Cryptospace Sex For World Peace with Adryenn Ashley
An award-winning filmmaker prior to her marriage, Adryenn advises business on how to utilize the crypto blockchain. However this pivot is just one of the many she made along the road of becoming a better version of herself. One such pivot came after a two year court battle related to her husband’s former marriage. Throughout this, Adryenn learned how to stand and fight for social justice by presenting her argument in a way that people could actually hear, leading to her two books. Her latest pivot is a step further into the match-making industry with an app for sexual compatibility, among other things. Adryenn has found her own personal fulfillment in standing up for the importance of sex and the cryptospace.
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Cryptospace Sex For World Peace with Adryenn Ashley
I’m with somebody that I’m really getting to know and really getting the respect quite amazingly at a level that I’m really even surprised by. That sounds maybe funny but this particular woman is just really a great surprise. The level of her intelligence, her energy, her vivaciousness, everything about her I think is intriguing and has something to offer the world in even bigger ways than she’s already been able to do, which is amazing. She’s done incredible things with her life as a business strategist and a consultant and somebody that’s really on the cutting-edge and a flat out legit, early adopter. That’s what I’m bringing you. We’re going to talk about pivots as usual. I’m excited to hear what she’s got to say about who she is in the moment, not who are you, but what are you committed to, what do you love about your life, what do you want people to know that’s important.
Before we get there, I just want to remind everybody on something that is always first and foremost of importance. That is that we get to be here together. This is a huge break. This is a huge stroke of the divine that we get to be here because in this moment where we are collectively breathing, maybe we’re even connected in our breath and we’re listening, I’m talking, there are people who are taking their very last breath everywhere on this big, blue Earth of ours. This is a sacred moment. It’s holy. Maybe you’re out jogging or you’re driving or you’re somehow just looking to shift your mind a little bit right now because maybe some things are taking you out today, whatever it is, this moment is beautiful and it’s a blessing. It’s an honor to be here with all of you. Without further ado, I get to have my friend introduce herself to all of you. We’ll get started with some juicy pivot stuff. I’m going to turn it over to you. Would you introduce yourself to our community, please?
My name is Adryenn Ashley. I am an author, a filmmaker, a high-tech priestess currently in the crypto space advising startups on how they can utilize the blockchain. My big pivot came way back when I was a filmmaker. I got married, I got pregnant, and then we got a bill in the mail for $100,000 in back child support from my then husband’s ex-wife. That led to an epic two-year torturous family court journey. Of course as a filmmaker I had always said, “I’m never going to make a documentary. There is no money in documentaries. Who would do that?” In that moment, I discovered why and began the journey of making a documentary called Anarchy Ahead: The Harvesting of American Families.
Let’s unpack that just a little bit. You’re married back then to a guy who was married before and he had some issues with child support?
Not exactly. You would think based on that bill, but no. It was something else.
That came out of left field?
Completely. When you’re eight months pregnant and you get a bill like that and you know what the consequences are, which means your spouse is going to jail. For more than a year that means, where we lived, that would have been San Quentin. The last non-violent offender to be sentenced to San Quentin was a third strike DUI plumber. He lived for three weeks before he was killed. It was basically a death sentence. I delivered my baby early. He’s actually not technically considered a preemie. He was one day from preemie because he was three weeks early, but it was pretty stressful. He was only four and a half pounds when he came home. It was pretty brutal. I went through the process of fighting the Department of Child Support Services and then figuring out, my spidey sense started tingling and I went, “Holy shit. This is corrupt.” Facts don’t matter. It’s all about the commission structure and who’s going to get paid. That’s how the entire operation was run. I climbed buildings with Fathers 4 Justice, dressed up as Bat Girl because I had a gag order and I wasn’t allowed to speak as myself.
[Tweet “Facts don’t matter. It’s all about the commission structure and who’s going to get paid.”]
You’re an advocate now. This thing has happened. Your inner sense which I don’t know whether you were driven by social justice before that or this just triggered it for you like it was a recessive gene or something.
I grew up in Marin, which is the woo-woo capital of the world, so I’m like, “Clean air, clean water is probably a good idea,” but I was not an activist. Social justice was never on my radar. The more I researched and I interviewed 1,000 divorced families, 1,000 dads who had child support orders. Dads who had custody of their children who had child support orders where the wife was supposed to pay and never did. I did all the documentation, all the research, all the deep dives and proved that it’s an absolute scam. The whole point was to recoup welfare money. We spent $400 million in welfare money, which is nothing. We spent $5 billion to recoup that $400 million. In what business is that ever a good idea?
