I-B Any live gigs that I have coming up? Yeah, okay, I've just just gotta get these out of the way

27th of April I've got Cork in the Opera House there's about I'd say 15 tickets left for that that will probably be sold out by the time this podcast goes out but sure fuck it have a look anyway then we have the 3rd of May Letterkenny Mount Arigal Hotel

and then the 4th of May I'm in the Mullingar art center and the guy who's promoting this gig is busting my melt about me not promoting it or whatever the fuck or he's not happy with sales i think it'll be grand all right but anyway mullingar just so you know i'm in mullingar doing a live podcast on the 4th of May in the Mullingar Arts Centre please come along to that, we'll leave for fuck's sake so I can have a relaxing evening, and then Limerick

Dorland's Warehouse, 9th and the 10th of May I think they're both sold out are they? I don't know anyway, yart, god bless I'll be back next week with a hot take just so you know, yeah the week with a hot take just so you know yeah the fucking like hot take

podcasts are a lot of work lads they're a huge huge amount of work so that's why this week I'm putting out a live podcast this one it's good crack I know some people prefer regular podcasts to live ones but to those people give me a bit of a break please

for fuck's sake I'm podcasting every week I'm trying to write this book I've got a BBC series so I'm effectively I'm massively massively overworked at the moment so for me to be able to put out this live podcast is a serious weight off my shoulders this week I can now just

write and I'm so thankful and you know what this live podcast is great crack, I think you'll really really enjoy it, Conor's well able to talk and he's really interesting without further ado, here it is look after yourself be nice to yourself, be nice to other people

and you'll be grand, alright he is a writer an occultist a gay porn performer, a sex workers rights activist, and a podcast host. His name is Conor Habib. Come to the stage, sir. What is the crack?

How you doing? I'm still figuring out what that means, so yeah. So the first question that I want to ask, right, you moved from, like recently, moved from Los Angeles to Dublin. What the fuck is wrong with you? I'm going to make it sound even more fucked up, because I've wanted to live here my entire life, actually.

That's what I want to know about. Yeah, yeah. So I came here when I was 15. It's actually where my porn name, which is Connor Habib, but everybody calls me that now, comes from... So are you like Connor in everyday conversation? Yeah. Why did you choose to spell Connor? C-O-N-N-E-R.

Okay. I'm not going to say that that's the right way to spell it, but I... Okay. It's a complicated story so i came here when i was 15 i was in a pub in ken mare yeah yeah and um and it was and it was the first time i'd ever gone drinking in my entire life and nobody i was 15 nobody knew that i was like attracted to guys and i was there with my sister and my stepbrother, and there were two guys just sort of playing at being gay

in a booth a little ways away, and they were dry humping, and one of them kept going, oh, Connor, Connor, Connor. And the fucking sparks were flying out of my head, and I couldn't say anything about it. You found that erotic? Oh, Jesus Christ, yes.

Two lads in a fucking pub in Kenmare my sexuality is pathetic yeah so I would shock the kinds of guys I'm attracted to would shock and alarm you so

so I also I had a they probably listen to this podcast. I hope so. Yeah. I don't know if they'll remember that moment as much as I do. It could be their party piece. But then there was a wrestling coach in my school when I was a kid named Mr. Connor and it was spelled C-O-N-N-E-R.

So I just brought it all together because wrestling coaches and guys dry humping in Irish pubs. That's, that's pretty much it. That is interesting. That's an interesting... And Habib, you're part Syrian, I believe. Yeah, I'm half Syrian. Habib, does that mean I'm okay? It means beloved. It means like beloved one or sweetheart, yeah. So you're Connor Sweetheart.

Yeah, exactly. I'm a pub dry humping sweetheart, yeah. Exactly. I'm a pub dry humping sweetheart. Yeah. How are you finding Ireland so far? I mean, coming from Los Angeles and going straight into the middle of Dublin. Yeah. I mean, I've wanted to be here for so long that it's not actually that weird for me. But you've only...

Twice. I assumed that you were coming here all the time. No. I've made a very coming here all the time. No. I've made a very rational decision over several different years that rather than just, oh, yeah, go to that place where I saw the lads dry humping when I was 15. I'm going to move there. I'm going to get my life.

Do you know my life? I'm going to get that and put it into that place. I'm actually noticing now that you're bringing that up because I moved, I lived in Massachusetts for eight years and I moved there solely on the fact that I saw gay porn where a guy had a Boston accent. And I thought he was a ranger. The movie was called like Ranger Nick.

Yeah. And he's like, you're doing a good job there. And I was like, I'm fucking going. See, that's controversial. Eight years. I got there eight years. So I'd be here for quite a while. So you also fetishize Irish-Americans. I know. They're a different breed man. I'm so, just everybody in the audience, I'm very easy if you're Irish, just so you know. You were, you put out a tweet the other day, you were up in the George, a fine

place. Yes I was. But what did you say about the George? There's one bar is for older lads, younger lads talking about drag race. Yes. And then what's the older bar? Well, it's called Jurassic Park. I've already started calling it the JP because that's my place now. Because I liked being around the older guys. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. What a suppose, yeah. It's a bit weird if you just hang around with 20-year-olds. Well, it's also like, I mean, I think in the U.S. there's at least, and maybe here too, but there's a big backlash against the kind of like bro-gay culture, right? But then the alternative... What do you mean bro-gay culture? Well, just like the idealizing being like a straight guy, you know?

Like that's it. But then the sort of alternative to it is this kind of like consumerist version of gay culture, which is like, let's just talk about RuPaul, which I have nothing against RuPaul, Drag Race and all that, but it's just the same, like it's all packaged. And I find that irritating too.

How do you feel about how pride is like really co-opted by large corporations who are doing nasty things? Yeah, I mean, that's fucking gross. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Again, I don't know what pride is like over here. So I saw some of the questions people were asking and they were about, well, what do you think about

what's happening here in Ireland? And I'm still getting a feel for all of that. But in the US completely, it's like you can have a multinational company that's killed tons of people in different countries and be responsible for impoverishing people and all that, and they just put a fucking rainbow flag on their murder float and people are like, that's great. So fuck them. Yeah. Yeah. Your podcast is against everything with Conor Habib.

Against everyone, yeah. Against everyone with Conor Habib. And I listened to your latest episode, which was really interesting, because you did an interview with Irish media, and you were not happy with it. No. And when I listened to that podcast, it was great,

because it's like, okay, I want to do the opposite of what Irish media are doing. Yeah, I mean, this is... Tell us about your experience with that. Yeah, this is great. So after a few days of being here, somebody from an Irish radio station, I won't say which one, you can figure it out,

reached out to me and was like, hey, I heard you moved to Ireland. I was like, how the fuck do you... Do you live inside of me? I have no idea how they knew. But they they but they knew and they asked me to be you know on their show and uh with this I guess well-known radio host here and um they said okay so we we wanted to be about you and what you're up to in the world I was like okay great I sent them this whole list of like resources the same thing thing I sent to you. Right. And so there's like a ton of stuff on there to choose from. And, um, you know,

and I was like, look, I, you know, I, I've not really made a porn for like three years. I mean, that's always going to be part of my identity. I'm not afraid of it. I'm not ashamed of it. It's part of me. I, you know, I do a lot of sex workers rights activism, but I'm writing, I'm doing my podcast. Those are the things I'm kind of known for workers' rights activism, but I'm writing, I'm doing my podcast. Those are the things I'm kind of known for now as the activism and the podcast and the lectures and stuff for the past three years, basically. And they were like, yeah, yeah, great. Yeah, we're going to ask you about all that. So I'm going to ask the audience if you think that they asked me about any of that on the show. So I got there and the guy was like, so you're in porn,

like how do people react when you tell them you're in porn? And guy was like, so you're in porn, like how do people react when you tell them you're in porn? And I was like, I mean like this, like it was just, it was so irritating. I was, and it was all questions like that. Well, you're fit, like, so when you, when you have sex for a job, what's it like having sex? And, and it's not that those questions are bad, but you know, they're, they're all questions that I think people want to hear the answers to and i think sex is so important to people but we don't act like we can talk about it so and sex work and porn especially but it was like you asked me on to talk about all the things that i'm doing and now you're not talking about any of it you said it was it was disingenuous that they kind of do you feel that they brought you on on the premise of something different and then

