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Feb. 9, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:06:04
THE TRUTH ABOUT WEB CAM GIRLS! Tristan Tate Reveals All!
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Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
So I'm here with Tristan.
And Tristan has agreed to, I guess, be grilled, cross-examined, questioned about an aspect of the modern economy that I suppose some of you know about very well and some of you don't know about at all.
And I guess it's important to try and cross that gap.
I was really struck by the tweet that you put out.
Wherein you were talking about the cam girl business.
So let's, you know, for those who aren't familiar with it, and of course, I guess everyone will say, Oh, heavens, I know nothing about that, even if they do.
But what's, what is the business and what are the economics behind it?
Well, in the late 90s, before my time, before I was running any sort of business, I was way too young, there was phone sex.
It was typically called, where women who were probably not so attractive, with beautiful sounding voices, would have people call them up for $1.52 a minute.
I don't know the exact rates. It was not something I was involved in.
And around about the turn of the millennium, a few years afterwards, the idea of webcam modeling came about.
Very much like with the big social networks, Facebook, Instagram, there are the main camming sites which my models and studio owners like myself will broadcast their collection of girls on.
And it's essentially girls Talking, flirting, stripping, sometimes performing sex acts, etc., always with themselves, solo stuff, to guys across the internet who are paying upwards of $4, $5 per minute for the pleasure of watching these women.
Now, of course, this is not something that everybody is completely okay with, nor do I care if they are or I want them to be.
Who I am is I am a webcam studio owner.
I don't have an office, so to such.
I have numerous houses, apartments, mansions filled with webcam models who obviously broadcast on my platforms as well as some of the more famous platforms.
It's a business I've been in for five and a half years alongside my brother.
I made my first million dollars in this business.
And what's unique about me talking to you today, Stefan, is that most people in this industry, I'd say as close to 100% of people in this industry, will never tell you the truth about it.
It's all smoke and mirrors.
The guys like me want to protect very much what I do.
The girls, obviously, they all have fake stories.
They're not the people who you think they are.
They, again, want to protect what they do.
So, yeah, I'm here, I guess, as a whistleblower.
Not just because...
Whether or not I talk to you isn't going to affect my business, because it's not.
I'm also doing many other things that make me a lot of money.
But because In a way, I'd like to see fewer people abusing this service as I do.
I liken myself to a bar owner.
A lot of people will come in and drink two or three drinks in a very healthy way.
I guess they use it as pornography, they use it as masturbation, and they'll then log off.
But you do get addicts and you do get people who abuse this who really fall in love.
I will not All right,
so If a man, I assume it's usually men, although I'm sure it can go the other way, but a man logs onto the website, chooses from a webcam model, and is it a one-on-one session?
Is it many-to-one, or how does it work in that way?
Well, it depends very much on the webcamming platform.
Different websites have different ways of operating.
So some websites, a girl will have still photographs saying she's live.
One guy calls her at a time, four or five dollars a minute.
He then opens up the live stream.
He is then alone with her in what's called his webcam room.
He can talk to her.
A lot of it is talking.
Very little of this business is actually sexual.
Pornography is freely available on the internet, so a lot of it is talking and that kind of interaction.
Some websites work more like, the ones that I specialize in, they work more like online strip clubs.
Whereas if you imagine a strip club with a girl standing in the pole in the center and crowds of men throwing dollar bills at her, it's essentially the same way.
However, the crowds are much larger.
So you can have up to, some of my models will peak at 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 individual men sitting on their computers from across the world.
Throwing in little bits of money.
On the websites I use, they're called tokens.
They're worth 5 cents each.
This guy will throw in 10 tokens.
That guy will throw in 100. And as various goals are met, the girl will then take off her bra, for example, after she's made a few hundred dollars.
So the different websites work in different ways.
I specialize in more the online strip club kind of ways.
But anything that you can imagine essentially happens.
And virtual reality sex has now just started.
And that is the next big thing.
And I can touch on that later as well.
Okay, so men buy these tokens.
And this is how you get around the micropayment issue is that men buy clumps of tokens.
And then the tokens, when they reach a certain amount, will trigger, I guess, on your side, some sort of credit card payment or something like that, not for each individual man, but maybe as an aggregate.
And that's how you get over the micropayment issue.
Because obviously, if you've got 3000 men, each one of them doesn't want to be paying three bucks a minute to watch this, right?
Of course. No, no.
What happens essentially is these men, like casino chips, these men will buy tokens in their own time.
So their accounts will have various numbers of tokens on them.
So the tokens at that point belong only to the website.
They pass them to the model as and when they feel fit.
So there could be 2,999 men in the room with zero tokens just watching the show and one big spender financing the whole thing.
That has happened before.
And then you think, well, why would that guy spend for everybody else to enjoy the show?
He also has the option to take the girl into a private chat if she accepts and spend $5, $6, $7 a minute obviously watching her just by himself.
So it is, as I said, quite difficult to wrap your mind around.
Because I, when I first started this business, me and my brother, the reason we didn't think of it any sooner is because we didn't imagine in any universe that something like this existed.
We stumbled on it by accident and used the fact that we always had pretty girlfriends and we were always relatively good with women to build a big company out of it.
But I know it's mind-boggling to people who haven't seen this before.
Oh, the economics.
I mean, the ethics we can perhaps discuss a little later, but the economics are really interesting.
And I remember on my show some years ago, talking to a man who had gotten so infatuated with a webcam girl, he was a call-in to my call-in show, that he'd actually gone in debt to the organized crime to try and sort of fund his habit and also figure out how to fly her over and so on.
Like, he had become so wrapped up with her.
That he was literally putting his kneecaps, his elbows, maybe his life itself in danger by borrowing from organized crime just to try and pursue this kind of madness really when you think about it because the relationship is very artificial.
It is obviously highly sexualized.
The man is kind of in control.
The woman's personality is not there.
And it's not like she says, hey man, I need you to watch my kid while I go and get a root canal or...
My mother's ill and therefore, you know, I have to not be available this weekend.
And like the realities of life, it's sort of like an affair, like the realities of life don't impinge upon this sort of weird, you know, waifu anime fantasy of who the woman is.
Yes, and the relationship is far more artificial than you would even believe because a lot of the conversation that's happening, a girl will typically, in my setup, a girl will sell her phone number to an individual.
So he'll pay up to three, four hundred dollars to have the girl's WhatsApp number.
Now, the entire time he's messaging that girl, it's not that girl.
It's another member of staff I have who has a pile of five or six phones and her job is to just reply as these false personalities As these false names looking at getting the money.
So before the guy calls again, one of my admin staff will have a chat with the girl and says, oh, by the way, Stefan, well, I'll use the name.
By the way, Stefan was talking to you earlier today.
He sent you $200.
His dog is sick.
Ask him about his dog. Ready?
Go. So it's so fake.
More fake than people could possibly believe because they're not even talking to the girl they think they're talking to.
Even when she's live on screen, a lot of the time there's somebody else behind the scenes Especially when the model's English isn't that strong, doing the typing on behalf of the model.
The model's just bashing a keyboard, which isn't plugged into anything.
So it's far more artificial than you could possibly believe.