Not a business that’s run for “profit.”
It’s always terrible. I kept trying to get this through and I was flying all over the country with my team and doing this documentary. It was soul-sucking and solutionless and unwatchable. I got to Sundance and I met this guy who’s a super famous documentary filmmaker. He crushed my dream of actually finishing by telling me that documentaries take their own time and they’ll tell you when they’re done, and it’s usually ten years plus. I was two years into it and I just went, “I am surrounded by broke, depressed, just broken people.” Sixteen years of cheerleading, I can smile through anything. I am a perky person. It was rubbing off. It was affecting my marriage. It was affecting my mood. It was affecting everything. I realized I could not see this through. I could not finish. The information that I had dug up, the research that I did, I ended up getting a PhD in Constitutional Law. That was how we finished the case.
The only time I could ever argue was in administrative court because I wasn’t a lawyer. When I argued in administrative court, I would put the judge in a corner, hold her by the throat verbally and then shut the other attorney down and I won every single time. The only thing they were afraid of was my ability to argue in real court. I actually got an anaphylactic, almost died. I have allergies. The next day, my husband told his ex-wife, “I have two things to tell you. Adryenn just graduated from law school.” The bar was in February, it was January 25th. January 26th she settled because the only thing they were ever afraid of was me being able to argue his case, so they settled. At the same time, here I have this failed documentary. Thank God the actual court case itself was over. I’m in this place where I’m just not happy. I’m not living my passion. I’m not living what I’m supposed to do. I’m constantly down this rabbit hole with depressing people and it was taking its toll. I went to a live event and I didn’t go to live events before.
Do you mean like a seminar?
Yeah, like a seminar with people but it wasn’t actually a real live seminar. What it was was Ladies Who Launch. We took over a nightclub and this bouncy girl, I am talking full on perfect Barbie with energy like I used to have. We go there. It’s called Ladies Who Launch and it was a whole bunch of women entrepreneurs with startups, with ideas. It inspired me to take everything that I had learned. I realized that nobody was going to watch that movie. This is where you have to boil it down to, “What’s the point? What is your actual intention? What do you want to accomplish?” The vehicle that you’re using might not be the right one to get what you need done. I was using the vehicle that I was equipped to use, which was filmmaking because I was an award-winning filmmaker. I had already been around the world. I have a trophy case full of awards. That was my genre. To me, that was the best medium for me to get my message out, but it wasn’t the right medium for the message. Right before I met her, I had figured out it needed to be a book. I met her and then I was like, “I can do this.”
Every Single Girl’s Guide to Her Future Husband’s Last Divorce
I wrote the book, Every Single Girl’s Guide to Her Future Husband’s Last Divorce. It is all about protecting second wives and making sure that they’re prepared. Had I done two things before I got married, we never would have been in this situation in the first place. I didn’t know and he didn’t know and nobody really thinks to know. What I needed to do was number one, read his divorce decree and see what it actually said. He didn’t read that either. Number two, I needed to get a satisfaction of judgment for matured installments, have the ex-wife sign it and file that in the Recorder’s Office and do that every year. That is literally a line in the sand that says, “No go backsies.” Nobody does that. If I had done those two things, we never would have had this problem.
I think this is really important because there’s a niche group of people that this is going to be really relevant to. More likely than not, there are people that are listening to this or watching this right now who are nodding their heads up and down either in regard to their own situation or potentially somebody they know or their kids or whatever. What happened is you got married to a guy who had been married before and you went in like any other person. I don’t even say naïve, just you would not have thought this is an issue. He’s divorced.
I had a prenup. I actually was prepared.
You were prepared and yet even in the prenup, this subject never came up. Not with your lawyer, apparently, not with anybody that might have been advising you at the time, which is that you got married to a guy who brought some baggage from his old marriage. Those were pretty heavy bags. How many years did that go on?
The court case was two years. We were married seven years to the day. We broke up on our seven-year anniversary.
Two years embroiled in a court battle regarding his ex-wife?
The first two years of my child’s life. That’s what I lost out on. That’s what it cost.
This is an interesting takeaway right here, but anybody that is getting married to somebody that has been married before, what I’m hearing you say, Adryenn, is that they’ve got to read the divorce decree. You’ve got to get it. You’ve got to give it to a lawyer to look at. That’s just the common sense I hear. If there’s some support that’s still being paid or has been paid, you’ve got to get the ex-wife to sign off, which has its own problems I would think because there’s really no leverage over that person to sign off. That’s a challenge that we don’t really have a solution to other than to pray they’ll be nice and not want to stand in the way of their ex getting married again.