carnage yeah totally and then and then cornered you. Yeah, totally. And then the guy who did the research, in quotes, did the research, he was like, I did so much research. I was like, you didn't do any fucking research, dude. But he was like, you know, I think you sounded great. You sounded like a sex worker with agency. And I was like, yeah, I know I sounded great because I gave that interview like 800 times to fucking blogs the first two years I started doing this. And again, they're not bad questions,

but they should have been. I kept the offer. I was like, look, I'm going to come in, just record two extra questions. I don't care. And they were like, no, we can't. So they just deleted the interview. So this is my first Irish media interview,

and I think it's a pretty fucking good one, right? So what I did with it, basically, is what I do with all my interviews, I ask the internet for the questions. Do you know what? I was pretty pleased. I was

pretty pleased with them. The only one dodgy question, and it was from a well-meaning woman who direct messaged us. You're like, it was from BigDicks84, but it was a dodgy question on Twitter. This was a woman, a curious woman. Do poppers widen your hole, or is it a placebo? So that's the only, that's the only question that's dodgy. Do you want to feel

that one for me? Well, I mean, why does she have to ask Connor Habib? Why can't she just ask anyone who's used poppers? Or just try it. Just try it.

That's what it, yeah. You know? Try it, love. Come on, Sharon. I remember back in Limerick, poppers became a thing for a while you know it was

it used to be glue out of a Lucas head bottle which was called a Luca and it cost 5 euros from a dealer or no before euros it was pounds

then it moved on to links through a school jumper axe that's axe in America sniffing axe through the school jumper. But then when people got a bit of money it moved on to poppers. But all the dudes that were doing it

were like real hard lads. You know what I mean? Straight, masculine dudes. And it was before the internet. Then they found out what the poppers were for. Imagine they're surprised when they looked on the internet

and also found out that sucking dick was gay and they've been doing it for like a year. Do you have... Here, are poppers illegal here? You can get them in... As room orderizers and sex... Oh, yeah, because that's what it says in the US.

It says VCR head cleaner. Is that what it is? Yeah, so, like, if you want to, like, take time travel to the 80s and, like, you know, loosen your hole, yeah. We have an odd thing in the country at the moment regarding... Do you know, we had a situation in Ireland

three years ago. Do you remember when drugs were fully legal for one day? Really? Is that a real thing? It wasn't like... So, like, instead of the purge, it's like the binge. a real thing it's it wasn't like so like instead of the purge it's like the bin no no it wasn't like some ancient thing written in the irish annals every 1000 years we can do ketamine but uh no what it was is that the government there was an anomaly in the an anomaly in the legislation where someone... Basically, what happened is that

a judge actually looked at the Irish drug law, right? And it said, holy shit, we left out the part that made it actually illegal. So they figured out, shit, it's not really illegal. It's a load of words that looks like it is, but it's not really illegal. So they had one day to change it to being fully illegal.

So for one fucking day in Ireland, everything. Wow, but they didn't... Like, who remembers it? I went on the... I took ecstasy and went on the radio. Do you know what I mean? I went on... I went on Tom... Cos you can't... The thing is, you can't go on radio or TV with drugs in your system.

You can't say it because the Broadcast Authority of Ireland will shut it down. Same way that you can't call, well, you can now. Remember I called the communion way for haunted bread? But the BAI ruled that that was okay, so you can say haunted bread on the radio now. But you can't take drugs on radio or television and admit to it. But for this day, you could.

So I took an ecstasy and I spoke about sensible drug policy in very loving terms. Well, I was thinking then that, like, I was thinking that for them to crank the change in the law out in one day,

they must have done cocaine in speed to get that done. Probably. They must have been like, let's just do a ton of coke, and then by the time we come down, it'll be illegal. But we always have these gray areas. We had these things, too, called hedge shops. You have hedge shops in America, yeah? So hedge shops, that was all those fucking dodgy drugs,

like fake cannabis, which was all those fucking dodgy drugs like fake cannabis which was driving people nuts. But now there's this thing where you can walk, like cannabis isn't legal here in Ireland but CBD cannabis is. So you can buy this weed.

Have you seen it yet in shops? Smokable fucking, it's fucking weed. It smells like weed. It is weed. There's just no THC in it. But if the police catch it, they have to send it off to a lab to get tested.

A very expensive, strange loophole. How did we get talking about drugs? I don't know. I don't know what one to ask you about first, Connor. The occultism? Let's just get that out of the way, right? Why are you calling

yourself an occultist? What does that mean? Yeah, so for me, that's, you know, I was introduced to I was introduced to the occult at a very young age. But even what is it? No, no, no. I'm just kidding. Mainly for me, that's the

influence in my life of this guy named Rudolf Steiner. So if you've ever heard of biodynamic farming or Waldorf schools or community-shared agriculture, he invented all that shit. He was this sort of like Leonardo da Vinci kind of figure from the late 19th, early 20th century. But when I hear occultism, I think like devil worship. Yeah, yeah, no, it doesn't mean that.

I mean, there are all these different kinds of occult streams. Basically, for me, it means a philosophy that takes seriously the idea that our experience matters, that our thoughts are as real as objects, that there are different states of consciousness, and that means something. It's not just like, oh, well, our waking conscious is the one thing that matters, you know, the way we walk around. And, you know, we've talked about this a little bit even before we came on stage. But also the idea that there is a spiritual landscape populated by spiritual beings. That's the crazy part, right?

So, but for me, I get that out of just really paying attention to my experience. So I know that the world is not as it seems and that I need some kind of map for it that's not just the kind I've inherited when I realize, you're a really weird person to say this to, but I realize that I can't ever see my own face, right? But like if you walk around you realize that everybody has a different apprehension of you than you can ever have of yourself. That's a major mind fuck, right? Because you walk around... You're a different Connor for different people. Yes, exactly. But also, I can't ever see this, no matter what. Even if I look in the

mirror, people are getting a completely different version of it, right? So, if I do something like that, or if I sort of pay attention to my experience and the phenomenology, which is just like, how do I describe my experience? How do I create a sort of philosophy around my experience? I realize that things are really fucking weird. And so when I realize that things are really

weird and I go into it, a lot starts to unfold from there. But how do you define weird? Yeah, how would I define weird? I think noticing that my, again, that my again that my experience is really like a lot of the ways I just think about it like there's material and everything's just material and it's matter when I realize that no actually things seem a lot more like evolving states of consciousness around me that's what I mean is weird so what does it mean that everything that I experience only comes through my thinking like that's fucking weird like nothing nothing happens that's not only comes through my thinking. Like, that's fucking weird. Like, nothing happens that's not apprehended by my own thinking.

So how do I deal with that? How do I sort of unroll a way to be in the world from there? So this is all very, like, yeah. I think I spoke about something. Would you mean, like, because one thing that always fucks up my head is, like, bats, right? But bats... Like, they're not fully... Bats aren't fully blind.

They're not fully blind, but they don't really use their eyes. Yeah. But if you put a bat into this room now, they'd fly all around the gaff. They wouldn't hit any walls. They wouldn't hit my hand. But that bat has a perfect vision of this

room we'll say, but not through its eyes. So what does this room look like in the inside of a bat's head? Yeah. There's actually a really famous essay about that called... Was it Descartes? What is it like to be a bat? No, it's this guy Nagel. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, not related to Angela Nagel, different Nagel. But he... Yeah, so he wrote about the bat bats experience and how that was sort of, you couldn't understand that. But you take it to a human level, right? So there's a great story. There's a book called Animism by this guy, Graham Harvey. And in it, he's recounting this guy that is walking through Australia with an Aboriginal guide. And the guide is sort of pointing out all the stuff that he sees along the way. And he says, well, there's the river, there's this. And he

points to this sort of mountain range. He says, and there's where one giant dog is fighting another giant dog and its guts are spilled out all over the place. And the anthropologist is like, well, okay, oh, so you, so that's the origin story of these mountains. And the guy's like, huh? He's like, that's where, like, that's how these mountains formed. And he's like, no, there's a giant dog fight.