And yes, people do get themselves into debt and spend money indulging in these relationships, which from my perspective, it just looks ridiculous.
But I'm happy to run the business.
It's a great business for me to run, but I would not advise anybody to partake in this in any manner.
Now, when you first, I guess, got the idea for the webcam, was there, you know, there's this sort of law in economics that supply sometimes creates its own demand.
Did it take a while for the business to get rolling?
Or did you kind of put the bait in the water and like 12 sharks ate up your boat?
Oh, I mean, the first model that we put online was a model who worked for my brother.
The women who will go into the webcam world and do well are not the women that people think they are.
I get all these kind of insults thrown at me all the time, as you can imagine, usually from customers.
And they'll call the women damaged or broken or, I mean...
If you're in this industry, never hire an ex-stripper, never hire an ex-prostitute, never hire an ex-pornstar.
These are the worst girls in the universe to hire for webcam.
The reason being, a prostitute will make her $500 a day in an hour and a half in one evening appointment.
Then she lives the rest of her life doing whatever she is.
And it's a very morally empty business.
I know people will say that of my business, but that's perfectly fine.
The perfect webcam model is a pretty young girl who has a great personality, who works as a waitress, I mean, my number one model used to work in a bathroom store, showing people around bathrooms and stuff for a thousand pounds a month.
That girl will happily work a six or a seven or an eight hour shift without the, I'm tired, I'm bored of this, you know, I'm too lazy for it.
I sort of hate to get all Protestant on you, but you're looking for a girl with a good work ethic and that generally doesn't come from prostitutes or pornography or anything like that, right?
Absolutely not. I've hired ex-strippers and girls who I've suspected were escorts or whatever in the past.
It's always been absolutely terrible news.
The best models are just the normal average girls.
I've had virgins work for me.
So the judgments that are made about these women are actually very wrong.
Yes, they're willing to get naked and show themselves off on the internet, but only to a slightly higher degree than your typical Instagram girl these days.
So I've had virgins work for me, and people insult women who work for me, etc., and call them all sorts of names.
And I don't really believe in any universe you can call a virgin a whore.
But yeah, she worked for me for a good number of months.
And the fact that she was a virgin is what made her so much money.
So yeah, we started with a really beautiful girl who my brother was dating at the time and still is with to this day.
And yeah, the sharks attacked.
I quit my job a few weeks later because we saw the potential of this and we scaled up and became very big names in this industry.
And when I say very big names, you probably haven't heard of me.
Because I don't tell people what I do and nobody knows that the models who work for me are working for me.
I wouldn't even divulge that information right now to you.
They have 50, 60,000 followers on Twitter, 100,000 followers on Instagram.
They're very big girls in terms of their fame and their popularity and the money that they make.
But nobody knows that I'm the guy behind the accounts.
And I wouldn't ever divulge that anywhere because that would be damaging to my business.
Now, was it fast out of the gate?
In other words, when you started advertising or you started...
How did you get the business going?
How did you raise awareness of the services you were offering?
Very much like with social networks, to start your own webcam site is immensely difficult.
Now, I own shares in an app, an app that shares new photos, etc.
So I do have my own platform in one way.
However, even to this day, I will still use some of the major sites, LiveJasmine being the biggest.
You've definitely seen pop-ups to this website because anytime you go on any website, LiveJasmine pops up.
The richest man in Hungary is actually the owner of that website.
He became Hungary's richest man by owning a webcam website.
So that's the Instagram of webcam modeling.
Then you have the Facebook of webcam modeling, et cetera.
To run your own site is very difficult.
So initially, to build up a model's popularity, you have her Twitter, et cetera, advertised on her live Jasmine profile.
People go there. It's already got the traffic.
Every pop-up in the world is leading to this website.
People see the pictures of the girl, click on her.
But you need to build up her own Instagram and Twitter before you start making money off of those platforms.
So that's a very good place to start.
But that's where we started. And I remember the first ever day, we made something like $300, $400, $500.
The first day, the first girl was online.
So we saw the potential instantly.
So what are the...
Does it follow that sort of 90-10 rule or the 95-5 rule that in the industry, 95% of the money goes to like 5% of the people, 95% of the money goes to 5% of the girls?
Is it that lopsided or is it more of a sort of flattened bell curve of income?
Yeah. It's a flat bell curve.
The models at the top can make, I mean, the world's highest earning webcam models, of which I have number six.
I have the sixth highest earning girl in the world working for me.
The top five are all Americans because the main fan base is American.
And there's always this fantasy, this dream that maybe I can meet this girl.
Maybe she'd be my girlfriend.
Maybe I could fall in love with her. So the American girls make a very big income.
My girls, as you can imagine, many are British, but many are Eastern European.
This is where I'm based. American guys are less likely to believe that the hot Ukrainian is going to actually marry him.
So they do earn less.
Any girl can make a good living in this.
And what I will say is I've never been able to accurately predict, even with all my experience, whether or not a girl will make money.
Sometimes you have a girl not very attractive, seems a bit boring, very timid, very shy looking, and you'll put her online and two or three guys will just fall in love with her and she'll become a superstar.
Sometimes you'll have a girl 10 out of 10.
I've had a girl who used to model for FHM, did a bunch of those kind of photo shoots.
I put her online, she earned nothing. And I don't know exactly what it is, even to this day.
It's something I call chemistry, like chemistry with a C-A-N. It's something that I don't know how to measure even to this day.
So when you run the business at a very high level, you simply bring them in three or four days trial, and then you know if you're going to keep them or not.
So, okay, average earnings per girl per hour, I guess, or per day?
How does that shake out? Well, per hour, a girl in my studio will work between...
Six and seven hours a day.
My best models, I don't know per day.
It's too unpredictable. Some days will be very low, some days will be very high.
Monthly, a very good girl can gross about $40,000 to $45,000 in a month.
An average girl, $15,000 to $20,000.
Sorry. Okay, so gross.
Okay, I won't take that word, the double meaning.
But gross, you mean before paying your cut?
I mean, it's not like there's a lot of overhead technically.
That's the entire amount of money that hits my account.
I obviously have to pay the girl.
I have to pay the girl who works her phone.
I have to pay the studio operators.
I have to pay her rent. There are lots of expenses to this, but the girl who's performing will typically make about 50 cents for every dollar she brings in.
There's a lot of support staff behind her, a lot of people who help her make her money.
Sometimes she's at the salon or she's in bed or doing nothing, and one of my assistants is texting her guys away on his phone making her money.
So the average girl could make, what, $120,000 to $240,000 a year after...
Absolutely. Absolutely.
And the numbers involved are really quite astonishing.
And this is why the fantasy of the poor, struggling model who doesn't know what to do, she's trying to earn money to pay her grandma's bills.
This was very much the typical webcamming story 10 to 15 years ago.
But now people know.
They're becoming more aware of how much webcam models are actually making.
I mean, three, four dollars a minute.
These girls are working six, seven hours.
Half the time is spent in private.
I mean, you could do the mathematics.
And this, of course, is with no risk of a John beating you up.
This is with no risk of STDs.