[Tweet “How you give people information and how you tell them things, it affects how they receive it.”]
There are all sorts of things with that. What I learned through that whole process is how you give people information and how you tell them things, it affects how they receive it. While I did the documentary from the male perspective; in America, men are not allowed to be victims. They’re not allowed to be victimized. They are not allowed to be weak. They are supposed to be the strong John Wayne type. Anything that violates that archetype, you’re not going to get media attention. You’re going to have a really hard time getting buy-in on that even though it happens, even though it’s true. That’s what I realized is it doesn’t matter if it’s true. Can they even hear it? When I did the book, I literally pivoted around, “Women are allowed to be victims.” As a matter of fact, I think the society demands that women be potential victims because otherwise, they can’t sell us this whole concept of victimhood and that we need these particular rights.
After this whole thing, I started doing some lobbying. For victims’ advocacy, you have this Violence Against Women Act that funded all of these shelters. They added in California, lesbian, gay, transsexual, bisexual. I said, “Basically what you’re saying is the only people who are not allowed to be guaranteed services for being a victim of violence is heterosexual men?” It is equal. It is half women, half men, a third women, a third men, a third mutual. It’s not the way that they portray it in the media. They do that for profit-making and profiteering but they can’t hear it. I had to do it in such a way where I made the women the advocates for themselves. You could read it in a three-hour double-tinfoil hairdressing session and get the most out of it. It was in a very girlfriend, snarky, sisterhood, cover your ass thing, and that worked. I did 300 media appearances about that. I got the word out. I got to talk about the issues but I talked about them in such a way that they could hear me. I helped people get a longer marriage but then I realized if they’re already engaged to the wrong person, the majority of them are going to marry them anyway because they would rather be divorced than a spinster. That was really rough, so I went back further. My next book was Spotting The Kooks and it was all about not dating the wrong person.
Spotting The Kooks
When you say you were lobbying, you were lobbying for men’s rights, fathers’ rights?
Yes. I’m a fathers’ rights advocate. I actually have two pages in a CIA file because I climbed buildings with Fathers 4 Justice, who are considered a terrorist organization because they think that children deserve both parents and have the audacity to actually write it in chalk on sidewalks.
The movie didn’t get finished, right?
No.
It sucked as much as it could out of you.
It was soul-sucking and solutionless. I literally got the head of the DCSS in Texas to admit. I’m going to try and quote this from memory and I think it’s accurate in its intent if not word for word, “If the obligor has no money but their friends and family are willing to pay, sometimes incarceration results in money.” When you deconstruct that sentence, what they’re saying is they created a debtor’s prison-type situation where after Katrina there was no court, so you could not actually modify child support back to the date of the storm. The federal government refused to allow them to do that, but you had no legal services, no nothing, courts weren’t open, records were under water, so people were racking up child support obligations month after month. While the State of Texas used the same system and they could transfer over the payments to the women who are now in Texas, you couldn’t file in Texas to modify because it was a Louisiana case. You ended up with 25,000 child support obligors who then went to the point where they were going to be incarcerated because of their arrears because a natural disaster hit.
I literally talked about those things. It’s hard because it gets so complicated and people don’t want to hear it and it’s not fun. That’s why I would do things like go on TV and talk about how to keep the romance hot when the economy goes cold, and are you committing financial infidelity, and all the things that you want to hear on a talk show. I’m imparting little pieces of it and getting in as much as I can and then dropping huge bombs on Fox News, which was so funny because they were just like, “You’re fun.” They never tell me what I can’t say, which is awesome. Even though I don’t agree with them half the time, they let me go. They let me say whatever.
Tell us a little bit about what you’re up to now because the pivoting has never stopped and you’ve been doing something. Part of what we love about this pivot concept is that at some point, you learn how to pivot elegantly and you do it intuitively. That’s a beautiful thing. What are you up to today?
Doing the book, I had already done movies. I knew how to market a movie, but to market a book, I had to come up with a new way to market. That launched my company, Wow! Is Me. From that marketing, I learned how to market pretty much anything. That got me into startup advising, teaching people how to add joint ventures, monetization, lots of different revenue streams, really get the word out, get publicity, start their own organic, all the internet stuff because I’ve been on the internet since before the internet was born. I wrote HTML before the internet was born for a law library that moved the law library from paper to CDs. I wrote HTML for that before there was an internet.