Don't you see the two giant dogs fighting right now? This guy had this realization, like, holy shit, there are different, not just concepts of the world, but the perceptive apparatus is actually completely different amongst different people and different traditions along the world. What the fuck do we do now? This is something that anthropologists have discovered again and again and again, interacting with different kinds of people and different groups of people around the world is that

the perceptual thing is actually different and certainly throughout time but also just in the present now there's um it's one i spoke about on one of my earlier podcasts but there was a tribe somewhere in saudi arabia in like the 1700s okay and it was when art was in the neoclassical phase so there was a painter Jacques Louis David so neoclassical painting is it's like a photograph it's not a photograph but just really really realistic good painting so the French were dealing with this tribe and the thing is is that they the tribes people their thing was horses horses everywhere they dealt with horses they rode horses

their lives were fucking horses right like your story yeah yeah but horses were their thing so the French went to this tribe and with a gift they brought them this amazing painting of a horse if we looked at this painting of a horse. If we looked at this painting of a horse, you'd go, fuck me, what a brilliant painting of a horse. So the lads were Islamic, and within Islam, in the strictest form of Islam, you just simply do not draw or paint anything created by God. It's just, you don't draw animals, you don't draw humans. So when they showed this painting of the horse to the tribe they couldn't fucking see the horse their lives were horses they couldn't figure out the 2d representation of a horse because they'd never seen one before so their perception of it is gone yeah well you

don't have to go to other cultures to see that you can see it in your own life um if you can remember before you couldn't read um there were just fucking symbols and squiggles everywhere and then suddenly you go through this developmental, interdevelopmental process. And I would say that actually is very akin to kind of occult processes and developments where you go through this thing of deciphering and gathering all this sort of understanding of what these mean. And then suddenly the world is like filled with new meanings and they're everywhere and you can't unread. You can't learn to unread and suddenly everything is like

coming at you in this new way. And I think that that's, in our own lives, you can experience this thing with the learning about what the horse was, you know. You're a proponent of science being a social construct. Yeah, we'll just go right there.

Immediately, Jordan Peterson's bat phone just went off. He just woke up in bed now. Tell us about that. Yeah, maybe he'll fall down the stairs in a day. That'd be great. Because that's a tough one to, like, it's a very triggering one for a lot of people to hear

because they go, what about evidence, you prick? Yeah. But what does that mean for you, science as a social construct? Yeah, so first of all, I studied science in grad school with this scientist named Lynn Margulies. She was a really well-known biologist and geoscientist. She was married to Carl Sagan, which is how everybody knows who she was. So the best thing that I got from my science education

was learning how to interrogate and question science in its own terms and just say, okay, know what's going on here when people investigate and say I'm detached from this I'm being objective that was one thing that Lynn always impressed as a scientist who won the national science medal in the U.S. and is one of the most respected scientists in history she said the first thing you have to know if you want to be a scientist is that there's no such thing as objectivity. And that really like, like just, I mean, I had already had my suspicions, but she really just did a number on me for that. She was like, everything is like really mediated by the people who are looking. It's always the case that the prejudices come in. And so when I started learning science, I realized that throughout history, there were different

kinds of scientific method. So scientific method was not a static thing. It's actually evolved over time and there are different versions. There's actually a really interesting version of it created by this guy, Goethe, who wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust and all that kind of stuff. His scientific method, I think, is actually way better than the one we have right now. But also objectivity is a concept. Can you talk us through the two different things? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Goethe would say like if you see something, if you see a red flower and you have a certain feeling about that red, then that inner feeling you have is actually part of the phenomenon that's being interpreted because it matters what's happening inwardly when you look and the observation, it's not objective observation, it's a communication

between you and the thing that's being observed. What happens if you think the flower is lovely and I hate the flower? First of all, that's a great question because what Goethe is saying is actually science is something that's a lot more individual than we think it is. What do we do with those kinds of conflicts

between ourselves? He wouldn't necessarily say, I'd have to say, oh, this flower is love or something like that. But he would say, just note that and don't throw it out as part of the evidence.

That's one aspect of it. I mean, it's easy. When we're talking about something like music, we can accept that. It's easy to go, I don't like Coldplay. Someone else thinks

Coldplay are brilliant. And that's okay. Yeah. You know, what I just say are brilliant, and that's okay. Yeah. You know, what I just say is, like, for that person, their lived experience, they live in a universe where Coldplay are brilliant. Yeah. I don't live in a universe where Coldplay are brilliant.

Yeah, yeah. But that's grand with art. Yeah. But when you start applying that then to more scientific, I don't know, penicillin yeah yeah well i mean there is an interesting thing about medicines there's actually a principle that i forget the name where medicines become less effective over time almost always and it's not just because of resistance no it's not just because it could be something that's not even like

uh it could be something that's not even antibiotic right so all treatments become less effective over the time so that's to accept something like mending a broken leg or something like that that seems to actually these physical injuries seem to be kind of static but I just want to bring it roll it back a little bit so we're not going down the Goethe rabbit hole and just say like the one of the things that we talk about when we talk about science being a socially constructed thing and someone like jordan peterson or people like that being like oh these post-modernists are ruining everything what we should be more concerned about is the way that science is directed and led by corporate interests and how some kinds

that is the greatest threat to science being uh destroyed and dissolved as an objective, quote unquote, endeavor, because scientists are guided by what funds them again and again. And there's a really interesting story about Lynn, which I'll tell, where Lynn was just like, she was not to be fucked with. She was a really intense person. And she once got, she's in her office, and someone called on the phone to her assistant. And this was right around the time when someone in the same building as her had made this major discovery about uranium and bacteria that was getting millions of dollars in funding. And so the person was talking to Celeste, her assistant, and said, oh, hey, can we talk to Dr. Margulies? This is, you know, this is the White House. We want to talk to her. Because Lynn didn't really communicate through email. And Celeste was like, okay, what's this about? And they're like, well, it's the White House. Can you just put her

on the fucking phone, right? And so Celeste went over and said, hey, can we, do you want to take this call? And Lynn was like, just ask him what it's the fuck about. And she's like, they won't tell me. She's like, ask him. So she got back on the phone. She said, look, Dr. Margulies is very busy. What is this about? And they said, we can't disclose that to you, but please tell her that there's a lot of money and funding involved. So Celeste went back in and she said,

there's a lot of money involved. And Lynn said, if it's not public, it's not science, just fucking hang up on them. So she went back in and just hung up on the White House. So like, not the White House, I'm saying, but the government, basically. And so I think that that's, like, the kind of... Unfortunately, most scientists can't afford to do something like that,

but that's the kind of, like, integrity that you need to be able to navigate an actual objective science that's not led by these fuckers that want to lead your research into the military, basically. What would you... Yeah, of course. Like, even something... You can trace can trace like what google is now you can trace that back to the late the mid 90s with cia funding yeah and imdb was a yeah it was a total information awareness project yes and then you know 20 years later oh they're using the data to spy on everyone. What did you think it was for?