This is with very low risk of stalkers because I assume, of course, the girls positioned the camera so you can't see where they are and they have anonymous locations.
So you can make more money than a prostitute, of course.
No pregnancy risk, no STD risk, no violence risk and so on.
No incentive for someone to get you hooked on drugs so that you stay as a prostitute.
It is really quite astounding, those kinds of numbers.
I mean, that's more than a doctor makes often.
Of course not. No, it really is.
It really is. And the fact that these young women are sometimes 18, 19 years old, and they're bringing home $100,000, $200,000 a year, I mean, that is how much they get paid.
And at my peak, I've really scaled down my webcam operation, which is, I guess, why I'm more open to talk about it now.
I'm running a small chain of casinos.
I'm doing multiple things which aren't as interesting to talk about.
But since scaling down my operation, I'm more happy to sort of go into how much money it makes because people are always very judgmental of webcam rules and they put them in the same category as porn stars and people who work in the porn star, I guess, porn industry, because a lot of porn stars will webcam as well.
A few escorts will webcam as well, but I don't like the whole, the mass stigma put on them because Because these girls aren't going to be doctors, Stefan.
They're not going to be. They're not going to be PhD-winning scientists.
They're not going to be that.
So in what universe are these girls going to make $100,000 plus a year in my universe, in this business?
That's where they can do it.
It's either that or work a normal-ass job as a waitress your whole life.
And then you have more people hitting on you, touching you, slapping your ass, knowing your real name, probably stalking you than you would on a webcam.
So I have no problems with what I do.
I'm very proud, actually, of what I do, in case you can't tell.
Well, it's funny because, you know, the thought that popped into my head when you were talking about moving from webcams to casinos, it's like, man, you're like the vice of the vice chairman of business.
You know, if there's a vice, I'm mining it for money, baby.
And, you know, I mean, you're not creating the vices, but, you know, you certainly...
And what kind of money were you making at the peak of your webcam business from that business?
When I had 75 members of staff, not all of them were webcam models, but I had 75 people on my payroll, I was making profit almost $3 million a year between me and my brother.
Now, keep in mind, yeah, profit.
Keep in mind, I was paying 23,000 euros a month in rents.
In Bucharest were rents relatively cheap.
It was a very stressful business to run.
People will also think, oh, you run webcam models, that must be great, sitting in your hot tub all day with a bunch of naked women.
No, because you can't put the lifestyle above the money, otherwise you're never going to make anything.
So it was a very high-pressure job.
It ran 24 hours a day around the clock, seven days a week, Christmas, New Year's, there were no exceptions.
And I think with any business that big, that makes you that kind of money.
There's a lot of pressure involved in it.
Nothing is that easy. And we became, as I said, very, very big in the industry.
And to the people watching, I do know this from Twitter.
I do know that a lot of people will doubt me.
They'll think that I'm a drug dealer or whatever it is they think I am because I've got seven cars and I live in a big-ass house and that kind of stuff.
This is what was my bread and butter for the last Five years, five and a half years of my life.
This is what I guess I do.
I consider myself a professional businessman in my sphere and it really does make the money that, you know, that I say it does.
People who doubt me, I typically find our customers, people who pay webcam models, people who, you know, they fantasize about the girls and they fall into this kind of weird, fucked up relationship with them.
They're the guys who are very quick to call me and my brother out as pimps or liars or Whatever it is, because they're holding on to their fantasy too hard, if you know what I mean.
Right, right. Now, what were the stressors?
Were they technical?
Were they tax?
Were they regulatory? Were they personnel?
I mean, what were the major stressors that you were facing as the owner of this business?
Oh, where girls lived.
Where girls lived and who you put with who to avoid arguments.
I mean, having one beautiful girlfriend is stressful enough.
You know what a diva, one beautiful woman can be.
If you imagine in this house here, which I now own, I used to rent.
This is a cigar lounge I built in the house, but this used to be a webcam set.
This house used to have eight models living in it.
So, you know, she used my makeup wipe.
She moved my shoes.
Oh, well, she was making too much noise when I was online.
The petty arguments between women were by far the most stressful thing about running this business, which sounds stupid, but I mean, a bunch of pretty girls in one room.
In one house, living together, cohabiting.
All competing for eyeballs and wallets, right?
Yeah, and one girl doesn't do so well.
The other girl who she doesn't like is doing better than her.
She accuses me and my staff of helping one model more than the other when really I just want them all to make money.
Those were the stresses of the business, of the industry.
In terms of legality, taxation, very easy.
Very easy to deal with. I have a good accountant.
It's a completely legal business.
I've never done, despite the accusations, I've never done anything illegal for money in my life.
Before this, I was selling home improvements door to door.
So, you know, it's a really great industry in that way because people assume you have to be some sort of gangster or criminal to run it.
But, you know, you just have to be nice to everybody.
Make sure everybody's happy. Make sure everybody's online.
Make sure everybody's well fed and make sure everybody's doing their job right.
Now, when it comes to your customer base, could you give me some sense of the demographics?
Yes. Yeah, young men.
Young men are the customer base, which is always surprising to anybody I tell about this business.
They assume it's men who, I guess, older men, divorced men, 50 plus.
That's what they assume the customer base is, but they're completely wrong.
Sorry, I'm just going to take a moment and enjoy the older men designation as men over 50.
Just let me just enjoy that for a moment before we continue.
Older. I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding. Okay. So it's young men, but shouldn't they be out there kind of living it up and asking girls out?
I mean, what are they doing sitting there jerking off to webcam girls?
You know, it took me a while to work out what it was, and I cracked it.
And it's something that I refer to as the over-digitalization of the sexual relationship.
That's a term I've come up with.
You mean the kids who get on the porn sites at the age of 11 or God help them, whatever, right?
And they just associate pixels with sex.
Exactly. And it's not just the porn sites.
When I was a young man, when you were a young man, when I was even 17, 18, Facebook wasn't around in the way that it is today.
I mean, I think we had MySpace when I was young enough.
But if I liked a girl in my school or my college, I would have to go and talk to her face to face.
If I wanted to get laid and I was, you know, I'd have to go out to the bar, Drink a few drinks, man up and walk over to a woman and introduce myself and say, hello, my name is Tristan.
As shy as I was back then, that's what a man had to do to get some sort of sexual interaction with a woman.
The one generation, I guess even 20% of a generation younger than me are the main customer base.
When they were at school and they liked a girl, what did they do?
Send her a message on Facebook. When they want to hook up with girls in their town, they have Tinder on their phone and they're swiping and nothing is done face to face.
And I think that causes a lot of damage to the male mojo, psyche, persona, whatever you want to call it.
And they just rely on the digitalization of sex.
for all of their relationship needs so they're from a small town where you don't get women who look like the women who I broadcast these 10 out of 10 super hot girls when they want something with them You know, to see them naked, you know, to interact with them, to have a conversation with them.
Webcam websites is where they do it.
They don't know how to, I mean, you'd have to build yourself up, dress nicely, go to a really nice swanky place in London to meet this level of woman.
And if they came face to face with her, they wouldn't know what to do.
However, you know, click the private chat button and it's no holds barred.