Al Gore can’t really claim to have started the internet when it was in fact you that did that.
I did get paid 2,500 bitcoin in 2009. I can’t find it. That was for a consultation back when bitcoin was nothing. I’ve been in crypto for a very long time and now I’m doing crypto. I did my book then I did the dating book. I’m now doing a dating app, which is a naughty augmented reality dating app for good girls. For good girls because we don’t want to have hook ups because we generally think that it’s not going to be fun. What I’ve done is given them that sense of safety and security but we’ve also added a lot of technology that is machine learning as well as on the blockchain. It’s pretty amazingly bleeding edge tech and we’re launching that on an ICO. I do a lot of ICO advising. We just launched Musiconomi, which was awesome. We hit our cap in 48 hours. It was amazing and fabulous. Part of my background has led me to be able to create these really organic, awesome communities of people that care about projects. That’s what I do now is I advise on ICO startups. I advise businesses on how to transition their current play to add blockchain and add that technology so that maybe if they need to do a funding round, they don’t have to go the venture route, they can do an ICO.
For those that don’t know that an ICO is, would you just share that?
It’s an Initial Coin Offering. We absolutely try not to say that because then that makes the SEC think that it’s a security, but it’s not a security. It’s a utility token. We’re basically doing a kickstarter for a widget that is pre-developed. Instead of it being the cooler cooler, it’s actually something digital that you can do.
SEC is actually trying to get that ICO to be changed to some other term, right?
Yeah, they don’t like the ICO. That’s why we have to say token sale, crowd sale.
In the app that you’re developing, would you say a little bit more about that? I also want you to leave a website where people can check out. I don’t know if the app is available yet or it’s coming, etc. Just give us a little information on that.
We’re going to ICO the app in February. You can go to Loly.co to register for the pre-sale or get on the newsletter so when things start coming out, you’ll be notified. I am WowIsMe.net. That’s my personal marketing website but pretty much just my name, Adryenn. I think I occupy the first ten pages, so you can find me pretty much anywhere. I’m single, so I am divorced from the husband that I was married to when all this was going on.
Somebody said to me, the wasband.
That’s what I call him, my wasband. I hate saying ex because ex is such a pejorative. He’s my co-parent. We co-parent brilliantly. We’re excellent friends.
That’s your ex, you’re excellent friends and former spouses.
That’s a good way to put it, I like that. Thank you for that reframe. I’ve been single and I’m tired of being single. I was on Tinder and I’ve swiped thousands of times. I’ve matched hundreds of times. I’ve had hundreds of messages with people. I’ve met three people in three years in real life. I was actually with the founder of Tinder swiping in Lisbon, looked at the apps, “See, it says I’m in Lisbon, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, never got out of the United States.” If it can be broken, I can break it. That was actually one of my early jobs is I broke into banks for a living. That was super, super fun. That was one of my most exciting, most awesome fun jobs.
I want you to go one level deeper on what this app is because I know you’re holding back just a little bit. Don’t be shy. What’s this app for? Let’s get at it.
[Tweet “It’s not about the individual. It’s about what’s the connection you’d be like.”]
I’m hooking up good girls and nice guys to have orgasms because that’s really the key. It matches based on sexual compatibility and communication style. We use a patent-pending heat index. As an explanation, you are not rated individually. You are only rated in comparison to you plus somebody else. The two of you are rated because you can have a ten and a ten and together, they’re a two. It’s not about the individual. It’s about what’s the connection you’d be like. You can’t really get past an eight and a half unless there’s a long-term potential. Even though I’m selling orgasms, I’m giving them what they want, which is potentially a long-term relationship. We have a lot of in-app upgrades, so we have background checks, but we also have a matchmaking service. Maybe the person who’s actually right for you is a whole town over and geolocation-wise that’s too far for the app to see. We can actually hook you up and match you up. We have a whole other level for celebrities because obviously they want to seek but not be found. They can’t be like, “I’m standing right next to a single celebrity and they’re on the app. I’ll just walk up and go hi,” and show them that you’re a nine on the Richter scale. That would be pretty awesome. I think that if everybody had an orgasm a day, we’d have world peace. That’s just my philosophy.
Our company has been committed to world peace for many years and we’re taking a different approach, but the orgasm approach I think is valid.