Yeah, exactly. What would you feel about a Patreon-style model for science then? Does that exist? Crowdfunded science? Does that exist? I think they are trying to do open-source science and open-source journals and stuff like that

for science, but it's not really up to that point. I mean, independent researchers can seek out independent science, but it's not really up to that point. I mean, independent researchers can seek out independent funding, but that's about it. Most researchers are related to universities in one way or another. Tell us about the PhD you're doing right now. Yeah, okay. So I'm here to study how people who investigate

and have paranormal experiences and supernatural experiences in Ireland and the ways that they're stigmatized and ridiculed and dismissed by their communities, the media, and their families, and how that affects the material conditions of their lives, whether it's an investigator who can't get paid for putting in real labor hours and research,

it's someone who has a stigmatized property, they can't really sell their house, someone who's deemed mentally ill for saying they saw a ghost or fairies or whatever of these long-term, and why also those experiences when we see them in media, like a narrative in a horror movie, for example, are so popular. So for me, like, this was all sort of queued up because I was talking to my friend Greg Newkirk,'s a paranormal investigator and he read me a letter that was from someone who sent in and said I have a poltergeist and this guy was like look I have I have this weird thing going on if I told anybody everybody would think I was crazy or sick or laugh at me and I've seen you on you know the, and I feel like you're the only person I can talk

to. And I was like, Greg, this is the same letter I get all the time, but about fucking. I get this email constantly about sex. People saying that they have weird desires that they can't express or whatever. And so then I started realizing and talking to Greg and his wife, Dana Moore, about the ways in which they were stigmatized for even the work that they did, the way that people had been fired from jobs, the way that people had been made fun of by people for having these kinds of experiences. Now whatever you want to think about the reality claim of the experience, those kinds of events are happening. So I'm really interested in that and also the ways that people are... how do you formulate an idea of the world if you see a ghost?

Like, do you just say, well, that was a ghost. I guess the world is exactly the same as I thought it was, but there's just this one weird thing about it. Or do you start to reformulate your entire idea of the world? Have you ever seen a ghost? Have I seen a ghost? Yeah, I have. Yeah, when my mom died when I was 24, I've seen a lot of weird things,

but when my mom died when I was 24, she was in hospice care for a really long time in the house. So she died of cancer, so it took a long, there was like a long death. And I was in my bedroom upstairs, I had come home from college, and I was in bed, and I just sort of looked over, I was in my bedroom upstairs. I'd come home from college and I was in bed and I just sort of looked over. I was kind of out of it. And my mom, who was at this point in the bed downstairs, she weighed like, you know, 70 pounds or something. She was like a nothing, you know, just a skeleton.

And she was standing there fully formed. And she said something to me and I said something to her. they're fully formed. And she said something to me and I said something to her. And then my stepfather called up the stairs. He said, Hey, I think it's time. And I went downstairs and my mother died. So yeah. Wow. And as you said there, like, how do you then process reality? If that's an experience you had? Yeah. I mean, that's really a great question that I'm still trying to answer. I mean, and, you know, the really, I had this guy who, an old professor of mine who is really into psychology, he's like, well, well, you sort of retroactively, like, planted that there. I mean, I think that that's fine, you know, that's fine to say, but so many people have experiences like that. So we need to talk about, and so many people have variations of that experience.

It's called a crisis apparition. And I just want to know more about that. Well, if people are doing that, still, there's still something to be reckoned with here because now memory has a relationship to death that we didn't think it had before. Yeah. So the case kind of that you're making,

it's not, you're not doing a PhD on are ghosts real you're doing a PhD on why is this stigmatized why do we shut these conversations down yeah and how people think about the world when they have these experiences so there's a lot of weird shit around this right so like

why Ireland you're going to keep coming back to that question. There's a lad down in Kerry. There's a lad down in Kerry. I nearly had him on the podcast. But, like, he successfully had... He stopped a motorway being built. Yes.

Because there was a ferry fort there, you know? Well, that's shit like that that's so interesting to me, right? So we still have elements of that in our culture. And don't you guys have... I just learned about this person, and I don't know anything about him. Healy Ray, is that this person? Who talked openly about, I mean, you imagine

someone in the United States would never talk about ferries, or ferry forts publicly, a politician, right? He's an interesting character. His other lobbying thing is he's trying to abolish, people should be allowed

to drink and drive, that's what he wants. How do the ferries have anything to do... Because the ferries... What it is is... He wants to support ferry bars. To understand the Healy Rays, you have to understand the needs

of a very forgotten and isolated community. So there's a... Regarding his comments on... Obviously, don't legalise drink driving. But... All right alright I'll talk to you later but here's the thing

right so don't legalise drink driving but we said the heart of where he's coming from so put it this way

my dad was born in 1933 very very rural West Cork. Fucking mud huts. And when he was... Seriously. Mud huts. And...

But he tells me... When he was alive, he used to tell me stories about... What was it? When he was a kid, he used to hang around outside the local pub and all the old drunk men used to have a donkey and cart outside the pub. So they would go to the pub,

get shit-faced drunk, get into the cart and the donkey would know the way home. So you had all these... Oh yeah, didn't he say the car knows the way home?

Yeah. Is that something he said? Yeah. I mean, it's pretty, if you have a self-driving car, that's true, you know. Well, that's the thing. It's a Tesla. That's what I said? Yeah. I mean, it's pretty, if you have a self-driving car, that's true, you know. Well, that's the thing. It's a Tesla.

That's what I want to get to, is like, in the olden days, the donkeys were taking the drunk men home, but now there's a real situation in rural Ireland where men, you're getting men who can't socialize, who can't meet women, who can't live their lives, because they live up on a hill,

the pub is too far away away and they can't get there because it means drink driving so you've these very isolated men it's correlating with higher levels of mental health issues and suicide so it's a real thing to be looked at but I think we need these glowing driverless pods with drunk

old men in them just hovering across the countryside that's the future I want. You're just there in the middle of Kerry at night time and there's this little self-driving mobile coffin with a drunk 80-year-old man glowing.

Couldn't you just have an escalator? Like a really big escalator up the hill? We need lateral thinking because it is an issue. The solution is not let them have five pints, it'll be grand. Right. It won't be grand. Or else, I don't know, put pubs on stilts and let the pubs walk.

Or just have drones drop the drinks in people's house. You could. Just like booze drones. You said something very funny backstage. You're half Irish, half Syrian. Yeah, so I can blow up anything. Not really. We're going to take a little intermission soon

so you can have a gentle wee and a gentle pint. I haven't talked about porn yet, Conor. Do you see a difference between Irish and American attitudes towards sex or are you not here yet long enough? I'm not here yet long enough, although I do want to say I've had some weird like grinder and scruff experiences. Like one guy who is like, just he really was like, wanted to go he's like, let's fuck, let's fuck, let's fuck, let's fuck, like really into it or fuck, right? Yeah.

And, and so... Was this in real life now or on an app? This is online. So maybe he did not have an Irish accent. You're right. Okay, okay. Sorry. So, and then... And then he made this comment.

He was like, I wish I could clone you. And I was like, okay, then we could have a threesome, right? And because I know I really want to have sex with myself, you know? I mean... Just to see what that feels like in there. Do you masturbate to your own pornography? Sometimes. Okay.

But anyway, so he said, I want to clone you so we can have a threesome. And I was like, yeah, let's have a threesome with me and he said, no, I want you out of myself. And I was like, What? What the fuck? He doesn't know what clone means. Yeah. What the fuck?

I want to clone you? What the fuck? He was so concerned. I want to clone you so I can have a toxic, jealous relationship with your clone. Exactly! I want to have you and have you be jealous of me having you. Fucking fair play to him. Well, you know, there's that joke,

there's this joke, I heard it, I mean, he didn't write it, but Slavoj Zizek told it, this philosopher, and he said, okay, so there's a guy and he's stuck on an island, a desert island, it's Cindy Crawford. This is the example he used. So whatever supermodel you want to put in there, but he's stuck on a desert island with Cindy Crawford. And they're there, you know, for a week. And he's like, can I have sex with you? She's like, no, we've just been here, like, you

know. And so then a year goes by, two years, and he's like, can I please have sex with you? And she's like, after two years, she's like, all right, yes, finally, I'll have sex with you, sure. So they have sex, and he's like, okay, okay, now, hold on. I know this is going to sound a little weird, but can you please put this hat I made of a coconut on your head and hold this frond in front of your face so it looks like a mustache? And she's like, okay. And so she does it, and he goes, hey, I just had sex with Cindy Crawford. Okay.