It's, oh, can you please get naked please?
And, you know, and the woman will.
It's very pathetic, actually, to be honest, and it's very sad, but that's where most of my customers come from.
They're young men. It's kind of digging your own confidence grave.
Everybody, when you're in your teens and you're a man, you have to go through that gauntlet of just going up, as you say, crossing over the room, going up.
I remember this in grade six.
There's a darkened gym, a Stairway to Heaven is playing and all the girls are on one side and all the guys are on another side and you've got to cross over and you've got to say to yourself, okay, I need to ask out a girl to dance, not so pretty that she won't dance with me, but pretty enough that my friends won't make fun of me.
And trying to figure out this very complex algorithm that goes on about where you are in the sort of romantic pecking order.
And I've really, you know, now that I'm older, I've seen the men.
It's a real clear divide. It's like divvying up coke, man.
It's real divide of the men who just crossed that gauntlet and were willing to risk rejection and were rejected and just toughened up that way.
Those men, I know, have gone on to do fairly well in life, but the men who just kind of backed away from that challenge, they kind of live as man boys for the rest of their lives, from what I can see.
And they are the main bulk of my customer base.
As I said, people who assume it's men who are older, a lot of older men are very happily married.
They've went through this gauntlet.
They know how to date and interact and meet females in the real world.
The young men don't. And they are the guys who I see doing very desperate things.
I'm talking about selling their television sets, spending their grandmother's inheritance when their grandmother dies on my webcam levels.
And I did once warn a man not to do it.
I called him myself and told him who I was and the type of business I was running and told him not to spend his money.
And that, I really regret doing that.
I should have taken his money. Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on. One could say that that was a Geister-like eruption of conscience.
Like, why would you regret that? I mean, that seems like a fairly decent thing to do.
Well, I was new to the business.
I was new to the industry, and I didn't quite understand the mindset of my customer.
I didn't understand how, I guess, messed up these people were, not because of people like me or because webcam girls are on offer.
This is the result.
Them going on webcam sites is the result of them being so messed up, many of these guys.
So he essentially, his grandmother had died, and they were waiting to sell this house in England where the grandkids were going to inherit about 20,000 pounds each from the sale of this house.
And he promised it all to one webcam model of mine.
She no longer works for me, but she was not very attractive, but she had a great enough personality.
This guy was really in love with her.
So she had purchased this guy's phone number.
So I called him.
I didn't tell the model, of course.
I called him.
I said, hey, look, look, bro.
Her name isn't Chloe, one.
She doesn't live in England, two.
She lives in Bucharest.
Like it's all a big scam.
My name is Tristan.
This is the business I run.
And he seemed, I guess, relatively embarrassed and humble.
And he thanked me.
And I never saw the guy again until about eight weeks later.
I hired a new model from Lithuania who was broadcasting from my studio.
And this guy pops up.
When his picture came up in the office, I mean we have six IMAX in a row where I could see everything these guys are saying and doing.
I almost, like, my heart sank to my stomach.
So this guy was talking to my Lithuanian model about how he had been tricked By this English girl and how he had figured her out and realized she was tricking him and didn't give her the money.
She was trying to scam him out of his grandmother's inheritance.
And I looked at my management team.
I said, take this guy for everything he's got.
That is the last straw. I'm never doing anything like that again.
He just could not stay away.
Essentially, The terms I put it in when I was saying about alcoholics abusing a bar, he was an alcoholic abusing my bar, and I stopped him from going into my bar, and he just went down the street and started drinking somewhere else.
But it was a bar that I owned, luckily enough.
But that's when I realized that you can't feel sorry for these people, and it's not something that I have done.
Although I'm the face of it to a lot of people, and I'm very easy to point a finger at and say, this is your fault, Belle Delphine's selling her brat bath water, Tristan, this is because of you.
It's nothing to do with me.
It's to do with the internet, the digitalization of sex.
I am simply providing a service that targets these people who have been created by this process as my customers.
Sorry to interrupt.
Do you think that any of them use the service to get over their fear of interacting with women and then somehow translate that into the real world?
Or is that a complete pipe dream?
0%. I think that's a pipe dream.
I think it's a pipe dream.
Oh, come on, man. Let me have my pipe dream.
No, I'm kidding. I've never seen it.
I've never seen it. I do see some guys.
Some guys I can't profile.
Some guys I can't work out why they're doing it or what for.
There are some guys who I, I mean, there was a guy, I can't remember his username.
I wouldn't say it here anyway, but it was a German guy sitting in his office.
And he'd be sitting in his office doing his work, and he'd have three computers, and he'd call, say, one of my models here and two other models here.
He'd have them all going for $5 a minute.
As he sat there in his suit just doing his business and work and watching them get naked and stuff.
Now that guy, I don't know what his deal is in real life.
He never bought a girl's number.
I never got to profile that guy.
I don't know what he's doing it for.
If he's getting some weird power trip out of this, maybe.
Maybe it helps him concentrate on the next financial derivative instrument he's creating or something.
Who knows, right? But hang on, hang on.
So you could see him too? Yeah, and he was just sitting there at his office.
I mean, assuming you're not going through the Edward Snowden back door, which is probably some porn movie somewhere, so the customers can turn their own webcams on as well?
No, not just that.
The customers pay to turn their own webcams on.
Because a freeloader, there are men who are exhibitionists who do all sorts of disgusting, horrible things to themselves on camera.
Girls don't want to see that.
So a guy will pay a model 20 or 30 bucks for the model to switch on his cam and look at what he's doing.
They pay to be watched.
They're either paying in a private show where their camera comes on, where they get to turn their camera on if they like, but most guys who like to have their camera viewed by a model are paying for the pleasure.
That's why the model can see them.
I mean, do they feel that their life is somehow short of blackmail material in some manner?
I mean, good heavens, what an astounding risk to take and what a way of saying, boy, I hope I never ever achieve anything in life, because having that kind of stuff out there is pretty astonishing.
Some of the guys...
Man, some of the guys who are doing this, there was a big-time lawyer.
The thing is, when someone tells me their story or that tells my management staff the story as I'm in the office, you know who the fakers are and who the realistic people are.
And usually it comes down to how much money they're spending.
This guy claimed to be a big time lawyer in NYC.
He was always broadcasting from a luxurious penthouse apartment and he spent very big.
So he'd be in his three or four dollar a minute show.
But he'd also be tipping, which is essentially throwing big bills in the pot as well.
Just at the model by herself.
Fifty bucks here.
A hundred bucks here.
And he was for a very big firm.
And his fetish was he liked the girl to boss him around and make him do very degrading, embarrassing things.
drink a whole glass of vodka, throw up on himself, And, you know, so when I'm saying young men who can't quite work out the sexual relationship is the core of the business, there are obviously many, many exceptions and people who I can't profile.
I can't work out what they're doing it for.
Yeah, there is that old phrase, you know, nothing human is alien to me, but boy, there's real borders there where it's kind of tough to figure out what the hell is going on in people's heads, right?
Well, it is true that a lot of people who have a lot of power in their professional life do like sort of billion style to have somebody order them around in their off time because it sort of balances out the imbalance of power.