It’s a sellable one. It doesn’t have to be done in an esoteric way. It really is all about connection. They say you need a certain number of hugs a day to really thrive. You’re going to get some hugs if you’re getting some orgasms.
There are studies on this, so not being tongue-in-cheek at all. For men and for women, orgasms and multiple ones create better health, longer life, lower heart rates, better immune systems, happier, more peaceful people.
Way back when Clinton was being impeached for a blow job, I said we need to institute a presidential knee pad program because whoever put their finger on the button, I want to make sure they’re relaxed because that’s pretty important right there. I keep getting dragged back into politics and I want to just stay nice and stay in sex because it is so much more fun here. Sex and crypto, can I just stay in my happy place?
That’s going to be the liner notes for this podcast. Sex and crypto, why everybody should be getting into sex and crypto. On a scale of one to ten, is that all right?
That’s awesome. It will certainly get clicks. I’m using crypto and I’m funding this whole startup with crypto. 80% of women are faking orgasms. We have an epidemic of women not having orgasms. Men, you’ve got to do your jobs and you’ve got to tell them they’re faking. You’ve got to be able to tell. You’ve got to read facial expressions because when it’s real, your face makes these micro-expressions and these movements in your face and you cannot control that. You make these funny faces and you can’t control it.
Cryptospace Sex: 80% of women are faking orgasms. We have an epidemic of women not having orgasms.
Face reading is a science. I met somebody who’s a face reader, so this is no joke. You can Google face reading so you can start to become better face readers. Face reading is a big part of criminology, right?
It is. It’s micro-expressions. I actually learned from the woman who teaches the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, all of them, their interrogating, all that, body language and face. It makes dating impossible for me, which is tragic because I really want to have a boyfriend but at the same time even when they don’t speak, I’m watching what they’re thinking which sometimes is good and sometimes like, “Really? Seriously?” Just ditch the hesitation and the inaction and just go for it.
Adryenn, last question. What’s one ritual or daily practice that you use to keep you feeling great and doing great things in your life?
An orgasm a day or two, absolutely every day. I’ve read a study that’s once a week. I’m like, “How do you function? How can you function every day?”
Thank you for inspiring that in hopefully every single person listening.
I would prefer a partner every day. That would be even better but barring that, take care of yourself.
We’re all working on things. Thank you so much. What a blessing to have you on the show. Everybody that is listening, if you haven’t driven off the road yet, hopefully you’re still on the straight road, I want to just remind you again how important it is that you take care of yourself. If I could wave a magic wand and I’m waiting for spirit to put that magic wand in my hands. I feel like I have it at times because this platform and other platforms I’ve been blessed to be a part of have given me that opportunity and it is a sacred one. To wave that magic wand, I’d wave it in front of everybody so that they would understand in every moment of their day how deserving they are of their own love. We cannot give anything that we don’t possess. Our world is in need of love. I don’t think there’s anybody that would dispute that. The way to that is to love ourselves.
To go back even further before that, so a domino before self-love is self-care. I think, Adryenn, a part of what you’re talking about is how do you care for yourself. What do you do to care for yourself that isn’t either trying to control something or trying to sedate something? Drugs, alcohol, and other things are sedatives. We sedate where we have pain and suffering. You don’t want to deal with it, you can’t deal with it or want to avoid it. Then there’s that other part of us that’s more of a male energy, which is about control. Cigarette smoking, interestingly enough according to studies, is not a drug thing. It’s a control thing. It’s not a sedating, it’s a control. When you’re taking a puff and you’re smoking, you take that inhale, you’re in total control of your life right then.
As opposed to having a control or sedate the things that we haven’t yet dealt with or integrated from our childhood mostly and those energetic charges in the childhood experiences and even traumas, we can simply decide in this moment to love ourselves unconditionally. To do that takes practice and the practice of self-care. When you do that, you will not only love yourself, but you’ll trust yourself. In which case, from a business context and a personal context, other people will trust you. We know that when people trust you, things just happen. Your business flourishes, your life flourishes in many ways you can’t even expect. It’s great that we’re here, we’re awake. Let’s be grateful for that, all of us together in this moment as we’re taking this breath to realize how sacred a moment it is, then to repeat that. Tomorrow morning when you wake up, the first practice of the day, the morning ritual that we teach and I share it again and again and again, is that you wake up, you feel blessed to be alive in that moment, grateful for that breath. That you stand up what a blessing that is, put your hand on your heart or throw your arms up in the air and say, “I love my life. I love my life. I love my life.” It’s been a blessing to be with you all here.
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