And so she does it and he goes, hey, I just had sex with Cindy Crawford. So the idea being that people want, people consummate sexual acts in all sorts of ways, right? So this must have been this dude's clone way of doing it, you know what I mean? Like in his imagination or something. And you told me you had an interesting exchange with an Irishman regarding Hiberno-English and sex. Wait, I did? What did I say? you told me you had an interesting exchange with an Irish man

regarding Hiberno English and sex. Wait, I did? What did I say? You told me backstage. Regarding Hiberno. The lad who said something to you. We were talking about how. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I got a video from this guy when I was just talking. Before I moved here, he like sent me a video and it was him just talking to me in his Irish accent and he said, Connor, I'd eat your ass like. And I was like, what's it like at the end of that? Like what? But then, you know, you explained it to me. I think. Well, you're a huge, you used to teach Joyce. Yeah. Alright. Joyce's whole shtick is

Hiberno-English. He speaks English the way we speak English. And I would just... That's... English was forced on us. We speak English, but still we maintain some of the grammatical structure of the Irish language. So that's why you end up saying,

can I eat your arse like... I'd eat your arse like... But does anybody know? Can someone translate that into Irish for us? Just yell it out. Can I eat your arse like? It wasn't a question. Pogue Mahone is can I kiss your arse? But kissing and eating

bottoms are different things. I mean, I like a little kiss every once in a while. Who knows the Irish for... I'd eat your ass like... One person. What was it? I'd eat your ass like... Okay.

Can you all yell it out at once to us in unison? Two very clear school teachers. Because the thing was I tell you how I know. My Irish isn't great but when I asked for it the second time it was just pure judgement in stereo.

It was like you've been talking to seven-year-olds today who are shaded Irish. I'll just check on Duolingo, yeah. Fucking Duolingo. Duolingus. Passive-aggressive owl. Yeah. Fuck that.

Jesus Christ, have you rang your mother today? We'll take a little ten-minute break for a pint and a piss, alright? On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's the girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil.

It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey!

Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The first omen, only in theaters April 5th. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th

when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com i forgot my sheet of questions to the the site side of sage staff can you bring my sheet of questions please they're upstairs in the green room um someone tweeted the Someone tweeted the Irish for

I would eat your arse like So there you go lads Now you know So let's talk about one thing it's a conversation that does not happen in Irish media, really. It's something that is going to be spoken about in the coming years, I think. Sex work isn't spoken about.

Sex work, activism, sex workers' rights is not a national conversation at the moment. Do you want to chat about that a bit? Yeah, I mean, it's not a national conversation in so many countries. It's not in the US either, for sure, except in that... Thank you. They're just tweets, lads. Except in the sense of, like, you know, every narrative about a dead hooker

or, you know, a tragic porn star story or sex trafficking or all those kinds of ways that's the way that sex work is a national conversation but besides that it's not really a national conversation and it should be a national conversation about workers rights yeah it should be a national national conversation about in my opinion about sexual liberation for the people who are doing sex work that want that to be part of their idea of work, because not all sex workers do. It should be about a conversation about autonomy and agency and all those sorts of things. But it's not any

of that right now. By the way, there's a group here in Ireland called the Sex Workers Alliance Ireland, SWAI. So please go on Twitter and follow them and give them your support. I mean, and if you want to know what to think about sex work in Ireland, don't listen to me. Listen to them because they're the ones that are doing sex work in Ireland and working on all these issues here. So they're an awesome organization. But anyway, yeah, so it's not really a national conversation

in the way that it needs to be in most places. And one thing that you see a lot around this export conversation is you heard the phrase Nordic model and whether people are for it or against it. Yeah. To someone who hasn't a clue what that is, can you explain it? Yeah, so the Nordic model is essentially you... It's supposed to be progressive.

It's not progressive. It's actually completely regressive, which is that it's saying, OK, well, we don't want to arrest these poor women who are being coerced and falling into these awful patterns of behaviour, so we'll criminalise the guys who are paying for sex. So if you try to hire a sex worker, you'll be criminalized.

But sex work is still criminalized, but they only arrest and enforce it around the people that are paying for sex workers and hiring sex workers. Now think about that for a second. We don't want to hurt the workers, so we're just going to arrest everybody that pays the workers. That's fucking crazy. That's crazy.

And Amnesty International did a huge study on this, and they condemned it. And every group that has significantly researched sex work and talked to sex workers, including groups that are composed of sex workers, have come out against this model. And in fact, we've seen huge spikes in deaths and police brutalization, rape, all that, because sex workers still can't go to talk to anybody if anything bad has happened, because

it'll totally pull the rug out from under their ability to meet with clients to make a living and it makes it harder for them to screen clients because when you have escorting sites where someone can advertise and meet people and talk to other sex workers about their clients and the clients aren't afraid of going on there and contacting sex workers, then you have a lot of word of mouth about clients, but because it's limited the ability for clients to freely speak about and talk to people and seek out people, it's limited the pool of clients, which has limited the revenue for sex workers,

which has made them more susceptible to violence. So there are a lot of problems with it, but I think really the Amnesty International study is one of the best places to go to look for that and sway. What I've heard is, because I even heard an argument against full legalization, because if it's fully legalized, then it opens it up for corporate power, whereas with decriminalization, it keeps the agency in the sex worker's hand. Whereas with decriminalization, it keeps the agency in the sex worker's hand.

Yeah, so that's another thing to sort of parse out. Almost no sex workers want sex work to be legalized. That might sound weird, but I want you to think about politicians, okay? Who could be possibly the worst people in the world to make laws and regulations around sex? The most repressed people in the world to make laws and regulations around sex. The most repressed people in the entire world who can't even talk about their sexual desires or their sex lives, right? So, I mean, they're just completely inept and incapable of making laws and regulations around sex. That's the first thing.

But second of all, it subjects sex workers to the kinds of regulations and rules that actually can still be rather oppressive and problematic. So, you know, like in the US, for example, I don't know what it's like here, but there are all these laws that criminalize HIV transmission. So if you are somebody that, like there was a woman who gave a guy a blowjob and she had HIV and she was charged with manslaughter. I mean, it's just like crazy shit like that. So think about how that relates to sex workers

and what their lives are, even if they're undetectable or if they're on PrEP or if they're using Truvada for pre-exposure prophylaxis or if they're using condoms or whatever. So there are all sorts of problems with the regulation. Now maybe we could get to a point one day where we have governments that are capable of intervening in these kinds of situations and setting up something that works for sex workers, but I don't think that we

see that with government bodies regulating other forms of work, so I don't know that we're gonna see it with sex work. Do you see anywhere in the world that's like a shining beacon of doing sex work right? No. No, I mean, I would like to. There are some places where the laws are a little better, like New Zealand, I think. And then, of course, everybody talks about... Yeah, I mean, the answer is no.

I mean, I could go down that. Because one of the problems is that even if we have decriminalization, we have to go beyond that. We have to start challenging our attitudes towards sex and labor in general. If you want to get rid of sex work, the best way to do it is to get rid of work. Like, let's not anybody have to fucking have jobs anymore. And also liberate your attitudes towards sex, so sex transforms.

And then it doesn't exist anymore. Then I'd be okay with it. That's a big ask there, Connor. It's and then it doesn't exist anymore. Then I'd be okay with it. But right now, we don't have that. That's a big ask there, Connor. It's a big ask. Tomorrow, please. But I'm totally, I mean, I should just say, like, I'm totally against,

I think that work is, like, really fucking, the problem with sex work is work. The problem with sex work is that people have to have jobs, particularly in the US, where the idea is work. The problem with sex work is that people have to have jobs, particularly in the U.S., where the idea is work or die. Go work and be forced into a specific wage-labor relationship, or your kids will starve, or you'll starve, or you won't have health care. Try to find a job because you need to have one and then get so depressed that you kill yourself because you can't find one and provide for your family, etc cetera, et cetera. There's so many problems with work and that's what kills people.

And people try to make a special case out of sex work all the time. But sex work just has the same problems as any other job. Like my friend Stoya says, you know, okay, she's a porn star. And she said, you know, my father was a stonemason. Sometimes he would go to work and he would break his hand. Sometimes I go to work and hurt my cunt, you know? And it is... It's true.