But all right, we can theorize about, I guess, people all day.
So the next question, of course, I have is, so please do tell me a little bit about Your childhood.
How were you raised? What was your family structure like and all that?
I was not expecting this.
Okay, well, I was born in the United States.
My father was a military man, a very smart man.
He was a chess master, world-renowned chess master.
People like, when he died, lots of the world's most famous grandmasters wrote, you know, tributes to him, et cetera, on Twitter.
Is it James Artichur, the guy's name is?
I follow him on Twitter, very smart guy.
I wrote a tribute piece to my father about a chess game they played.
So he was an exceptionally intelligent individual.
So he was away playing chess a lot.
But when he was home, he was a very, I guess, strict father.
Me and my brother were, I say, forced.
I call it good parenting. But, you know, forced to read books, copy pages from books, write essays for them, play a lot of chess.
So I had a very, I guess, intellectual upbringing in that way.
My mother, more of a simple woman.
She was from England. They met when he was stationed over here, over in the United States.
Sorry. They met when he was stationed over in England.
Right now I'm in Bucharest, Romania.
I'm not a Romanian in any way.
My parents got divorced when I was about eight or nine years old.
I moved to England. I had a, I guess, poor upbringing there.
My family never had any money.
My mother never had a car. I used to have to walk to school in the rain.
So me and my brother were quite enterprising people because we were, I guess, blessed with a fraction of my father's intelligence, which was enough to get where we are today.
And we're always looking for ways to make money.
My actual job, and I've never divulged this anywhere publicly.
My first, I guess, money-making scheme, which involves pornography, was when I was only 14 or 15 years old.
I was not even interested in women at this time.
I was quite a late developer.
So I was selling copied music CDs.
Well, I guess I have done something illegal for money.
There we go. I was selling pirated music CDs around my school for £5 a time.
I would go and copy the Songs from the album at the local record store, copy them and sell them.
And some Asian kid came up to me and said, can you get pornography?
You've got the internet, don't you?
I said, pornography? What do you mean pornography?
Can you get videos of women having sex with men?
So I started burning these sex scenes onto CDs and selling them to kids around school for £10 each.
It was much easier than the music CDs.
And I was loved by all the teachers at the school.
I was the smart kid in all my classes.
All the teachers loved me. So they were very disappointed when a kid actually told on me and they busted me with a bunch of these pornography CDs in my school.
And my mother walked to school and had the meeting with the head teacher and that kind of stuff.
And when we were walking home, my mom looked at me and went, you know, you have to stop because they're going to catch you again.
But that was actually quite a smart idea.
So my first money I ever made...
Sorry to interrupt.
That's interesting. I mean, that very statement, it seems to me kind of pivotal.
Right? Because she didn't say, it's wrong, it's exploitive, you know, you're selling other people's property, the women are being abused.
It was like, you're going to get caught again, was the sum total of her objection to the process.
Not anything empathetic or moral or anything like that.
I'm just sort of pointing it out that it was very Machiavellian or transactional, I guess is the word that I'm looking for.
Like the costs and the benefits don't accrue to you positively as opposed to any other considerations.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I bought myself a new bike, new shoes.
Up until that point, every item of clothing I owned was a hand-me-down from my older brother, who was always one size bigger than me.
He's a year and a half older than me.
So yeah, we grew up completely flat broke without any money, which is why whenever anyone tries to attack my brother and I for the way that we make money for the business that we run, one, they do not understand the business, which is always the crux of it, because they do not understand how much money my girls are making, how happy they are to be in this line of work.
You know, when I fire a girl, she begs for her job back.
You know, they don't understand that side of it.
But also, you know, regardless of what people's moral problems are with the business, I'm very proud of myself.
And that's what me and Andrew have this ego and we carry on to the world like we are very proud of ourselves and we are.
So, yeah, my upbringing was very poor.
We were always looking for a way to make money.
And we did everything.
I worked in a Subway sandwiches when I was 17, 18, literally putting the mayonnaise on sandwiches and selling them to idiots in an airport in Luton.
I sold home improvements door to door.
All sorts of things. But this was the thing that I guess made me financially successful.
I couldn't have considered myself financially successful in any real way until I'd started working in adult entertainment.
Why did your parents get divorced?
Do you know? Yeah, simply financial problems.
My father had a very good job with the United States military.
And he lost that job when I was three or four.
So I don't ever remember having any money.
So he lost his job because he was diagnosed with a personality disorder.
He said he had some sort of personality disorder.
I don't think he did, but he fell out with too many of his superiors.
Irregardless, he lost his security clearance.
Sorry to interrupt. So he was discharged from the military because of what they call the personality disorder.
Do you have any idea what it was?
Yeah, well, no, no.
Personality disorder is what was on the paperwork.
And they offered him an honorable discharge with a full pension and full benefits, and he refused to take the money.
His line was, my sanity is not for sale.
I'm not going to sign that piece of paper.
Oh, so he had to sign the paper saying he was nuts, so to speak, in order to get that pension.
Yes, and he refused it.
Well, so I guess my parents fell into, I mean, I remember my dad, as smart as he was when I was seven years old, took a job washing cars because he was still fighting for his job back.
So we were just talking about your parents' divorce.
So your dad, what happened with your dad in the long run?
In the long run, he stayed in the United States.
He played chess, I guess, for the rest of his life.
He was an exceptionally intelligent individual, maybe one of the smartest men I've ever met.
Very gifted with languages, spoke six or seven languages.
I like to think I've picked up some of that from him, because I know a bit of language in every country I've lived in.
But he literally would play chess, win some money, gamble, drink, womanize, and then when he went broke, play chess again.
And he followed that, I guess, Life cycle for his entire life.
He actually died at a chess tournament.
It's about three and a half years ago.
He won his first game. He won his second game and halfway through his third game.
It was in California. He went to the bathroom and came out and called 911 and collapsed.
Heart failure. But he didn't live the healthiest of lifestyles.
If you burn the candle at both ends, it's not going to last as long.
So he was 57 when he died.
I'm sorry about that.
Did you have much contact with him after your mother moved to England?
Oh yeah, a lot. We stayed, I mean, even when, he would come and visit England, and my mother was very gracious, even though they divorced just a year or so after she left the country.
She would always let him come and stay at the house and see us whenever he was in England.
So yeah, I had enough contact with him.
I'm a big believer, and so is my brother, that You know, being a parent is a very full-time job for the mother.
I think a dad can be a great dad part-time.
And whether or not people disagree with me is fine.
But I was raised by a part-time father, essentially.
And he was as good a dad as I could have wished for.
I owe him so much.
My success, my work ethic, I guess my intelligence.
There's so much I've learned from him that helped me become the man that I am.
So I couldn't have wished for anyone better.
Do you have a theory?
I know you like to figure people out, which is why the demographics questions are interesting.
Do you have any theory as to what might have gone wrong with your dad or his life?
Well, wrong, there's wrong and there's right.
I mean, I would say that I'd rather live 57 years as Emery Tate than 100 years as most people.
So, you know, whether or not you consider something went wrong, he has two sons who became multimillionaires, a daughter who became a very successful lawyer in the United States.