It's physical labor. And emotional labor. Yeah. And, yes, well, it can be. And the fact is, all the problems that are unique to sex work are only unique because of the way that it's regulated and oppressed and not thought through by people and institutions in power. So are you like tax the robots

and give everyone a living wage? Or is it should we barter things for sex? Like which what's your vision of a utopia? I have 12 chickens sir, can I have a blowjob? I actually charge 14, sir. Can I have a blowjob? I actually charge 14, sorry.

So you're a little short. No, I mean, I think do you mean what's my idea of utopia when it comes to sex work? Yeah, but like when you were talking there about, you know, get rid of work. Yeah. Replace it with what? Well, see,

the first thing I want to do is try to imagine what that looks like right yeah because the problems that are present right now are fucking terrible right think about for instance i know i'm sort of dodging your question but i'll come back to it more directly think about okay so you're fairly successful doing the things that you love doing yeah think about i'm an anomaly i'm an about how fucking hard it was for you to get there. I want what I do, what you do, which is like sit back and say, what do I want my day to look like?

What do I want my day to feel like? And I worked so hard to get to the point where I'm at now, which is still fucking difficult, which is still always trying to piece things together from all these different streams of income. I want that to be easy for everybody, right? And so basically what I'm proposing is that we start, I don't know what it looks like. I'm trying to do that.

I'm trying to have the impossible vision of some people. There are a lot of post-work anarchists. But what I'm trying to do is think to myself. Post-work anarchists. They're awesome. Bob Black is a really fun one. You'll love him. He has an essay called

The Abolition of Work, and the last line is, workers of the world, relax. That's a real fucking, trying to pick a girl up in the smoking area of the workman's club, though. What do you do? Well, actually, I'm a post-work anarchist. Do you know what I mean? Or something you say to your parents, get a job. Well, let me tell you that. All it means is that we start to sort of chip away at this enforced, I would say, completely non-consensual wage-labor relationship.

We should not have to make a living. That is fucked up. But we take that into account. We've taken that in so internally. I'm not saying that we don't do things that look like effort, that look like, okay, I like doing this, so I'm going to dedicate my time to it, or I have these ideas that I want to enact in the world

and I need a team with me to do that. But the idea that the wage-labor relationship is the way that it is, enforcing that and making us do that or die, especially in the US, but in countries that don't have any safety net at all, I mean, I think that that is really fucked up. So I want to start asking the question, not, what do you want your job to be? What do you want to do for a living? I want to say, what do you want your day to look like? If we just start there, something else begins to unfold. And there's this guy, Fritjof Bergman, who he started something called New Work. He moved to Detroit because he saw that everybody was sort of unemployed there. And this is what he asked.

He said, I saw everybody being unemployed as an opportunity for us to completely change the way that we think about our day and what we do in the world and how we contribute. So instead of trying to get these people back into work, I said, all right, you're all unemployed. Great. Now we have a chance to start a completely different kind of culture here. And so he's been working with that from the ground up. And I think we need more people who are viewing that as an opportunity, you know. And some would say now is the right time for that because robots are doing so many jobs that... Yeah.

You know, that was what the future was supposed to be. I know, I know. The robots are doing the work. They're generating money. Let's take the robots' money. That's not how it's working at all. No. Now it's just like, let's bring a lot of robots into Dunn stores

and fire a lot of people who used to work at the cashier. All it's done is turned us into the robots. So that's really fucked up. I mean, think about that. Think about the different dimensionalities people used to have in their work lives. You'd be doing all kinds of different shit with your body, threshing in the field. I'm not romanticizing farm work or hard labor. My father was a contractor.

It's hard work. But think about it now. What do you see if you look into a fucking building? It's everybody doing this, sitting still, moving their fingers and their eyes. The positionality of our bodies has changed because we've been fucking becoming parts of the computer. That's really crazy. I mean, that's crazy. The only company I think of

that kind of challenges that a little bit is Aldi because Aldi is they're in America too it's just a really cheap supermarket

but what they do and just people I know who work in Aldi they like it it's there's no such thing as just working at the checkout

you do that and then you go and pack tomatoes and then you go and sweep the floor. But their day has variety. So fair play Aldi. But

however, the Aldi manager experience apparently is not very pleasant. Because people who go for jobs in Aldi and Lidl, it's like, wow, free car, wow, amazing wage. Just be a manager. But it's like you're a manager of about 20 stores in a region, and it just sounds like a never-ending hell of driving and shouting at people.

And it's in your job description to handle the robot revolt when it eventually happens, you know? That's the thing. That's the scary thing about fucking robots, you know? They're gonna start. Robots don't give a shit about anyone. They already have. That's what I'm saying with the fucking working at the computers. They're already starting.

It's not like, oh, the Terminator's gonna come to life and kill us. It's already fucking brought us into submission, you know? Yeah. How do you feel about sex robots? It depends on if they're hot or not I mean I think I saw a pornography film

of men fucking their sex dolls to techno music and it was one of the most lonely but beautiful things I've ever seen because there were those

do you know those really really expensive sex styles that look like humans so it was two lads with them but then you're going no it's just

two of you in air air humping air humping while listening to Underworld in a bedroom together lads

and they didn't think that that was in any way homoerotic because their plastic women were present yeah it's sort of like Guitar Hero but with pussies yes And they didn't think that that was in any way homoerotic because their plastic women were present.

Yeah, sort of like Guitar Hero, but with pussies. Yes! How did you get into making pornography? How did I get into making pornography? Yeah. Because we don't have... There's no porn being made in Ireland. Well, no, so I want to... Porn, like like Ireland was like a

really lifelong dream. Like I have wanted, I wanted to do porn for a really long time. Some kids want to be astronauts or president or whatever. I want to be a porn star and so... But like how, like we didn't have porn till 1996. Lads, porn wasn't legal. I mean, I had a set of racy playing cards when I was 13. I'm serious, man. You know, they were German. Like, to get porn in Ireland when I was

a kid, someone's grubby father had to go to England. I remember my dad told me... I like the someone's grubby father had to go to England. But my... I remember my dad told me someone's grubby father had to go to England there was a brilliant painter in Limerick called Jack Donovan

he's one of my favourite fucking painters he was amazing and he used to get smuggled pornography and stick it onto the canvas in the 70s in Ireland which was fucking crazy but my brother was in art college when he was his lecturer in like 1991. And Jack Donovan,

there was a pair of bachelor farmers that were living together with their mother out in the countryside. And she came across their suitcase full of pornography. And she threw it out onto the side of the motorway. And also Jack Donovan found this fucking suitcase full of pornography, which was gold in Ireland

at the time, so he brought it into the art college to look through it. Then all the other art lecturers came down to see this find of art. And my brother, he was like 19, a fist fight ensued amongst 50-year-old men

over the suitcase of smuggled pornography. I'm talking, this is only 25 years ago, so that's what you're dealing with when you're talking porn in Ireland. Grown men fighting over suitcases of smuggled pornography. So you were obviously seeing porn at a young age then, and it was open and... Yeah, I'm realising I'm like a parent's worst nightmare. I grew up and became an occultist porn star. It's like the devil in sex is basically what people think.

But no, I mean, I saw porn when I was very young, yes. How, like, with a friend's tape? No, we had these things called, I don't know if you had them here, but they were called cheater boxes. Does anybody know what those are? Where you would steal the neighbor's cable? Yeah you so you would put like this box on your tv and you would sort of splice the neighbor's cable wire into your and my father that was a thing but it was just to see english soccer we couldn't get any there was no pornography that can be used for

pornography i hate to tell you yeah um english soccer but um but i but yeah so i we were i mean this is this is a crazy moment so i think i was like eight seven or eight years old my parents had just gotten divorced my dad had this giant screen tv and uh the the cheater box was in and this is so long ago so that like the remote control only had an up and down button, so you could only go, like, up and down through the channels, and as he was going through, he hit channel 27. I was sitting in the living room with my dad, my stepmom, and my sister, or the woman who had become my stepmom and my sister, and the channel, the remote died at the, the battery died as it hit channel 27. I say it like there's this line in John 5, verse 1 through 4,

the hands of an angel troubled the waters of the pool of Bethesda. The hands of the angel troubled the battery of the remote control and killed it on Channel 27. So I'm just seeing this giant dick and like pussy just like, and my sister screamed.