So, in terms of being a father, he was very successful.
Financially, he didn't, you know, do very successful.
I think his main problem was a form of loneliness.
That you get with that hyper level of intellect.
I'm nowhere near as smart as my father was.
I don't pretend to be. Me and my brother are relatively smart people.
We have each other all the time.
We want to discuss, I don't know, anything.
Politics, women, sport, whatever it is.
We want to go on a vacation. We have each other all the time.
And we live together even now, even though we don't need to.
We just like to live together.
We're a team and we work as a team.
My father had this, I guess, Loneliness from being as smart as he was, he couldn't relate to people like the, I guess, normal, quote-unquote, normal person could.
So he lived his life as, I guess, a lone wolf.
He never had anyone he could count on, anyone he could rely on.
Me and my brother only really became men a couple years before he died in every real sense.
So he didn't even have us as co-men to deal with and to speak to.
So I guess that's the recipe for why he lived his life the way he did.
He wasn't a particularly unhappy guy, not at all.
He had his moments, but he could have done something different, and he chose not to.
And it's not his son's place, or mine or anyone's place, really, to question his motives or why he lived the way he did.
He gave me enough of what I needed as a father to be the man I am today, and that's all I can ask for him.
From him. And what did he think of your business?
Him and my mother. My mother especially.
When she first found out the business I was in, they were horrified, Stefan.
They were absolutely horrified.
I told my mother, I tried to explain to her loosely what I was doing.
I was just trying to explain. It was an evolution of the old phone set studio where you had girls calling on phones.
My mother was... Panicking.
Are you doing something illegal?
Who are these girls? But it wasn't until she actually met some models who worked for me that she completely calmed down.
The myth of these girls being girls from the street that are exploited and they're the victims of this industry is the least accurate assumption about this business.
The victims of this industry are the men, the customers who abuse it.
The typical way I will recruit a model Is the following.
A girl of mine who's very successful and very famous on webcam, she'll get a message from her Instagram account saying, wow, I know who you are.
You broadcast on this website.
You make so much money. How do you do it?
She'll say, I work for this team.
Why don't you come and talk to them?
That girl will come and talk to me for 20 minutes.
I don't sleep with her. There's no casting couch.
I don't give her drugs.
Nothing like that goes on.
And should she want the job, having had me explain it in full, my only real explanation is it's six or seven hours a day.
It is a real job. It's not magic, easy money.
You do have to put the hours in. If I think the girl's up to it, I hand her over to my completely female management team.
I won't ever really see her face to face any more than once a week.
And my female management team take it from there, and the girl gets paid every two weeks directly into a bank account or cash.
And that's how I recruit models, just from the reputation of the Sterling studio that I already run and the models who currently work for me.
Now, that was an excellent non-answer to the question.
Just wanted to point that out.
I appreciate the filibustering, but the question itself was, what did your father think of At first, he was mortified.
He thought it was something it wasn't.
He thought, as I said, there was something sinister about it.
But like when my mother met the models who worked for me, she explained it very nicely to him.
He came and stayed in England for a while.
He even encountered some people who worked for me, including the manager of my studio, and he completely relaxed about the whole thing and realized that it is, in fact, a legitimate business that makes a lot of money.
But the initial impression when I tell anyone what I do is that of horror.
Yeah, and I was working quite a good job before this.
And when I told my mother I was quitting that job, or I was making maybe a thousand English pounds a week, take home, not a bad job for someone who was 25 years of age.
When I told her I'm quitting that to run webcam models, she thought I was nuts.
But she very quickly, they both very quickly came around to the idea when they saw how much money I was making and how happy the people who worked for me were.
Right. So let's talk about some of the differences between your business and straight-up pornography.
Because if we kind of accept the arguments that you're making about your business, I'm not sure that they would spread their wings to cover the human hellscape and degradation and drug addiction and abuse and exploitation that seems to go on in the pornography industry.
Have you had any brushes by that world?
No. I really have.
When I say I don't hire and would never hire former strippers, escorts, that kind of girl, There was always this problem that I had when I would work a model for a few weeks, realize that she's not right for webcam.
And I would think, what else can I do with this girl who's willing to work for me?
Most girls, in fact, every girl who works for me now, and the type of model I hire now, if I said, well, cam isn't working out, why don't I get you some pornography shoots?
They'd say, absolutely not.
I'd rather go work back at the bathroom store.
That's the type of girl I work with now.
But I did have a few models who I think would be up for this kind of thing.
So I, I guess, touched very briefly in the world of, I wouldn't even call it management.
I knew some agencies in Budapest, Hungary, that obviously put these girls out to these various shoots, etc.
And a few weeks into my first two girls shooting scenes, I said, look, if you want to do this, you're on your own.
Don't give me a cut. I'm not organizing it anymore.
Here are the agency's names here.
Good luck. Bye. I have a very big moral problem with pornography.
And it's one that you probably haven't It's an argument maybe you haven't heard from outside the industry.
So I'm going to articulate it as best I can now.
You see, pornography back in the days of Ron Jeremy, I met that guy a few months ago, hilarious guy, by the way.
Back in the days of Ron Jeremy, pornography was very different because film equipment and editing software and editing equipment was very expensive.
So what you'd have is you'd have a studio shooting a pornographic film.
I'd be the studio. I would pay a male talent and a female talent, they're both getting paid, to perform for me.
I have no sexual interaction with these people.
They do their various tests, et cetera.
Yes, there were a lot of drugs. Yes, the industry was dirty.
I mean, now it's far worse, but the studio would pay these guys to make the film.
I would then, after they've had their money, market the footage and make my money from there.
Now that film and editing equipment has become so cheap that a single dude can set up his own essentially...
Studio by buying $1,000 worth of equipment, the porn industry has taken a horrible, horrible shift where it's men who should be paying for prostitutes.
They're not talented. I mean, they haven't got big dicks.
They're not in great shape.
They're not great performers in that way.
But these men will start their own studios.
Let's call it, I don't know, Tristan Tate's fake cigar lounge.
So I am now paying for the sex.
I'm the studio. And I am now paying the model after having an STD test and shooting her doing all sorts of depraved things in my cigar lounge.
But that's me looking for my own sexual gratification.
I may make a website, tristansfakesigarstudio.com, and I might make money, and I might not.
But the money is very much an afterthought.
Now essentially it's televised prostitution.
Yes, there are still the big studios.
They do exist. Brazzers, and there are some reputable studios that will pay reputable male and female talent to do these shoots.
But these girls work this.
It's called the POV scene, the point of view scene.
They'll work this scene for years before they get a shot with the big guys.
So it's now more disgusting than ever.
Because it's guys renting out hotel rooms and fucking these girls who call themselves porn stars and these guys call themselves producers.
It's nothing short of escorting and prostitution.
And when I realized that, when these girls were coming back to me, one of them is still shooting actively now, but she originally trialed on webcam for me, a Romanian girl.
And when I realized what was actually happening, I quickly Ended all association I had with that side of adult entertainment.
And personally, I think it's disgusting.
I don't understand pornography.
I don't watch pornography. Obviously, I'm a young, successful dude.
I have a very active sex life.
I don't need to. But I have a real moral problem with pornography, which is very different from webcamming.
Whether or not people watching this will draw the line, essentially it comes down to the number of sexual partners a woman has.
And I think that a very high number of sexual partners, I'm sure you agree, damages a woman, whether it's because she wants to do it, whether she's getting money for it, whether it's on film or not.
It does do irreparable damage to a woman's psyche.
And some of my top performing webcam girls I mean, one of them, I guess you could call her my girlfriend for all intents and purposes.
Since she's watched me, she's been with me.
So four years she's been doing the job.
She's had sex with one man in four years.
She only had two boyfriends previous.
And she'll probably never sleep with another man again if everything goes well between me and her.
She makes $200,000 a year.
She's one of the world's highest earning webcam models.
Whether or not she sells this fantasy to individuals, whether or not you can Google her and find pictures of her tits out, it's very different from actually going and having physical sex with men that you find disgusting to look at, if that makes sense.
I mean, I agree with you.
Certainly, the data is very clear that the more sexual partners a woman has, the less stable her marriage is.
I mean, it's just, it's Amber Heard on steroids.
Now... When it comes to, I guess my sort of argument has always been that the more a woman milks her sexual market value, the lower her marriage market value becomes.
And I suppose that's one of the concerns that I would have with the webcam girls.
And I recognize, you know, it's a bit of a minefield because one of them is your girlfriend.
But... I guess it would be of concern to me because certainly, I mean, if I was out in the dating market and I found that this is how the woman was making her money, I'd be like, hey, you know, that's the ragged edge of free market capitalism, man.
More power to you. But it's not something that, you know, hey, dad, I googled mom, you know, and look what I found.
I mean, that's... I guess there's a horizon where you're focusing on sexual market value, not marriage or parent market value, so to speak.
And I think that's where I think a lot of people, myself included, would find that the ragged edge of approval begins to fray a little.
Yes, and I don't blame you or anybody in your world or your sphere for thinking that way.
This is just something that I know from being inside of the industry, that especially these I guess over-sexualized personalities that are displayed online.
These women are nothing short of actresses, literally.
And I don't think they would even have the confidence, which is something very ironic, To think that sometimes three, four, five hundred men, I mean, I took a screenshot, the one that you initially reacted to, 350 men were watching this one model at any one time.
If you put her in a room with any man besides me, let's say five random men that she didn't know, and say, get naked and do something sexual, there's no universe where she would have the nerve to do that.
It is so detached from the reality of all these dudes, some in Saudi Arabia, some in the United States, some on oil rigs, some are watching.
They see this little number on the screen.
It's very different.
I mean, they've said it themselves.
If I had to sit in a tennis court, today 2,000 people were watching me.
If I had to sit in a tennis court and perform for 2,000 people, there's no universe that could go through with it.
So these women are nothing short of actresses, and it's only their...
Webcam persona that you guys will see, if that makes sense.
So I understand why you'd think it may lower their value as wives or girlfriends or whatever it is you're looking for.
And by all means, if that is the consensus of anybody watching, then don't marry a webcam model.
Okay, but for you, does it trouble you at all that, you know, thousands of men are masturbating to your girlfriend's naked gyrations on a webcam?
Does that cross your mind as something that may be suboptimal, so to speak?
Zero percent. Zero percent.
And obviously, me and you may obviously have very different lines that we can draw morally, but most girls, the fact of the matter, from what I know of...
The internet and this side of sexual relations being so digitalized.
If your girlfriend has more than 5,000 followers on Instagram, people are masturbating to her image and her bikini and her whatever pictures anyway.
So yeah, sure, we monetize this and this is a business that I am comfortable running and I'm comfortable with the girls who I know who work for me.
I would be comfortable, and I am right now, dating a webcam model.
model she works for me i know that she is sexually exclusive to me far more than i would trust most women in this world uh whether she be a hairdresser or a bartender or whatever it is you know i know that that girl is never going to cheat on me in a million years and if i married her tomorrow she'd never be um she'd never be unfaithful to me because what webcam models develop and this is something that you've probably never heard is a real hatred and disdain for most men
she looked at me in a way she couldn't Yeah. She looks at me in a way that she couldn't look at a customer.
When I mean a customer, I mean a member of public.
She knows I'm not that guy on webcam who will wear the fancy suit all day and dress nice like the lawyer who I mentioned, but then go and throw off on myself and try to suck my own dick on the internet.
She will not answer a single message to any man.
If I broke up with her tomorrow, she'd be single for two years.
I'm telling you, there's a hatred and disdain for most men that comes with this job that I like.
So I see it almost as a benefit.
Yeah, sure, you can Google naked pictures of them.
But I like to think that these women are far smarter and more savvy with the sexual marketplace.
No day gamer is going to pick her up with a few lines because she's going to look at him and think, wow, this guy's a customer.
What a dork. So there are two ways you can look at the equation, I guess.
Do you think that the generation of the hatred and disdain might have long-term personality consequences?
No. No, because I don't think it's anything artificial.
Even me, when I walk through the world, I mean, there are guys, I don't know if they'd ever watch it, so I'm not going to use the profession, but there are guys in very high-level positions.
Who, if I met them in any other sphere of the human interaction, in human interactions, I'd be proud to meet this guy.
Airline pilots, guys who helped design the Concorde planes.
I'd be like, hi, wow.
Hello, sir. My name is Tristan.
Very nice to meet you. Real top tier guys.
But I see who they really are from my office, from the screens.
I see them crying every night, saying, I wish I hadn't married my wife.
I hate my wife. I hate my kids.
I should have dated a young or hot girl like you.
I see the realities of men.
And so do these models.
So I don't think it's damaging because it doesn't give them a false impression.
It actually opens their eyes much more than a lot of girls who will say, oh, well, this guy, I was sleeping with him.
I think he's funny. He makes me laugh, so I'm sleeping with him.
Well, that's cool, but he's also a webcam customer doing depraved things as soon as you're not looking.
And I do think, actually, that...
Webcam is not a pornography fix.
I see it as a form of cheating.
It really is men being very disloyal because they wait for their wives to go to sleep and they spend five or six hours giving the family's money away on these credit cards to women who they are in love with, who they're infatuating with.
So, yeah, it makes women who work this job distrust men and look down on a lot of men.
But I think that's a very healthy, eye-opening experience.
And I think a lot of women should know these things before they just jump into bed with, you know, guys from the street.
I wonder if, because your presentation, you know, you're sitting in your expensive cigar room having a cigar and a nice shirt and all of that, well-groomed.
I wonder if something happened with your childhood, which as I always find, it doesn't explain everything about who you are, but I think there are these dominoes.
So when your dad didn't have any money, your mom left him.
So you're the guy who goes for money to make sure that's never going to happen.
Well, to be fair, it was my father's decision to send my mother and the kids back to England.
That was a decision he made because he thought it was in my best interest and my brother and my sister's best interest.
So in hindsight, when I say moving to England was the best thing that ever happened to me, I mean, I lived in a tiny town called Goshen in Indiana.
I don't know where I'd be if I'd never left Goshen, Indiana.