But you didn't have a context for it, I'm guessing, did you? I didn't know. No, I didn't really know what it was. So why are those people attacking each other? Yeah. And why is my sister screaming and covering my eyes? You know, and that to me, actually that moment was really formative for me, not because I saw the porn, but because I got this lesson about human sexuality really early, which

was like, here it is, it's giant, everybody wants to watch it, there's a TV channel, don't look at it! You know? And that is the history of Western sexuality. It's there, everybody's thinking about it, it's present, it's for everybody, don't talk about it, don't think about it, don't do it, don't express it, don't, you know, all those things, and scream and be offended by it at the same time.

You know, so I think that that really, that's more what left the impression than just seeing that. I mean, I didn't see that and say, I want to do that. It wasn't like that. I got a little older, and my body started working in a certain way

before I realized that I wanted to do that. Would you say, because I'm picking up a vibe that you're, like, was it an act of rebellion? Was it an act of punk rock, fuck society? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, a porn performer's favorite question is,

so what do you do? You know? Because when they have, what do you do for a living? Yeah. Because when you tell people, there's a confrontation immediately. Yeah. Because you tell people and then suddenly,

and again, I don't really do porn anymore. The last porn I did came out in 2017, maybe? It was called Jack's New Job. I was Jack. I got the job. So that's my, you know, despite my post-work anarchist. I went on Pornhub for research, obviously,

to see what Connor was up to. Which is good. Nobody ever does that, by the way. I don't mind watching lads fucking. I have no problem with that. But I saw the most beautiful title for a porn I've ever seen in my life. And in all my time of looking at pornography online, I've never laughed out loud at a title. It was...

Muscle Buds Backyard Butt Fuck. I thought... I thought I thought you were going to say hard Brexit but no not that but like how

like what do you do to get like what did you just walk up to a porn person's door and go

what's the crack like how like what happened hey Mr. Guy you have a mustache can you hire me and being up to a porn person's door and go what's the crack like how like what happened he uh mr guy you have a mustache can you hire me and being and the other thing as well is like what's it like being being a lad like is it easier being a woman in porn is it like what's the story with genders like i know i don't know what story is with with gay porn but i've heard male straight performers just going you know they don't get paid as is with gay porn, but I've heard male straight performers just going,

you know, they don't get paid as much, it's hard for them. A lot of them are just in it for the sex. Yeah, well, they're not... They just have to work more, so more often. And gay for pay. A lot of straight lads who do gay stuff for the money. Yeah, we can talk about gay for pay backstage. No, we can talk about gay for pay.

We can talk about gay for pay here. But, um... No, we can talk about K4Pay. We can talk about K4Pay here. But... So, no, I was going to say, interestingly, when anti-sex work, so sex work exclusionary radical feminists, WORF is the term,

when they come down against porn, it's like, this is the one industry where women make vastly more than men. This is where the wage gap is in women's favor to an extreme degree, where they're making so much more money, by and large, not always, but by and large. And so I think that, yeah,

men in straight porn end up getting much less. I think that they should be getting paid just as much as anybody else. People should be getting paid equal wages, despite their gender and all places. But I'm happy with it being weighted toward women, at least one fucking industry. You know what I mean? But I'm saying that they have to work a lot more.

With gay guys, it used to be more, but the wages have been steadily decreasing over time in general, in ways that I find actually rather exploitative. So a lot of the workers have, and no pun intended, seized the means of production and begun, that's a Marxist gay sex term, begun to, you know, do only fans, just for fans, all that kind of stuff, and make their own money. But then that has its own weird trap too, because a lot of those performers are then not paying the people

that come and make the videos with them. It's not happening that much, but I've seen it start happening. I'm like, you guys, did you not fucking learn? You are being treated like shit by your bosses. Don't become bosses. Become workers in solidarity with other workers, you know? Yeah. And do you have the thing with, like, with straight porn,

female porn stars get elevated into, like, icon status. Yeah. Does that happen with, you never see it, with maybe one or two male porn stars, like Rocco Soffredi. Uh-huh. Do you know what I mean? If you say to lads, name a male porn star, they stars like Rocco Soffredi do you know what I mean if you say to lads name a male porn star they'd say Rocco Soffredi just because he always wears funny shirts yeah but uh yeah is that the case with gay male porn as well would you yeah yeah you can have

followers do you have people who hassle you do you get recognized in the George yeah yeah yeah I get recognized I mean porn is a weird recognition because people kind of want to say it and they don't. So people come up to me and they're like, I love your writing. And I'm like, yeah, I know you do. But I mean, sometimes that's true. And more and more, especially for the podcast, like people are saying that they love the podcast, which is really great because now I've been doing that for like two years. But it was like for a while people would say anything they could to avoid saying, yeah, I jerked off to you, and I think when someone says I've jerked off to you, I'm like, thank you, that's great, that's why I did that, you know, I did that

so you could, you know, well, for money and for my own pleasure, but also so you can feel good, you know, so, but with women, you're right it's like um they can become really big icons whereas the straight men don't in fact today um so what was his name there's rocco sofridi and no no no i was gonna say luke perry died and the guy from prodigy yes today and also today this male porn star uh straight male porn star bill bailey died now bill is super sweet he was so kind he cared about other porn performers. He fell off a balcony and fell to his death to a parking lot. It was a really tragic way to die.

He was such a sweetheart. And the thing is, like, I'm a little choked up, actually. The thing is, like, he's made hundreds of fucking movies. He dedicated his life to helping other people feel good and feel pleasure. And he's so recognizable. Recognizable even as these other male porn stars by tens of thousands of people.

Probably as recognizable as Luke Perry at this point in time. And yet, there will be no mainstream media coverage of this person who did all this media. Who did all this stuff. Who's totally recognizable because the idea is like, yeah, well, we recognise you, but we're not going to recognise that we recognise you, so fuck you.

Your corpse goes under the carpet because you were in porn. And that, to me, is sick. That's so disgusting. Sorry, I'm getting a little angry about this. Anyway, Bill Bailey, you can just watch this porn tonight to honour him in light of his job. Yeah, because it's a strange thing that people don't

apply meaning to that part of their day. It's like the part of your day where it's like, I'm going to watch porn and have a wank. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? If he was Luke Perry, I should be more shameful about watching 90210.

Do you know what I mean? I mean, RIP Luke Perry, right? I mean, but yes, I see what you mean. And I mean, I think it's this whole... Like Ron Jeremy. Like, you know who Ron Jeremy is, yeah? He'd be another really famous porn star from the 70s. Like, Ron Jeremy's whole thing was,

he got into pornography so that he, it was a gateway to be a serious actor. He wanted to be a serious actor in Hollywood. And how he started off was Ron Jeremy, he volunteered himself to be an extra in fucking tons of Hollywood films, right? So he was very recognisable. He's got the moustache, he's got the beard. It's Ron Jeremy.

But what happened in the 80s and 90s, now I'm talking like die hard I think Reservoir Dogs was another one like really big films it would get to the editing room and they'd have an incidental scene where they're in a bank and he's got a tiny part and some lad in the editing room wanked off to his porn and he said that's Ron Jeremy it's like what that guy there in the background in the back's Ron Jeremy. I was like, what? That guy there in the background, in the back, is Ron Jeremy. He was cut out of so many films as an extra.

Because people in the editing room were like, we can't have fucking Ron Jeremy in this Bruce Willis film. And it's really sad, and there's a tragedy to it, in how much of Ron Jeremy's serious attempts just got left on the fucking cutting room floor. For what reason? Because he was legally having sex with adults on camera. Like, what the fuck? But they kept the movie title.