I don't know. I'm quite good at talking.
Maybe I'd be a Hummer salesman in a cowboy hat selling cars off of a I don't know who I'd be, but I wouldn't be where I am today.
So it was actually a decision that my father made to send us over to England.
And one of the motivators to becoming financially successful, in whichever realm I did it in, was to look after my mother.
And that's just something, you know, I've always personally wanted to do.
My mother doesn't work. She hasn't worked now for four years.
I pay her a very healthy salary to do nothing.
And, you know, she can enjoy the rest of her life as much as she wants.
If she needs anything, a vacation, you know, I take care of her.
She's the only woman who I spoil financially.
The others spoil me.
And what is your ethnic background?
Well, am I... Okay, well, I am...
In terms of religion?
No, no. It's just like I always get these questions and you're going to get them too.
So people are always like, dude, what the hell is your accent?
You know, a little South African, a little Australian, a little Irish, a little English and so on.
And just for clarification, just curious about that for you.
Yeah, I think you said ethic, not ethnic.
My apologies. No, my father's, I guess, African-American, but his mother's white and his father's black.
So he's a very light-skinned African-American man.
My mother is English and Irish.
So having lived in both of those countries for half of my life, my accent is very mixed up.
So I have a few features. I've got some dark eyes, some big lips.
I'm a big guy like my father.
I'm 6'4", 108 kilograms.
My mother's family is all very tiny.
So yeah, I'm a mix.
I'm a mix of a few things, I guess.
And you've talked about transitioning out of this business.
What are the considerations behind it?
You talked about how pornography has changed.
Is the webcam business changing as well?
The webcam industry is taking on two massive shifts right now.
So webcamming was the best way to make money for any American or British girl 13 or 14 years ago.
Now what happened was, I'm now talking from a country, Romania, which has the fastest internet speeds in all of Europe.
Romania has the fastest internet speeds in all of Europe because it was one of the last countries to get the internet.
The government obviously had the foresight of thinking, okay, let's use the best quality stuff here.
England had internet a long time before that.
When Romania got the internet, a bunch of webcam studios opened up in Eastern Europe.
And me living in Eastern Europe has nothing to do with webcaming.
That's just something that happened by coincidence.
But that priced out a lot of the American girls who were doing this same kind of thing for $8, $9, $10 a minute.
Then it became $4 a minute because there was a bunch of girls in Bulgaria and Romania, where the salaries are much lower, willing to do the same thing for less money.
Now, the money is still fantastic if you have a top tier model.
My girls have, I guess, pedigrees, reputations that go back for so long that they're never going to be in a position where they don't make money.
But launching a new girl has become much harder because Colombia now has fast internet.
Brazil is now getting fast internet.
So there are girls there who are willing to do what the Eastern Europeans are willing to do for less money.
And I see a world in 10 years time in Vietnam, Cambodia, 15 years.
When these countries get high speed internet and broadband, yeah, I see the market being absolutely flooded with these models and the potential to start new models.
Being a lot more difficult.
So that's one of the changes it's going through.
But also it's growing. It's a growing industry in terms of the customer base.
More and more men are engaging in this all the time.
Virtual reality sex is now coming out.
Is that VR? I mean, what does that mean?
There already exists, right now, even in my studios, and for the last five years, there already exists, I guess, sex toys, vibrating underwear, that literally vibrate when you give the girl money.
Now, industry secret, it doesn't feel good, the girls don't care, but they'll run out of battery and just keep faking it because the money's still coming in.
It's all a big act.
But these guys will throw money at the situation because they think they're pleasuring the model by giving them money, which is a very slippery slope.
Because soon, in five to six years' time, if I'm still involved in this business, maybe I'll go into it.
Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll just close the book on my own webcam days.
But virtual reality sex is coming.
I'm talking real hardware, headsets, waistbands with masturbating, fleshlight attachments.
This stuff is coming.
And that will be...
Very destructive to the average man.
In terms of, you know, a young guy coming up in the world trying to find a woman to engage with sexually, it's going to be a very big temptation.
Jeez, God, I mean, we're going to end up banging our toasters.
All right. Now, if you could just sum up for me the sort of speech, I felt it was sort of bubbling under the tweet and so on.
The speech to young men, right?
As someone who's purveying this stuff out there in the world, you recognize that it can be damaging to young men.
What is it that you most want them to know about what it's costing them that they may not be aware of by pursuing this stuff?
Well, I mean, what it's costing them is it's damaging their own ability to interact with women in the real world.
I think I'm just old enough now at 31.
I just missed the boat on all of this.
I mean, I know people who grew up, they're 18, 17.
They don't know a world where social media didn't exist.
I just... Managed to fit into the previous category.
I would say pornography is something that I don't watch, but I do believe people can have a healthy attitude towards it.
You can have a healthy attitude towards smoking cigars or drinking alcohol or pornography and masturbation, and it's all down to self-control.
But webcam girls are a dangerous thing to partake in because they let it slide out of control.
If you watch a pornographic video, the actress doesn't care who you are.
She's not going to check up on you.
She's not going to message you or pin you and ask why you're not watching pornography today.
But webcam models will do that and they'll tempt you in with this siren song of caring about you, of obedience, doing what you say, wanting to see you.
Missing you. It's a siren song.
You obviously know what I'm going for.
For anyone not watching, it's basic Greek mythology.
But it's a very slippery slope and I would avoid it if I was a young man.
And I think that young men should use it in a much healthier way than I'm seeing today.
And if this speech helps even one guy think, ah, that girl from Ukraine doesn't have a sick grandmother.
She's not in love with me. Maybe I shouldn't spend my college fund on her.
If it helps even one person not do that, then I'm very glad I had this conversation with you.
Well, it's a funny thing, you know, because I used to be in charge of an R&D tech team in the software industry, and, you know, we would sometimes be grinding away on code, you know, all night and so on.
I remember one of the coders saying...
The sun was coming up and he's like, oh man, let's go out into the big blue room and meet the flesh people.
And that always struck me as pretty funny.
And I would sort of remind that to people, screens are not life.
Pixels are not human beings.
Nothing is as it seems.
And it is a kind of dopamine drip.
Yeah.
and meet the flesh people.
It's wonderful out here.
So, hey, I really, really appreciate your time and the clarification of what's going on in this industry.
And yeah, if it helps people stop with these addictions, so much the better they can go out and have, you know, proper relationships, families, children, all that kind of good stuff, rather than destroying their capital in the pursuit of a digital fantasy that will always evaporate.
You know, it's like watching people run off into the desert saying, hey, man, there's water out there.
It's like, nope, just a mirage.
So thanks for your time, Matt.
I really, really do appreciate it.
No problem, Stefan.
No, thank you very much for having me on.
Any questions, you can find me on Twitter.
Livestalisman is my Twitter. Talismantate is my Instagram.
You can find out more about myself, how I live, and everything I do there.
Wait a minute. Do you have more than 5,000 followers on your Instagram?
I do. I have 31,000, I believe.
Well, you know what that means.
According to your own earlier statement, people are whacking after you.
All right. Thanks, man. I appreciate it.
Have a good afternoon. Bye.
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