Did they? Die Hard, yeah. No, but, I mean, let's not Valraise Ron Jeremy, who's been also accused of sexual assault by multiple women. Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. Right, I'm glad he's not in Die Hard now.

Really changes your plans for after this. I did not know that about Ron Jeremy. But, yeah, but no, I mean, it's just one of the many problems that people face who have done an act that everybody does and that everybody thinks about, but do it publicly, and suddenly there's a problem. I mean, that is really, like, think about how crazy that is. And also, this is the oldest... It's what?

If there's a robot in the room looking at you you're filthy and need to die? Like, what the fuck? It's really bizarre and you can start tracing, as I've done in some of the writing I've done, but it's like you can start tracing how sex becomes used as a leverage point

for people and institutions in power to control other people. So I'm sure that you've experienced some of that in Ireland, but where like sexual repression and oppression and suppression have fucked people up and been ways to control the populace in some way. And so I think that you can start seeing that. And so this continues for people that are sex workers, for sure. So there's this like documentary after porn ends. There is now there's no after porn ends. Once you're a porn performer, you're always a porn performer because you've always, you're always visible. You're always out there. It's never going away. And so I think that like, you know, I try to talk to people when they're like, oh, I want to do porn. I'm like, okay, are you ready? Are you really ready for this? Are you ready to be discriminated against by your family, by people,

you know, by people in relationships, by, you can't in the US, actually, just so you know, as a sex worker, you can't use PayPal or Venmo. If they discover that, you're never allowed to use it. The government can shut down your bank account. You can get fired from jobs legally, all this kind of stuff. So it's a whole heap of discrimination being handed your way just because you're doing something publicly and giving that to other people that other people do privately. So what I say is like... Just to interject, you've worked with John Ransom.

Yeah. John Ransom. Are you familiar with John? Not in porn. Not in porn, yeah. Are you familiar with John Ransom? He made The Butterfly Effect. He did that recent podcast on August Ames. He wrote the book So You've Been Publicly Shamed.

The Men Who Stare at Goats. Men Who Stare at Goats. An amazing journalist, writer, documentary maker. And he's consulted with you quite a bit on his stuff. And there's one thing, I don't know if you remember it, if you do, I'd like you to tell the story but in the Butterfly Effect, John Ransom speaks about it's a male porn star who left porn to work in a hospital do you remember that? Do you know who it was?

I don't remember who it was but yeah so this porn star, he'd been in porn for like three years, he was like okay I don't want to do this anymore went to medical school to be, I think he was like okay i don't want to do this anymore went to medical school um to be i think it was like an emt or something gave his life to it uh then finally gets a job in a hospital he's working at it he loves it he's passionate about it the hospital find out that

he used to work in porn and they very calmly sit him down and go look i've no problem that you were in porn but if you were alone with porn, but if you were alone with a client or if you were alone with someone in a hospital bed and they simply said that you had assaulted them, the fact that you did porn is enough to cost this hospital millions in a lawsuit. So they let him go. They fired him. If you said that you assaulted them, so think about that, the idea that a police star is

more likely to assault somebody, in fact you know like there was a period of time where a lot of people were asking me like well what can what about rape on porn sets what about sexual assault like i mentioned ron jeremy before i was actually very close friends with a guy named james dean that was accused of sexually assaulting a bunch of women and so i just sort of stepped back a bit but but a lot of people around that time were like what what about rape on porn sets? I'm like, do you understand the levels and layers of consent we have on a porn set? People should be asking us for lessons on consent, because we have to do all kinds of shit. Was James Dean accused of issues

with consent on camera? He was accused of issues, no, the first one was not, and the first one was Stoya, who I mentioned earlier, but then some of the other women said that there were moments on where he might have crossed a boundary. But the idea being, think about what consent is like for a porn performer. I get an email that's like, you're going to have sex with this guy. I might not be attracted to the person, so already I have to do something with my ability to allow that encounter to happen that's not just about my preference. And I'm excited to, and I'm interested in it. Then I go, and the acts that I'm doing are determined by the director, right?

And we have to keep constantly checking and triangulating. Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? And having this kind of communication for hours. So we know consent. So this idea of a form performer. It's a non-stop consent narrative. Yes, exactly. Constantly. That's a great way of saying it.

And it's obviously edited so we don't see that. So even when positions change, someone goes, we're going to do this now. Is that cool? And that's edited out. And in aggressive porn, where people call it violent porn, yes, it's happening there even more. Why did you report aggressive porn, like where people call it, oh, it's violent porn. Yes, it's happening there even more.

Why did you airport aggressive porn there? Well, because people, I don't know where people get their ideas of what's happening in those movies. Because they see them, they turn to them out of interest for whatever reason of their own sort of desire set. And then they get worried that somehow some awful thing was happening on set. But in fact, the layers of consent, especially you know, especially BDSM porn are like, they're through the roof, you know, the way that people, and I'm not saying nothing bad ever happens. It does happen sometimes. But why are we only focusing on that, you know? And I think it's like, you know, when you talk about the assault, when I'm talking about these things, sex workers, we're called sex workers, and that includes porn performers.

Sex workers do so much to carry the burden in a culture that won't work on sex. We're sex workers. And I think we're all just fucking tired of carrying that burden. I mean, we keep doing it for whatever reason, but one of the best things that could happen for sex workers as well,

to listening to them about labor policies, is like going inward and starting to work and undo your sort of knots and fears about sex and sexuality. On the issue of consent and porn, right, how do you determine consent if somebody is under, we'll say, financial duress, things like that? Yeah, so again, we have to say that's the same for every single kind of job, right? Yeah. So the idea is like, I've heard this line before from some people who are anti-porn and anti-sex work. They're like, well, non-consensual sex is rape, and your job structure is also being imposed upon you,

but everybody's job is being imposed. The wage-labor relation is non-consensual, and we are all violated that way. The content of what we do as a strategy to navigate that oppressive wage-labor relationship is not the same thing as the non-consensual wage-labor relationship, which we have to get rid of. Did that make sense to everybody?

Okay, thank you. It's a tough one to take on board. It's like, yeah, we don't have these conversations here, you know? There's no... Can you think of an Irish porn star? There's none. Like, it's not really a thing. There's Paddy O'Brien, but he lives in... What? No, I'm serious, but he lives in... What? No, I'm serious.

But he lives in... And there's also Brendan Patrick, who lives in the US. But they're both gay porn stars. But are they Irish-American or proper Irish? Brendan Patrick's proper Irish. Okay. I doubt that's his real name. There's no one called Brendan Patrick in Ireland.

Paddy O'Brien, I don't know. Has anyone ever seen Fucked in Ireland? So it's... Has anyone ever seen Fucked in Ireland? So it's... Has anyone ever been fucked in Ireland? A porn star called Tanya Tate, she was British, and she came to Ireland in about 2002, I think it was, and it ended up getting in the papers because a lad who was a county hurler or something like that ended up in the papers because like a lad who was like a county hurler or something like that ended up in

the porn but it was it's amazing to watch like he looked like a proper porn star and he was having a bit of crack but then she had sex with one of her fans and he was just like an irish lad in his 40s very very shy quiet man and there's's an amazingly Irish scene in it. A beautiful Irish scene. Where Tanya's doing her whole, you know, porn thing. He takes out his mickey, right? And she goes, oh, it's so big,

it's so big. And then he goes, ah, no, it's not, it's not, it's not. It's amazing. And I had to turn it off. I was just like, no, sir. Stop exposing us all. Ah, no, Tanya, it's not, it's not, it's not. It's very small.

Do you know what I mean? It was just pure and utter Irish shame. It's like, you're shooting porn and you're worried about fucking compliments, man. It's like we can see your taint and you're worried about someone looking thinking that you might be a little bit cocky jesus christ thank you all for listening to that that was uh that was good crack i enjoyed it and connor's a legend um all right there you go there were some audience questions at the end but that was a really long one.

I just didn't have time to put in those audience questions. It went on for, I'd say, another 40 minutes after that. I just didn't have time. All right, talk to you next week. God bless. Thank you. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm.

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